Part XI: Border Wars

‘Stay low,’ I told the rest of the team, ‘trouble ahead.’

Since dropping off the elven diplomats in the city of Lenktra—Queen Amira’s latest addition to her kingdom—we’d headed north. All the whispers on the street said that Lenktra was far from the new Goldmarch border, and the queen’s influence stretched much further into the continent. From what we knew of Niamh and the Council’s involvement with Queen Amira, we could only assume that she would be at the frontline, long since departed from Lenktra.

Val and I had tried to sneak into the city anyway, on the basis that we might have been able to get a more precise location out of someone. But we’d fallen at the first hurdle; in the queue at the gates, Goldmarch soldiers roughed up all those trying to get in, extorting them, sometimes seemingly just doing it for enjoyment. We could have portalled our way inside, but as we peered in through the gates we could see how many soldiers in mustard surcoats were already inside; moving around in Lenktra—and trying to find information—was going to be difficult. Instead, we turned north, and hoped the density of Goldmarch soldiers wouldn’t be quite what it had been in Lenktra.

We couldn’t have been any more wrong.

Soldier presence actually seemed to increase on the roads leading north, particularly towards the eastern coast. Wherever you looked, there were people in the sun-marked armour of the Goldmarch, and they definitely didn’t get any better behaved outside of Lenktra. All of them seemed keen—or perhaps even briefed—to take whatever they wanted, and to hurt anyone who tried to stop them.

I’d made that mistake once in the past couple of days, stepping in to stop a half-dozen soldiers from taking the crop of an elderly farmer. We’d won the battle, but they’d been stronger than I’d anticipated, and Val once again had opportunity to level up her Healing magicks to fix injuries to Lore, Corminar and myself. She healed me last, as I “was the one who got us into this mess”. At least I’d levelled up Knifework and Worldbending some in the process.

But all of this hadn’t even been the worst of it. The morning after Lenktra, as the team had awoken, still groggy, from our sleep, Corminar had barged into our shared bedroom and slammed a stack of papers onto the chest. I’d wiped my eyes, trying to focus them, and then my stomach lurched when I saw what the elf had brought in.

‘Wanted posters,’ he said. ‘One for each of us. They know not our names, but the sketched likeness is largely very accurate.’

‘Largely?’ Val said, picking one of the papers up, raising her eyebrows.

‘I am more handsome in person,’ Corminar clarified.

The bounty placed on our heads had been… large, but that wasn’t the most surprising part. The bit that shocked me most was who had placed the bounty—not Niamh, or the Council, as I might have expected, but the Cult of Ascendency. I hadn’t thought about them in a long, long time—not since killing that cultist who had attacked Val and I in that tavern, from whom I unlocked the Worldbending skill tree. That they’d be interested in us threw me for a loop, at least until I realised why.

The cult were Player worshippers. Somehow, they knew we’d killed one of them. And they were out for revenge.

All of this led, days later, to the five—or six, as Lore insisted on the depth raider’s behalf—trying to sneak into a small village just off the main road, hoping to grab some overdue food. My stomach was rumbling just thinking about it.

‘I swear we didn’t have to sneak around so much until we met you,’ Val said, glancing in my direction along the low stone wall we were crouched behind.

‘Are you really blaming me for—’

‘You have a suspicious-looking face.’

‘No time for bicker,’ Arzak said, slapping Val and I around the head. ‘Not eat in long time. Need food.’

I gestured to the two dozen or so Goldmarch soldiers milling about the village in front of us—almost enough of them to outnumber the locals. ‘We got time. Gotta wait for an opportunity. Unless you want to start a fight we definitely can’t win.’

‘Reckon it’s time for a Styk-Val snatch and swap?’ Lore asked.

‘A what?’

‘You know, that thing you do.’

Val and I looked to one another, both apparently equally lost.

‘Styk opens a portal, grabs a soldier, pulls them here, we all knock em out, and then Val wears their armour and changes into them,’ Lore explained.

‘Lore… that’s happened once,’ I replied. ‘Why do you have a name for it?’

‘And why do you expect us all to understand it?’ Val added.

Lore shrugged. ‘Sorry, thought you smart folk would know what I meant.’

‘He has point,’ Arzak said, interrupting both Val and me before we could respond to this strange assertion. ‘Good way get food. Soldier can do what want, nobody stop them.’

