The smoke in the air barely hid the stench of gremlin blood, its horrible ichor like so much rot. Despite my speed of killing the creature, I couldn’t help but feel paranoid at the possibility that there were more of them.
My ears flicked, trying to trace footsteps, but to no avail. Either there were no more this way, or they were better at hiding than I was seeking.
I never was much of a [Hunter], but I decided that it was not what I should focus on.
I didn’t focus on the far off cry of voices either, though they were Human, I didn’t fear for them, they sounded more a cry of rejoice then fear.
I instead found my focus falling on the focus itself.
Or should I say foci?
Foe Ki?
Was it even a focus if it was more of a magic item? Some kind of control thing? Did it matter? I knew what it was, but regardless of its name, it didn’t bode well for the current situation.
The metal scrap ball, rusted and pitted as if aged for a decade without so much as a buff, rolled audibly along the paving stones of the alley like the others I had seen before. It wore etched in metal, strange runic lines.
Though I knew not how to use it and not what the inscribed squiggles and harsh, jagged lines meant, I knew it was used to control the undead. I quickly scooped it up and began my retreat, my movement skills aiding in my expeditious movements toward the line of men and the closed square of civility. Without the need for soft footsteps, I made my way as if I were chased by a demon to the open square.
Making my way back and up the wall, I juggled the pack off and at the foot of the [Crossbowman], who grunted a “Thank you” that sounded more like, ‘took you long enough.’
Anna gripped the air again, and I waited for the shot to land. The stone she hurled out slammed through not one but three skeletons, many of which seemed in some level of disarray.
“Anna, did the undead just almost spontaneously get a little dumber?” I asked her, a little canny knowing peeking through my voice.
She turned to look at me quizzically, one delicate eyebrow raising to my question.
“They do appear to be more disorganized, yes. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that you have done something?”
I vibrated, a bit of nerve that I did my best to bury as I replied, “Because I found a [Cultist] while I was getting the arrows. He had one of these. As far as I know, they use them to control the undead.”
I showed her the iron ball, hefting it up in my hand. I noticed a weight that felt slightly too heavy in a way I could not quantify. I stared at it for a moment, tracing its lines with my eyes as my senses felt at it, but I felt nothing off. No dark power passed from the ball to the air nor my hand, and so I let it be.
“You stumbled upon a [Cultist]… While you were retrieving arrows?” she asked, not disbelieving me so much as believing she was missing the middle bit.
“I heard a noise,” I told her, “but that’s not the important bit. The important bit is that there are Gremlins controlling the undead. They’re being guided.”
I could see her mind slam down upon the idea immediately, spinning up. The idea was placed in the grinder of her mind and quickly worn down to fine, sifted and sorted.
Bits lined up that I could not see, lines drawn in her mind I could not follow.
She nodded.
“We could end this quickly if we brought down those [Cultists]. Move on with an escort further in toward the wall.”
I nodded, though it was not what I was thinking, it was true.
“Yes, though more importantly, I believe something is wrong here.”
Anna’s mind jittered to a stop so suddenly I could see it as she focused, her pupils focusing back to me instead of in the distance.
“Oh? I don’t see anything amiss. Do tell,” she asked.
“Why would a team of Gremlins usher a wave of undead into one side of us when were mowing them down like wheat? They’re not the sharpest tools in the shed, don’t get me wrong… But they had a tendency to work in teams and surrounding targets to bring them down. When I fought them, I went for their [Archers], and their warriors came in behind me trying to pin me between them.”
Anna thought it over, but she didn’t speak up before another voice did.
“Something about this is fishy,” The old man spoke up, “Pardon my intrusion, Lady Mage, but the lass has a good sense if she’s picking up something being wrong. My skill has been telling me that there’s been something going on the whole fight.”
She turned to him, then back to me, before she rushed down into the square. I turned to follow her, flooding down the ramp and dropping the ball on the stones with a metallic thump.
Taking the shovel in two hands, I came up next to her as she reached the other end of the square and began to cast, the earth shifting below my feet as Anna's magic seemed to both exhale into the shape she wove before her and some into the ground where more mana in kind followed it up and into wall and ramp.
“Are you going to wall everything off?” I asked her quite dumbly.
“Yes, yes, I will wall off everything. I will not sit by and discount your verdict. Go get your ball, Saphine; I will need it in a moment. When I’m done, I’m going to try to find other objects like it. Shoo. I don’t need you hovering. I’m no damsel. I will be just fine for but a few moments. Fetch the ball.”
She spoke it with enough force that it came across that she might be dissatisfied with my guarding. Awkwardly, I rushed back over to fetch the iron ball.
