“Take down as many of the easy monsters as possible, it’ll help rack up the points. Always bank as many points as you can, as there’s likely to come a time when we need them to cushion a blow,” Rabyn yelled back to us as a cleaver appeared in one of his hands. The other hand was working to rapidly throw a series of knives into a small flying creature in the yard.
Dave: Try to conserve our mana as much as possible. There’s a strong chance we’re running a gauntlet today.
Corey: Understood, I will fight with mostly blunt force.
Dave: Stick close to me, please. I want to try to keep my mana use down as well.
Corey: Understood.
“Does anyone else hear singing?” Elicec asked as his hoe-turned-sickle ripped one of the flying monsters from the sky. I did. Somewhere in the distance, someone was blasting out some impressively loud vocals, though I couldn’t make out the words.
“Some sort of bard class, most likely. Stay focused on our own goals for now!” Rabyn yelled over the singing. Corey slammed into the side of a flying lizard thing that had dove off the roof toward me, throwing it across the lawn. Rabyn was right. I needed to focus on what was going on directly around me.
“Pretty sure those are the ones!” a voice yelled from an alley across the street. No, they hadn’t actually yelled. It was just the enhanced senses from Rabyn’s food that made me hear it so clearly. Were they talking about us? That question was immediately answered before I even had a chance to voice it as several rat-like creatures poured out of the alley, charging straight at us.
“Well, that confirms your theory on people being after us, I think,” I said to Rabyn as his knife-throwing changed targets, striking two of the rat-men before they even crossed the road, both dropping dead with a knife lodged into their chests. As I readied my own blast of fire, I spotted Cecile’s scythe as it grew in size ten times over and swept across the street, easily knocking all of them to the ground. None of them moved to stand back up. That had to be a feature of Cecile’s new class, and it was damn impressive.
“Holy shit, going to have to make sure I use ‘clear the weeds’ more often; that was amazing!” Cecile yelled, cheering himself on. I couldn’t argue with him. That was some perfect timing for that ability.
“As Elody pondered where we could be of most use, the guiding font of knowledge rose up from the page, the words themselves leading us to those who were most in need of a timely rescue,” Elody chanted as she read from a book, and just as she had read, the words themselves broke free of the pages and began to fly off down the street.
“I assume we need to follow them?” I asked.
“Yes; in theory, this will speed up finding our recruits, and then we can just focus on holding down an area until we need to find further things to engage us,” Elody answered before beginning to chase after her own words. The rest of us joined after her. The singing grew louder as we chased them. Were they bringing us to the source of it? I spotted several people fighting a giant gorilla with eight arms in the distance at an intersection and was happy when the words turned down a different path. The more mana we had to use in fights here, the harder things would get throughout the day. I was sure Korl was behind the bribing, but what exactly had he done?
“Look, lady, I’ll make you a deal. Quit the singing, give us the kid, and we won’t kill you unless we have to at the end!” yelled a voice over the singing directly in the path of flying words. I couldn’t see the source of the singing yet as the view was obscured by the group, who I assumed included the one that had just threatened her. I had to stifle a laugh and force myself to recognize that even if the creatures in front of me looked like oversized turkeys, they were still potentially dangerous.
“Hey, you in the orchestral aura. Any chance you want to fill some openings in our squad?” Rabyn yelled, completely ignoring the birds. Several of the birds’ feathers ruffled at his shout.
“Hey asshole, this is our kill!” one of them said as they turned around to face us, and then nearly deflated as their eyes looked us over. Apparently, we were not the people they wanted to see. Partially likely because Rabyn had already landed a knife into its chest.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“I would prefer less vulgarity, thank you!” Rabyn yelled, stepping closer to the group.
“I’ll gladly join your group if you can get these vulterians off me,” the singer answered Rabyn’s earlier question, stopping her own melody. In answer to her request, Rabyn immediately waded into the group of birds, his cleaver seeming to dance between his hands as bird after bird fell to the ground in piles of bloody feathers. With them now dead or dying on the ground, I could see two figures in a small pinkish bubble, one of them a small squat woman who reminded me of a dwarf, but she was dressed far more like an opera singer than the usual way dwarfs were depicted. Behind her was a figure I thought I recognized.
