As Faye watched the crafters dismantle the beast’s corpse, she wondered what it would be like to be subject to their ministrations.
Apparently, crafting used up monstrous resources quite regularly. It was one of the primary exports of Lóthaven. That and some of the final products, of course. Crafters like Mich and the others were not masters of their chosen art or trade.
They groused that people that could call themselves masters would have grand palaces and manors to call home in the cities.
No, these crafters were the journeymen. The ones that were still learning, still experimenting. The way they described themselves, they were like a child playing with a bucket and spade at the beach compared to the civil engineers of the world.
It did not seem that way to her.
With barely any effort, they carved through the skin, meat, and bone of the beast with their bare hands. Digging out specific sections that to all Faye could tell were exactly the same as the ones next to them, the crafters would exclaim their surprise and glee at findings.
“Oh, look at that beauty.”
“There, it’s perfect.”
“Just wait ‘til we get deeper.”
She thought it was a little strange. The beast corpse was so huge and the pieces of its body they needed so varied and rare they were barely a quarter of the way through processing it. They were able to carve through massive amounts of flesh as once. But from the occasional grumble amongst their mutterings, it was clear the attack had slowed them down.
As her thoughts strayed back to the combat, the stuffed feeling of her emotions rose to the fore again. She felt nauseous from it.
Shaking her head, Faye stood and wandered toward Gavan. He was standing with lidded eyes, near the crafters. At the last second, Faye wondered if she should not disturb him only for his eyes to flick open.
He smiled.
“Hey,” she opened, “how are things?”
“Good. Glad you are unhurt.”
Faye grimaced and rubbed at her leg. “I don’t know if unhurt is the word for it.”
Gavan looked to her leg and the puncture marks across the cloth.
“Are you wanting a heal?”
She nodded. “I’m not sure if I’m one hundred percent… I’m concerned about my leg being weak.”
At first, she could sense his hesitation, but he smiled and touched a glowing hand to her shoulder. The healing power rushed throughout her in a wave. It smoothed away the pains and aches that had been left behind.
“Thanks,” she said, giving him a full smile. “Levelling gives me something back, but a heal just makes everything feel better.”
He cocked his head to the side. “It was only a short time ago this spell overdosed you. I was prepared to ration your healing to once a day…”
Faye shrugged. “I think the levelling is making it easier. I think… well, it’s hard to remember, but I think after the last time you hit me with it, my system said something about protection from overmana?”
Gavan froze, looking at her strangely. “There is no such thing.”
Faye grinned. “I said I wasn’t sure. I’m probably misremembering. But, honestly, levelling up is making it a lot easier to handle… anything.”
The mage nodded. He pointed at the edge of the forest with a hand. “I saw your barrage of darts. Very impressive.”
“You think so?” she replied, surprised. “I was just getting them to come out as fast as I could, really. They were still basic Fire Darts.”
He shook his head a little. “Hmm.” He paused, hesitating to say something she could tell, but he barrelled on. “If you don’t want to tell me, it’s fine… but you did something different, didn’t you?”
Faye blinked. She had!
“Oh, yes! Sorry, I guess I did.” She thought about what the system had said when she made the spell. “It’s called Scorching Lance, instead of letting out a dart of flames, it’s like a thick beam. Takes a lot of my mana pool to cast it, though.”
He frowned. “I wish your system was active.”
Nodding absently, Faye tried to engage the system as she had in the forests around Lóthaven.
Status.
Nothing.
Spells?
Something blipped, almost like a screen turning on for a millisecond before losing power. But try as she might, nothing would respond to her mental commands.
“Sorry, yeah, still not working,” she said. “The moment it does, I’ll let you know what the spell is like exactly.”
Gavan smiled. “It is good that you are experimenting. The more that you do so, the further down the path of becoming a mage you travel.”
Faye was not averse to the idea of wielding magic. Quite the reverse, actually. Magic was the stuff of her childhood dreams. Flights of fancy that had been some of her only escape from a mundane, and awful, world. Of course, growing up Faye had abandoned some of the more fanciful dreams as the ravings of a child’s mind.
There were no such things as protective unicorns.
She faltered.
“Uh, Gavan?”
“Hmm?”
“Is there a creature called a unicorn in this world?” she asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“I don’t think I know that word,” he replied.
“A horse with a horn in the centre of its forehead, magical being?” she explained.
He thought about it for a moment.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve heard of a unicorn before.” The way he said it was clear that the translation magic was not working as intended. “I have not seen the whole world, though.”
She smiled. Maybe.
