“What’re we doing back here?” Eric said, looking around nervously. He was so scared he was sweating beneath his hood, despite the chill. “The don said we weren’t supposed to come this way.”
It stirred up Jimmy’s rage something fierce that he couldn’t be sure whether Eric was terrified of disobeying the don, or that little girl Mel.
Jimmy turned and glared at the Archer. “We aren’t here. We never were here, got it? We’re hunting. The boss’ quest says we gotta kill groles, so we’re killing groles, aren’t we?”
“Not much hunting out here,” Lisa said, testing the draw on her bow. “It’s like somebody’s wiped ‘em all out. Might as well head back north. Even if the red-skinned ones are a lot stronger, we’ll at least be done.”
Jimmy stood up from his crouch and glared at his team of 12. It was a large scouting party, meant for one purpose: quest killing. Stolst would get quests, then hand them down to his lieutenants and captains. They would complete them, and the whole organization would profit.
Unfortunately, Jimmy’s glare didn’t have the same effect as the boss’. He grumbled and struck off toward the east.
It was clear to Jimmy that Eric was losing his nerve. He had been with the boss and Jimmy when they ran into those weaklings protected by that pint-sized bitch. He should have learned to show some backbone after getting bound and gagged by a little girl. He was a good soldier, loyal to a fault, but he didn’t understand that sometimes you had to bend the rules a little to protect the boss.
“That’s toward the camp we’re supposed to leave alone,” Eric said, causing several people to look his way curiously. Everybody had heard about the disastrous encounter with a group of Mages. Few knew the whole truth, however.
“Is this the Mage camp?” Lisa asked excitedly. “Are we going to get some revenge?”
“The boss said–” Eric began, but Jimmy was there in a heartbeat, towering over him.
“The boss ain’t here. I say we check to make sure they aren’t dead, got it? Could be a group of groles killed them all. Take your best scouts with you, Eric. Be unseen. Report back what you find. We’ll wait here.”
Eric looked like he was about to protest, but he swallowed the complaint and picked out his group. They faded into the thick underbrush.
Jimmy’s temper was quickly becoming the stuff of legend around the organization. He alone knew how to interpret the boss’ rules. Sometimes, as a loyal captain, you had to protect the don from himself at times.
No matter what Stolst wanted people to think, he was still just a man. And a man was fallible. He felt fear and anger, lust and regret. It was Jimmy’s duty to protect Stolst from himself when it became obvious he was letting his emotions rule him.
That strumpet who tugged on his heartstrings, tempting him toward a life of softness had been the first person Jimmy took out. It was easy to make anything look like an accident with monsters around every corner.
If only Boston had been like this, Jimmy thought to himself. We’d have had the whole city in the palm of our hand.
It wasn’t Jimmy’s place to rule. He merely wanted a seat at the table and the ear of the Emperor himself.
He was pulled from his thoughts of revenge, knowing full well that he’d need to move on from the area if that troublemaker was about. The boss wanted her head for himself. With all the dead monsters around, he could guess easily enough who had culled them.
Eric looked unsettled, which meant that he had either been spotted or the group was dug in more than ever.
If they were still there, he couldn’t risk it. Even with nearly two to one, Jimmy didn’t like their odds. That girl had taken out three of their best Archers without anybody noticing. She could have killed them if she wanted.
Just thinking about her made Jimmy grind his teeth so loud he missed what Eric said.
“Say again?” Jimmy asked.
“I said the camp is deserted. Best guess is they’ve been gone a day or more,” Eric repeated.
All eyes turned to Jimmy as he grinned viciously. The boss said the camp was off limits…but they weren’t at the camp anymore. Ambushing a group on the move made the numbers work overwhelming in his favor.
Against a fortified defense, he wouldn’t have risked it. But moving targets were easy.
“Can you find their trail?” Jimmy asked, not daring to hope.
Lisa, sticking her flat chest out like a preening bird said, “I already did, sir. They weren’t trying to hide where they were going. Might be a bit harder out on the plains, but I reckon we can find ‘em. What’s the plan?”
Jimmy’s grin curled the edges of his lips into a devilish smile. “We go hunting.”
----------------------------------------
Seeing her window, Mel leapt for the dragon. She screamed for good measure. Falling here would be bad, and the best way to banish fear was to be as loud and boisterous as possible.
It worked on roller coasters, fighting monsters, and potentially leaping to your death.
She hurtled in an upwards arc, bloody coat flapping like a banner behind her.
What she couldn’t account for was the blustering winds sheathing the dragon’s twisting body. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man in light robes impact it before she did.
He was sent spinning away.
She was moments from that happening to her too. Mel summoned her twinblade in the hopes of using that to pierce through, but she wasn’t fast enough.
In a wall of rushing sound, the quasi-barrier of corkscrewing winds blasted her away.
Mel tumbled backwards end over end, miraculously crashing into the platform she started on.
Only this time, there was another person there. A tall and imposing woman in rough shape with a mane of flame red hair under a wolven hide hood. Tattered weapons were stuck into the back of her damaged heavy armor.
A lot of people had clearly tried to kill this viking and failed.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Aspect Skill: [Howl at the Moon]
The magical force of the viking howling like a wolf pushed Mel back before she could get to her feet. She slid nearly a foot before she stabbed her twinblade into the ground and used that as a piton to anchor herself.
The viking was building up momentum by swinging a giant ball and chain that was clasped to her wrist like a prisoner’s restraint.
Mel watched in astonishment as the woman did the impossible and launched the ball toward the long dragon. The chain snapped taut just as the woman noticed Mel, a surprised expression of recognition on her face.
It was gone a moment later as she was pulled through the air toward the long dragon. Mel got to her feet, watching as other people had devised their own ways through the wind barrier.
