Did you know? There actually IS a summer on Nuprima! It's eight days long and takes place only on the spot furthest from Keypoint, but if you're willing to stick it out, it's a truly beautiful sight.
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─ Maelstrom
─ Type: Ascended Soulsword (3rd Form)
─ Rank: Legendary (Integrity: 23%)
─ Abilities: Darkflame (Inactive, Integration: 83%)
Imbued with the pure energy of Mount Sanctum and the lifeblood of its creator, this blade has transcended its humble origins and become a weapon of limitless *****?
After ****?, this blade now contains traces of darkflame, has taken on the ****?, and ***? and will **? once accumulated in sufficient quantity.
─ Class Requirement: Mageblade
─ Bound to Jair Welburne
“Well, that confirms it.”
Eythron looked over at Jair. “Confirms?”
Jair tossed him Maelstrom.
Eythron examined it, eyes narrowing. “When did this happen?”
“In the future. About a week and a half from now, we run into the venix again. I killed it twice in two different timelines, and the integrity increased both times. So either Maelstrom isn’t able to absorb the full essence in one go due to its own lower integrity, or killing the same creature multiple times can be exploited to massively increase the sword’s strength.” Whatever the case, it was definitely going up by a larger amount each time, as well as Darkflame reaching 83% integration rather than the expected 75.
“And you came back to now?”
Jair shrugged. “First option available. I wasn’t quick enough to grab the previous crack, sheer luck I managed it the first time. Didn’t have anything to slow me down this time.”
“Uh-huh.” Eythron handed Maelstrom back with a scowl. “Being able to carry power back in time is absurd.”
“I know, right?”
“It’s against all known laws of time.”
“Which we evaded by using the soul directly. And something strong enough it wouldn’t disintegrate.” Jair grimaced. “We tried using different ascensions a few times. Didn’t end well. The soul isn’t meant to have things explode while inside it.”
“I still can’t believe you collected those components so fast. Less than ten years, and you found all of them?”
“It was a few hundred years at least. Just over the same few years again and again.”
“Still ridiculous.”
Jair shrugged. “Your plan. I’m just the one who followed through on it.”
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Days passed without any sign of the venix, though Jair found himself increasingly familiar with the area. It made it more challenging to maintain the necessary perpetual attentiveness. True, you’d die if you ever wandered the Oriad fully inattentive, but for someone used to taking the normal precautions—especially when accompanied by a master mageblade—there was only so much extra attention he could pay to every rustle of a leaf and every brush of wind before it became incredibly tedious.
He briefly considered just letting their first contact happen without interfering, but it’d been a long time since he was this excited for something. This was actually new, truly unknown. A power he’d never heard anything about, and he only needed one more piece of venix soul to make it work.
Something rustled from the side, and Jair spun to face it. A viper squirrel hissed and bared its fangs at him, then darted away further up the branch.
He threw Maelstrom at it just out of habit, practicing his aim at a moving target. The branch split and crashed to the ground. The squirrel escaped, but left half its tail behind.
Jair pocketed the fluffy tuft, then caught up with Eythron.
Eythron for his part ignored Jair’s behavior except for a single glance with raised eyebrow. He continued to walk as though he weren’t escorting someone who destroyed trees seemingly at random and collected even the most mundane of monster parts for a crazy vampire witch.
“Have I mentioned recently how much I appreciate you, master?”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to turn it into an argument.”
“No I won’t.”
Eythron snorted.
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Jair’s first warning was the slightest rustle of wind from the side. He jumped up eagerly, Lift giving him height as he swung Maelstrom in a two-handed arc.
A frost hawk fell to the ground, sheared clean in half.
Jair exhaled, disappointed. He dropped to the ground and knelt to collect the feathers. It’d been days longer than he thought he’d need to reach their first encounter with the venix. Either it had decided to stop hunting him for some reason, or his sense of time was further off than he expected.
He half expected it to swoop down on him from behind while he was distracted—it had proven in the previous timeline that it could be a clever hunter, following them, waiting for the brobeg fight to strike—but no venix had appeared.
They were only a few hours away from the brobeg’s swamp resting place now, and still the venix had yet to show itself.
The hours passed quietly, and they reached their initial target. Jair pointed ahead. “Brobeg's sleeping in the swamp just past those bushes.”
Eythron nodded and summoned his sword, then signed that he was ready.
Jair jumped forward, Lift allowing him to glide across the ground soundlessly. He dropped down onto the brobeg’s wing, stabbing deep into the muscle and drawing a jagged slash across the membrane.
The bulbous beast woke with an angry gurgle, whipping its head around as it reared up. Jair held on and kept slashing.
