(Y7, January 17th-January 18th)
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The trek across the no-mans-land separating Beta Sector from the Deva proved to be much different than the one over two months ago. Quandocor’s Skills and Stats had improved somewhat, but the addition of the Intuition ritual provided so much additional information at least three times a day.
Still, there were things his Skill did not twitch on, but Thalokainy’s The Land did work better on. If it was deserted and empty, it did not register on Lay, but the scout’s personal topology map did warn him of something unusual. If it worked like Quandocor’s, then it was an almost subliminal map, seen at the edge of his sight, yet precise enough to read when you decided to pay attention – which was ordinarily impossible the way human retina worked.
So, while Quandocor’s dungeon was almost 10 kilometers to the side of the group’s path, their scout had found something a mere kilometer from that very path, which was now evident in the middle of the plains.
A town. Or rather, as usual, what looked like a piece of a town. All such abandoned or ruined settlements found on Northworld, even the largest ones, would barely qualify as a village back on Earth.
Despite the mission, they all agreed to quickly check the place, given how close it was.
Up close, the abandoned town looked nearly intact. Fanduk, where Quandocor’s adventures had started, had concentric rings of increasingly less ruined buildings up to the central tower, but this town structure was almost all intact housing, laid down haphazardly—small, large, single and multiple floors, with no clear streets between them. The entire area was paved, without a single ditch to swallow the runoff when the rare rains fell. More than other towns he’d seen in Northworld, this one felt like an idea of a town rather than an actual abandoned one.
“That one looks like a warehouse, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Seems there an upper floor. You can see the beam over that opening has a loop where you put a rope to raise loads,” Thalokainy noted.
The large doors were slightly stuck, but as Theavilast had high Strength and Door Knocker, the heavy wood gates finally parted without much breaking, letting them look inside. The interior was dark, and Thalokainy, who had, of course, Night Sight, reported almost immediately that the warehouse building was empty.
There was an upper floor covering half of the warehouse and a pair of ladders to get there, and the only thing they found up there was a pallet-like stack of cloth squares. They reminded Quandocor of the velvety cloth they’d found in Fanduk’s tower, just in a blue-purple color.
“Not too shabby. Wildcard cloth,” Jonkartman noted.
“Wildcard?” Quandocor asked.
“You noticed they don’t have a descriptor, right? No levels. When you make items, you cap at the level of your Skill or best Skill and the lowest level of the components you use. Wildcards don’t have levels, so they usually don’t factor in,” the Cotton Road crafter explained.
“Very handy. We found some in Fanduk.”
“You get such cloth in normal ruins, never in dungeons, and rarely in big quantities.”
“We had a chest with a dozen bolts or so.”
“Sounds on par for the type. They drop the quality a bit if you use too much of them, though, which is why everyone uses primarily leather bases rather than clothes for adventuring gear. Cloth is hard to get on Northworld, so you end up using Earth-made cloth as a wildcard instead. It’s not quite the same, but you can end up within a level or two of what you’d get with local wildcard stuff, so it’s not too bad. You’re crafting?”
“I was hoping to do something about leather, but I’m only dabbling in it. Got Skinning and Work Leather but never went anywhere with those.”
“Good combo. Work Leather is not bad. It’s got decent tier, but it has you do all the work, so unless you really have practice with it, you never end up quite with the level you could make in theory. Specialized stuff like Cobbling almost guides you, but of course is more restricting in products. The absolute best crafters, unlike me, have snagged multiple self-reinforcing Skills on the lottery.”
“I botched quite a few belts.”
“That’s the easy stuff, right. Crafters don’t level fast, but jokes on F-rank Skills aside…”
Theavilast snickered.
“… dedicated ones tend to have high Skills in their true passion. Even with the Interface helping, you achieve greatness only by being your Skill. I know I’m not one of those, but I like crafts. And selling them, too. Mostly selling them, actually.”
They dropped back to the warehouse floor.
“You’re leaving those wildcards?”
