A peal of thunder tore through the grey, chilly afternoon, kickstarting the daily downpour. Right outside the wooden door of the double-bed inn room, Sylvia noted the soft drumming of little footsteps as little boys and girls ran past. A moment later, the children hooted and cheered in their high-pitched voices as a brief, blinding flash of light lit up the overcast sky.
A few seconds later, yet another boom reverberated through the inn, completely bypassing the flimsy wooden walls. Outside the room, the children screamed before descending into hysterical laughter. Sylvia shifted her cross-legged posture in clear discomfort as all that noise drilled into her ears.
The inn Pireus had chosen offered zero protection from outside noise, which also meant that anyone keen enough could eavesdrop on the room’s occupants. The floorboards also creaked constantly, the beds stank of unwashed miner, and some of the rain seeped through the old roof.
However, it was that sorry condition of the place that kept them hidden from prying eyes.
The old man himself was meditating in one corner while Brian snoozed away in blissful dreamland on the other bed. Herself, Sylvia had taken the role of sentry in Sylthis’ absence. Although her eyes were not as good and her Skills even less specialized in gathering information, she knew countless spells which served a similar purpose. They would never replace Sylthis’ astute mastery of her role as a scout and her vast experience, but they were the best they could do in the straits they had found themselves in.
Absentmindedly, she materialized the spell circle of an active far-sight spell known as [Periscopic Sight] and adjusted its parameters. She had just picked up a trio of Adventurers who looked mildly competent from their well-kept equipment, alert gazes, and assured gait. She needed to ascertain their affiliation before they arrived at the city gates.
She sighed in relief as the spell zeroed in on the image of their party’s insignia emblazoned proudly upon their chests. They were not among the parties listed on the Demon Exterminators Ladder.
“Your churning mana tells me we've had another close call,” Pireus droned from his position in the corner, his deep voice echoing pleasantly against the wooden walls.
“It was just another competent-seeming Adventurer party,” she reported to the veteran Slayer who had yet to open his eyes. His odd breathing patterns were the only thing that betrayed the fact that he was still deep in meditation.
“How long do we have to stay... here?” Sylvia’s face twisted in disgust as she opened her eyes and took in the walls stained with a brown sludge that she did not dare guess the origin of, and the haphazardly patched floors. She kept her nose plugged with a film of mana. Nothing was worth risking a whiff of the putrid stench that hung over the place like a necromantic miasma.
“And how long will we live in fear of these feeble, pesky humans?”
Pireus finally opened his eyes after he heard the seething anger in her voice. It was unfair. If Sylvia wanted to, she could level this city with a single spell. The three of them could easily accomplish the feat. Yet due to being blindsided by the Demon Extermination ladder, along with Brian’s bleeding heart...
“Only until we find a secure enough place to contact Darius and Janet,” he answered in a soothing tone. “They’ll be the ones most affected by this, you know?”
Sylvia just scowled at the platform of compressed air she’d deployed to act as a barrier between her and the filthy bed. Her eyes also panned past Brian’s sleeping form and the cold pane of blue flames under his back that played a similar role. “Do we have to do it from this place?”
“All the better inns are playing host to at least two parties on the rankings,” he chided. “If we even step foot within 100 meters of any of them, our cover is blown. We’ll be drafted into the extermination teams due to our strength, and Brian needs us to watch over him as he recovers.”
All salient facts, but Sylvia still grumbled at the inconvenience. The idiot that had designed the Quest had built a 100-meter proximity alerting system into the system so parties on the rankings would find it easier to find each other in cities and team up.
At first glance, it was a well-thought-out feature, considering the threat posed by the demonic scourge. Yet, from a practical viewpoint, wouldn’t an invitation-style broadcast system have sufficed to prevent needless conflicts? She sure thought so.
People rarely understood that even those as powerful as her party needed time to rest after battles. All they would care about was the number of slain enemies listed there, and the opportunity partying up with them would open in terms of the open nobility quest.
“How long would you say it will take until Brian is fit for duty again?”
“If Darius was here to administer treatment? Less than two nights,” Pireus answered and shook his head regretfully. “Unless we find a Healer equally skilled in separating mana by Mystery and sequestering it... about a month.”
“The reprobates from the Religious Council will have gotten to Janet by that point!”
“I know,” Pireus’ shoulders slumped as though a huge weight had alighted upon them. “Then our mission will have truly fallen apart.”
“Oh, I just spotted a promising pair," Sylvia suddenly piped up. “Warrior and mage this time, and those insignias are definitely on the rankings.”
“What do you suggest?”
“A wait-and-see approach, of course,” she said before her eyes glided to Brian’s prone form and the struggle between his mana and the pernicious taint of demonic flame that was wreaking havoc on his pathways.