Ah, a magical horse that protects young girls and maidens fair. Seems a little too fairy tale for this place.
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Arran appeared from out of the darkness beyond the torchlight.
“Faye, well done.”
Nodding, mechanically, Faye tried to ignore the images that those two words had conjured in her mind’s eye.
“What’s the matter?” Arran asked, immediately.
It seemed that Arran was more perceptive than she would have given him credit for.
“Nothing,” she lied.
“We’re on a job, Faye. Lies are fine when we’re at home. Not here. Not now. This affects us all.”
She stared him in the face. He was serious, but she did not want them to know how weak she felt.
“I…”
Arran’s gaze softened for a moment.
“That was your first… fight, wasn’t it?” he said.
Gavan turned to look at her, surprise on his face.
Faye swallowed around the sudden lump in her throat. “Not exactly… I, uh, I think…”
“The first people,” Gavan said, quietly.
She stuttered to a stop. She nodded, once.
Arran put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed through the gambeson.
“It’s hard, the first time. I think I threw up five meals.”
“Didn’t sleep for a few nights,” Gavan offered.
Faye looked between the two. She offered a weak smile. “I threw up, on the road.”
At that, Arran frowned. “On the road?”
“I met one… well, there were two of them, heading to the Steading,” she explained. “My skill was telling me they were hostile already… they were talking about attacking here, but I wasn’t sure if they had done anything, but the skill, it wouldn’t tell me they were hostile if they were friendly, right? So, I followed them. I had just left the Steading, but they were locking it down. When the wards went up, one of them left… coming here, I think. The other… well, I confronted her. She got my leg pretty good. But they really hate fire and I think they might be weak to it? I… I… k-killed her.”
The words poured out in a torrent; she couldn’t stop them even if she wanted to. Fortunately, neither man tried to stop her and by the end of it, if she sounded hysterical neither one commented on it. She hid her face with a hand.
“I’m sorry that you had to do that alone,” Arran said. “I thought the risk was minimal… but that’s no excuse. As the team leader, it’s my responsibility.”
Faye shook her head, hard. “No, no, I did it, it’s my fault and you weren’t there so I had to decide myself. I came here after. I saw them attacking. There was no choice after that. I just had to take them down. My sword… is still over by some of them.”
She pointed, vaguely, in the direction of the other Primalist bodies where she had attacked from behind.
Arran nodded. “I’ll go look for it.”
“It’s the wooden one,” she said, quietly. “The one I borrowed is at the Steading, still.”
He nodded again, then smiled and walked away.
“He really does blame himself for not knowing,” Gavan said, looking at Arran’s retreating form. “Gets a bit much, sometimes.”
Faye laughed a little, smiling through her teary eyes at the mage. “Thanks.”
“Happens to us all. I’m going to check the other side of the beast. There are still monsters or beasts to worry about.”
Faye nodded, sniffing loudly and wiping her cheeks.
“Yes, yeah. Go on. I’ll wait near the crafters, use my Sense.”
[Swordfighter’s Sense] was a powerful ability. The nudges and sensations it imparted on Faye’s mind and body as she fought were the difference between being hit and dodging, suffering from an ambush or enacting one of her own. It had saved her hide enough that she was already incredibly thankful for it.
As she activated it, this time, she thought about the implications of a skill that told you who was hostile just by virtue of being near them. Was it some kind of emotion meter, or a truth-finding spell?
No, that did not track with what she knew of it.
The sensations of the beast corpse and the surrounding area were empty, quiescent. She retracted the active portion of the skill.
Mich and the others were hard at work still. They moved quickly, with the accuracy of machines, and she did not want to disturb them.
Arran was approaching from where she had left her sword. He was holding the blade by the ricasso, the unsharpened section of the blade closest to the hilt.
“Here you are,” he said, holding out the handle toward her with a bowed head. “One wooden blade, found and returned to its owner.”
“Thank you, Sir Arran,” Faye replied.
“Bah, I’m no ‘sir’,” he said. “Keep an eye out, okay?”
She frowned at his sudden seriousness. “Did you see something?” she asked.
“No,” he said with a scowl. “That’s what disturbs me.”
Sheathing the blade, Faye nodded and walked in a small semi-circle around the working crafters. She did not want to stay still too long and risk getting cold.
Though, the more she levelled, the more she realised that what she expected from her body was not what she was experiencing. Sure, the cold air was still chilly, but there was a part of her that remembered a frozen dash through mountains, desperate to find shelter and the weather had taken a turn for the worse since the time she had arrived.