“Can’t carry all of them. And besides, they don’t sell for lots, since you can substitute Earth-made stuff without too many problems. It’s not as if it was alchemy stuff. Most of that doesn’t have any Earth equivalent, unless someone’s made a breakthrough in reverse engineering some back there. But I’ll make notes. If there’s enough useful stuff in the city, someone from the Cotton Road will organize a small expedition to loot it. It’s not always about dungeons. Hopefully, anyone who’s interested in the dungeon won’t have time to ransack the ruins here.”
“It even looks extensive from here,” Quandocor said.
“Really?” Theavilast said.
“Boosted Lay of the Land has a resolution of 540 meters size for parts of an area. I get at least eleven different subsets of critters based on that size. The only dungeon I ever had that kind of feeling was a cave system that crossed an entire mountain, even though most of it was empty.”
She whistled.
“Well, at least it means it’s not too many regrets not doing it. If it’s multiple square kilometers of dungeon, it’s way too big to do it in a single delve,” Berkleyyan commented.
The expedition leader contemplated the abandoned town.
“Okay, one more hour of exploration, then we go on. Thalo?”
“Nothing really registering. Is desert and safe.”
“Then three groups. Be back here in one.”
Quandocor found himself with Goglas and Thalokainy. They moved in, looking at the buildings.
“Looks more like houses than commercial buildings,” Goglas observed.
“Most abandoned cities like that,” Thalokainy said. “I found two myself in Beta, so that is third.”
“The Land, right?” she asked in confirmation.
“Yes. That necromancer cop here find adventures, I find things that people like to visit.”
Quandocor laughed.
“Necromancer cop makes it sounds badass, even if I’m not one here in Northworld.”
“Well, we’re investigating our neighbors, to see how they’re doing,” she said.
“That’s true.”
That’s what I am here for.
“How did you split your Stones? Is that how you ended up with Necro?” Goglas asked.
“Van sold us on the archmage archetypes, but there are only eight types, and there were three of us. Thankfully, he already had a few Geomantic Skills and one or two Aether, so he went for the bizarre Skills. More Aether and Psionics.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Psionics are cool. Need to be focused, though,” Thalokainy said. The scout had said he’d got a few Skills there, in addition to a pair of ranged archery Skills, which were the extent of his primary fighting Skills.
“Aether works kinda the same, Van says. He tends to like bizarre skills, he’s the kind of guy who would walk on water rather than add a new way to fight. Birka didn’t have magic, but she had already some unarmed style fight, so she went for boosting herself with Druidry and Arcana. Geomancy is more versatile, and Van didn’t need those Stones, so she picked them too.”
“She got Infuses?” Goglas asked.
“Stamina and Vitality.”
“The basics then. They’re the most common druidic Infuses for vitals. There’s also ones for six magic vitals, except obviously Lifeforce, since expending Lifeforce to gain Lifeforce sounds and is stupid, and Death, because Death. I have Infuse Mana and Infuse Power too.”
“I’d say I can use Infuse Mana, but…”
“Meditation. The best kind, too.”
“There are a few more at tier 1. With Fanduk, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a full catalogue of the possibilities now. There were even some of the minor tier meditations going around.”
“So you just picked the rest of the Stones?”
“I already had Necromancy from Setup. Two Skills, even. But yes, I was a complete ignoramus so I asked for the leftovers, since they did not matter much, or so I thought. Rituals are surprisingly good, even if they have the long cooldown drawback.”
“I love that Entranced by Fate,” Thalokainy said.
“That one’s from recent lottery, not our Skill Stones. That’s why it’s not yet at a higher level, I’ve got only a few early points in it. Omens is much higher, with months of constant practice.”
“Skills you can use on yourself are always good for grinding. It’s not like combat skills which can’t be raised by training or sparring,” Goglas said.
“Rituals like that for everything would be insane, but alas, there’s only three, one in each main stat for Rituals. Fortitude, Presence and of course Intuition.”
“Love that,” Thalokainy laughed again.
They found a sprawling single-floor house and went in. The floor plan was looking like one of those north African-style building he’d seen on many tourist catalogues, a large open inner courtyard with a small garden gone wild, weeds growing, and vines sneaking upward on one of the walls.
