In a small glade, ringed by the straight trunks of deep blue [Azure Cedar], Taipan called a halt to their travel. The Twins had perhaps a quarter hour left until they dipped below the horizon. Inside this almost invisible patch of ground, kept clear mostly through the light blocking of the walls of interlaced evergreen branches of the surrounding trees, Taipan got them settled.
The day had started out a little rough, his fatigue weighing down on him. His condition had improved steadily though, mana exhaustion was the worst of it. Recovery would have gone faster had he not been experimenting with training his perception of the detection spell's input, he had prevented himself from reaching Core Saturation, but he had faith in Taipan's ability to avoid any conflict that was dangerous to them.
It wasn't until he watched her crawling into her bedroll, his having volunteered for first watch, that he realized that she had invited their battle with the [Bloodstarve] broodlings in direct contradiction to that assumption. She was an experienced scout and had to appreciate the possible hazards of a mansized flying beast with a razor fanged maw. Was it, perhaps, that she didn't consider them an actual threat? No, surely not.
He let his thoughts go back over the entire course of events, from the first realization that something was amiss in her wood to the brood mother's den, to their almost serene rest day not five kilometers from said den. His eyes snapped to her instantly sleeping form. It was. That horde of flying nightmares didn't scare her at all, didn't even register as something being worth concern. They weren't dangerous. He rolled this epiphany around his noodle for a minute, as the gentle pop and crackle of their small campfire filled in the back ground noise.
[Bloodstarves] didn't count as dangerous? What exactly the hell did?
No, stupid Ulric, do not ask.
"Do you hear me universe?" He pleaded softly in his head, "I take it back!"
There was no sign that the universe was listening. He could almost hear an imagined subaudible chuckle from the planet though. Silly questions deserve silly answers.
**************72 Hours Later***************
The pair of them dragged themselves into the Lowlands Forest Elf village, some seventy kilometers farther East and South of their intended stop in the Celestin city of Trachn'ir. Their clothes reeked, a stench like rotting eggs marinading in corpse juice. Ulric pulled a sled, a thin leather cord connected him to Taipan, who was using it as a guide to follow him as he set the pace and picked their path. No way was he leaving the beast's body behind, not after what it had put them through.
Ulric looked to his Shadow, noting the haunted set to her face, even though he couldn't see her eyes at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty bad.
His robes, once so fine, so comfortable, had been utterly ruined by the creature. Already, the outer layers were fraying, looking like canvas left too long under the sun. His exposed skin still burned, even after much rinsing and rubbing of dirt. Taipan had a bandage over her eyes, having taken a glancing hit to her lovely orbs. She said the effects would wear off in a day or so but, for now, she was nearly blind.
The Guards at the gate had smelled them coming for almost half an hour. When at last the source of the disgusting odor became visible, one leaned over and spewed her lunch, having taken a direct hit to the nostrils from an errant current of air.
The male guard watched them approach the final half kilometer, assessing them as soon as they'd become visible around the bend, trail winding out from the final treed hillock between them and succor. His duty partner recovered from her sickness and watched balefully as the source of her distress closed in.
Two bedraggled travelers. One a comely, if too tall, Iriel'en, a hunter by the looks of her, and the other, a Human? Now this was a thing nigh unto unheard of. They had approached from the South, from the Deep Wood. Humans hadn't been allowed entry into Iriel in nearly a hundred years. The woman turned to her partner and voiced their concerns.
"What in the Treeless Hell is going on here? An Iriel'en scout accompanied by a Lordling of Prespang? And why do they reek as if they have been rolling in [Nox'is] dung?"
Her partner only grunted a noncommittal agreement. He was more concerned by the bulging packs the travelers carried, the sled with a massive corpse strapped atop it, and the obvious signs of prolonged battle that were upon the pair. Slight nicks on hands, bruising on knuckles, tears in cloth that bespoke bestial opponents' glancing claws, and dried blood soaked into their ruined coats. To say nothing of the cloth protecting the obviously blinded Hunter's eyes.
It was weeks before the trading season would begin, and, despite his partner's claim that the manling was a Lordling, something told the guardsman that he was not from the noble class of that place. For one thing, Lordlings of Prespang did not hump their own gear. No reason for his partner to know that though, she was young and hadn't done duty in any of the borderlands. For another, he did not move as a soft foot, nor did he have the instinctive grace of the Hunter beside him.
No, there was something else going on here and the guardsman's instincts said that it was outside of his paygrade. Only one thing to do when a riddle appeared: Call for Someone Else to deal with it. The village guard beseeched his younger comrade, "Seralin, too much besides their odor reeks. Go for the Village Counsel, tell them what is afoot. I will hold these two at the gate until one better suited for making decisions is arrived."
