This is going to be a disaster.
Val couldn't do anything but hope her thoughts wouldn’t come back to bite her as a premonition, even as she fiddled with the sturdy coldsteel chain affixed onto her non-dominant arm, the latest addition—among others—to her armour.
According to the tollgate fifteen minutes out, the separator veil existed further down the tunnel, a brisk trek away. The shared knowledge of it led to Caro asking an ordinary question, one Val thought certainly necessary in hindsight of a prior dive in Darkshaft.
“Oats, what’s the plan once we spot the red ribbon?” The pair let them in on the object’s significance days before this morning, leaving no one in the dark or out of the loop. “If the CAU guy’s scoop is right, we’re going to be facing something right out of the gate.”
Val wished she could’ve blamed the flickering lights—still half-broken, three months later—for the way his eyelids fluttered open and shut rapidly, or could’ve attributed his ashen skin tone to the stenchful rot gripping onto the wooden tracks below.
Then, he opened his mouth, and his one unsteady word had all of them sucking in their breath in a sharp hiss.
“Plan?”
“For the love of…” Nightingale muttered up ahead, his gloved hand going up to comb a head of curly black hair. As most Hunters did, he decided on a cloth-based attire, wearing a dark grey, fibrous material accented by ebony metal pieces on his vitals. His clan’s symbol—a silhouette of their namesake—flew gracefully in place on his arms, back, and the sheaths of his two daggers.
“I-It’s fine,” Otis said. “We’ll observe the task and handle it as need be.”
“Otis…” Jesal left his spot beside Lenson and passed the pair of Strikers, his evergreen poncho billowing at the motion. The piece of clothing obscured all except his black shin guards, his gleaming piercings, and the two rods fastened tight on his back. The wooden staff and metal shaft—the former used for spells and the latter, a mobile area silencer—ceased their shifting as he planted a patient palm on the towing Novice.
A Novice that seemed more like a teenager than anything else inside that moment. “That’s not a plan. We confront anything as you’ve described regardless of the time and place. Darkshaft has tens of entrances and the one we chose, we chose because of what we’ll encounter. You gotta give us something, Cap.”
Magus Kane, the hardcore teacher that he was, ordered a complete run, and they could be described as… Well, Caro called them crazy, but Val would settle for painfully efficient. Age of Atera sent them on the behalf of every major faculty in the guild, instructing them to bring home certain parts of aether creatures, metals, materials, and energy cores for all parties involved. Val’s eyes glazed over at the sheer number of tasks on the lengthy list two weeks ago, wondering just how they were to succeed.
Thankfully, the answer ended up being incredibly simple: start at one hundred percent. Now that’s the problem. From behind, Val could spot how tight of a hold Otis had on his shield, knuckles white. Sweat beaded on his nose, and for the weirdest reason, she didn’t accredit it to anything other than the panic of being in charge—of making the wrong choice. As an impromptu caregiver of her siblings, she could smell that particular worry miles away.
“Otis,” Nightingale’s tone for the Bulwark was—surprisingly—gentle, forgoing his habit of utilizing people’s family names. “Do you want to lead?”
His shoulders raised half an inch, only to drop a second later. “I’m a liege to the crown princess, Lady Nitza.” That had Val’s eyebrows shooting upwards. “I carry out tasks. I follow orders. I don’t lead.”
He swiveled on his heels, snapping his shield back in the space between his back and pack before taking in the five in front of him. Frustration swam in his golden eyes, reminding Val of the tiny frown that sprouted on his lips when Magus Kane gave him the helm a fortnight ago. He couldn’t really say no, could he?
“I’ll lead in your stead, then,” Nightingale candidly said, more than offered. Otis gave a disgruntled nod along the lines of ‘fine by me.’ The Kidraan’s sea-blue eyes travelled from member to member, meeting the impartial green of Jesal, the unbothered brown of Lenson, and the neutral viridian of Val.
No one appeared surprised when his gaze hitched on Caro’s displeased face, nose wrinkled. “Saints. Fine, we’ll go with you, then,” she grounded out. “Remember. Otis is captain, you're filling in.”
