“What is going… where am I?” Janet asked, groggy eyes scanning her immediate vicinity.
There was a tent above her bed, and a pillow under her head. Unfamiliar noises could be heard coming through the tent flap waving silently in the wind.
She also picked up the sizzling of roasting meat, and the scent of burning. Someone had left a steak above the coals for too long.
As her thundering heart calmed down, Janet picked up the comforting babbling of a lazy stream.
Again, what was the last thing she remembered?
Like a bolt out of the blue, Janet recalled that final message: “Don’t die.” There had been a tree stump leaking mana into the air, and some upturned loam…
Holy Hell! She was in a fucking bed!
Janet jumped out of the strange bed like a rat escaping a flaming nest. Or rather, she tried to. Her legs were like lead, and her muscles felt like jelly. Nothing responded to her commands. Even her tongue refused to wet her lips, which all of a sudden felt chapped and cracked.
Suddenly, the feeling that she really needed to pee occurred to Janet, escalating her need to get out of the comfortable down comforter from a panicked urging to a desperate panic.
So, she did the only thing she felt was left to her. She screamed at the top of her voice.
It was actually quite the impressive wail. The canvas of the tent shuddered a bit, and her ears even began to ring. Top-notch scream all around, if she had anything to say about it.
“Hear that, guys? She’s awake!” a cheerful feminine voice carried into the tent.
People, Janet realized.
‘I’m in a tent that belongs to people I don’t know, and my body can’t... won’t move.’
Slow, heavy footsteps thumped against the ground. Janet tried to sink under her bedding, her heart thundering in her ear. Another pair of footsteps joined the first, and then another.
At least three people. Now, Janet truly began to panic.
She tried everything. Clawing at the blankets, flailing her arms, even rolling out of bed. Her body simply refused to move.
People had finally caught up with her, and they had cast magic on her…
Magic! That was it!
The first set of footprints were close enough that Janet could hear the rustling of their owner’s clothes. She needed to do something, and fast.
With no time for surgical precision or a spare moment to worry about mana efficiency, all thought of caution and heedfulness went out the window, replaced in totality by a blanketing paranoia. One immobilization at the hands of a murderous psychopath had been more than enough for her.
Janet called upon all her mana, blasting it into as many constructs as it was willing to divide itself into. She did not care if she was left with an empty core. Her only concern was survival.
“Holy shi…” a gruff masculine voice cussed out. “What does she think she’s doing? Sylvia, did you forget to restrain her core?”
“She’s First Circle, Brian. How much damage do you think…” the voice trailed off.
“That’s… not good,” the first voice sounded out. The footsteps began to retreat.
Mana answered Janet’s call. Of that, she was very glad. The problem was that it was not just her mana that answered. In her mind’s eye, or perhaps it was the [Mana Sight] Skill the Lancing Deer had mentioned, she saw streams of ambient shadow mana answer the call, and join up with her own mana to create a construct that was frankly monstrous.
Then, just as Janet had willed, the construct broke into ten, then a hundred, then ten thousand little constructs that all at once lashed out at everything.
A groaning creak echoed through the tent. Under the furious assault of rampaging shadow, Janet’s bed gave out. The bedding was shredded, sending feathers everywhere. The tent was sent flying, the canvas in tatters.
Janet, oddly, was still floating in the air, totally unable to move yet held aloft by tentacles of her own mana. She thought she might have looked like an upside-down sea urchin.
The stray thought curled her lips into a wry smile.
Mana from the atmosphere was still flowing into her constructs. The tiny tentacles were still subdividing and lashing out, blasting apart everything they came across.
Ding! You have learned the Skill [Mana Constructs- Shadow]
Ding! [Mana Constructs - Shadow] has evolved into [Construct Field - Shadow]
Additional Experience gained for learning a Skill at First Circle
Skilled Learner Title awarded
Additional Experience gained for evolving a Skill at First Circle
Skilled Learner upgraded to Avid Learner
Ding! You have reached Level 4
Ding! You have reached Level 5
Janet’s core bottomed out. All the atmospheric mana captured inside her constructs blasted outwards, levelling everything in the clearing. She might have heard the creak of a felled tree and some shouted expletives.
The blast was loud, but mainly Janet was just distracted. The sudden onset of Mana Exhaustion coincided with her butt hitting the hard, cold ground.
“Ouch!”
“Now, why did you have to go and do that? You destroyed my favorite tent!”
Nobody answered the petulant man.
“Hi there, sweetie, Are you doing okay now?” a Cyclopean woman entered Janet’s field of view. “If I take off the restraints, will you promise not to misbehave?”
Janet tried to nod, but couldn’t. Feeling thoroughly confused, she blinked twice for yes. Apparently, that was enough.