“It looks almost recently abandoned.”
“A lot of things look like that. If it was Earth, I say it’s been abandoned a decade ago? I had a garden like that, my aunt’s,” Thalokainy said. “She been living with my parents for nine years due to disability when we finally decided to sell the house and went to clean it.”
The walls of the house had a small hallway running all around the courtyard, and square, nearly identical rooms opening to the hallway. All of the rooms were empty, save for one which had shelves attached to one wall, and clear, empty bottles on it. The bottles had stoppers, but no labeling. Quandocor opened one and sniffed, but there was nothing to suggest what it was meant to contain.
“Set of bottles, for Jon,” he said.
“Useful?”
“Birka was quite excited by the stuff, for alchemy. She’s a dabbler, like me with leather. I suspect it’s like those wildcard cloth bolts – it’s better to use Northworld-native stuff to craft with rather than imported items from Earth.”
“So?” Berkleyyan asked as they all met back at the town’s entrance.
“Mostly empty. Found bottles, perfectly intact. A house with a small tower attached had a workshop, though. All sorts of saws, and even a drill. That thing must weight 200 kilos,” Quandocor reported.
“Same thing. Found a hammer,” Theavilast said, “but it’s unleveled.”
“Crafting tool, not adventuring item,” Jonkartman said. “We got lucky. We found the bank.”
“What?”
He pulled out a small chest. It had metal-reinforced corners and borders, and a loop to put a lock on, but of lock there was no trace. He opened it, and it was two-thirds full of coinage. All of the others whistled at the sight.
“Nothing above silver, though.”
“There were coins all over the town we found at spawn,” Quandocor noted.
“Ruins are the main source of coinage. It’s usually hidden in various places all over. That’s also why the Cotton Road will probably mount an expedition,” Jonkartman explained. “We can always use some more coins, what with the expanding population. Deflation is a Northworld problem.”
They spent 10 minutes counting and stacking the coins.
“711 copper, 99 bronze, 17 iron, and 4 silver. That’s still quite a sum.”
“Roughly over $26,000 based on usual trades. Split 7-way, that’s around $3800 for each of us.”
“Well, it was slightly profitable for a few hours, but we do have days of walking ahead of us,” Berkleyyan concluded.
The town and dungeon – plural, since the one he’d spotted at the end of the first day might also be of interest, even if it was fifty kilometers north – were an exciting part of the expedition. Quandocor understood better why scouts like Thalokainy had a reputation. The people in Manticore’s Buff may think the wilderness at their east was empty, but it was anything but.
“With an expansive dungeon complex next door, and some serious rank critters around, that’s the kind of place that becomes a high-rank town, where people migrate to as they get into high veteran or early thousander range,” Theavilast told him. “We’ll let the Cotton Road use the data first, but if they don’t want an exclusive deal, the bosses will include the location later. Probably even try to get some Probationary or better Agent working there. You sure you don’t have any other dungeon in range?”
“Not so far,” he confirmed. “And it is high rank,” he added, “Without the boost from ritual, I get nothing from it except one single item, so everything else is above 41.”
“It’s a very good place,” she mused.
The only warning they got was when his Sense twigged at something large entering his range. A rank-75 Elite, plus or minus 7. Well above and slightly behind them.
“FLYER, EIGHT O’CLOCK,” he yelled.
Everyone stopped in their track, and almost as one, dropped their backpacks while they pulled their weapons. Jonkartman and Thalokainy had their bows already strung – the Northworld items did not require them to be unstrung to preserve their bent.
The flyer was huge and had the six wings they’d been warned about. A Drake, and not a young one, if size and rank correlated with age.
As the silhouette swung about, checking on the unexpected prey, Quandocor took in the beast. The Eudimorphodon Sexalatus was as one would expect a dragon to be. Large, distinct scales covered an elongated body. Six short feet hung under the snake-like length, one pair under each pair of wings above. Unlike traditional draconic depictions, though, the wings were, or at least looked, feathered. And immensely huge. It had to be almost eight meters long, and the wingspan was easily double that. Even with those, Quandocor couldn’t see how such a massive creature could sustain flight.
