“So, what do you think?” Sam asked as he lounged in the café chair, idly watching the world walk by while Lucy, sitting opposite of him, was looking at her tablet device, sipping some insane concoction with too much sugar.
Usually, after every bigger event that affects the company and-slash-or the guild, they would have a strategy meeting to ‘realign the objective’ and ‘synergize the processes’. In practice, it was mostly one of them bitching about something that annoyed them. Oddly, it was mostly Lucy who was doing the bitching.
Currently, they were discussing the Glorious Artefact issue. Normally, they would do this either at Sam’s or at Lucy’s apartment but the weather was beautiful, so they decided to head to one of those small cafés that had a small garden where guests could enjoy a small slice of nature in the middle of the city.
“I think it’s a trap,” she stated, not even looking up from her device. “A guild that anybody would love to have just shows up and offers themselves up on a silver platter? You’re ridiculous, Sam, but this strains the boundary of believability.”
“I looked into it,” he said while reaching for a pastry. Or rather, he asked Isabella to look into them. He would give Lucy the report later. “They rather undersold the animosity between Darell and his relative.”
“How much?”
“Just send Katie in… They have the money and the numbers, but from what I saw, nothing special.”
“Just to clarify: you want to crush them?”
“Want to? Not particularly. But they’ll come after us if we take in Darell and his ilk. Charles, the relative in question, has a hate boner that could replace a space elevator for Darell.”
Hearing that Lucy looked up, interested. She was always a sucker for a good drama.
“What did he do? Did he steal the girl he was pining after but never talked to? Did Darell dare look at him?”
Sam had to snort at that. It seemed Lucy was also noticing certain patterns. “What have you been reading?”
Lucy blushed and looked away. Sam cleared his throat and continued. “Well, from what my source gathered, the actual issue is that while Charles is a pretty competent engineer and such, he is over thirty. Darell, by the time he was fifteen, achieved more than Charles ever had.”
“Ugh… one of those…” Lucy spat, her desire for drama forgotten. “We have to do something about that. People like that don’t really change… Anyway, who is your source?” she asked curiously, no doubt already putting together a plan.
“Izzy.”
“I hate you. Send the documents over later.”
“Sure thing. But what about Artefacts?”
“Knowing about Charles helps. We can use the threat of that guy to chain them to ourselves. With a little creative restructuring and cross-training between our crafters and theirs, plus having them work on stuff that Liz developed, I think we can successfully integrate them into Chrysalis."
“Not AFK?”
“Not for now. Maybe later. First I want to see what happens. Having them near Chrysalis is already big enough bait…” Lucy answered with a serious look on her face.
Sam nodded in agreement, not really seeing anything bad in testing their new ‘allies’. His gut told him that the Darell guy was on the up-and-up, but it never hurt to double-check.
“What about the contract?”
Lucy shook her head. “We’re still negotiating. They really want to squeeze out every ounce of profit from this one…”
“But you’re not letting them, right?” Sam asked with a grin.
Lucy snorted in response. “Who do you think I am? The lawyers had fun putting together some really ironclad conditions into it.”
“Good luck with that then. Tell me when it is concluded. I want to be there when Liz and Darell are introduced,” he told her with a mischievous smile.
“I can already feel that headache forming…” Lucy replied with a small glare before it morphed into a smile. “I’ll make sure Tim is there. Should be fun.”
“It was my luckiest day the day I ran into you…” Sam said with a laugh.
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The savanna was rather empty.
Of people.
There were countless numbers of animals, both terrestrial, arboreal, and aerial, all calling the endless savanna their home. Most of them were harmless, just living their lives as best as they could, being the productive members of the life cycle, but there were a few monsters here and there.
As expected, Sam's mana sense had already identified several giant vultures circling in the air, radiating deadly and anticipatory necrotic mana.
‘Ah, Necrotures…’ he mused. ‘Let’s make sure to thin their numbers. Annoying to fight necromancers that have them as pets.’
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With that thought finished, he raised a hand holding his sword and unleashed a furious spear of wind that sailed through the air and hit one of the circling carrion-eaters, vaporizing its head.
Nodding in satisfaction and watching as several lesser creatures instantly descended on the corpse, he continued his journey.
Necrotures had some instinctual control over necrotic magic, so instead of eating corpses, they would find a corpse, animate it, then have it hunt for them. That wasn’t a big issue when they were wild, as a wildebeest zombie wasn’t exactly a world-ending threat. However, necromancers loved to have them as familiars as with some training, enhancements, and direction they would be able to let loose on the battlefield.
Giving them, and the necromancers, the opportunity to create self-propagating zombie armies.
And nobody liked that…
Thus, as he journeyed through the savanna, he made sure to kill every Necroture he spotted.
It was his civic duty.
Other monsters that he saw were wild dogs, roaming in packs, ready to tear anyone to pieces to satisfy their hunger, while giant herds of gazelles sometimes sped past, running far faster than they had any right to.
They were called Velozelles, and their hide was particularly valuable as it could withstand tremendous friction. Another valuable part of theirs was the blood, used to create potions that increased reaction time and the magical equivalent of the drug, speed.