The woman reached down with gigantic arms and picked Janet up like a little kitten, by the back of her shirt collar. She heard a click as a clasp was undone, before she was set gently down on her feet.
In the one-eyed woman’s fingers was a silver collar, complete with an inscribed gem. Janet wanted to reach out and grab that gem so she could study the runes, but was distracted by the sensation of her boots on the ground.
Instinctively, she flailed her arms to assert her balance. Hey, she could move again!
The Cyclopean woman stepped back, allowing her room to find her feet. The motion allowed Janet to take a gander at the absolute devastation her magic had wrought.
While she was quite proud of the power on display, the looks by the five adults facing her down made her choke down her exuberance.
“[Construct Field],” she pointed at the devastation, color burning into her cheeks.
“We figured,” the Cyclopean answered. Her eye expressionlessly panned through the clearing. Not even the grass had been spared.
Janet really wanted to stare into that eye, but that would have been rude. It was one eye, just above a beautiful slender nose, and framed by two rising ridges of bone on either side of the nose that made the woman seem regal and intimidating, yet kind and motherly.
As for the reason she felt secure and safe enough to just stand there? Cyclopeans were an honorable people. Not the ‘I swear on my estranged uncle’s grave’ kind of honor that some humans professed to uphold, but an iron-clad honor baked into their very blood and being.
One thing that a Cyclopean would never do was hunt down a child. It broke too many tenets of their faith and tradition; anyone who did it would have a thousand of their kind bearing down upon them.
One of the nuns at the orphanage all those years back had been a Cyclopean. She was the most gentle, loving person Janet had ever known.
Cyclopeans made for great warriors, and were terrible, unrelenting opponents. But what Janet could gather from her reading was that they made the best allies.
So, Janet shook the offered hand, not allowing any of her envy for its size to surface. She still had some growing to do, yet.
The larger woman was smiling down at her. Janet returned it in kind.
To the Cyclopean’s right was a man who just burned with fire mana. His hair was red, his clothes were red, his shoes were red, his nails were painted red. There were motes of fire mana swirling around his form like fireflies. Janet felt a headache rising just from the garish sight.
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She could tell that they’d get along just dandy, so she saved her getting to know him for last.
“Hello, my name is Janet,” she returned her attention back to the giant of a woman beside her.
“I’m Sylthis, the guy in red is Brian, the old man is Pireus, the elf beside him is Sylvia, and the guy on the stool is our party leader, Darius.”
Darius was sitting on the only spot in the entire clearing that was still green. Had he protected his sitting spot during her magical oopsie? He was hunched over reading a book, looking very dapper in a grey suit.
Did people still wear suits? Weren't they relics of a time before mana and spells?
Wait… did Sylthis say elf?
Ignoring everyone else, Janet turned her head like a weathervane looking for the storied master of art, dress, magic, and any craft known to man.
“Hi, I’m Janet.” She was standing beside the old man, looking like a dream come to life.
Seriously. The woman’s hair was a golden waterfall dropping all the way to her back. Her skin was perfect, not a single line, wrinkle or blotch in sight, and her clothes were green with golden embroidery of vines and leaves that somehow seemed livelier than the swaying trees in the distance.
Janet detected just the slightest hint of Life mana radiating from her immaculateness. The ground at her feet was already beginning to sprout!
In Janet’s Status was a line she was sure she could use to bond with the elf. They both were beholden to Gaia, after all.
Janet smiled her widest smile, tilted her head as she allowed it to drop, and flashed the woman the elvish hand signal for “Pleased to meet you.”
Everyone’s eyes boggled. The elf narrowed her eyes. Janet did not spot a wrinkle, even then.
‘Did I do it wrong?’
Janet held her bow, but peeked at her folded fingers. Everything was in order. Where was the problem?
The cyclopean cleared her throat. “Umm, Janet… where did you learn that?”
Janet, torn between releasing her bow and answering the towering woman, darted her eyes nervously about the clearing.
Eventually, though, the elf returned her signal, her long, slender fingers curling into a more perfect version of her own bungled-up signal. She too bowed her head, elegant brown eyes locked onto Janet's for but a second.
Janet released her bow, and looked up at the Cyclopean. “I read a lot of books. Ardusian hunting signals were among…”
Ding! You have completed the Quest; Welcome to Wayfarer (3/3)
Ding! You have acquired the Skill, [Novice Cartographer] (Common)
Janet instinctively focused on the words [Welcome to Wayfarer]. The name somehow evoked in her notions of freedom and exploration, two things that resonated very deeply with her.
Quest: [Welcome to Wayfarer]
Requirements:
1. Demonstrate a willingness to explore in spite of danger or peril to oneself (1/1)
2. Make contact with a Wayfarer and pass their trial (1/1)
3. Demonstrate ability to communicate intelligibly with three different Peoples (3/3)
Reward: Automatic admission into the Wayfarer’s Guild, Access to one [Wayfarer] Skill.
