This wasn’t the first time Rose had been near a spawn point. In fact, while following her old mentor, she’d been involved in several officially sanctioned quests to deal with monster and beast outbreaks. Even though she hadn’t ‘personally’ dealt with a spawn point, she understood the concept of an elimination quest well enough.
It usually started with monsters or beasts showing up somewhere with increasing regularity. In response, the local government would contract a mage to find out the general area they were coming from. Afterward, a party was assembled, usually around 10 or 20 hunters. Said party then escorted a mage, or a seasoned hunter capable of dealing with an essence event, to the spawn point. Along the way, there were usually a few battles, maybe some arguing over loot, then someone would declare that they’ve located the essence event. Everyone then stands around doing nothing, while a few high levels end up dealing with it. Ten minutes later, the party heads back to civilization to get paid.
At least, that had been how her previous quests had gone. She never saw, sensed, or interacted with a spawn point. She obviously tried to follow along with what the mages and senior hunters were talking about, but she’d only ever seen them waving their hands around at nothing, then abruptly declaring that the problem was solved.
Now that she was with a new party, even taking into account the interruptions and unusual party composition, she had expected everything to pretty much follow the same general pattern. So, when she saw Lords Walker and Salvatore-Verena start waving their hands around, she didn’t think much of it. In fact, she was lucky to still be paying attention when the little lord collapsed.
It happened so quickly, she’d almost missed it.
Lord Walker was holding his hands up, as if he were caressing an invisible wall. Then, without warning, he went completely limp. Rose was able to see his muscles go slack, and his entire body awkwardly hit the ground in a tangle. The vacant look in his dead eyes was so shocking that it nearly knocked the wind out of her. She’d seen people die… but NOT like that.
She was around 10 feet away, so it only took a moment for her to be standing over Lord Walker’s body, unsure of what she should be doing.
Lord Salvatore-Verena dragged the body flat, then started casting something. She assumed it was some kind of resuscitation magic. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the little lord was dead. The corpse’s vacant eyes along with the smell of voided bowels made the situation disturbingly clear.
But barely a minute or two later, the little lord was standing there completely fine. A cleaning spell cast almost as an after thought, and Lord Walker was once again verbally sparring with Lord Salvatore-Verena. ‘What in all the hells just happened?’ she wondered.
She tried following along with what they were talking about, but the entire conversation seemed to fly over her head. Questions about what they were saying raced through her mind so fast that she didn’t have a chance to focus on any one in particular.
Wasn’t ‘delving’ meant to identify what type of material something was made of? It couldn’t be used on a person, could it? And she’d never heard of it being used to clarify where something had come from. That was impossible, right?
So, Lord Walker hadn’t died? He went through the spawn point to the other side? But his body… oh, it was like scrying? Is that really how scrying worked? She wasn’t so sure about that.
Manipulating dungeons? Wasn’t that an arch-mage thing? She was pretty sure arch-mages were sent out to stabilize dungeons that were showing signs of breaking down, or failing, or some variation of that. She was sure her old mentor had mentioned something about that… she was almost positive.
To her chagrin, she just didn’t know enough about magic to understand half of what they were talking about. Yet, she still did her best to pay attention to what they were saying, and more importantly, how they were saying it. As a result, Rose was almost certain that they were hiding something… something monumental.
Yet, she hadn’t a clue what that could be.
All too soon, the conversation was over, and the older mage began instructing the little lord on how to deal with the spawn point. Since Rose couldn’t see what they were doing, or even understand what they were talking about, she quickly lost interest.
Her gaze drifted past the two nobles, looking into the eyes of Sergeant Wesker. She could tell that he wasn’t nearly as lost as she was. It was obvious that he was able to follow the conversation. But, she was a little surprised to see a look of boredom on his face.
Perhaps she was wrong. They might not be hiding anything, maybe she just didn’t know enough about what they were talking about.
Not for the first time, she lamented the fact that she was put in this position. ‘Don’t worry about it, just keep your eyes and ears open, and focus on staying alive. Let the nobles, gods, and generals play their games, try to stay on the edges, and you’ll be fine,’ she reassured herself.
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Unsurprisingly, Nero found Nick’s explanation of how to deal with an essence knot unnecessarily complicated.
Once they were finished dealing with what they came to do, Sergeant Wesker hadn’t wasted any time, and the party was soon on their way to their second ‘mark’. The pace he set was quick, and he seemed bound and determined to get them to their target as soon as possible.
At the moment, Nero was quick stepping over some shrubs and dead branches, doing his best to maintain his vigilance over his assigned area. It really wasn’t that hard, he’d had plenty of practice using his psychic field as an early warning system. He remembered reading that there was a way for high level hunters to use their fields to discourage attacks, but he wasn’t currently in the mood to figure it out.
His thoughts were stuck on how Nick had dealt with the spawn-point. The scene replayed itself in his head, over and over. He couldn’t stop analyzing Nick’s lecture describing what he had been doing. Nero felt that it conflicted with what the old man had actually done.
