Early in the morning, Iris departed the Flopping Fish and headed for the forest. She was wearing her green robes and leather armor, which still bore a scar and scorch mark from the slime battle a few days before. She wasn't off on a quest this time, instead her goal was to find somewhere to train her new ability. It didn't take long for her to find the perfect place, a small clearing between a rough ring of redwoods which blocked all but the thinnest rays of sunlight. Several bushes dotted the clearing, each of them blooming with dozens of small yellow flowers, and a few strikingly large butterflies floated around and occasionally landed on a bush.
After taking a moment to enjoy the scene and inspect the layout of the clearing, she pulled a blindfold out of her bag and cinched it tight over her eyes, tying it off just below the brim of her hat. With a deep, centering breath, Iris opened up her awareness to the reality around her. She felt the solid ground beneath her and the flowing air around her, and the fuzzy presence of the nearest bushes. She sensed a butterfly flapping past her a few feet away, and what she guessed to be a lizard scurrying across the ground.
She sensed a small, almost round object on the ground nearby, and guessed it to be a rock. She reached out towards it and tried to blip it into her hand, letting out a surprised laugh when it actually worked. It made sense, she guessed, she didn't need to see objects to blip them, just know where they were at. Still, it seemed almost too easy to be true, not to mention it made her feel really cool. As she rolled the object around in her hand, she guessed it to instead be a large tree nut. She walked a short distance until she detected a bush on the very edge of her senses -- which seemed to extend about fifteen feet in any direction -- and tossed the nut at the bush. The leaves of the bush rustled as the nut pasted between them, and she felt the disturbance through her senses.
Growing confident, she graduated to blindfolded blipping, using her senses to discern empty spots between the bushes. It came so naturally that she was soon blipping circles around the clearing, and caught herself beginning to map it out in her mind. The new awareness was quickly becoming as natural as seeing, and if it weren't for the limited range, would actually be preferably to sight. She felt everything, all at once, all around her. The weirdest part was realizing that she also felt the whole object, as opposed to seeing only the side that was facing her. In a way, she wasn't just feeling everything in every direction, but also from every direction.
She moved on to practicing blindfolded strikes, wielding her wooden training sword and using the bushes as targets. She didn't actually want to harm any of the bushes or flowers though, so rather than striking them, she made it her challenge to swing the sword as close as possible without actually touching them. Moving from bush to bush, she swung the sword in practiced swings that led one into another as she took deliberate steps and occasionally threw in an awkward twirl or lunge. Iris had read plenty of times that an experienced swordsman would move like a dancer, and she supposed she kind of was -- just not like a very good dancer. Navigating and targeting with her awareness ability soon became so easy that she found herself focusing more on improving her footwork than deciphering her senses. It was as if she was always meant to have this ability, and now that she finally did it was taking its rightful place amongst her senses.
Something leapt into her field of perception and slammed into the side of her head, knocking the hat off her head and sending her into a stumble that caused her to flail and drop her sword. As she recovered, she ripped the blindfold off and found the creature that had attacked her. It was a very angry squirrel, twice the size of any back home but of normal size for Giantrock. It was crouched low to the ground, and growling at her.
"Why does everything in this forest growl?" Iris asked incredulously.
The squirrel leapt at her with aggressive speed, managing to snag her robe with a set of claws before she blipped. The blip dragged the squirrel with her and severely depleted her mana, and the squirrel immediately climbed up and tried to claw at her face.
"Aah! AAH!" Iris shouted as she fought to pull the squirrel away from her face.
When she caught a good grip on the squirrel's scruff, she pulled it away and wound her hand back before throwing the squirrel as hard as she could against a tree trunk, where it landed deftly and immediately shot back towards her. Blipping the fallen training sword into her hand, she brought it up to block just in time to catch the squirrel's outstretched claws. It clung to the wooden blade as she whipped it around in failed attempts to dislodge it, then leapt at her face again.
Iris quickly twisted the sword and leaned away, which changed the squirrels trajectory enough for her to dodge the leap and blip away to gain distance. The squirrel was now scurrying through bushes which rustled in its wake. Iris followed the squirrel's movements through the bushes, based half on sound and half on her awareness ability, and kept her sword ready to block a sudden lunge.
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When the squirrel finally leapt out at her, she harshly whacked it with the flat of the blade. aA small wheeze came from the creature as it was knocked to the side and sent tumbling across the ground. Iris reared back with her sword threateningly, but when the squirrel recovered it seemed to have learned its lesson and quickly scurried away up a tree. Iris blew the hair out of her face as she watched the squirrel escape, wishing she could think of something cool to yell after it.