I sighed, preparing myself to summon a portal on one of the soldiers who was out of sight of the rest. ‘Alright,’ I said to Lore and Arzak, ‘get ready to knock them out.’

‘Ready,’ Lore said, with a toothy grin.

I nodded, opened a portal just behind the lone soldier, put my arms around them and then tumbled backwards through the portal, spilling out onto the floor next to them. Just as the soldier was crying out, ‘You fools! The army will—’, Lore hit them around the head with the butt of his sword. Due to his strength, they passed out in one hit.

Level 18 soldier of the Goldmarch defeated!

Worldbending — +650xp

‘You know, we’ve really gotta do that more often,’ I said.

Lore mumbled his agreement.

‘What was this about an—’ Val started, and then Corminar suddenly straightened, alert. Not that he didn’t always possess perfect posture—he did—but suddenly he found an extra half an inch in his spine, and peered around, eyes wide.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

‘We must flee. Immediately,’ the elf said.

‘What? Why?’ I asked, looking around. Whatever he could see, I definitely couldn’t. Though elven eyes and ears were so often said to be better than human senses, and he had the hunting abilities to back that up.

‘An army,’ he said. ‘It approaches from the south.’

We attempted to hurry around the town without being spotted, but there were enough soldiers ahead that it wasn’t going to be easy, even with my low-glow Tamed Portals ability up my metaphorical sleeve. So we instead turned east, towards the distant Iron Sea, running while keeping low as the sound of marching grew louder and louder behind us.

‘If we continue going east, the army will soon be upon us,’ Corminar said.

‘Then what do you suggest?’ I asked.

‘We find cover.’

Val dropped to the ground, placing her hands on the dust, and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, and when she opened her eyes again, they glowed gently green. ‘There’s a cave. Not far from here.’ She began to jog northeast.

We wasted no time in following her, but I had to ask, ‘How do you know? Witchcraft, was it?’

‘Worms,’ she said. ‘With my summoning magicks, I can sense them, too. And there’s none in a large cavern a little way under our feet.’

I nodded, and accidentally pulled a face that reflected how impressed I was; I couldn’t really risk inflating Val’s ego any further.

We came soon upon a river, and following it upstream led us to a small opening in one of the banks—one still large enough to fit through if you crouched slightly, but obscured so that anyone passing might not see it.

‘I not want go in,’ Arzak said, as Lore and Corminar hopped in first.

‘Why not? There’s no other option,’ Val replied as I slipped into the dark. It was roomier than it looked from the outside—a reasonably sized cavern that seemed to go further back in the form of a couple of tunnels, but they were dark enough that I wasn’t about to hurry into them.

‘I not like small spaces.’

‘Close your eyes, then,’ the witch said, then she too slipped inside.

When it became clear that Arzak—the largest and most noticeable of us—wasn’t going to step inside, I poked my head out, summoned a portal under her feet, and tossed her inside the cave. She grabbed at the rims of the portal to stop herself falling through completely, but an irritated, ‘Arzak…’ from Cominar had her release her grasp.

I closed the portal, and the cave fell into darkness once more, no longer illuminated by the gentle purple glow of my portal.

And then we waited. It was hard to know how long we waited—it seemed like a long time, though I had a feeling it wasn’t as long as I thought—before we heard the army marching over our heads. The rumbling noise of the footsteps of hundreds—could it really be hundreds?—passing overhead grew louder then quieter, and I breathed a sigh of relief that we’d escaped undiscovered.

But that celebration was a moment too soon.

Two faces appeared at the mouth of the cave, and from what little I could make out of their torsos, they were in the uniform of Goldmarch soldiers.

‘Your turn,’ one of them said.

‘Nah, it’s yours.’

‘I did the last one!’

‘The last cave wasn’t a gave, though. Just looked like one. You still owe me.’

There was a pause as the first soldier considered this counterargument, and then he said, ‘...Doesn’t matter. Still your turn.’

‘Nah, cos if I do it, my head will be bitten off by a cave spider or something, won’t it, knowing my luck.’

‘Cave spider?’ Lore repeated under his breath. Someone—I couldn’t see who—hit him, presumably to get him to shut his mouth.

‘Alright,’ the other soldier said. ‘How about this: neither of us go in, and we just report that we did? Say we swept the lands all thorough and that.’

