The wind whistled around me and the landscape slid by below as Zirilla and I sped toward our destination. She led the way—I’d come on the promise that she’d found a source of the [Lightning] skill keys that she’d been searching for since we’d begun to settle in.
It had been five days. Our temporary keep had been built, and a satisfying array of defenses surrounded it. Our scouts had found [Weave] skill keys in the form of some crystal-coated lizards that apparently lived symbiotically with some form of translucent, fruit-bearing vine that had the wildhearts very excited. I hadn’t been out to see the creatures, yet—my presence wasn’t necessary to hunt them, and the colony was safer with me around.
Besides: now that our hunters had gained some levels, grown more familiar with the terrain, and been properly equipped with skills, the essence and keys had been coming in from all directions. It was becoming less and less necessary to have me out in the field as much as possible. I was reserved for the big hunts, but also for situations like this.
Zirilla had made it clear that the creatures she’d found weren’t as threatening as she’d been expecting, but we were still going to be safe. Only a few of the elves knew how to channel mana skillfully enough to cut a forming bolt of lightning before it could strike, and fewer still could survive one if they failed. Even if our quarry was weaker than we’d anticipated, there was still no point in sending anyone but the strongest of us.
We were flying over a great forest, one that was on the other side of the great swamp that stretched out below the colony—the trees grew out of water for almost a hundred kilometers, until the ground rose gradually and became soft, fern-covered soil.
I’d hit level 30 while cutting blocks with [Earth Magick] for the new keep. Truth be told, I’d been surprised that I hadn’t gotten the level for helping to kill the hydra or finally leading the elves to the settlement. But helping to build us all a communal home was in accordance with my calling—and in this case, it had been the act to finally raise my limit.
As we flew, I looked at my newest skill:
[Surging Power 14]
Components: [*Primeval 5] + [Surge 3] + [Surge 3] + [Surge 3]
+ 164 [Channel]
It was a skill I’d already had on the temporary wristwrap that Fireesha had given me. But while bindings had advantages over skills in a number of ways, one of their disadvantages was that they had to enchant an object with enough aspect—essentially an appropriate history—to bear the keys in question. The wristwraps had degraded over time, even with just two rank 1 skill keys.
And so the old skill, at the minimum rank for a binding, had only given given 110 [Channel]. This one was a clear upgrade, not just because it gave a better attribute bonus but because it freed up another of my four bindings.
?—Your Bindings:
B: [Aziriel’s Matchbow of Windborne Missile Conjuring]
B: [Aziriel’s Smooth Shiny Rock of Earth Magick]
B: [Aziriel’s Temporary Necklace of Animal Sight]
B: [Aziriel’s Pale Furs]
The [Animal Sight] pendant was obviously useful, and the [Earth Magick] rock was, if not as useful, still good for sensing the terrain once I got close.
Still, my newly raised [Focus] had extended my potential magical gaze quite a bit. With luck, Fireesha would find the time and resources to replace both of them soon… and one with something that granted [Forked Lightning], given that after today we’d have the skill keys for it.
“It’s just up here,” said Zirilla, signalling to me through our mental bond when to dive in tandem with her.
We were skimming just below the second mist-layer, moving over the crowns of the great trees, which seemed to always end right below the mist. The mists were bright with their stored daylight, and so when we dove through a gap in the branches it was like transitioning into a new world, a darker place where the white glow above us faded to be replaced by the multi-hued glow of the leaves, and new white glow—that of the first mist layer, grew beneath us.
She led me through this layer, and we perched on the side of one of the great trees.
“Down there,” she said, pointing.
Some distance below us, the underbrush of the forest grew sparser. Some of the plants had been trampled by unknown creatures, but for the most part the ferns were absent because the ground seemed freshly tilled. Further away, the churned earth gave way, had been pushed back to uncover a shelf of rock which featured several round openings—large, smoothly-cut holes that had unmistakeably been made by either [Earth Magick] or skilled digging.
“It’s an insect colony,” she said.
I regarded the holes in the rock with mingled hope and displeasure. I thought back to the sleeping thousands I’d found on my first day here—I didn’t want to disturb whatever creature was storing its own private army of insect soldiers in the deep earth.
But at the same time….
“How many have [Lightning]?” I asked.
“You’ve got the sight skill,” she said. “But by my guess? Hundreds at least. Wait a while and we’ll see one.” She paused, then added. “You know I don’t like insects, especially the gigantic aggressive ones, but these… you’ll see. Most of the wildlife here knows to avoid their colony, so they end up sending out hunting parties… ah, there.”
She pointed, and out of one of the holes I saw a rust-colored beetle emerging. It was approximately the size of a pony, and it moved somewhat slower than I would have expected. It was followed by five more, each of them sweeping their antennae across the ground while also scanning the forest around them with twitchy motions of their tiny, faceted eyes.
“They’re feeding a colony of hundreds by hunting their surroundings?” I asked, eying the creatures curiously.
