What a pleasant morning! That is, if you ignore the fact that the sky is pitch black yet everything is still sunlit. Weird phenomenon that didn’t exist pre-Eldenhaven, but guess we gotta work with what we have. Flowers blooming, birds chirping, leaves rustling- and there are our adventurers! Cenvin is poking his head into a mysterious purple portal, which is his pocket dimension thingy. Durand is busy turning a pebble into air, good for him too! Brett is watching closely with the wonder of a child.

“Haha! This is great! I can put anything inside!” Cenvin yells to nobody in particular.

“Yes, yes, but you can’t turn-”

“Is it possible to put a person inside?”

Durand stops and looks at him wearily.

“I don’t want to test that out right now.”

Cenvin shrugs his shoulders, picks up his backpack, and heaves it onto his shoulders with a grunt.

“Fair. Let’s get to Silvergate then. I can see its gate right over the trees.”

Decades ago, Silvergate was the center of a major colonization attempt by Italica. The royalty endeavored to settle the mysterious forests of the West Coast. They poured streams of gold and silver into the cause but due to various reasons such as poor planning, stupid officials, and minor interference from a certain all-powerful being, things eventually didn’t work out.

An arching gate made of pure silver was established at Silvergate to mark its significance. Now, it stands lonely and depressed, as a symbol of the past authorities’ failures and dullness. If it was not for the town’s name, one could not even tell that the muddied and mossy gate is silver.

Pessimistic description aside, our adventurers are standing directly in front of it. Cenvin draws his knife and slices some vines dropping from the arch. He examines the shining metal underneath.

“Silver?” he asks to no one in particular suspiciously. Durand rolls his eyes.

“I’ll just stay here and make a little nice camp,” Brett says timidly, staring into the town behind the gate nervously. Cenvin begins chipping away at the gate with his knife and gathering the silver flakes. Durand helped Brett gather their packs as he labored. At last, Durand pulls Cenvin away from the gate and into the town, despite his complaints.

“You can’t be that desperate for money.”

“Money is money!”

They both pause at the sight of the wrecked, burning Silvergate. Houses are toppled, shrines are demolished, and everything is on fire with a layer of blood covering everything. Durand walks into a clearing that seems to use to be the town square.

“Tutorial boss fight?”

Meanwhile, Cenvin, who was absentmindedly looking around, points towards a building that hasn’t been destroyed yet. It is covered with blood, yes, but the structure seems to hold.

“Let’s check that out. Maybe there are survivors.”

“Survivors that you can loot?” Durand side-eyes Cenvin. He shakes his head hastily.

“Well, what I am looking for is monsters that we can fight,” Durand comments. “We need to get powerful to fight this Otherworld thing.

They enter the door standing ajar. The house looks as if a massacre has happened. Rotting intestines line the floor and pieces of bone and stains of blood paint the walls. A staircase leads down to a small basement, too dark to see anything inside. A massive grotesque blob of human parts similar to the one back at Eldenhaven lays dormant. Durand lets out a chuckle and nods to Cenvin.

“What did I say? Experience, here we come!”

He draws his longsword and slashes the amalgamation with quick attacks. Cenvin pounces onto it and stabs it with his shortsword while screaming at the top of his lungs. The amalgamation took the hits like a lifeless rock without reactions, movement, or sound.

Then, at lightning speed, the amalgamation moves at a velocity that does not correspond with its size. In the blink of an eye, Cenvin is flung through the walls and into another building, while Durand is knocked onto the floor, a rib cracked and the air slammed out of his body. He gasps and stands up to face a still amalgamation. Dormant as a corpse. He looks to see Cenvin embedded into a wall and in a coma. He sighs.

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Looking at the basement entrance, he realizes the amalgamation is just above it. He concentrates his mind to focus on his ability and the floor. He evaporates the ground beneath the amalgamation, sending it crashing down into the basement. Solidifying the ground, he then turns the air in the entrance solid, effectively sealing the amalgamation inside for a short while with an invisible barrier.

Stumbling out of the house and catching his breath, Durand notices a hunched old man holding a notebook. He could not make out the old man’s face through the dust and smoke.

He ran towards the figure, “Who are you? What’s your name? What are you doing in such a dangerous place?”

He paused as the old man raised his face. An inhuman, alien one. Durand gasped as the creature resembling an old man pointed towards its mouth and shook its head. It stretches out its bony arms, holding a notebook and a quill.

“You’re mute and deaf? I guess you want me to communicate through this notebook then,” Durand says. “Of course.”

He takes the notebook, but before he can write anything a deathly shrill of a dying man pierced the air. Cenvin, rising from some rubble, mouthed to Durand; Brett.

They dash to the gate, and where Brett and their stuff is stands a few malnourished and tired villagers, holding large leather sacks of what appears to be their belongings. They fall to their knees as soon as they see Durand and Cenvin.