Of course, each time she found herself fighting there were hits and attacks that should have killed or seriously injured her that did not. Finding herself at level eight already, Faye thought back to the arguments people had tried to make to her.
That literal children might be stronger than her. If there were twelve-year olds with their seventh or eighth level already… this strong, as a child? Yes, it was a strange, alien, thought but it made sense that in a world like this one they needed to be.
She shook her head. There was so much that tricked her into thinking it was the same as home. But then there were things like the giant-sized beast corpse behind her. It had been there for days, and it was far from rotten. In fact, there were no insects around it at all. She wondered at that. Maybe the crafters would know?
She took half a step toward the crafters, her mind already forming a question about insects and life here… when [Swordfighter’s Sense] suddenly went off in her mind like a klaxon.
Spinning around, Faye looked all about. She scrambled to draw her sword.
“Arran! Gavan! Ailith!” she shouted.
After another second of frantic searching, she cursed and activated the skill.
Her Sense expanded.
There, at the edge of her skill, she felt the massed hostility of a swarm of monsters.
“Swarm! Far side of the corpse!” she shouted.
Ailith had heard her. The Guardian was already setting up facing the direction Faye had indicated.
Just before Faye deactivated the skill, she felt something different. Something, bigger, stranger than what she had felt with the skill so far.
“Ailith, there’s something else…”
But she could not say anything else before the night erupted into howls, shrieks, and the enraged sounds of a forest come to claim its prize.
Arran appeared out of the darkness, again, and Faye had to stop herself from pointing her blade in his direction. Gavan emerged out of the darkness on the other side of the beast almost at the same time.
“Ailith, third tier monster,” Arran called. The Guardian nodded, then pulled her maul up and activated a skill of some kind.
“Faye, it’s a tier above you, it’s too strong. I did not get close enough to get its full measure, it could be too much for all of us. I’m pulling us out.”
“Are you sure?” she began, but he interrupted with a hand.
“This is not about you,” he said with a quick smile. “Promise. It’s our job to get these people to this corpse and back in one piece. By leaving now we adhere to that job. By staying, we risk their lives. Mich!”
The last was shouted, and the crafter looked up at them.
“We’re done. Pack up.”
The man didn’t argue. All three of the crafters dumped whatever they had in their hands on the cart, pulling a big cloth tarp over the precious cargo with swift, practised movements.
[Swordfighter’s Sense] alarmed her, again.
This time, she knew what it was saying. A low-moving form was approaching the crafters from the other side of the corpse. It was hard to see, but the vague movement in the dark was all Faye needed.
She pointed at it and let out a Fire Dart. She pushed her burgeoning mana sense and tried to force the dart to be more accurate.
It worked, somewhat, the flaming dart didn’t veer wildly, but it did wobble on a curved path. The monster easily avoided it, but as her Fire Dart swept past, she saw its predatory eyes.
The crafters were already picking up the cart by its handles and manoeuvring the bulky wooden contraption around to go back to the road.
Faye watched as more and more shadowy shapes crawled over the beast corpse, looking down at the humans below as if they were just more meat. Faye shivered. The crafters were moving the cart faster than she expected, with its size and the amount of meat and other materials shoved on it, but they were still slow enough that she was getting nervous.
“Gavan, cover the retreat,” Arran said.
The mage nodded. As the cart carried on, the sound of its wheels muffled by the grassy ground, Gavan stood still. Ailith was at his side, her maul ready, and Arran stood opposite her. Faye stood behind him, letting her skill act as her early-warning system.
A few moments later, Gavan’s hands orchestrated the rain of numerous shards of ice across the path they had taken. Each shard was a metre long, but as she watched, the shards started expanding outward. Tines of ice grew until they met other tines, and panels of ice formed between the shards to create a wall of ice.
Ten seconds later, the icy barrier was complete.
Gavan sagged a little, but Arran grabbed his friend by the arm and helped him turn and carry on after the cart.
“Faye, keep an eye out. Ailith is rear guard. Let’s go.”
“Arran, the Steading’s warded. They told me we can’t get in for another day.”
The Duellist grimaced but nodded. “Alright, we’ll think of something when we’re away from here.” He and the mage swiftly followed the crafters.
Ailith sidled closer. “Surprised it took ‘em that long,” she said. “But those Primalists, eh? Might be they had something to do with it?”
Faye nodded. “Summoned them, or were keeping them away? Don’t doubt it.”
“Aye, well, fire girl. Let’s hope these monsters hate fire as much as the Primalists!”
There will be time to test that, Faye thought. Because the shadowy forms of two or three of the monsters were scrambling at the top of the ice wall already.