Thankfully, they were fast enough that catching them was annoying and they were almost impossible to domesticate. Their runs usually took them from one end of the savanna to the other. Creating a corral that big was almost impossible. And if the Velozelles were prevented from running, then soon the magic inside them would weaken, making the entire domestication effort worthless.
Luckily, due to his mana senses, he had some warning before the great herd of zooming Velozzelles approached and managed to put up a razor-sharp wind wall that caught a few necks. He made sure to take care of the carcasses, skinning them and harvesting all available materials for the future.
There were also giant trap spiders and tiny snakes that hung from trees in bunches and fell on unsuspecting victims as they walked by. He spotted a few elephants in the distance, their hides sizzling with heat as they lumbered along a path only they could see. Scorchphants were herbivores and fiercely protected by all the other denizens of the savanna. They took in any kind of water, even from the very air, and used the heat to evaporate and clean it.
Attacking one would aggro every animal and monster in a several-mile radius.
As he headed toward the first town he knew about, he even spotted a few more predators. Brownish green lionesses stalked in the tall grass, each of their tails ending in razor-sharp bone protrusions, and each lioness sporting two and sometimes three separate tails.
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Soon, he had Lucky slow down, as the first sign of civilization came into view. While there weren’t many roads leading through the savanna from the Emerald Kingdom direction as everybody felt that traveling on a boat to do business was much more comfortable – with fewer drop snakes to boot – there were still a few towns scattered around in the wilderness near the border that would make sure that anyone who tried to cross the distance to the first major city would have places to rest and recuperate.
And to spend their money.
Even now, there were a lot of forum posts about the price gouging and the artistic levels of scamming that happened in those small towns scattered around.
Their favorite scam? Taking the adventurers on a hunt, then ‘accidentally’ spooking or annoying a strong local monster, getting the adventurers killed. Then, when the adventurer resurrected, they would helpfully sell them tools, potions, tinctures, wards and everything they could think of that would help them defeat the monstrous ‘local nightmare’. Meanwhile, they would have one of the local maidens, in appropriately pitiful, but enticing garb, feed the players some sob story about the monster eating their family and promising riches if they could defeat it.
Very industrious…
‘I wonder if I could scam them…’ Sam wondered idly as he continued his journey.
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As he crested over a small hill, he stopped Lucky with a gentle nudge of his heel and surveyed the area.
The town was still in the distance, almost hidden by the horizon, but Sam could see several shapes that hinted at intelligent construction methods, as opposed to the meerkats who liked to copy human houses. They were excellent with earth magic, but not so with architecture.
Using his mana sense, he cast his gaze in the direction and was relieved to not see the angry haze of blood magic.
Most of the forums were full of players crying about the unfairness of blood magic, but the developers were silent. Oh sure, they put out a statement that it wasn’t cheating, hacking, and voodoo magic, but they claimed that it was a conflict between players, thus they were staying out of it.
There were a lot of posts on the forums, mixed with a lot of trolls just fanning the flames, but from what he knew most of the towns that were razed and left with desiccated bodies of both players and NPCs were even more south.
Sadly, the southern part of the continent wasn’t united under a kingdom. Instead, it was littered with countless city-states that were one of the most powerful groups in the area. The closer to the ocean, the more powerful they were, thanks to trade.
The other powers were nomads moving through the savanna and desert, never staying in one place too long. Though a few oases had towns sprang up around them, but from what he knew and remembered, the people living there were considered lower class by the nomads.
The city-states didn’t care as long as they had money. Or power. Best to have both, then they would be your friend.
Small towns, like the one he was heading toward, usually belonged to one of the city-states or alternately serviced the nearest nomadic caravan, which would give up their ownership as soon as they departed. Until then, however, you either served or else…
Otherwise, most of the denizens of the savanna and the desert were friendly folk, superstitious, and placing greater and greater importance on guest rights the deeper one headed into the desert.
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The moment he reached yelling distance from the town wall, he jumped off Lucky’s back, the familiar giving him a friendly lick and vanishing into his shadow as Sam began to walk toward the gate adorned by countless bones of the animals found in the area in various configurations hinting arcane purpose which was confirmed by his mana sense as the walls shimmered with defensive power.
As he got even closer he saw that the ground was stamped down by countless feet, showing that the area was pretty popular.
“Halt, stranger!” came a call from the top of the wall.
Looking up, he saw a man, covered up to his neck by traditional garb adorned with green, brown, and gray colors, with a few splashes of gold-yellow and ruby-red denoting some rank.
“Do you seek death or life?” came the traditional question.
“I seek life and rest,” answered Sam, keeping his hands visible.
The man took a moment to scrutinize him, looking for any deception before nodding.
“Then come and rest, traveler, and may the winds carry your words!” he called out, vanishing behind the wall, probably heading to open the gate.
“And may the earth provide for you,” Sam finished the traditional words, even though he wasn’t sure the man heard him. Better to be safe with superstitious and traditionalist people.
The gate opened silently, showing it was cared for, enough for Sam to slip in and he did so, the gate immediately closing behind him, equally silent.