She nodded, plainly happy to pass responsibility for whatever this situation was onto another. Three weeks of gate duty did not prepare one for handling the unexpected. And then there was the horrific stink. She took off at an easy lope to find a Village Council member.
Ulric pulled his sled stoically, ignoring the digging of the hasty harness into his skin through his traveling robes. He offered thanks to the heavens that there was still a thick snow upon the lands to ease the passage of the skids of the sled, else there would have been no way to pull it. He would have been loath to part with their bounty, not after having paid so dearly for it.
All their best-laid plans in shambles. All because of a jumped-up skunk.
*********Just Past Tempting the Irony Gods*********
Let it never be said that Ulric Einar did not live a life full of adventure.
Two days he and Taipan had navigated the frozen wilds of Iriel, heading towards the lowland forests. Two days of rucking at a hard pace, straight after they had taken the [Bloodstarve] cores and that of the [Mindworm]. Taipan was not satisfied unless they had covered some eighty kilometers a day, even if that meant marching into the night. Ulric did not question his Shadow's haste, they had a plan and were bound to make up the time lost waiting for the enraged killer vampire bats to die off.
The rigor of the journey told on both of them and Ulric was struck yet again by the incredible physical optimization of the creatures in this world cultivated by the Impossible. Even the squirrels could put up a fight, as they found out when a pair of the things tried to drop down on top of them as they passed beneath the little bastards' nut cache. A rather unpleasant squirrel bite later saw the travelers encamped. The bite was almost offset by a lovely dinner of sauteed tree rats with a side of roasted [Jin] nuts. Sort of a mix between a walnut and a chestnut, earthy with a hint of sweetness and none of the bitter tannins associated with acorns, even though they smelled like they should have those properties. Whatever, magical nuts, they were filling.
The next day’s travel saw a small group of creatures akin to [Heckler Monkeys] high in a particularly large set of Aspen-like trees straddling the path, descending on them when Ulric, too distracted on his spell practice with the [Ceraunoperception], tripped on a vine laid across the trail. The little beasts used the vine to indicate their usual prey passing through and they dropped a somewhat sophisticated, and incredibly heavy, net on him. Taipan had bypassed the vine as if by instinct and, of course, the monsters wouldn’t have attacked at all if someone hadn’t been incautious enough to trip over their trap trigger. Nevertheless, the trap was sprung and the instincts of the little beasts led them to assault en masse.
The resulting scrum had Taipan using a nifty trick in which she pulled her shadow into a set of small lances, impaling three of the creatures up to two meters away from her. However, the struggles of the monsters were sufficient to tear away the shadow stuff and they had to be finished with practiced jabs of her knife. Ulric fared less well under the net, it was weighted with heavy stones and thickly woven. Five of the creatures were jumping up and down on him, biting and scratching where they could. He tried to drag his sword free and couldn’t, between the monsters and the net. He started to go for his knife before he realized it would take far too long to cut free of the tangle.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Cursing, he pulled on his core and reverted its mana, his concentration challenged by the battering. As pawed feet stomped and jarred and it took him all of fifteen seconds to condense enough Caelum to fire off a rapid casting of twelve [Wind Blades] that tore through both the net and the monsters. In an interesting development, the traveling [Wind Blades] carried arcs of contaminating Ceraun through them, ineffectual in its randomness but it would set his mind to thinking later of the benefits of such a spell.
With their ambush repelled, their prey fighting back more than effectively, Taipan having started laying into them by arrows delivered with lethal precision, the remaining members of the monster troop fled back to the trees. Taipan scolded him the entire while she made him process each of the little monsters. He took it like a man, without bitching; this fuckup was all him. And it was the second time in as many days that something had come out from the trees to start fucking him up, he was going to have to fix that.
Damned [Ceraunoperception] was proving unwieldy, his useful range was a paltry five meters, the beasts had been fully forty up, well outside his detection range. It also hadn’t picked up the dead, dry, vine across the trail. He just didn’t have the perception to resolve low-conductivity materials like that yet. They were there, but buried in the noise of his spell’s input on his flesh. He’d have to suck it up and keep practicing, the spell hadn’t even matured outside of its first rank.
Taipan declared them well into Celestin territory when they rose that next morning, a mere half day's walk from the destination of Trachn'ir. They'd get a real rest then, and a chance to finally dump off all the cores and scraps they'd harvested along the way. The Twins rose beautifully that morning, reds and oranges slashing across the horizon, and the wind held a loosening of its chill, a hint of warmer weather coming.
Ulric pulled again on the straps of his pack, easing their press against his chest. He'd have to consider adding a little pad or something if he was going to end up humping so much weight that the thing dug into him. Their journey had been, so far, an odd combination of sedate and harrowing. If not for the swarm of mutant vampire creatures he'd have called it peaceful. That and the damned monkey things, little bastards.