The groggy brobeg flapped its good wing rapidly, trying to take flight. Jair hopped back as it flopped over onto its side, Jair’s attacks on its wing leaving it off balance.
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They’d caught it off guard while digesting what looked like a large meal, judging by the lumpiness of its lower half, but it wasn’t opposed to adding more. Its tongue whipped out, snapping around toward Jair.
Eythron jumped into the fight and slashed the tongue with his sword. It wasn’t Maelstrom and couldn’t sever a resistant body part in a single strike from an elite monster, but it was enough to distract the creature.
It wrapped its tongue around the sword and tugged it forward. Eythron let it pull him in, letting go at the last instant so the brobeg swallowed only the sword.
“Not your best move,” Jair cackled.
Eythron raised a hand and stood unmoving.
“My turn.” Jair jumped in. He slapped the brobeg on the side of the leg with Maelstrom, drawing its ire.
As much as it would love to finish gobbling up the unarmed and unmoving Eythron, the brobeg clearly recognized the guy with the brightly glowing sword as a bigger current threat.
Its mistake.
Eythron’s sword came bursting out of the brobeg’s lower jaw in an explosion of torn flesh and scattered blood, having torn clear through the inside of its mouth. He caught the blade by the hilt and immediately jumped back on the attack.
Jair ducked just in time to evade a swipe from the creature’s claws, distracted as he kept scanning the treetops. They were past the point the venix had attacked the first time, and still no sign of it.
If it had given up on fighting him, he’d have to go on the attack.
It took another three minutes to finish the brobeg, which once again included Jair getting himself eaten as a distraction in the vital moment, but without a venix sharing mouth space it was entirely survivable.
Eythron finished stabbing the thing from the outside, Jair amused himself by slicing its tongue into ever smaller sections while it tried and failed to swallow him, and finally it fell still.
Jair carved his way out, then joined Eythron in stripping its hide and bundling it up for transport. “Do you know any way of tracking a venix?”
“No. Dratted things do that teleport thing every few days. It’s impossible to follow one once it does that. No way to know where to go.”
Jair pondered the problem as they finished up, and quickly reached the conclusion that there was only one time he was guaranteed another shot at it.
“Apologies, master.” He dropped the roll of brobeg hide and gave a formal bow.
Eythron squinted at him suspiciously.
“As much as I’ve enjoyed our time together, I think it’s time I went back to Qahrvirna for a bit. Don’t worry, I’ll see you again soon. We’ve still got a star hydra to hunt, but I have a few stops to take first.”
Eythron frowned at him, then disappeared behind the curtain of golden light as Jair dove into Temporal Reversion.
Since he wasn’t trying to go back hours or days, he had plenty of time to assess the temporal landscape as he dropped back. Months spent with Eythron, months before that spent with Qahrvirna, and…
There. It was easy enough to see, a dramatic spike sticking out, and just below it a tiny vertical shelf. He prepared himself as the months fell away, then grabbed the spike in one hand and slammed his other hand onto the nascent shelf and pulled himself forward through the ghostly cliffside and into reality.
Half a year ago, back when he’d first arrived in the Oriad.
Jair and Qahrvirna walked through the jungle together. It was nighttime, their path illuminated by Jair’s staff.
The abrupt shift from starting to feel like himself to his significantly weaker previous body was jarring, as was the sensation of having two standard hands again. He’d gotten used to the construct one, and it made this one feel somewhat like a downgrade without the ability to move quite as freely. But what it lacked in physical flexibility, it made up for in imprint capacity.
He retraced Absorb and Protect, one on each hand, right where they belonged. As bad as it felt losing so much improvement in the short term, if he was going to be hunting a star hydra he’d need full magical capacity.
The fact that this was the closest intersection with the venix was just poetic beauty. This was where it took his hand in the first place, and it would be where he took the final piece of its soul.
Two days of walking and he started to get the feel of traveling with Qahrvirna again. He missed being able to move with full flexibility, his muscles still unformed now, and being without Lift showed that he relied on subtle application of the spell in casual movement a lot more than he’d remembered, but it would be worth it.
Finally, he spotted the telltale glint of an octide nest ahead of him in the trees. He slowed to a stop. Their first battleground.
“There’s a nest of octide up ahead,” Jair whispered. He withdrew Maelstrom, the silver light drowning out the glow of his staff as it illuminated the thick foliage and glared off the low-lying fog.
Qahrvirna shielded her eyes against the sudden glare. “I can see why you need Eythron’s help, that weapon’s leaking power like a dying jackal.”