“Sirs! Please help us!” The leader croaks. “We are villagers from Eldenhaven, which has been attacked by unholy things invisible to the eye! We escaped with our lives, but we didn’t dare go into the forest and we ran out of rations!”

“Well, right where you are was also where our stuff was, so unless anyone came before you you should know what happened to our belongings,” Cenvin says. The leader shakes his head.

Durand charges and grabs the leader by the collar, roaring furiously, “WHERE IS BRETT? GINGER-HAIRED TEENAGER? WHERE IS HE?”

“They’re just refugees, stop!” Cenvin attempts to pull Durand back but stops.

The moment Durand dashed, the refugees behind the leader had transformed into something skeletal yet menacing. The tall, thin, and pale creatures brandish spikes that protrude out of their arms, ready to attack. Durand groans and steps back, clutching a wound in his abdomen where the leader had stabbed him. Quickly pulling himself together, Cenvin draws his crossbow. Durand straightens and draws his longsword.

A twink of string and a creature falls over, a crossbow bolt in its head. Weaving into the fray, Durand takes on four at once, defending himself from the barrage of attacks the creatures are hailing. Cenvin reloads his crossbow as fast as he could.

“Ah! Too slow!”

He drops his crossbow and goes in to relieve Durand of the pressure with a pair of shortswords. The blades clink against the bony spikes. Despite the numbers advantage, the creatures seem to be wary of Durand and Cenvin’s attacks, focusing more on defending rather than attacking. Then, a spark hit Cenvin’s mind.

Open up a portal on the ground, Cenvin throws one of the creatures into his pocket dimension, effectively putting it out of the battle. Inside, the creature seems to be frozen in time, unmoving and dead.

“Keep doing that! That’s overpowered!” Durand yells as he kicks one of the creatures to the floor and decapitates it. The battle is now a four-on-two.

“Of course!” Cenvin yells back. He proceeds to throw two more into the pocket dimension, and they kill off the remaining two creatures easily. Cenvin and Durand fall in exhaustion before Durand jumps back up.

“We have to find Brett!”

One of the leather bags left by the creatures begins to wiggle. Durand and Cenvin quickly tear a hole in it with a dagger and Brett falls out. They didn’t see anything bad at first, but as they turned him over they noticed a large stab wound in his back.

“He’s lost blood, that wound’s too big to patch up quickly,” Durand mutters. He desperately scrambles in his pockets for anything that can help him. Grief-stricken, he lies beside Brett, who is unconscious and barely breathing.

“I’ll freeze him with my ability,” Cenvin offers. “He shouldn’t be able to bleed out in there.”

Durand looks at him and looks at Brett.

“Hurry!”

Cenvin opens a portal beneath Brett, letting him fall into the pocket dimension.

“The moment he comes out, he’ll be in critical condition,” Cenvin says. “But he’s safe for now.”

Durand nods grimly and turns towards the gate, where the deformed old man stands. It is holding the notebook. It points toward the corpses of the creatures and letters fly out from the notebook like butterflies, and eventually, they form a coherent word in midair.

S H A P E R S

“Shapers? These things?”

Then pointing to himself, the old man blows a few more letters into the air. They flap chaotically but they eventually settle in the air.

W A N D E R I N G

“Wandering? You’re from the Otherworld?”

The Wandering nods. It then points towards Cenvin and the flying letters yell at each other, trying to follow a telepathic instruction to form another formation. They squeeze and squirm, changing into different letters while a few more letters join them.

I T A L I C A C I T Y

“Oh! You want us to go there! Why?” Cenvin pipes up.

“Is there someone there who can help us heal Brett?” Durand asks. The Wandering nods in affirmation. Then, it conjures a glowing white mist out of its hand. The mist seems to have a mind of its own, and it comes together to form a milky and pearly cat, shedding pure snowy light all around its body. Cenvin and Durand look at the radiant creature, jaws dropped in awe.

The cat looks disdainfully at the Wandering, and the back half of its slim body evaporates into little glowing particles, brightly contrasted with the burning backdrop of Silvergate. The particles flick the wobbling letters away and it arranges to form a sentence.

MY NAME IS NYRI.

The particles quickly swap positions to form a new message.

I WILL BE YOUR GUIDE.

Nyri’s face, which has remained solid, purrs gently and seemingly smiles at Durand. The particles fly back together to form a solid body like completing a jigsaw. It gracefully treads towards the adventurers, and Durand picks it up. Cenvin watches it with caution and keeps a distance away.

Nyri’s tail shifts into an arrow, pointing southwest at a road leading away from Silvergate.

“Let’s get out of here, then,” Durand says. Cenvin’s nostrils constrict from the smell of barbecue.

“I agree. Let’s go.”

As they begin marching, Cenvin looks back at the silver gate. The Wandering is gone.

How many people died in this chapter? Hm, say Silvergate has about 312 residents and then the six shapers, it means 318 deaths, which adds to the death total of… 447 deaths! Not too shabby! Wait, do we count Otherworld creatures?