Our suddenness didn’t go unseen. Some of the [Guards] that could not properly fit in the choke and the [Guard Captain] had noticed our flight from the wall and were muttering amongst themselves as to what we strange women folk were doing.
I picked up the iron ball and, in a moment of thought, said toward the closest [Guard] that wasn’t hogtied, “You might want to get ready for a surprise attack. The horde is being guided,” and rushed off without slowing for them to respond.
I did not stay to explain; instead, I rapidly delivered the ball to Anna.
“Singular ball, ready to be pondered,” I told her as she raised one last wall.
She looked at me before saying, “I’m not going to ponder a ball… You're thinking about Orbs. You ponder orbs, not balls.”
Was that right? I thought it was crystal balls.
“I’m sure someone's out there pondering crystal balls instead of crystal orbs,” I told her thoughtlessly.
Anna looked at me, and I stopped to look back. She just kept looking at me as if I had something on my face. I rubbed my face to feel for whatever might have been there, but there was nothing. While she stared at me, I got to finally thinking about what had just come out of my mouth and almost choked on my own spit.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She smiled. Just a little. However, I couldn’t enjoy it with the blaze in my cheeks. It was a silly thing to get embarrassed about, but it struck unreasonably deep.
“I’ll show you pondering orbs…” I muttered more to myself than to her like a child. Then I realized what I had said and again wanted to mentally decouple from my body and curl into a ball or possibly hurl myself off a cliff.
Anna, of course heard me, and she too flushed a little, though being the better of the two flustered mages in reach, she focused on the poorly forged oversized ball bearing.
She began to feel the…
She held the…
She pondered the damn ball.
I couldn’t tell what she was doing, but the feeling of her presence in the air was overwhelming.
I could feel nature gaze upon her, its awareness like a mountain, a monumental force without even intending it. An ineffable thing staring down at itself to see a flea.
I could feel nature give the equivalent of a ‘Hmm’ as its gaze fell on us and narrowed upon the object of the hour. The gaze then lifted, its pressure fading as the world around it checked its great pelt for more fleas holding more small metal balls of similar make.
“Thank the gods their [Cultists] because there’s no way a mage would miss that.”
“You can feel it because you can feel it. The mana is minimal, you could tell if you knew what you were looking for, but it could just as easily be a fart.”
I couldn’t understand how someone couldn’t feel that. It was so overt that I would imagine that anyone could feel it, and yet no one seemed to notice nature normally.
I hoped the [Cultists] didn’t feel the land itself glaring at them; it would be incredibly awkward to try and hunt them down after they felt the presence of the land on which they stood glaring at them like that.
I waited, looking at Anna, unsure of what was going to happen.
It wasn’t every day that I talked with nature anymore. I didn’t just casually talk to my oldest friend, and I had never asked it to do anything like this.
Or had I?
I supposed I kind of had when I had asked to find the lake… Or anything else like that.
I just wouldn’t have necessarily noticed the presence of it as I did so, it had never been examining me.
There had been presence before, but not like that, it just meant that it hadn’t been focused so heavily upon me.
And it hadn’t tipped off anyone before.
I decided to believe in my old friend. If you couldn’t trust a literal force of nature, who could you trust?
Anna stared off into the distance, mouth open in a way that somehow managed to be both unbelievably cute and made me want to do things I probably shouldn’t do in public.
Kissing a noblewoman in the mouth would probably get a whole lot of bad shit kicked up around us. Technically, it was not illegal for us to marry, and being technically not illegal didn’t generally make for a cocktail of acceptance, no matter how you cut it.
I did lean in right in front of her face, close enough to kiss, nose to nose with her, and when she came back to herself, she blinked and pulled back.
“Gah… Could you not?” She asked with a blush.
“I just thought you should know you were making a face,” I told her quietly.
She looked at me confused, then shook herself.
“There are two that way and two approaching from that way,” she told me, pointing once towards the wall of undead and once towards the opposite direction.
I paid close attention to the way her hands pointed and did my best to memorize them, then I nodded.
“Do you mind if I head out and you hold down the fort here?” I asked her.
She looked a bit cross for a moment, but she thought about it for a moment and sighed.
“Go for it. You're faster than I am by far. And while these spells are rather low cost, I’m not made of mana. You delt with them before… Just… Just don’t come back covered in gore. Please? For my peace of mind if nothing else.”
She was obviously not enthused. I could tell she wanted to come with me, I just didn’t know how to bring her.
I nodded, and quietly said, “I’ll be back quickly,” before making my way off towards a building that was between me and my targets.
“That’s supposed to be my line,” she said to me.
I made my way over to the buildings and, as best as I could, made my way through them. In through windows and doors, through the cramped homes and out through doors or other windows into other alleys.
At one point I had to go up a floor to drop out of a window.