For a response, Nightingale restarted their march forward, and shortly after, a crimson ribbon—tied onto a dangling part of the overhead lights—warned the six that very soon, they’d be in the hands of the Dark Mineshaft. Caro inhaled, shaking off the lingering sentiments on her exhale.
“Wait a sec, everyone.” Jesal’s statement brought Val up short three meters away from the wall of solid aether. “Kylee says… what? What’s that supposed to—ow! I’m trying, but I can’t read your hand gestures!”
The Support pinched Jesal’s arm through his robes, a small frown the sole sign of irritation on her face. Reaching a communication barrier between her mediator, she decided to dig deep through her adventuring cloak for saints-knew-what. At the very least, the moment gave Val another opportunity to appreciate the Support’s armour.
It was a beautiful configuration of crisp white on midnight blue, a modern wonder of steel braces and reinforced fibres that protected her in a near-skin-tight combat suit. A great bow as large as her frame hung snugly on her thin cloak, a translucent, taut string tied from one wooden end to the other that Val grew to fear over the past weeks in scrimmages. Her arrows never miss.
She finally whisked a piece of paper out, writing on it with a fountain pen. The action pulled the frontline—Hunter, Bulwark, and two Strikers in tow—towards her, as they squinted at the note.
20 chimeras ahead. Lizards. Tier One. Ranged from one-starred to two-starred.
“We should take another entrance,” Caro said. “Darkshaft has like a billion of them, we don’t need to use this one.”
“And waste two hours and a chance to obtain twenty energy cores?” Nightingale snapped.
Caro slapped her forehead in utter disbelief. “Better than blindly walking into a suicide!”
“It’s achievable if she knows where they’re positioned,” Nightingale hooked a thumb in Lenson’s direction, and how he addressed the Support failed to sit right with Val.
“She is right here,” Val spoke up, taking note of the way the support’s eyes flickered her way in surprise. Could she not predict that? Val wondered with an itching curiosity about how divination worked. Did she utilize her powers willingly, or did the impartial element differ from the normal order of magic? “You know where they are?” she decided to ask the Support instead.
Nodding her answer, Val thought she imagined the appreciative smile that flashed on her face and disappeared just as quickly.
“Okay, this is doable then,” Val agreed, turning to the only other person on the team with a similar build to hers. “Tell us what to do.”
…
“Stop bickering you two,” Jesal said with the first hint of vexation Val ever heard in his voice. Frankly, huddled tight with Caro and Nightingale on either side of her, she found herself thinking the exact thing.
Knowing her best friend all too well, she doubted she needed to look Caro’s way to see her flipping off Nightingale instead. After all, the Hunter handed them each an invisibility tonic to drink, and the priceless item from the alchemy-heavy family worked seamlessly, their shuffling feet the only sign Val had to tell she wasn’t staring at twenty chimeras by her lonesome.
Jesal set his silencer rod into the cavern floor the second they crossed over into the labyrinth, nullifying a sense chimeras relied on the most: sound. Even still, talking amid the roaming chimeras bordered on negligence and it was only a matter of time before someone pointed it out.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“The potion will disappear as soon as you use your energy,” Nightingale reminded them in a whisper, a duet of soft rings indicating he unsheathed his dual shortswords. “Do we remember our jobs?”
He earned nods and a sarcastic “no” from one but ignored it with a twitch of his cheeks. “Okay. Azot—Otis,” he corrected himself, “you’re up. Jesal, be quick about it after, else Lenson’s spell may miss, and that would ruin the entire idea.”
“She won’t miss,” Caro said. “And before you say it, yes. Me and Val will play our parts.”
Otis stepped forward at the tail end of her words, his armour registered painfully bright white by Aster’s HUD. Visibility, Otis clearly demonstrated for the Novices, meant only one thing.
A spell.
“Barricade.”