“You know how abundant the life is in this place,” she said. “But my guess is that the whole ecosystem around them is drastically affected by their presence. I saw some of them dragging back a creature the size of a mammoth, earlier. Scaly thing. Was huge.”
“And they hunt with [Lightning]?” I asked. “Every one of these little things can throw bolts?”
I stared down at the rust-colored creatures as they disappeared from view into the forest. Even on this world, an entire colony made of hundreds of creatures with that kind of power was hard to believe.
“Not quite,” said Zirilla. “Come on—let’s follow them.”
She took off, and I followed. They’re not searching around with a [Wild Bond], I said. Or trying to hide from one.
I don’t think they have one, she said. Rare for a predator, I know—but they tend to attract predators themselves on account of the fact that they’re so open to being psychically sensed. Creatures ignore their colony, but not their hunters. Watch—this won’t take long.
We followed the hunting party for several minutes as it zigzagged its way through the forest, seemingly at random. They ignored tiny creatures like the ribbontails—likely they couldn’t have caught any anyway. But after awhile one of the gigantic spiders emerged from within the root chambers under the great trees to confront them.
It was curious—there was usually a family of spiders occupying the base of one in every three great trees. But these insects had to stray quite far from their colony to get attacked by this one—perhaps they’d depleted all the population nearby?
Stolen novel; please report.
The spider was massive, easily bigger than the half-dozen rust-colored bugs together. It struck quickly, emerging from the shadows of the roots to pit the lead bug with its two front legs and then grab it in its chelicerae.
Then the bugs struck back.
It happened almost instantaneously—so fast that I almost didn’t see it all. First, there was a closely timed set of high-pitched clicking noises from the insects. Then each of the rust-colored bugs extended a line of mana ahead of it, connecting to the next bug in the line. The last bug ignited the stream, and the bolt shot forward and connected with the front of the spider’s body, blasting off two of its legs and and turning half its head into nothing but a smoking ruin.
I simply stared at the bugs as they set about dragging the corpse back toward their nest.
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Zirilla crooned.
But I was still staring. The bolt had been so fast… and what was more, the bug that had been stricken by the spider was still alive, seemingly unharmed by the spider’s powerful opening strike.
“That’s either a tough carapace, or high [Aegis], or both,” I said.
“It’s iron,” said Zirilla. “I think they eat it out of the ground or something.”
I blinked, then looked closely at the texture of their shells. The bugs weren’t the color of rust—they were actually covered in it.
“They have no [Wild Bond],” I said. “They’re mass-spawned insects; they probably just have common classes. Common classes with [*Lightning] skill cores. I’ve never seen such a thing.”
“How do you think they’re managing those bolts?” she asked. “I mean, obviously they’re lining them up in tandem.”
“Which makes them very fast even with low attributes,” I said. “And as long as they’re forming a continuous line, the bolt will be attracted to the highest density of mana at its end—it won’t strike any of the bugs. But….”
I frowned. “No [Wild Bond]... but the bolt has to be ignited by the one in the back. If they feel a connecting line of mana, they don’t ignite. And that clicking noise that preceded the bolt, that signals all of them to start forming the line.”
“Pretty fascinating,” said Zirilla. “But you know what’s really nice is that they’re filled with treasure.”
“[Lightning] skill keys, you mean.”
“Power is the greatest treasure, Aziriel.”
“I’m sure the poets would correct you on that one.”
“To what? ‘Literacy is the greatest treasure?’”
My mouth quirked into a smile. “Love, perhaps.”
“Love gives a decent bonus to [Primeval Resonance], I’m sure,” she said. “But love without [Lightning] doesn’t kill things nearly as well as [Lightning] without love.”
“True poetry, Zirilla. As for these,” I jerked my head toward the insects dragging the spider carcass below us. “They’re… something of a conundrum. I’m sure we can harvest some skill keys by ambushing their hunting parties, but if we attack that nest and draw the ire of hundreds of the things, we’ll be overwhelmed. Those bolts come fast. And if they retreat into the earth, it would be suicide to follow them.”
“How many [Lightning] keys do we need?” she asked.
“As many as we can get,” I said. An idea occurred to me as I considered the nest. “Come on.”
I flew back to the nest, then flew close to it, reaching down with my [Earth Magick] and my [Animal Sight] to sense a network of caverns beneath the earth, carved into the rock. But my senses picked up living creatures at a greater distance than rock, and I could see that there were probably two thousand of the metal-sheathed bugs beneath us. More than we’d expected.
We landed in the bark of a great tree, considering the nest below us.
“Well?” Zirilla asked.
I made my decision. “We need help,” I said.
“Help in the form of?”
“Let’s go get Mirio and Luthiel.”
----------------------------------------
“It should not be particularly difficult,” Luthiel said, examining the earthen model before him. “I can see why you sought me out.”
Zirilla and I had grabbed he and Mirio from the settlement. Luthiel could fly now, and so we’d made good time—Luthiel and I shared a windsleeve and Zirilla sat astride Mirio’s conjured mount with him, hastening its flight with her own conjured wind.