Nick’s words said that he was unraveling the essence knot, allowing the essence flows to return to their original streams. The theory being that essence knots were formed from large amounts of essence getting clumped together and creating rents in the fabric of the material plane. In order to smooth out those tangles, the entire essence knot had to be wrapped in a psychic field, one with a uniform essence signature… or center, then shaken like a snow-globe. He was especially clear on the fact that the caster had to ensure that the local essence streams were allowed to pass unhindered through the psychic field, or the spawn point could collapse into a planar event.
The difference between an essence event and a planar event was that an essence event didn’t cross some density threshold or something. Planar events were full-on rips in space, and they were incredibly unpredictable. Nick then immediately contradicted himself by saying that it was almost impossible to manually create a planar event by collapsing an essence event, and only someone with an exceedingly thick essence field would be capable of the feat.
Nero thought the whole thing sounded plausible, but also incredibly wordy and confusing. It was like someone trying to describe how a car engine worked by going into the details of … well, whatever happens inside a combustion engine. Nero honestly didn’t know, and he really couldn’t care less.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
For Nero, what was important was what he saw while Nick had been ‘unraveling’ the essence knot.
He saw Nick surround the tangled web of essence with his psychic field, imbue it with some of his center, then vibrate the field as if he were psychically humming. There were no streams, no essence flows, no interactions with the ambient essence at all. The tangled essence just separated, then vanished. It was like shaking an etch-a-sketch. The overlay of the weird, bent essence quickly dissipated, and the surrounding wilds returned to their usual essence signature. From Nero’s perspective, it was unbelievably underwhelming.
In fact, it had looked so easy to disrupt the essence knot, Nero didn’t really understand how the things stayed together at all. It had barely taken any effort on Nick’s part to deal with it, and Nero felt that someone should be able to do it through a scry with just their mind playing the part of a psychic lever.
‘Come to think of it, why don’t the mages just break them up from range? It shouldn’t be too hard,’ he thought to himself, a little annoyed at the thought that they might have come out here for nothing.
An essence signature intruded on the edge of his psychic field. It was a far enough away that all he could tell was that it was a large, fuzzy disruption in his senses.
Snapping out of his thoughts, he called out firmly, “Contact left. Can’t see it yet, but it’s there.”
The entire party halted and prepared. Forming a circle with Nick at the center. Nero pulled out his shield, and took the front position. He felt Rose and the sergeant switch places, allowing Rose to take the rear and the sergeant to join Nero at the front of the formation.
While watching the approaching signature, Nero prepped his mage-armor. The feeling of imbuing the outer layer of his essence shield with purpose caused him to close his eyes and groan in concentration. The sensation was nowhere near being a practiced action, and it still managed to take all of his focus to complete it.
Regardless, it only a took a few seconds, and he needed to get used to casting it. At least it was getting easier for him to let part of his focus handle it, while most of his attention remained free to deal with the actual combat. Yet, he still felt like he was overclocking a processor, and from the moment he cast it, he felt like a timer had started in his head. He was absolutely sure that he couldn’t keep it up without suffering the mental deceleration that would result in him once again being enamored with butterflies.
Refocusing his attention on the approaching essence field, he cocked his head in confusion. There were multiple signatures blending together. It wasn’t like a mob, it was something different. Each of them was different, but also similar. It was like he recognized them… kind of. Something seemed familiar with their essence fields, but he couldn’t tell what it was.
Before he could say anything, he heard Nick groan in annoyance. “It’s just an approaching hunter party. Looks like 8 of them I think,” he said, not sounding like he was worried in the least.
Sergeant Wesker echoed Nick’s annoyed groan, then said, “Alright, everyone look relaxed, but keep your eyes open. No point in letting them get the jump on us if they turn out to be hostile. ‘Stabbers’ are rare, but it’s best to be prepared.”
Nero felt the translation of ‘Stabbers’ come through, and he couldn’t stop himself from chuckling. Essentially, it meant a large group of weaklings that stabbed hard working people in the back in order to kill them and take their loot. ‘What a great word,’ he thought.
Soon enough, a group appeared through the trees around 40 or 50 feet away, all of them dressed in various shades of fantasy chic. There were a couple leather clad rogues or rangers, some robe wearing mages, two full plated tanks, and even what looked like some kind of cleric sporting a staff topped with a glowing ball of light. Despite them all being human, Nero thought they looked ready for Comic-con. Though, in his opinion, one of them should really be an elf… or at the very least, a dwarf.
Nero watched Sergeant Wesker take a few steps forward, slinging his shield over his shoulder, somehow wedging it under his backpack. ‘One of these days, I’m really going to have to figure out how he does that,’ he thought.
It didn’t take long for the approaching group to clear the remaining distance, and they lined up in a half circle about 10 ft off from Wesker, while one of the leather clad rogues continued forward, raising a hand in greeting.
The rogue, or maybe ranger, was almost 6ft tall, attractive, and surprisingly female. It wasn’t her gender that was surprising to Nero, it was that she had the same haircut as Wesker, almost like a flat top. Nero stifled a chuckle when he realized that she was, in fact, a ‘she’, and not just some androgynous looking dude.
