As I stepped down from the wagon, I was greeted by the dazzling brilliance of a sunny day, an ill-fitted backdrop for the carnage that lay before me. The aftermath of the recent battle was strewn across the field, the gruesome scene marked by the corpses of dozens of warriors being looted by what was presumably Ike’s war party, and a line of broken cage carts, heavy bars keeping them open to the air in a way that directly distinguished my own.

Inside of these were various fantastical beasts.

I stared at them, fascinated, and drank in their details. All the creatures were things I recognized from Lords of Chaos. There was a displacer beast, looking exactly as I remembered it—a pitch-black panther with two tentacles sprouting from its shoulders. Its eyes met mine and it snarled, showing a mouthful of gleaming incisors and canine teeth. The eyes shined with malicious intelligence, and as I viewed it, a duplicate of itself appeared outside the cart.

Tensing, I prepared for combat, but Ike barked a laugh. “It’s a trick. The monster is still in its cage. Don’t worry—just smoke and mirrors. That double is an illusion.”

“Yeah, I know what a displacer beast can do,” I said, my voice more defensive than I intended. But just because I knew it didn’t mean I was ready to face it. The VR version back in the game was one thing—my brain knew it wasn’t real, no matter how immersive it felt. But here? Here, if that thing got loose, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fight it.

Turning, I checked the other pens in turn. A carrion crawler, its slimy green body bristling with tendrils, squirmed in one. In the next was a hook horror, its terrifying claws tapping against the bars, while its vulture-like head twisted to and fro. A few cages down, I saw a young owlbear, its massive beak snapping at the air. There were even some mundane animals like giraffes and an elephant, giving me a rough idea of what regular fauna looked like around here.

My mouth began to water, the scent of blood and battle again rising to my nostrils, and I turned away from my inspection. None of those mattered. What did matter was Ike and his companions. I turned to the little man and saw him pointing to the distant horizon. Shading my eyes against the sun’s glare, I could see a couple of shadows, humanoid, scrambling up a hilly rise and away from the battlefield. A primal urge bubbled up within me to give chase, to hunt down those fleeing from my just vengeance.

I could nearly taste their flesh, the fear marinating it, the adrenaline of their retreat making them so much more delectable. My muscles trembled and Jeldorain stirred within me.

The wind blew a cool gust across my face, sobering me just as a small hand touched my calf. I shot a look down and saw Ike staring up at me.

“Best to just let them go. Our crew, what we do, it all works better if we let a few get away to tell the rest. Gives us a reputation.”

Jeldorain growled inside me, but I pushed him down. I didn’t know what exactly their purpose was. And until I did, it was better to assume that they knew what they were doing.

Ike had rescued me, after all.

“We haven’t got a lot of time before we need to beat feet and get on out of here. But it’ll be worth a good scrounge to see if we can’t get you any weapons. Do you have any decent skills in weapons that aren’t whips and chains?” he asked.

I closed my eyes, diving into my character sheet. C-rank. All C-rank. How was it that I was supposed to be this great champion if I just had one specialized combat skill. I opened my eyes.

“Nothing better than a C,” I admitted.

“C is average for a warrior class, so don't grump about it. Besides, you can improve your abilities with use. And on certain level ups you also get the chance to raise one combat and one civil ability. How is your weaponcraft skill?”

Opening my sheet again, I looked through my civil abilities and was surprised. Here I had an S-class in Weaponcraft, Leadership, Grand Strategy, and Assessment, with a flurry of A and B-classes besides. Each of the S-classes came with 3 abilities, the A-classes had 2, and the B-classes had 1. Opening my Weaponcraft, I saw that I was able to Fuse for 20 stamina, and Upgrade or Repair, both for the cost of 10 stamina. Fuse and Upgrade also came with a monetary cost of 500 gold coins, and 100, respectively.

I opened my eyes, the gleam within them telling Ike all he needed to know.

“That good, huh. Well, tell me what you’ve got.”

We walked through the bodies, stripping them of gear as Ike gave me a good rundown on what to take and what would happen next. Fuse would let me take two weapons plus 500 gold coins and make them into a single new weapon, whether that be by disassembling both to make something new and different, or just combining one directly with the other. With a knowing look, a sack of gold, and his prompting, I took the chains and fused them with a pair of throwing axes.

CRAFTED! 2-Bladed Ax-Kusarigama, Damage 2 to 18 (+10)(x2), 5% Critical Fail, Weight 5, Speed Medium

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Great in a pinch, slicey and dicey in a way that your local chef wishes he could be. Welcome to your first fused weapon, the Ax-Kusarigama. Be careful, you’ll chop your eye out.

I startled a bit at the last line, not because of the humor in it, but because of the seeming earth reference that it represented. Did that mean they were connected? I smiled grimly, hoping that it meant there’d be an easy connection between this place and mine, and that I really could find a way home.

Focusing back on the weapon in front of me, I allowed myself to examine it. The Ax-Kusarigama looked tremendously exotic, featuring a central handle made of leather wrapped steel and two chains extending opposite each other that held ax blades on their ends. I could see immediately that this sort of weapon would act as a sharpened helicopter blade in mass combat, and that it could easily hurt me as well in the process if I wasn’t careful.