My brother and I had spoken little, both while I’d laid out the plan and on the way over. We weren’t being cold to one another, not really—just curt and to the point. If we were going to talk about the Doom, it wasn’t today.
Today he would just follow my orders, coolly and precisely. Luthiel had never failed to be cool and precise.
Whatever they thought of our working together, neither Zirilla nor Mirio said a thing about it.
We stood in a small clearing only a few kilometers from the nest of lightning bugs, Luthiel regarding the earthen model I’d made of its tunnel network, his faintly luminous white hair starkly visible in the dark of the forest. There were a few corpses of spiders and apehounds around us, all of them riddled with holes from my conjured arrows. Mirio was using his [Wild Bond] to deter any more potential predators.
“Highest density of life is in these chambers,” I said, gesturing to a few points on my model.
Luthiel nodded, not taking his eyes off me. “This section,” he said, indicating a piece of earth that divided some of the tunnels. “Could it be removed with some haste?”
Zirilla peered at it. “I think so,” she said.
“Very good,” he said. “I’ll ready the bombs, then, and you two open the path for them.”
“Something of a shame to kill them all,” Mirio said plaintively, eying the earthen model.
“There’ll be more of them out there,” said Zirilla. “The wildlife isn’t too smart about them—predators attack into the lightning and get killed for it. I can’t imagine that they’re so uncompetitive that they’re a rarity.”
“Yes,” he said, still sounding somber. He sighed. “Still a shame, though.”
“Let’s get to it,” I said.
We flew into the air and clung to the side of the nearest tree to the insect colony—at which point, Luthiel began to shape three perfect spheres of hollow frost.
Circular shapes held mana. Spheres held mana well. Ice was not the best material to use when making a magic circle… but it was good enough. Not only were the spheres natural containers, but with my absurd strength at channeling mana, I could pack them with more mana than they would ever naturally hold and then keep it there.
I did this, and Luthiel began to form the other, more difficult component of the spell, inscribing the inside and outside of the spheres with runes and recruiting his high [Focus] to create the sophisticated spell that would guide the orbs into the tunnels before detonating the mana they contained in the form of a powerful frost spell.
We used mana from the air, keeping our own pools full so that we could use it to continue our attack. Finally, after a signal from Luthiel, Zirilla and I dove toward the colony, making haste—without me to help hold it in place, the spheres would start bleeding away the six thousand mana that they collectively held.
Both of us landed in the middle of the group of tunnels, and as soon as our feet touched the ground I could hear the stirring of the heavy insects within as they mustered to defend their colony from the invaders. But we were only a split-second on the ground: with a great heave, Zirilla and I tore a huge section of stone away and hurled it toward a sloped section of ground, giving it a bit of topside spin so that it hit the ground rolling to bring it free of the colony. We stayed only a second longer, clearing out some other hunks of earth and making sure to keep a few passages open—and we could hear a stampede of motion inside, bugs upset by the sudden heaving of earth.
“Now,” Luthiel said calmly.
Both of us leapt into the air, conjuring a shared windsleeve and taking us above the colony as Luthiel’s three spheres flew past us, each of them trailing a billowing cloud of fog and taking a different path into the tunnels. I reached out with my magic and channeled mana into the various tunnel entrances—and Luthiel joined us a moment later, hovering beside us and conjuring walls of ice using the mana that I’d channeled, blocking each tunnel with a glittering barricade that was several feet thick.
We’d cut off all the main entrances to the colony only three or four seconds after our attack had begun—and a few moments after that, we’d flown around to the secondary ones and sealed them as well.
Our attack had been so fast, so coordinated, that none of them had made it out: apart from the noise of many insects suddenly startled into motion, and the glittering icy barricades, the whole assault was strangely silent, seemingly free of violence.
But with my gaze, I could see otherwise: inside the tunnels, the frost bombs detonated, sucking heat from the air. The inhabitants died by the hundreds, vitals slowed and then halted by the deadly cold. Those who weren’t killed were still sapped by the deadly cold—a few dozens of insects crawled weakly toward the entrances, where their instincts failed them—they didn’t throw lightning to blast away the frost because they didn’t seem to take it for an enemy. Some of them began to dig with [Earth Magick], but not in a coordinated way.
“It’s working,” I said. “It’s working… very well.”
“The boons are good,” said Luthiel, looking down on the silent colony beside me. “Shall we continue?”
I nodded. “Over here,” I said, descending to one of the frozen pathways—within, I could sense more motion than near the other entrances.
Luthiel conjured another sphere of ice, and we got to work. Within a few minutes we’d killed almost all of them—and Luthiel reported a bounty of more than three hundred boons containing [Lightning 1].
We had Mirio’s conjured broadwing carry one of the carcasses back with us so that we could use its parts to create the components of a tracking spell to hone in on more colonies. Zirilla and I were almost in states of disbelief: abundant [Lightning] was never something we’d have thought could come so easy.
As we flew home, I had to lament how everything had gone between Luthiel and I. Truly, there was nothing quite like having a skilled mage on your side, one given a lot of time to prepare. With his help, the hunt had gone perfectly.