“Glorp, is that you?” Elicec called to the small man before I could. What was Glorp doing here?
“Elicec, Cecile, and is that Dave?” Glorp questioned back, his voice going from panic to elation as he said our names.
“So you know them then, kid? That’s good news. I thought for sure we were going to end the song prematurely there,” the woman said.
“I met them once. They were very nice to me. Um, can I join your squad too? I really didn’t want to fight here, but they didn’t give me much of a choice,” Glorp said. Who had forced him into this? Then I remembered just what he had told me. Pryte had been the one to send him with the message. Was this what would have happened to Pryte if he hadn’t joined up with us? But how did he end up in the exact match we were in? This had to be a message aimed at me for causing Korl problems.
“It’s your decision, Dave. You must agree to it,” Elody said. How did that work when a faction leader wasn’t present? Probably just a squad leader’s decision, but we’d decided not to have one of those yet.
“Yeah, of course, uh, what’s your name?” I asked the dwarf.
“Constance Aurelia V, Connie for short,” she answered. She certainly had a name fitting of an opera singer. I noticed Cecile and Elicec giving the dwarf a weird look. Wait, hadn’t their planet been part of a dwarf faction’s holdings? Hopefully, she wasn’t a member of that. We didn’t need that potential wedge driven into team unity.
“I assume you both have classes. That didn’t strike me as a standard battle bard, more of a trained operatic voice,” Rabyn asked.
“I am a student of the great Trelione, not some simple bard. I practice the Path of the stellar Opera,” she answered. I had no idea what that meant. From Rabyn’s confused look, neither did he.
“Really? How did you find him? He’s been in seclusion for a century,” Elody spoke up, apparently not nearly as ignorant as the rest of us.
“He is my grandfather. It required no finding,” She replied, and that claim was enough for the twinogs to stop scowling. I guessed that meant there was no way she was connected to their oppressors then.
“We can discuss that later. How about the kid? What’s your class?” Rabyn cut off the lineage talk with a much more pressing question.
“I’m just a courier, not really any use in fighting,” Glorp answered. Damn, that was a problem. Could we even use him on the next floors? Not that we had much of a choice; there didn’t seem to be anyone else around for us to recruit, especially if bribes had taken place to target us.
“Alright, then, for now, your job is to stay in the center of us and stay alive. We can sort out the class problem later. Oh, and we’re likely stuck in this Arena until we manage to clear floor seven, so pace yourselves. You’re going to need the mana,” Rabyn explained to them.
“So, how much longer do you think we have on this level?” I asked, wondering how long the average floor lasted. I’d guess we had been here roughly fifteen to twenty minutes.
“Honestly, it could be minutes, could be hours. It really depends on the quality of the other squads, but since I don’t see any more monsters around us, let’s go find a building to hide out in for now,” Rabyn answered, parroting Elody’s earlier plan of laying low.
“Hey, so you aren’t a member of any faction, right?” I heard Cecile ask quietely the dwarf as we headed for the nearest intact building.
“No, well, maybe yours now, I guess. Why?” She asked back
“Just had to check you weren’t part of the dwarves who own our planet. That would have been pretty awkward,” Cecile answered. The moment we were all through the door, Rabyn pulled back out his cooking utensils and got to work.
“Why did they want you so badly anyway, Glorp?” I asked, remembering what one of their attackers had said about wanting the kid.
“This is all punishment for helping Pryte. How was I supposed to know the big factions would be angry, though?” Glorp said, looking on the verge of a breakdown.
“Hey, it’s alright; you’re going to stick with us now, and we’ll figure it out,” I said, trying to calm him down. Was Glorp another person caught in the crossfire for having the bad luck of knowing me?
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
The last known public performance of the great Trelione ended with two faction wars, thousands in custody, and the complete destruction of the opera hall he played in. Later interviews of those in attendance claimed that it was entirely worth it and they would gladly pay any money to see him perform again.
A History of Music in the Spiral by Emwood Greens