There was the barest hint of a pause, as though the woman was trying really hard to be in two minds about it. ‘Yeah, fine. Deal.’

With that, the two soldiers left, and the next sigh from me was surely not too soon.

Rocks fell deeper inside the cave, followed by the sound of something approaching. It was too soon after all.

Gods damn it, Styk.

Arzak and Lore hurried towards the cave mouth, but I rushed to stop them. ‘Not yet. You go out there, and you’ll be spotted. We’ll have a whole army on us.’

‘Better that than a cave spider,’ Lore replied, only half-whispering.

‘No it isn’t and you bloody well know it. Now stand your ground and…’

But then I noticed something about the approaching sound. It wasn’t the pattering of animal legs on stone, but the steady dun-dun of a footstep. Of a thick-soled boot, in face. Whoever was inside this cave in us was… human.

‘Weapons ready,’ I said, and Arzak and Lore drew their blades, rushing towards the noise to stand between the enemy and the more fragile members of our party—me included.

A gentle yellow glow started to appear around the bend in the cave tunnel—flickering, so it was flame, not magick. We stayed deathly still as the noise grew closer, praying that the potential enemies didn’t know we were there, affording us the advantage we might so desperately need.

The figures that came into view were not what I’d expected. Their faces were greying, their movements weak, their body language saying they hadn’t eaten in days. These weren’t enemies; these were people in trouble. Yet their clothes said they should have been anything but. They wore the sorts of threads we’d seen in the palace at Auricia—definitely not clothes suitable for delving into caves. So what could they have been doing down here?

The woman at the front of the group—who carried herself with her head held high, despite her obvious tiredness—studied us with glossy eyes.

‘Who are you?’ Val asked, after a moment of the two groups staring one another down.

It was the woman who spoke. ‘You may put down your weapons. I have the feeling we share the same enemies.’

‘Not until you tell us who you are,’ the witch continued.

The pale woman sighed. ‘You have the honour of speaking to Duchess Yua of Lenktra. Now, please, put down your weapons. We must talk.’

"Styk"

Level 14 Bladespinner

Base Stats:

Vitality — 32

Intelligence — 140

Dexterity — 69

Strength — 63

Wisdom — 48

Charisma — 31

Skills:

Worldbending — Level 35

Knifework — Level 28

Stealth — Level 15

Needlework — Level 12

Identification — Level 10

Abilities:

Slice — Slice the enemy for physical damage worth weapon’s base damage and additional damage scaling on [STR].

Stab II — Put your weight behind your wielded blade and force the tip through tougher hides and armour. Damage scales on [STR], increased by an additional 20%.

Execution II — Attack a target while undetected for +200% damage.

Closed Reach — Bend reality to narrow the gap between blade and target by up to 8 inches. Uses mana.

Mana-Fuelled — Passive. Optionally, use mana in place of stamina to activate Knifework abilities.

Local Portal II — Create a portal to another location within current range of sight or within a ten yard radius. Uses mana/second.

Portal Slice — Passive. Portals can now be spawned within non-sentient objects. Doing so slices through all objects that are not reinforced by magic.

Tamed Portals — Passive. Increased efficiency of portal magicks means that your portal glow is reduced by 50%, making them less likely to be detected by enemies.

Ash Husk — Convert your flesh to ash, strengthening it against flame for ten minutes. Gain 50% resistance to fire attacks.

Shrill Perimeter — Create a perimeter wall of 20 foot radius, invisible to all but those adept in magicks. If an enemy crosses this perimeter, this spell releases the shriek of a banshee.

Warped Shield — Passive. If an enemy strikes you with a low-level melee weapon, Warp Shield automatically activates to open a portal that deflects this attack. You must not have any portals currently active. Uses mana on activation.

Cloth Storage III — Open a portal to an inventory space, wherein you can store up to 30 distinct Needlework supplies.

Stealth Attack II — Passive. 80% boost to damage when unnoticed by enemy.

In Plain Sight — When activated, you have a heightened abilitiy to hide in plain sight, and are able to spot opportunities to break from combat at a higher rate. Scales on [WIS].

Stitch — Create a basic stitch in common fabrics. Ability scales on [CHA].

Cloth Armour — Craft a cloth armour of higher quality, dependent on materials, time and skill level.

Active Effects:

Legacy of Sisyphus:

XP gain increased by +900%