With my S-class in chains, it felt like a weapon style that I should get used to. Especially since it’d been very apparent during combat that I was incredibly good at using such weapons. Who knew what sorts of area effect damage I could accomplish once I knew it well?

I told him the stats and he nodded. “S-class will get you double base damage, and your strength will give you a plus on that damage as well. The gold cost is too high to wanna spend on regular stuff like all this crap here, usually, but I wanted to see the make of yer mettle. It’s really not bad. I mean, the Critical Fail isn’t good, but that’s because that weapon is a bit on the unsafe side. There’s a reason it ain’t ever seen on no battlefield.” He smirked at the thought. “You can specialize in the weapon to get rid of that fail, and it would look big crazy in a fight. Might want to hold onto that and upgrade it when you can.”

I put it back into my inventory, happy to see that the new weapon had shrunk to 5 slots. Considering how much chain had simply vanished when I crafted it, I wondered if the slot limit wasn’t a function of weight. While Ike explained that I was basically a blacksmith with my Weaponcraft abilities and that I could improve weapons I created or found, depending on how many upgrades they’d already had done to them, I collected more weapons, armor, rations, and even a healing potion. Ike finished talking about the whole crafting spiel about the same time I maxed out my inventory.

“So now what?” I asked him.

His eyes went wide. Ike turned his head to the sky and he laughed. “Sometimes when you’re busy chatting with a new friend, you lose all track of who you are. Times up and I gotta sound withdrawal. Our group will be splitting into smaller parties and disappearing into the hills. Won’t be much longer I suspect before patrols come out this way, and when they start tracking, we want to give them as many paths to track as possible.”

“It seems like you all handled them easy enough. Why bother running?”

“Heh,” Ike said. “Yeah, might seem that way. But these weren’t regular soldiers of the Empire. Cultist private guards, which sounds impressive, but ain’t. The regulars are better trained with more hit points, and the Warg Knights that will be following them are elite. We don’t want to be here for them. Especially since you are here. Makes me wonder if maybe they weren’t heading to hand you off to some better group. Cultists don’t brook regular Empire on their land, so might be your guard was so easy because non-cultists weren’t allowed to be there.”

It made sense in a bureaucratic way. Reminded me of how, when I was working as a first responder, some people wouldn’t let you in to treat their grandma if you weren’t the right faith.

Thank heaven for extremists, I thought. Heavens, Jeldorain replied. I sighed. It didn’t matter.

Following Ike to a mass gathering of his people, I saw that they were composed of a great deal of familiar player races. There was a centaur, a couple of dwarves, a black-skinned elf with purple eyes, a nose-picking ogre—no humans, but I suspected that I’d see more of them soon enough. And when we arrived, at the center of it all stood a real-life satyr. His tiny horns glistened in the light of the sun, looking very much as if he’d oiled them over.

When we arrived, the fellow soldiers were laughing at him while he pranced and played a tune. He saw Ike, and he stopped, bowing to his crowd.

“Friend Ike, greatest of all the scaled dragon rejects of the world, come late of all things to battle break! Tell us, dear friend, that being beside you, be he rescuee, prisoner, or loot?”

The lot chuckled, looking eagerly to the kobold for his answer.

“Rescuee. He’s tall and he can help me get things from the top shelf back at base,” Ike replied, winking one yellow reptilian eye. “Plus I can ride on his shoulders when my feet get sore.”

The lot chuckled again, and the satyr bowed.

“Alright, men, parties,” Ike continued. “Same as discussed. New guy’s name is Ryan and he’s with me. We can do introductions on the fly. Been here too long already. Up and out everyone!”

The groups formed, Ike moving me into a platoon consisting of the dark elf, a satyr, a centaur, and a goblin. When all were present, a notification flashed across my vision.

The Party ‘Champions of the Shadowed Vanguard’ has requested you join them. Do you accept?

I nodded, mentally pressing the affirmation and seeing all of their summaries in earnest.

Kevinar Dailstorm. Drow Elf Assassin. A figure of stealth and quietude, his form barely making a whisper as he moves. S-class sneak skill, an uncanny ability to melt into the shadows undetected. A-class dual weapons-wielding. Proficiency with the hand crossbow.

Brandosyeus Leafroot. Satyr Bard. S-class skill with pipes. A-class ability in music magic. A boisterous figure whose weakness for the female form is perhaps what landed him here with the rebels instead of into the court of some princely goblin duke.

Jon Schint. Centaur Warrior. A 9 foot tall, massively muscular figure. A-class skill in rapidfire shortbow. A-class in dodge. Fuse ability with armor.

Ike. Kobold Warrior. S-class dirty fighting. A scrappy reptilian humanoid who champions his people and hopes to one day raise them up into nationhood.

Schustak Veinslicer. Goblin Swamp Druid. B-Class Nature Magic. Born into an elite family, Schustak was the third child, handed a small purse of coin at the tender age of 15 and sent out into the world to forge his own destiny.

The last man surprised me, since I’d gathered that his kind weren’t so well liked around these parts.

The people who benefitted from empires seldom were. I narrowed my eyes. People who tore other people from other worlds were also cause for suspicion.

We came together, exchanging just a few words, before moving up an incline, and into the darkness of the deep woods.