“I’m beginning to wonder how Janet accomplished it.”
“Me too, Pireus,” she intoned in a subdued voice. “Me too.”
Sylvia did not know whether she did it to reassure herself, or if she did it to feel closer to her distant companions. For a moment, she allowed her mind to break from its constant vigilance and brought up the rankings. Due to a flaw in the Quest’s design, or more likely because of the sheer disregard for convention that Janet’s mere existence engendered, the girl sat atop the rankings above every party and sole Adventurer that had dared accept the quest.
Rank
Exterminator/Party
Incursions Closed
Rate of Dead Zone Reclamation
1
Janet
1
100%
2
Seekers of the Bloom
3
88.7%
3
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Millennium Three
5
86.4%
4
Oragun’s Blight
4
66%
5
Valorean Knights
2
66%
6
Kologrean Mountain Sages
1
66%
7
Blaring Scythes
1
66%
8
Horned Mane
2
33%
9
Janiru
1
33%
10
Salamander’s Smolder
1
33%
It seemed like the party made up of assorted priests and their paladins, Seekers of the Bloom, had also managed to kill demons before a Dead Zone fully formed. The position at the top remained unchanged - and was very unlikely to do so. That realization stole all the remaining shreds of cheer from Sylvia’s heart. It aroused in her memory the events of that fateful day when their predicament had taken root.
70 kilometers to the north and east of Seldor-Tep stood a rest stop. It was an expansive campground where penniless travelers could set up their tents and resupply in the joint store and inn that stood at its innermost edge. Since the three of them were loaded enough to buy out the campground and all three cities to which it led, Brian, Pireus, and herself were taking their sweet time slurping up a rich noodle soup that was a bit too light on the meat.
Still, not everyone could be as talented in the kitchen as Sylthis, and not every hunter that supplied the rest stop was Janet. That girl just seemed to find the most delicious animals to hunt, and for whatever reason, any meat touched by her mana was that much more scrumptious.
Since they were still relatively near the jungle, the noodle soup was garnished with restorative herbs and spiced with invigorating herbal essence. They of course did nothing for the three of them owing to the sheer density of their mana, but the herbs reminded them of Sylthis and the cheeky girl, so they relished the meal silently with eyes closed in nostalgia.
It was then that Sylvia and Brian picked up a very distinct erosion of the spatial fabric. Suddenly, the ambient mana keened with a sense of rejection and repulsion. It was a familiar feeling: a demon had crossed into their Sphere.
The intensity of the sensations informed them that the incursion point was close.
“Demon?” Pireus asked, a jiggling piece of fat hanging from his chopsticks.
“Yeah,” Brian answered as he sniffed the air like a lizard. “Not very powerful, but it’s strong enough to do some damage in this mana desert.”
“Three kilometers out,” Sylvia added.
As Slayers, it was their sworn duty to take care of threats to the Sphere. Be it demons, rogue elementals, the occasional Archmage that went insane, death cults that threatened to topple the peace, or even emergent dungeons, their quick and efficient resolution was a Slayer’s responsibility. This too, they would ensure was cleared up without incident.
Pireus tapped his replacement Guild Tablet on the table’s edge. An enchantment inscribed there automatically transferred the price of their lodging, and meals, along with a generous tip to the inn’s owner. A message that they were checking out of their rooms was also relayed in that single exchange.
If a demon was about, there was no guarantee that their identities would remain secure. Remaining in the inn would only endanger the people there.
After that, Sylvia cast a quick flight spell that covered both her and the warrior. Brian opted for a less-flamboyant spell than his go-to [Wings of Flame]. With all haste, the trio took to the air and arrived at the incursion in less than a minute.
“This is lucky,” Pireus droned. “There’s nobody around for miles.”
“We are quite a distance from the populated centers.” The Havenhust and the areas around it were so parched of mana, very few people dared live there. The only pockets of civilization that existed were the lawless Adventurer towns that took commissions to harvest the jungle’s resources and the two or three cities that had cropped up on Ley lines.
Disappointingly, or fortunately if looked at through the lens of a normal person, the demon was only Third Circle. It was barely powerful enough to set anything alight while in Brian’s presence. While the fire mage smothered its flames with his absolute control over the element, Pireus took its head with a single slash of his sword. He did not even need to bolster the weapon with an oscillating layer of mana.
Once the extermination was complete, Sylvia took a few minutes to set up a runic formation that would slowly draw out any demonic Mysteries out of the surrounding space. The formation was one the Slayers utilized in all demon hunts. Its function was to neutralize any extraplanar Mysteries by blasting them with what was essentially pure destruction.