As Janet was reading through the description, her mind thoroughly boggled at the implications that not only did there exist more than the one Guild, she had gained admission into one without actually having to go to town!
That was beyond amazing!
As the message in the corner of her vision disappeared, she became aware that Sylthis was talking.
“…must have been a rare tome. Most books containing ethnic tongues and their language characteristics became obsolete after the spread of Common…”
“Yeah, it was rare,” Janet cut her off. The question in her mind just couldn’t wait.
“You guys are Adventurers, right?“ There was no answer, but she didn’t need one anyway. Not that many people went into jungles, and of those who did fewer were as well-prepared for the rigors of the wild like this group seemed to be.
“What is a Wayfarer, and why am I suddenly a part of their Guild?
===
Sylthis felt her stomach drop.
They’d already been forewarned that the child was extraordinary. But this extraordinary?
She was still reeling from the power of the [Construct Field] that the girl had unleashed in a blind panic. That Skill had contained the power of at least a Middle Second Circle Practitioner. If her [Appraisal] was not being duped, the child was…
Janet, (Unknown Race) LV 5
She was barely halfway through the First Circle.
Then, that ancient Ardusian symbol. Apart from the Elves and Dryads whose civilization had persisted through the ages, very few people alive even knew of the existence of that archaic method of communication.
Yet, here was a child seemingly out of nowhere able to converse fluently in the language. She knew Sylvia. That had been respect in her eyes. The child’s symbol had been that immaculately executed.
“Shall we sit and talk?” she proposed, and her party turned in unison towards Darius.
The child looked around, confused. “Sit on what?”
Sylthis erupted with laughter as she dragged her charge towards the stools Darius summoned out of storage.
“Oh.”
After a round of introductions of everyone’s role in the party, Janet recounted a tale of her days through the Havenhurst. She skimmed over her ‘sacrifice’ and her ruthless execution of ‘that psycho Marius’, but from the vitriol in her voice it was clear the wound was yet to scab over.
Janet then spoke of her travels through the jungle. She particularly expounded upon a certain Thunder Owl that had caught her interest.
The party already knew that, but they listened with enraptured zest as the child described the being’s mana technique.
At the revelation that the child had achieved [Active Meditation] before her initialization into a Guild's System, the party exchanged knowing glances. Darius added another annotation to his book, and put on a pair of golden glasses.
The last part of the tale, where Janet encountered the Lancing Deer and managed to recenter her mental state during the beast’s active encroachment had Pireus’ jaw on the floor. A master of mind magic kicked out by an untrained newbie? It all sounded too fantastical to be true.
“I think I get the gist here. You suspect the Lancing Deer to be this Wayfarer, and the mental attack to be the test that you supposedly passed,” Sylvia intimated.
“Yeah,” Janet began, her eyes still bright with exuberance. “He gave me this map of the jungle before he left, along with a bunch of knowledge on spells and whatnot. The reward for the Quest I somehow completed by greeting Sylvia in Ardusian is a cartographic Skill.”
The girl was completely open and truthful, with not a hint of nervousness in her mannerisms. What made her so unwary of her party? From what Sylthis had observed, the girl was paranoia personified!
“Wait, are you trying to say the deer gave you a map? An actual Wayfarer-crafted map?” Brian asked, his head cocked in disbelief.
Sylthis understood Brian’s skepticism. Guilds other than the Adventurers’ were incredibly picky. Craftsmen had to train for more than a decade before admission into theirs. Slayers… they had to work as Adventurers and climb to Gold Rank before they were allowed to take the entrance test.
For Wayfarers… those Sphere-trotting magic snobs were the worst of the bunch. They only recruited from certain families and their own elitist training institutions.
Exploration of ruins, Dungeons, Pocket Realms, and the nasty sorts of places Wayfarers went was a dangerous game requiring adept knowledge and rigorous training. They thus asked of their members proficiency in certain very exclusive Skills and affinities.
Wayfarers were the first into the pit of uncertainty, their menagerie of exploration Skills allowing others to follow in their footsteps, even after they were dead and forgotten.
Of course, any place a Wayfarer explored was a permanent stream of income for them and their Guild, with them charging exorbitant numbers for dossiers that would allow anyone successful campaigns into such areas.
“Not just a map. It’s…” Janet stared blankly into thin air, either reading her Status or accessing information catalogued inside her head. “… there’s information about the Havenhurst, from an in-depth history of its various terrains, the beasts that call it home, to the treasures it holds and their cycles of replenishment…”
Basically, the Lancing Deer had given Janet the keys to the territory encompassed by the Havenhurst Jungle.
“Deft bastard!” Pireus cursed.