> |Alessio Azotus - Novice
>
> * Observed Elements: [Mineral—Subset: Gemstone {White Jade}], [Light]
Aster typed the Bulwark’s title and distinctions in a typewriter-esque font right as a thick wall of off-white gemstone popped into existence. The packed dirt walls—unsettled by the tapered end of jade wedged deep into it—dusted the moist floor with soil, resulting in over a dozen skeletal lizards whipping to the phenomenon in an extremely similar fashion.
If Val were to overlook the purple-red of their rotting scales, along with the sneak-peaks it gave of their bones inside, they’d appear as normal, lion-sized, lizards. However, as one of their eyeballs slid out of its socket to smack the ground with a loud plop, Val rectified her belief in preparation for their crazed charge.
“Saints,” Caro swore seconds before Jesal followed up with a spell of his own.
“Enhanced Field!”
There was an audible creak as their sense of weight dialed up to a multiplier only known to the gravity mage himself. It must’ve not been satisfactory, though, since he redoubled it with an element Val considered as foreign as divination.
“Amplify!”
At once, the weaker, one-starred chimeras slowed against gravity and amplification magic working in tandem, their bone-formed feet leaving imprints on the soil beneath them. Fortunately, that was all the time Lenson needed to prepare.
“Sword Graveyard.”
Val exhaled unbidden at those two words, odd as they sounded in the girl’s whispery voice, and blinked at the fog escaping her nose. An overwhelming, bone-chilling cold overcame the little pocket of space. Fifteen longswords—wielding blades the length of Val’s upper half—hovered over their soon-to-be victims, formed of clear and concrete ice. They twirled in position, energetic, frantic, and in desperate need to impale something.
Thankfully for all, they were granted their wish the next moment.
The ice lanced forward, diving so fast they left a line of frozen mist in their wake. Otis recalled his gemstone barrier, and Val didn’t hesitate to hurtle out the safeguard, Caro in step right behind. Like clockwork, the pair split four seconds in their rush, each narrowing in on three targets located on separate sides. Val ignored the twelve chimeras that lay prone on the ground, indisposed by ice that rained down from the air.
Instead, she unsheathed her custom-made saber, courtesy of her metalsmith friend, Lowell. Gotta remember to treat him out for sure, she thought, detaching one of the oblong pieces of coldsteel hanging off her tool belt. She figured since she loved everything about Shard Bomb except its discipline, she’d asked for it made and ready, energy-free, saving only the best part for her.
Detonation. “Shard Bomb!”
In an explosion of shrapnel, she crippled two one-starred skeletons by sticking a shard of metal between the joints of their limbs. The remaining chimera took one in its rotting eyes, squealing. The rest spiked the ground, and any that shot her direction ceased their motion in the presence of her next spell.
“Metal Puppeteer!” Yes, she had the foresight to prep her metal grenades with her soul signature not just to defend her, but for precisely what came next.
To me, she willed the nearby multitude of fragments and—save for the ones embedded in an aether creature or stuck inside the packed dirt—they flew towards her like a magic trick, swirling in a lazy circle about her torso. She ignored the pounding throb stretching her wits thin at the use of the spell—she found it familiar to drumming, where four limbs each operated on a different metronome—and sidestepped one lizard’s claw and hopped over another’s tail sweep.
She answered the first with a thrust of her blade, and the other by sending her army of shrapnel at its face. While she thankfully pierced the chimera’s heart with the help of Vague View, the recycled Shard Bomb enacted superficial damage only. The good news was, it distracted it long enough for her to force down an aether potion, allowing her to dispatch the metal chain wrapped around her left arm at the two-starred lizard making its way over.
Flooding energy into her legs, she pivoted to meet the recovering creature, its tapered face now a pincushion of metal shards. Using the sustained aether left in her bloodstream, she treated the lizard with a roundhouse kick—her combat-issue boot cracking against its slimy face—and a subsequent upward sweep of her blade that bisected its reeling form.
“Metal Spike!”
Val didn’t even have to look.
Thanks to the ten-foot-long chain binding the two-starred skeleton’s legs together in a crushing grip, she clocked the third and final target’s location using her soul signature. Still, she swiveled to the struggling creature and finished it off by decapitating it in one go.