“I’m going to take them out. If you see a venix, shout.”
“A venix? Here?” Qahrvirna looked around uneasily. “I don’t like those things.”
“You’re a vampire, do you like anything fire-based?”
Qahrvirna shrugged dramatically and leaned up against the nearest tree, toying with her dagger.
Jair charged the octide nest, adding the noise of trompling and shoving his way past underbrush to the light of his sword.
It made him quite a dramatic target.
Two younger octides scuttled down the trunks and toward him, awakened by the brightness and perfectly content to take advantage of a free meal delivered right to them.
Jair sliced through their faceted green carapaces with ease. Though his arms were subtly weaker than he was used to and his movement a little less precise than a few days ago in the future, he didn't need his full capability for this. Octide shells weren't enough to resist Maelstrom's strength.
Bigger octides came at him as he finished off the earlier ones. He sliced away their slashing legs, retreating in a slow circle to prevent them surrounding him or shoving him into a corner.
He quickly remembered why he’d picked this fight in the first timeline—it was excellent practice for getting back into the feeling of fighting. They were fast, but sluggish from sleep. Individually no threat, but enough of them to keep him moving.
His arms ached from the strenuous workout, pulse surging with adrenaline. He could finish off any one---or any three---of the creatures with ease, but had to be wary of his positioning so he didn’t leave himself vulnerable.
Qahrvirna had moved on from leaning against a tree to sitting on a tree branch looking down at the spectacle from out of reach. “You sure you don’t want help?”
“Keep an eye out for the venix. I need to know as soon as it shows up.”
As the octide nest finished emptying, the amount of oversized crystal bugs trying to chomp down on him steadied out, then began to drop as he killed them faster than they reached him.
Octide pieces flew in all directions, their blood soaking the ground as Jair switched Maelstrom from hand to hand. Steadily retreating, steadily demolishing the oncoming horde, until finally he stood alone and triumphant among the cracked and dismembered remains of an entire nest’s worth of octides. A few had tried to retreat, but they’d waited too long. He chased them down to finish off each of them with full aggression.
He’d hoped that the show of complete preoccupation would be enough to lure the venix into attacking, but if it was watching them it had yet to show itself.
“Venix!”
Jair’s head whipped around. He ignored the octide he’d been chasing and immediately dashed back toward where he’d left Qahrvirna.
A stack of octide carapaces had been scattered from what was obviously once a neat pile, and Qahrvirna was nowhere to be seen.
“Where are you?”
“Run away!”
Jair ran in the direction of her voice. He’d seen her fight the venix in the past, so he didn’t see why she would have any trouble with it this time.
“Qahrvirna?”
“Don't come this way!” Her voice was further away now than before, though he’d been running full speed.
“You need to come back to me,” he shouted. “I can’t catch up.” Vampires and their blood powers.
“Run, you can’t do anything!”
“I can help! Qahri! Get back here now!”
No response.
Jair snorted, much like Eythron would have, and slowed to tracking mode. Fortunately, a venix and a vampire left a sufficiently broad trail to follow with ease.
He might not catch up with them before the fight was over, but as long as the venix was still around he might still be able to salvage this loop before he went back to try again.
It took long enough to catch up that dawn had began to brighten the sky, and Jair started to worry he’d been led astray by a game trail in the dark. Then he emerged into an open field and the fallout of the battle became immediately clear.
Whole sections of the place had been flattened. Blood, both the glowing green of the venix and the deep red of the vampire, splattered the area in impressive quantities.
Jair staggered forward, searching for anything recognizable. He was gasping for breath, the long run through the night wearing him out beyond what this past version of him could handle with equanimity.
The early morning light cast long shadows from the trees behind him. Maelstrom’s glow helped to counteract the dimness. He’d left his staff behind a long time ago, never bothered to go back for it. Not that he needed it right now.
He came over a small rise, and the hollow beyond showed exactly what he’d been afraid of.
Qahrvirna’s body—or what remained of it—was all but unrecognizable. The venix crouched over her, glowing green eyes rising to meet Jair’s as it tore another strip of dark red vampire flesh from the arm it held down beneath one claw.
Jair shook his head. “Stubborn old witch. The one time I’d actually be happy for her to betray me and she refuses to. What’s wrong with her?”
The venix took a step forward, carelessly snapping Qahrvirna's bones underfoot. It was tall enough that, even with Jair at the top of the hill and itself at the bottom of the valley, it loomed taller than him.
“Time for you to die.” He held out Maelstrom, tip leveled at the monster’s luminous eyes. “Even if it was her own stubborn fault, you’re going to regret killing my friend.”
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