Each step brought me towards the flame, towards the less distant fire by the moment.
The smoke stung my nose and eyes more and more, the part of my head that made me want to check out becoming worse as I did so. I would have to find out what was wrong with me later because there was something wrong with me.
I kept myself focused on the task at hand, my heart beating faster, the world growing hotter, and my breaths feeling more and more shallow by the moment.
But I made it, breaking into a side street after peeking my head out, my ears picked up the noise of two bickering Gremlins, just distant, down the street.
They managed to look away at the same time, a miracle if I had ever seen one.
That's probably a dumb way to look at it, considering I have, in a way, experienced a Miracle. Coming back from the dead isn’t something you do every day. And there's all the harvests; they got blessings too…
I focused back on the current task as I noticed myself get lost in my own head again.
I pulled myself out of the window and into the street like some manor of Kobold spider, refusing to let the spade touch the ground to not make more noise, it was quite awkward to get through with only three limbs from a window for a person the better part of two feet shorter than I was, but I managed it.
My sandals clapped as quietly as I could make them, and I began to make my way toward them.
I’ll need to take out one, then the other. Can I get that by using [Long Strider] to close the distance? Or Will it just alert them? I fought three Gremlins the other day, and one of them got a nasty cut. And that had been from ambush…
I decided to play it safe and not risk the speed here. Focused as they were on their bickering and the orbs, they were distracted enough not to notice me.
Not until I got just close enough for their enhanced senses to pick me up some fifteen feet away.
They turned, surprise evident in them as they quickly drew their knives.
Taking as deep a breath as I could, I steeled myself to the idea of getting into a tussle and quickly closed the distance, taking my spade in two hands and slamming down, rapidly bringing it into the first Gremlins scull.
There was a crack of breaking bone… and then the Gremlin just… Dropped.
I didn’t even need to use [Rapid Action].
The Gremlin just… died.
I didn’t freeze at it, and as the body dropped, I did end up using my skill to rapidly bring the shovel down again, only onto its neighbour, who also died in one hit.
It felt… a little wrong.
Like I was in an illusion, and they would stab me any second, breaking the illusion to reveal they were alive and fine.
But it didn’t break.
I looked at my blade, fresh blood along the edge.
Their souls sat on the ground, hissing and spitting in their strange language.
I scooped them up, no problem, pulling them into and through myself.
When did it get so easy? The other day, I was fighting for my life against these guys… and now I’m just… not?
The other one wasn’t much of a fight either, but… was it always that easy?
Maybe it was the conditions?
I couldn’t tell. I could only tell it didn’t feel right.
I hadn’t gotten statistically stronger, I didn’t think. I was still level 20. My new classes still weighed it down, and yet, it just was?
Maybe it was the increased proficiency? Or the magical blade? The heads were cut somewhat instead of being bashed in along a line.
I was getting stuck in my head again; it was best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
I hadn’t seen many of those around… Or like any.
I hoped they were fine, wherever they were.
I sighed and started back, only to come up with an idea.
Why go through houses… when I could go over?
***
Running on the tops of roofs was not as easy as I thought it would be, and yet… It was also very fun.
My skill [Woodsman's Stride] was good at keeping my feet from tripping over themselves, but it was also good at keeping my feet on the slanted surface of the roofs.
It was also far faster to take the direct route back along the roofs.
The buildings were close together, with almost no space between any of them, which let me hop over them with ease.
It took me all of two minutes to run back casually along the roof.
As I did so, I could see the horde.
They shambled in uniform only so far as they all shambled in a confused jumble vaguely towards the [Guards].
I could see on the other side of the square more civilians streaming in, with beleaguered and hurt [Guardsmen] following them through the choke. Several guards with long poleaxes stood, waiting to fill the breach with a wall of spikes.
Anna stood, arguing with Gurtz, and I made my way over to hop down when I thought about something else that might be fun.
The next cultists were on the other side of the square… Why not try to get there on the rooftops?
I backed up, and sucked in air, hyping myself up before I put my whole body and [Long Strider] and ran towards the other side of the main street.
I kicked off and flew through the air.
Civilians pointed at me, jumping, hurtling across the gap.
I made it across, slamming chest first into the edge of the roof with a bone-rattling thud that knocked the wind out of me.
I scrabbled, my one free arm flying out, nails extended, the other trying to hook on the roof tiles further up. I just barely managed to stop my fall and pull myself up. The fun of it driven from my quite quickly.
It took me a moment before I could stand again, rubbing my chest where I would no doubt find a few bruised ribs tomorrow.
Was it worth it?
Objectively, probably not.
But it was also very fun to run on rooftops.
Even if sometimes I hurt myself in my own idiocy.
At least I could get to the other [Cultists] faster up here.