Since they had caught the demon before a Dead Zone could be established, the area would recover perfectly.
Their duty fulfilled, the party of three decided to continue their journey towards Seismul City, so named for its famed exports of gemstones. It was one of the cities that sat atop a Ley line, so the mana there was dense enough to comfortably sustain the three of them. The city would also serve as their base as they carried out Slayer missions and investigated Marius’ cult and the continent’s religions.
Unfortunately, luck did not smile on them that day. A short six hours later, they were forced off their path to take care of another demon, and another one three hours later. The demons were both weak, none of their cultivations cresting above the Fifth Circle mark. Brian easily burnt the first to a crisp, and Pireus bisected the second starting from its head into two symmetrical halves.
It was after that third one that things grew complicated. Some braindead genius decided it was a great idea to create a publicly-broadcast Quest to exterminate the extraplanar nuisances. And just as idiots were wont to do, their message resonated with even more idiots that were out for riches and glory.
The demons that could barely scrape by in terms of power received hundreds of mid-powered Adventurers that believed themselves invincible. Rather than feed only upon the ambient mana and the mana seeped into the land, they gorged themselves on cores of Adventurers and their tamed beasts.
Barely a day since the Quest announcement went out, signals of evolving demons pulsed through the still mana of the wastelands. Suddenly, two demons crossed the Fifth Circle mark. Very few parties in Norim could handle a threat that massive.
The fourth creature was taken down with some difficulty, but nobody was injured. They were professionals, and this was not their first demon hunt.
Quest: Norim Demon Extermination IV
Assist in the closing of an incursion point (4/4)
Contribute to the slaying of an invading demon (4/4)
Contribute to the restoration of a Dead Zone (3/4)
Reward: Upgrade a Title within the [Ruler] Line.
The final one, though, was different. Every single person that had attacked the fourth demon was dead. There had been no people that needed saving, so all that was required of them was to collect the corpses of the demon and adventurers, and they were home clean.
In the hunt for the last demon, however, things went a little south. Eleven parties had taken up the Quest. They had probably been thinking that numbers would give them a chance at victory.
By the time they landed upon the scene, only nine of the fifty-something people were alive. Of them, only three would survive with treatment. Demonic flames boasted the nasty quality of very low survival rates.
Brian and his bleeding heart rushed in without a second thought. There were people that needed saving, so all caution went out the window. He parted the green flames with a wave of his hand and tried to fly the salvageable lives to safety.
With the added weight, he was too slow to evade a lance of flame from the levitating fiend. It caught him right between his shoulder blades, instantly bringing him down and forcing Sylvia to engage.
“Have you seen this?” Pireus muttered to her after she was done airdropping the three sorry excuses for Adventurers to a Temple of the Healer for treatment.
“Did they finally change the notification system? Seriously, who was the genius that thought it was wise to communicate the location of every demon to the entire Guild?”
“Oh, I wish I was just talking about that,” he shook his head and relayed a glittering table full of Adventurer parties that had presumably performed admirably in the quest.
“We already knew this was coming. They always accompany public quests with some sort of a ladder and a needlessly convoluted useless reward.”
“Yeah, but can’t you see the name at the very top?”
“Oh, no.”
“Yep. Now everyone can see that besides the three of us, someone out there can also clear up the demonic miasma.” He rubbed the pommel of his sword, the only sign of the stress that was simmering in his insides. “Worst of all, we’ll need to change our party affiliation back to Millenium Slayers to warn them.”
The Guild System facilitated the free transfer of messages between parties, with additional features such as transmission of visual and verbal exchanges available at an added cost. For safety reasons, the three of them had changed their party affiliation after departing the Havenhurst.
“Why don’t we just do that?”
“The Rankings come with the very helpful feature of alerting other Adventurers on the rankings to the presence of anyone else who is on it, to make teaming up easier. The alerts also prioritize those with more than a 66% success rate to promote knowledge-sharing on how to clear up the demonic taint before the land turns into irreparable Dead Zones.”
“Does that mean that we can’t go to the Guild and get the change authorized?”
“Not unless we want to be drafted into an extermination force,” the old man sighed. “It would be wiser to go to a less-trafficked Guild in some distant town, but we’ll need someone who knows the lay of the land since we can’t obtain maps from the Guild.”
“Not to mention the fact that Brian can’t actually travel right now.”
With a final scratch on his clean-shaven head, Pireus began walking towards Seismul City’s slums. “We’ll figure it out before things get truly dicey.”
“We always do,” she answered and followed in his steps, making sure to meet the gazes of the roaming hordes of children pickpockets and impudent, overconfident muggers.