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Deep in the Great Forest, where the redwoods crowded together and covered the forest floor in a layer of thick, overlapping roots and the canopy blocked out all but the faintest glow of sunlight, was the forward command outpost. It had first formed as a ragtag regrouping of adventurers during the Matriarch expedition before being converted to a healer's outpost. Now, weeks later, it served as the base of operations for casualty recovery and spider extermination.
Most of the clerics had moved out and were primarily replaced by adventurers and parties who specialized in battle and sought to rake in bounties from the city for culling the population of Matriarch offspring in the area. Though smaller in number, another significant portion of the adventurers now populating the outpost were scouts, who were there to find and recover the bodies of adventurers who had fallen in the expedition. The rewards for body recovery were substantially lower than the extermination bounties, with only a small pittance offered by the city and the occasional bonus offered by the fallen adventurer’s party members. This meant that many who contributed to the search did so more out of a sense of duty than pursuit of profits.
Victoria was among these scouts. In the weeks following the Matriarch expedition, she had dedicated no small amount of her time to the efforts. The largest number of recoveries was made in the days immediately following the expedition, after which many of the scouts had moved on to other ventures. Victoria and a few others had stuck around seeking to recover the bodies of the remaining fifteen adventurers who were unaccounted for. They had since successfully gotten that number down to six, and were now hopefully about to make it five.
Victoria floated through the dark and claustrophobic woods as a cloud of mist that effortlessly wound between the redwood trunks. She was following a large spectral hound, a summoned familiar of one of the other scouts, as it aggressively pursued a scent trail. When it stopped and began sniffing erratically in crisscrossing patterns, Victoria materialized on a branch overhead. Her eyes glazed over with grey mucus and veins bulged around them, revealing the auras of all living things around her. She honed her focus to a particular spectrum of auras, those commonly associated with rot and decay. In truth, they were the actually the auras of the insects, fungi and other tiny life forms that devoured and decomposed bodies, together forming a hideous cacophony of auras which caused most auraseers to recoil in much the same way as the stench of death.
The body was in the webs overhead, suspended in a web cocoon affixed between two branches. To her senses, the auras appeared as a mass of black, green and purple bubbles that undulated, swelled, and popped like a boiling mass of death. The spectral hound dissipated into wafts of drifting magic swirls and Marc, a skinny adventurer clad in dark black armor, appeared from a shadow at the base of the branch beside Victoria. He followed her gaze into the darkness and soon spotted the mass of webs at which she stared.
He disappeared back into the shadows, soon appearing on a branch beside the body. He sliced his sword through the air three times, each slash releasing a spectral blade of energy that shot out beyond the range of his sword and cut through the webs that suspended the cocoon, freeing it to drop to the ground below. Victoria winced at the sickening sound of the landing, then turned to mist and drifting over to it.
Marc was already there, crouched beside it and using a hooked dagger to cut away the webs and reveal the corpse within. As he pulled away the severed webs, the clothing of the body within revealed its identity without need to see the face. The dead man was wearing the silver-trimmed robes and silver armor of a shock wizard. Marc stopped removing webs, rested his arms on his knees and looked up at Victoria, who was inspecting the body with her auravision.
"Still six more to go, then," she said gravely.
"Go inform Kerrick," Marc said, rising to his feet, "I'll stay with the body."
There was a third contingent of adventurers operating out of the command outpost, referred to colloquially by the rest of the outpost as the investigation. It was comprised primarily of Champion rank members of the Adventuring Corps on loan from Commander Bridge and currently serving under the command of the Dreamweaver. With them was Ranger Kerrick, who also doubled as the head of recovery efforts. All anyone knew about the investigation was that it related to the wizards who had attacked the expeditions, and everyone operating out of the outpost had been given explicit orders to report any remnants of shock wizard activity to a member of the investigation immediately.
A while after Victoria departed, Kerrick landed quietly beside Marc, with Victoria arriving and rematerializing from mist form shortly afterwards. Kerrick crouched and wordlessly inspected the body, then glanced around the surroundings.
"Did you find anything else?" He asked.
"No sir," Victoria said, "just the body. I can tell you something odd about it, though."
"Oh?" Kerrick asked, looking up at her curiously.
She glazed over eyes once more and observed the body with auravision, "there was no venom in his body when he died. I've learned that victims who died with venom circulating in their blood have a distinctly more chaotic and active death aura. This one has a local agitation in his lower abdomen, but the venom never spread, implying he was dead before he was bitten."
"You can see all that through the webs?" Marc asked.
Victoria's eyes flicked back to normal, "clear as day."
"Good work," Kerrick said with a nod, then rose to his feet, "the investigation will take it from here. You're both free to go."