Aspect skills went off, puncturing the winds and allowing their users to land atop the sinuous body of the long dragon. Mel even watched a few bulky figures tossing boulders that were too heavy for the winds to break apart, leaving a gap for their throwers to leap through.
The viking woman clearly had the same idea. The metal ball at the end of her chain punched straight through the barrier, leaving a ragged hole.
Mel wasted no time leaping after her. She managed to slip through the hole right before it closed. The sudden collapse of the hole behind her forced her off course.
Sorry about this, Mel thought to the dragon as she once more used her blade as an improvised piton to secure her position. Using her superior sense and agility, she found a gap in its scales and stabbed with all her force.
Considering the dragon didn’t so much as roar or twitch in pain, it probably didn’t even notice.
Mel climbed aboard the dragon’s back and immediately rolled under a swiping sword.
A man with a scarred face stepped forward, shifted his weight, and brought his sword down, trying to split Mel in two. She snapped her legs together, kicked off his shin, and split them again so the blade banged harmlessly off the long dragon’s scales.
Before the man could realign his strike, Mel hooked one foot behind his ankle and tripped him.
While Mel’s agility allowed her to get to her feet easily, the strength-focused Defender toppled to the dragon’s rippling back and slid right off.
An arrow whizzed right past Mel’s ear. She didn’t bother to respond to the attack. She turned and sprinted, her speed enhanced by her [Rustwing Boots]. If a dragon’s undulating back as it flew through the air wasn’t difficult terrain, nothing was.
A man in heavy armor flew harmlessly by, a look of comical shock on his face at the heavy metal ball in his arms.
The chain snapped taut, ripping the ball out of his grip. He immediately dropped out of sight.
All along the dragon’s back, people were fighting on their way toward the head and the long dragon’s horns glittering with aspect gems. Its slowly undulating form gave Mel the rising and falling sensation of being on a rollercoaster even while standing still.
I’m really going to have to earn my last aspect, Mel thought.
The long dragon was going too fast for her [Hidden Mist] to be of much use. The moment she tried to summon it, the fog was shredded and whipped away.
Mel focused on evasion, pushing her sense and agility to the limits. Sometimes she was running flat out when the dragon’s long serpentine body dipped and she suddenly found nothing but air beneath her feet.
Other times the dragon’s body was undulating upward, pushing into her feet and making every step feel as if she was suddenly doing gravity training in DBZ.
Those without the ability to detect when the dragon’s body was shifting or the speed to react were thrown off. Others were killed by opportunistic people who were often killed themselves moments later.
As much as Mel wanted to join the melee, she ignored the many openings. It was a potential way of moving several spots up the ratings ladder, but it would slow her down too much.
She couldn’t help but be reminded of Mario Kart. If you were in dead last or the first few spots, you were fine. In the middle of the pack was where every goddamned shell, bomb, star, bullet bill, and banana peel managed to hit you.
It was nothing short of chaos.
Once Mel pulled ahead of the in-fighting pack, she found the going much easier. Several others had the same idea, sprinting as fast as they could toward the prize.
A few looked her way as she overtook them, but nobody was stupid enough to try attacking her. The bloodthirsty savages behind them were too close. A few seconds fighting instead of running was all it would take to fall back into that mess.
The wolven viking surged out of the pile of savages, her fierce silver eyes filled with determination. And yet that fanged grin suggested she was enjoying herself.
Same, Mel thought to herself.
The viking began to catch up with surprising speed, even with some poor bastard clinging to her neck.
The dragon’s neck arched as Mel ran up it, the long dragon’s glassy scales glinting gold and copper. Her footing grew precarious, and Mel once again resorted to using her twinblade to keep moving instead of sliding back like many of the others.
There were a few people ahead of her who had similar ideas, though one man cloaked in shadows simply walked up the scales as if his feet were glued to them. Other climbers used knives or short blades to wedge into the gaps between scales.
Undead skeletons obediently braced the necromancer from earlier, who was reaching for an aspect gem radiating green esoteric symbols. The gusting winds threw back the hood of her tightly fitting dark purple and black robes, revealing a violet cast to her black hair and eyes as blue as polished sapphires. She studied the glowing source of magic with fascination.
Mel could almost touch the horns now, but she found herself staring at the necromancer instead. She had the strangest urge to call her “princess”. At first glance, she looked nothing like a princess, but the closer Mel looked, the more regal the woman appeared. Tall and graceful where Mel was short and fierce, the necromancer looked the part of a princess who got tired of waiting for a knight to save her and took up the sword her damn self.
Shaking her head, Mel focused on her prize. She wasn’t the only one. The lure of the aspect gems was too great for anybody to take advantage of Mel’s lapse. Any animosity between the people here vanished. Everybody—except Mel, apparently—only had eyes for the aspect gems.
The source of most magic in this world.
The shadow cloaked assassin made it there first. With one hand doing a fist pump, he touched a single aspect gem burning with a cold dark energy that drained all the color in a pocket around him.
He disappeared into a swirling portal of light.
Mel adjusted her plan as she hastily searched for an aspect gem that resembled anything that appealed to her.
There! A cloudy jewel crackled with lightning near another that was haloed in an opalescent aura.
Dismissing her blade into ash, Mel reached for both aspect gems at once. The moment she touched them, they vanished into twin streams of light.
(1) [Storm Aspect Gem (Ancestral)] has been stored in your inventory.
(1) [Divine Aspect Gem (Ancestral)] has been stored in your inventory.
Beside her, the viking grasped a jewel billowing upwards with crumbling, purple-laced rocks.
She tried to say something to Mel, but her words were lost in the wind. What truly caught Mel’s eye was the knotted symbol attached to her half-ruined pauldron.
The symbol of the Magi.
Before Mel could say anything back, she disappeared into a portal of frosty light.