“What?” Janet asked, then nodded in understanding. “I mean, I was a bit mad that he just shoved the information into my brain, and that he rifled through my memories like a jackass…“
“Language!” Sylthis pinched Janet’s cheek. She was so cute as she rubbed the sting away.
“– but he seemed okay when I recited Nagn'Mamor’s Mantra back to him.”
Oh, so that was it! Joining the Wayfarers was first and foremost restricted to people with the capacity to heed that mantra. People, especially in civilized society, were a bit reticent to follow teachings that advocated the power of might above all. It was why the Wayfarer Guild mostly recruited from amongst its own.
The question bore asking, about why Janet knew so much about the ancient-world, and why she would follow as archaic a principle as the Law of the Wild. But looking at her, Sylthis knew the answer without asking.
The leathers Janet wore were immaculate. The seams were perfect, visible only where they added to the aesthetic. They had been wet upon her party’s arrival, but a quick infusion of mana by Sylvia had ‘restored’ them. They were core-bound magical garment, only appearing as leather because that is what Janet believed them to be.
Sylthis and her party all wore similar garments, with Darius’ appearing as a grey suit and David’s as a mage’s robe. They had cost each of them more than a decade of adventuring salary. She was still paying off hers.
The clothes might have fooled an uninformed gaze, but the girl’s appearance told a story. She was a child of adversity.
Janet’s smile, easy and open as could be, revealed teeth that were just beginning to regrow back. One had to be a particular kind of malnourished for their teeth to be stunted.
Her skin was pristine, as were her internals to a cursory glance, but her scalp revealed another picture. Her mat of hair was uneven, with holes and hairless patches in random places.
It was beginning to grow in, a matte black that sucked in all the light, but one could still see at the reddish ends hair that had grown to a child bereft of nourishment.
When the picture was completed by Janet’s harrowing story about a ‘sacrifice’, everything painted a picture of someone standing alone against an oppressive status quo. Not because they were divergent thinkers or pioneers against the establishment, but simply because society had failed them utterly.
For the first time in weeks, Sylthis understood – partly – why the missive had stated that they were to recruit Janet into the Slayers at all cost.
If left to her devices, Janet might just grow into the kind of threat Slayers died trying to bring down.
The girl was paranoid, and definitely believed in the power of might above all else. She had seen the underbelly of civilization lived in it, and drowned for years on end under the cloying stench of putrefaction borne upon still winds of callous disregard.
To add insult to injury, Janet was obsessed with magic. Her tale of the Thunder Owl made her priorities and aspirations abundantly clear. She knew the kind of power that would be sufficient to set her free.
All that was discounting whatever the deer had found in the recesses of Janet’s mind that prompted him to break millennia of tradition to get her an automatic admission. Elitist organizations did not bend over backwards for novitiates, yet a Seventh Circle [Territory Lord] had seen fit to literally back-door Janet into his Guild.
So, here was a clearly prodigious youngster who would go to any lengths to acquire power. She probably believed only might would keep her safe from the cruel, uncaring world. And to make matters worse, her chief element was Shadow.
Once more, Sylthis gazed at that angelic smile, and for a moment could feel the weight of the burdens it failed to conceal. The world had failed Janet, an innocent little child.
Sylthis vowed to make sure she and her party would do right by her.
“That was a great recounting, Janet.”
She was answered by a blush and a chiming giggle.
“My god, isn’t she just precious?” she asked, cupping Janet’s cheek in her palm. Her tiny head fit in there perfectly.
“Sylthis…” Darius’ gruff voice cautioned.
Clearing her throat and gathering her palms to her lap, Sylthis got to her duty. For some reason, Janet was more open and candid towards her. That would come in handy for the next part.
“I was wondering, would you allow us… or just me, to look at your Status?”
It was taboo to even ask, owing to the fact that a Status was basically a readout of a person’s entire life. Reading another’s Status was akin to having them expose their soul to you, all their weaknesses and insecurities laid bare.
“If its you, I don’t mind,” Janet said assuredly as she shot a dirty look at Darius’ glowing glasses. “No need to read my Aura, Darius. I’ll be truthful, but only with her.”
“Dare I ask why you trust her that much?” Darius asked as he took his glasses off.
Janet coughed twice, then answered in the throaty, guttural voice that was clearly native Cyclopean.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t speak…”
“She said she knows a Cyclopean’s heart. Her favorite childhood caretaker was one, and she’s read more than enough to know you’d never betray a child,” Darius translated.
Sylthis felt tears well up her lower lid. With a wet sniff, she employed a gentle wind spell to clear them away, and prepared herself for the deluge of information. She expected to be floored.
30 seconds went by, with Janet squinting and grunting with effort.
“Umm, guys… how does one share a Status, again?”