Val sighed, forcing out the adrenaline pumping high in her blood, and tapped the ink-formed ring in thanks. If not for the gradients of colours signalling the incoming attacks, she’d never pull off fighting three creatures, even with her new-and-improved spell cache and ASC of 48.
“Remind me to never,” Jesal began, shaking his head at the sheer carnage across the field—burnt soil and sand on Caro’s end, skewered corpses rammed to the ground by ice, and the severely maimed creatures in Val’s proximity, “ever cross any of you ladies.”
Otis chuckled in agreement, bending low to claim pieces and parts to store in the packs left behind the separator veil. Nightingale, the forever-scowling Hunter himself, begrudgingly said, “I guess we all deserve the Thales crest in our separate ways.”
When they turned, as one, to focus on his lean frame in different measures of shock, he took it as a sign to continue. “Though it's all thanks to my plan—”
Four tired groans—and a single hearty laugh from the Bulwark—rang out in that tiny corner of the eerie, and yet survivable, Dark Mineshaft.
----------------------------------------
Val felt no shame in the exhale of relief that left her.
Nightingale eventually caved to Caro’s request to head to rest for the day and join the march into Basecamp. Lieberman’s slicked-back hair returned a handful of fear, and judged by the snooty tone he dealt Hammer Squad, he had definitely not forgotten Silann’s members. Val half-thought he’d let leave them out to dry in front of the hundreds entering and leaving his earthen walls, until his voice thundered across the cavernous expanse.
“Gap the gates!
The trek through the walls never failed to give her an ominous feeling, even during her first visit. Only until the gap closed shut at her back—and Lieberman took it upon himself to screen the next squad—did she feel safe enough to have that sigh.
Day one of the week-long mission flew by her in a blur of perilous close calls and bountiful harvests. Finally, ten hours later, they remained safe inside the defensive barriers of the settlement. At least, that was what she believed.
“Hayes, Efron,” Nightingale said for a greeting as the two arrived at his room, as asked beforehand. Val could spot the other three behind him in the slit of space he left, heads turning in their direction in interest. She’d wanted to head over to oldman Uche’s shop—the owner that carried various items—to specifically take the Darkshaft-related encyclopedia off his hands.
Ever since the HUD came online, Val’s been utilizing CAU’s guidebooks and informative entries more than ever. Stuck with the Wielder-bound encyclopedia, Aster could show only what she saw or learned while owning it.
Caro’s molars ground together as the pause lingered a second too long. “Can we come in?”
“No,” came his answer. “You two are on watch duty.”
“Watch duty?” Caro repeated, like she couldn’t believe her ears. “Here in the bright-ass, heavily guarded city? Did you smoke a pack of Glint or…” Her words trailed off as she took in his sea-blue eyes, devoid of influence or trickery or amusement. “What are we even gonna do on our shift?”
“Watch the streets, collect info, learn the threats,” he listed. “No place in a rift is entirely safe. Even here.”
True, Val conceded, putting a calming palm on Caro’s shoulder. “We’ll do it. Just have someone relieve us in time so we can get some sleep.”
He nodded sharply, slamming the door without a hint of gratitude.
“I might just do it, Val,” she declared, stepping back from the doorframe. “I know where he sleeps. Who would notice him missing?”
“Caro,” Val huffed, linking arms and striding down the hall. “It’s not the hardest thing to do.”
“No, it’s the stupid thing to do. What the hell are we gonna watch outside the hotel?” she asked no one in particular, breezing down the stone staircase of Habour. “People walking in and out?”
“Again,” Val kicked a pebble across the courtyard. “Not too hard.”
Her response was met with an illustration of how colourful Caro’s language could be. “Well,” she said on an exhale, dismissing her vexed feelings and shifting her rather piercing gaze to Val. A stone—hard and cold—rolled into Val’s stomach long before the magma mage ever got her words out. “I think it’s high time we talked about your mom anyway.”