Both archers launched arrows, and the drake swerved instantly to avoid them. Skill or reflexes, this beast had them.
Pull Mastery – giving to Varmatan, who was the most defensively inclined of the group, additional Reflexes at the enemy’s expense – and Decay Strength immediately went up as the flying beast reached his range. Others would be unloading their debuffs as well, even if nothing in the Interface gave him a sense of those.
A plume of vapor streaked out of the drake’s mouth, making him worry about firebreathing dragons. But the two Brethren on the path of the flyer dodged and were seemingly not too affected, so he assumed this wasn’t some kind of super-heated vapor.
“Mild poison spray,” Berkleyyan announced.
The beast did a twisting maneuver, leaving it facing them for a second pass, and started to dive down again.
Varmatan dodged at the last moment, as the beast kicked its short limb, which had nasty claws attached, Quandocor noted. The defender almost dropped his axe.
“Strength debuff,” he announced, then “thanks”.
“Welcome,” Thalokainy said instead of Goglas.
The beast twisted again, and rose.
“Going to dive!”
They all spread out, trying not to offer a good target. This time, the flying drake targeted Theavilast.
It was a mistake. The Cartographer waited until the beast swerved to avoid hitting the ground, and instead of letting it attempt to headbutt her, she swung her hammer to the left, crashing it to the side of the head.
The drake stumbled and crashed on the ground. As it rose, half-dazed, she raised her hammer and the drake opened its mouth and screamed.
Intimidate appeared on his status. It abruptly knocked Quandocor’s three highest stats by 44%, and he felt the impact almost physically as Strength, Resilience, and Fortitude dropped to levels almost as low as when he’d spawned in Fanduk.
Judging by the grunts, everyone had gotten the same debuff. He saw the percentage tick down to 43%, letting him hope they’d recover quickly enough.
But the drake was on the ground, and before it could take off again, both Earthen Brethren caught up with it, starting to hack at the frantically waving wings. Bits of enormous feathers flew, with blood spray marking the tear-off places as axe and sword fell. Goglas joined too, using her axe, while the two archery-oriented aimed at the last joints of wings.
Thea went staggering back as a side swipe of the beast ripped into her hand. She ducked and grabbed her hammer while Varmatan was hacking at the drake.
Even Quandocor joined with his staff, trying to knock the wings out and let him access the body. He was close enough to place more debuffs and, more importantly, have Disrupt Action at the ready. At 17 skill level, he doubted it would be successful, but you never knew.
The beast stank. It had to be worse in front of the mouth, but the “poison spray” that Berkleyyan had called out was almost enough to make him gag from the side.
Need my Fortitude back.
At level 370, even with his added skills, he was only good for some added debuffs while the higher levels harassed the creature. Sensing the danger, it tried to flex, to rise its front high enough to take off, but that exposed its underside to the axes of Varmatan and Goglas.
Quandocor got bumped by a wing, smashing to his side, and he fell, dazed. But the fight was almost over, and the beast was just trashing as they broke it.
He felt the Infuse Health, far more pronounced than Birkathane’s was, restoring three-fourths of his lost health already.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll stop there. There’s not enough vegetation right now to let me regenerate fast. I’ll finish it once we reach that tree group there,” she pointed.
They turned back to the enormous corpse.
“I hate flyers,” Theavilast said as she poked the carcass.
“I agree,” he said as he reached the corpse and bent, automatically draining it from Residue.
“That shout was nasty,” he added.
“Intimidate is a rare Skill for Gaters. Tier 2, and yes, nasty. That’s why you respect elites. They have lots of goodies like that,” she said.
Jonkartman was bending and methodically ripping out the drake’s claws.
“No time to properly harvest this, but at least some stuff can go in my bag. Oh, and…”
He plucked a feather and placed it on his hat.
“That’s ridiculous,” Goglas said.
“Okay, a three-foot-long feather isn’t the best.”
He ended up putting it on his backpack.