He was about to comment on the oddly bimodal nature of their jaunt through Iriel when her raised hand brought him up short. Dick, he swore to himself as his body locked.
Taipan had the guise of a meerkat, extending herself to her maximum height, her senses concentrating to pick up whatever had triggered her instinct to halt them. She slowly undid her pack and Ulric did the same, lowering them to the snow carefully.
Several minutes of this went by. Taipan still wasn't moving, so Ulric kept his ass in place, she had drilled him over and over on this. If the scout goes still don't you fucking move until they say so. She'd said it more prettily but that was the spirit of the discussion. He wasn't about to ignore tactical command from a lady who had been doing commando Elf shit since before his grandparents were thinking about how nice each other's ankles looked, or whatever the fuck people from that generation were into those days.
The snow bank fifty meters away exploded violently, a plume of snow and ice blocking sight immediately. Ulric was readying his spells, a throwing knife pulled from the thigh sheath and Ceraun cycling through it as he prepared a [Lightning Javalin].
Taipan had her bow drawn, string to her lips, and envenomed arrowhead aimed.
The cloud of snow cleared in a wash of the loudest sound Ulric had ever heard, a roar whose sonic energy slammed the frozen cloud away before it hit them like a paddle across the ears.
The source of this roar was a massive, pony-sized wolverine. It had been chasing prey through a burrow and the prey had struck back, evidenced by the spray of blood and a torn muzzle, opening the side of its jaws to reveal the gums and wicked gnashing teeth within. The creature that had so wounded the monster was a black armadillo, if armadillos came in the weight class of German shepherds and sported obsidian knives on their carapace. Backed into a corner, the creature had lashed out desperately and was paying the price, snapped up as the predator's roar echoed, stunned, and was now held within the jaws of the wolverine beast.
With a sickening crunch, teeth drove through the armored hide and the armadillo came apart wetly, strings of meat and organs holding it together only briefly as the predator used its claws to hold it while it ripped with its serrated fangs. In a matter of seconds, the chunks of plate were stripped of their meatier bits and a hollowed-out shell of blood-soaked black blades glistened wetly.
Taipan had not moved and Ulric mirrored her. They were far enough away that they had not yet caught the beast's attenti-
Here it comes, fuck.
The beast swung its head towards the travelers and roared again, this time it became clear that the monster was using weaponized sound as Taipan's arrow, released as soon as it moved to become hostile, was blasted away, a ball of visible distortion in the air, like a heat mirage, that traveled with incredible speed. The speed of sound, actually.
It hit Taipan and knocked her flat. Ulric threw his knife and got a taste of that medicine, a ball of sound-compressed air socked him in the mouth, knocking the knife away easily, and disrupting his concentration on the spell even as he hit the snow, dazed.
His vision doubled briefly and his balance got scrambled momentarily, his inner ear shocked beyond its ability to orient. The effect cleared soon but already the monster was taking advantage of its prey's incognizance closing on them in lumbering hops that might have been cute in a creature weighing fewer tons and less obviously trying to eat them alive.
Taipan recovered and put an arrow into the air from her back before rolling to her feet and sending another into flight.
Her first arrow intercepted the beast's chest driving into furred shoulder and wou- fuck no it didn't. The arrow caught in the beast's fur and slowed substantially. It might have penetrated the skin. The second arrow did better, burying half way through the creature's cheek even as it dipped its head and pulled up, charge aborted.
Ulric's brain figured out where up went, and he clawed his way to his feet, pissed.
Adrenaline-soaked senses saw the beast's intake of air that preceded that sonic magic, a weaponized bullet of sound that stunned its prey, and Ulric saw his Shadow dive to the side, evading the attack sent her way to roll smoothly back to her feet to send another arrow in retort.
Never stopping, the Elf put on a display not unlike the one she'd given him on their meeting. She had managed to turn her dodge into an attack, two arrows launched almost simultaneously snapping into the beast's shoulder, energy mostly shed by the dense fur but still biting it, especially the follower. That was her skill then, [Archer's Cadence], granting her an enhanced follow-up shot that bored next to the first, disappearing into the fur, indicating a solid hit this time.
The beast yoweled, and its claws, hand-long things, ripped up chunks of ice as it pursued its Elven tormenter. Taipan didn't give it the chance, circling easily and putting another pair of arrows into its face, or at least, they would have gone into its face if not for another slap of sound that drove for her that deflected those bolts in its wake.
Ulric now had a broadside angle and wasn't going to waste it. He drew again on his core a second knife pulled free, and cycled Ceraun to charge the projectile. A second, then another, and as the beast attempted to close with his Shadow, Ulric sent the blade whirling end over end towards the monster.