“We seek peace. Our group is safe. I am Breanna, and this is my hunting party. We heard a rumor that an encampment is being erected in the area. Do you know if the army is allowing parties to base out of there yet?” she asked.
Nero was close enough to get a good look at her equipment, and he thought the woman looked pretty capable. She was strapped full of knives, and she had a bow along with a quiver of arrows slung across her back. The sword at her side didn’t look out of place, and her essence field felt strong. If he had to guess, she wasn’t as strong as Wesker, but she felt much stronger than Rose did. He could barely feel Rose at all. Whether that was due to her low level, or something else, he didn’t know… but once that thought crossed his mind, he couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t noticed it before.
Nero couldn’t see the sergeant’s face, as he was facing away from him, but he could tell the man’s mood wasn’t very happy based on his essence signature. The man took his time answering the question, but eventually he replied in what seemed like some kind of prescribed greeting, “Safety in groups. Peace in the wilds. As far as I know, the encampment is still being built. For now, it is only for Dorchester’s elites, and I seriously doubt that changed. Where exactly did you hear that rumor?”
The woman, Breanne, didn’t seem fazed at the question. “Two days ago, we left Dorchester with a few quests in hand. The assigning agent at the Hunter’s Hall said that there might be an army encampment being set up in the area, and we should keep an eye out for it. He didn’t offer any details, or say anything else. I think he was just trying to be helpful. Was it supposed to be some kind of secret?” she asked, a little amused at the sergeant’s brusque manner.
Wesker replied quickly, “No. It’s not a secret, but it shouldn’t be common knowledge either. I’ll be sure to pass on your request to my superiors when I see them. Now, we’ve already been delayed by… unforeseen complications… and I’d prefer to keep any future encounters with any hunters to a minimum. I hope you understand that we have nothing to offer you.”
Breanne shrugged easily, and said, “Very well, we’ll be on our way. We didn’t search you out if that’s what you’re worried about. Our surveillance mage just sensed an odd essence signature in the air, and we came to check it out.”
One of the robed individuals from the hunters side coughed lightly to bring attention to himself, then said loudly, “It’s the short one. The one hiding behind the tower shield.” His voice was light, as if Nero was somehow funny to him.
Breanne’s eyes looked past the sergeant, focusing on Nero. From her perspective, she could see a 4 ft tall tower shield being held a few inches off the ground, and a white mop of hair floating above a youthful pair of eyes peeking over the top. She also found the sight amusing and offered the tiny hunter a smile.
Nero’s eyes furrowed, and he could see the humor dancing in the woman’s eyes at his agitation, but he didn’t respond to their provocations.
He wasn’t going to drop his guard, as he knew that people generally sucked, so he was perfectly happy letting the sergeant deal with the newcomers. He’d hide behind his shield, and anyone that wanted to point and laugh was welcome to it. He’d be more than happy to trade his pride for safety. Their opinion didn’t matter to him in the least, at least that’s what he told himself.
Wesker looked over his shoulder, appraising Nero. It was obvious that he wondered what the surveillance mage was talking about. What was so odd about Nero’s essence signature that they were interested in ‘checking it out’?
On the hunter’s side, the man dressed as a cleric took a step forward. His white robes and glowing staff caused everyone to turn their attention to him. He had a weird look on his face, and his voice was full of excitement when he asked, “Are you the new Lord Walker? The one the Temple of the Sun spoke about?”
Nero had no idea what the guy was talking about, so he didn’t reply. However, Sergeant Wesker’s response was a little more obvious. His shoulders tensed, and he stood straight up, almost at attention.
“What are you talking about? He’s just an elite hunter’s apprentice. Though, what’s this about Lord Walker?” he asked, pretending that Nero wasn’t anyone worth mentioning.
Breanne crossed her arms and glared at the white-robed man. Her voice was harsh when she said, “I told you to limit your sermons to the camp-fire. No one wants to hear about whatever ridiculous interpretation of events your superiors are currently promoting. We’re here for a job… and we’re going to stick to it.”
The man didn’t back down, seemingly surprising Breanne with his persistence. “If he’s really the Lord Walker, the one responsible for freeing us from Dorchen’s curse, then we owe it to him to offer whatever aid we can. Refusing to support him is tantamount to aiding in the destruction of Dorchester. If the Lord Walker requires anything, then I for one will give it.”
Now Nero was even more confused. What the hell was the Dorchen curse? And did she say sermons… like religious sermons?
Nick’s voice was louder than necessary, and filled with mirth. “I’m sorry to interrupt. But did you say there was a sermon about Lord Walker? What do the faithful of the Goddess Serine have to say about him?” he asked happily, seemingly very pleased with what he was hearing.
Nero looked over his shoulder, glaring at Nick with every ounce of hatred he could summon. Even though he also wanted to hear more, as this was his first real brush with this world’s religions, he couldn’t stop his stomach from clenching with worry. ‘Doesn’t he know it’s a bad idea to encourage religious nut-jobs! That’s like rule one in surviving in any fantasy environment. Does that son-of-a-bitch want to get me martyred or something!’ he thought to himself.