As the knife hit, he loosed the spell, and lightning crackled to life, flashing into its haunches.
[Lightning Javalin]
The jagged lance tore into the massive thing and knocked it flat as the thunder rolled through the forest. This creature wasn't a man though, it was tougher, meaner, and a hell of a lot bigger, and Ulric hadn't had the time to overcharge the spell.
It lived. A large patch of fur burned free, and having absorbed a surprising amount of the bolt's energy damn it, but revealed a deep wound to its back leg.
A deep wound that did not stop the beast from scrabbling to its feet and charging him with scary speed, despite the ungainly gait. Shit.
Ulric drew the blade of Xef'tocht and readied another round of lightning. This time he didn't bother with the knife focus, he wasn't going to need it, the creature was coming right at him, an unguided bolt would be fine on a target this big.
Ulric's eyes took in the form of his Shadow, crouched and burning with concentration. Darkness flowed up from her body, her own mana-manipulated shadow enshrouded her arrowhead, coated its head in a sinister black tar, even as the rest of the arrow began to hum with a dense blue glow. Crying out as she released the empowered arrow. The bolt flashed rapidly, faster than the bow alone could launch it, tearing into the lightning-scorched wound with an arrow empowered with a combination of skills: [Infused Arrow] to amplify the penetration of the bolt and [Shadowburn Toxins] to turn that mana cloaked arrow into a destructive poison that corroded the mana of the monster even as the infused arrowhead shattered inside its body, contaminating it with toxic fragments.
The creature roared its pain, the staggering sound tearing through the combatants and freezing them lifting a cloud of snow from the area around the enraged beast.
Taipan's combination took a portion of strength, which was why she was caught flat-footed when the monster raised its stubby tail and hit her with a pulse from the glands by that tails base, a bolt of acidic musk that took her in the face even as she watched her arrow hit the beast to do devastating damage. The burning fluid attacked her eyes immediately and she fell to the ground writhing, pain tearing into her as she scraped snow to stuff it into her agonized eyes to dilute the effects as rapidly as she could.
The creature whirled again, this time committed to bearing down on its tormenter and tearing her apart.
It attempted another bolt of sonic fury and the condensed sound fizzled inside its mouth, its mana already too disturbed by Shadow toxin to utilize its weapon. It charged.
Ulric saw the beast's intent and his stricken partner and launched himself into motion legs pumping to catch up to the thing even while he took the shackles off his core and let Ceraun loose. He would be too late, he saw that. His lightning bolt wouldn't kill it, not instantly, nor would the poison inside it. [Stormfire] would kill it but it was a slow spell that took both time to create, and time to gain power and speed. He wasn't going to make it.
Roaring, Ulric took two hands and heaved Xef'tocht as hard as he could, desperate, sending its glittering blue blade flying. The blade bit at an awkward angle but that didn't matter as it continued to spin, ignoring for a moment the mass it cleaved, ripping deeply into the monster's back before stopping, hilt proudly standing up from above the buried length.
The monster sagged as its spine midway down its body was severed, losing its hind legs and releasing musk as the organ's control faltered. On it clawed though, nearly upon its target who it would devour before it succumbed. Ulric leaped through the corrosive, stinking cloud, the foul musk undirected without its guiding muscles, and landed on the creature's back crackling violet arc of [Voltaic Riot] tearing whatever it could reach.
Half blinded by the burning musk, he fell to the bucking monster's back and held on with one hand buried in its fur. Locked in, he guided the magic instinctively, turning streamers of Ceraun to the beast's skull and the dancing arc razored burning slashes through fur, meat, skull, and soon brain. Steaming, burning meat assailed his senses and the beast jerked savagely below him before rolling over with its crushing weight burying him even as its limbs flailed and jerked. An incredibly violent roll spiraled Ulric and he was disoriented by the sensation of weightless freedom for a moment. His battered senses realized he was airborne as the surface of the forest rushed towards him, torn fur still gripped in his hand, and he hit the snow shoulders first to bury up to his thighs, thrown some twenty meters by the dying monster.
Ulric came to his senses in an uncomfortable arch, most of his body beneath the snowpack and his legs above it. His body heat must have melted the snow slightly causing it to compress around him a bit because he felt claustrophobic. He briefly struggled before cursing and calming himself. A more focused bit of digging with his hands had him backing his way out of the short snow tunnel, and, once he’d righted himself, he saw the monster corpse and his Shadow, who had made a rapid blind sprint away from the beast when she'd heard its rush. She was still rubbing snow into her eyes and he heard her using language that would make a sailor blush so he knew she was alright. More or less.