Ice Tree [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczMFP9Cwtvj1Yiwl4RsqDqjulaaDnrp7YNxA1ywCGCdn7u_J7GlPdzwAAQ7XRcgbx3zixVHH9hvAUMEQntmuTtPhSnwyfYGUqhbdhEXJf6iKBDPQa9Dh_scKstnDMMfOoszduWRsI2z2t_sURtApf5x8=w661-h992-s-no-gm?authuser=0]
Phoenix hated waking up without remembering falling asleep, as it usually meant she had done something horribly wrong. She was confused as she brushed silvery white hair out of her face, and it took a second for her to realize that it was her hair that had been made pale from her armor granting her the [Brightest Day] boon. She rarely managed to activate that one on the tundra that tended to be overcast more often than not.
As she sat up and looked around to find herself on a snowy white beach with the bright sun shining across the sea and reflecting off everything, her memories returned in a flood. She buried her face in her hands. How many had she accidentally killed? How many drowned? How many got caught up and eaten by the Emerald Caste monster she had barely managed to scratch?
She didn’t have the answers, so her mind went to the worst possible outcomes. Her whole team might be dead, all of her friends gone, because she didn’t think things through again. Instead of just losing her life, she might have lost everyone else.
A sob escaped her lips as she began to mentally spiral. She attempted to use the mental chat, but there was no response, and she couldn’t feel the connection anymore. Either Dazien had gotten too far away or…
“Stop it, Phoenix,” Tala scolded, “I don’t want to hear you think that about the shiny one or any of the others.”
Tala was right. She needed to stop assuming everyone was dead, or she wouldn’t be able to function right now. Exposed on a beach, with no idea where she was, was not the time to spiral into despair.
New Quest: Getting Back Together
Your party has been scattered; reunite with them.
Objective: Reunite with your remaining companions in Serenydi.
Reward: Epic magic rings.
From: Lover
The appearance of the quest was slightly reassuring. Even more so was that it actually appeared as though the deity had signed their name like it was a letter rather than an anonymous quest. Perhaps that was the entire goal of confirming her suspicion; now, she wouldn’t be suspicious about who was behind it.
The best news from it was that her party members were still alive… at least, some were. The bad news was that it didn’t confirm all of them had lived or would make it to Serenydi on their own… What if Uriel drowned? He was still only Crystal Caste and required breathing. The thought made her heart feel like it dropped into her gut, and she had to shake herself from the morbid thoughts again as Tala almost yelled at her, “Don’t ever think about the warm one dying again! That is a new rule now! I don’t like that feeling you get from it!”
“It’s not like I can help every thought I have,” she retorted, trying her best to keep away those intrusive thoughts.
She carefully stood, taking stock of herself. It was another surprise that she hadn’t died in the sea and somehow ended up washed up on a shore. Phoenix had no memory of her time in the water after that inky blackness within the water delivered its nasty Banes that eventually rendered her unconscious. She had tried her best to swim before that, but she thought it would have been more likely for her to awaken at the bottom of the ocean than on a beach.
Looking up and down the deserted shore didn’t help her get her bearings, and the sun shining brightly as it barely peeked over the ocean’s horizon directly opposite where she stood didn’t help either. The only thing she was fairly sure of with the ocean between her and the sun was that she wasn’t on the mainland since the sun was usually slightly south as it crossed the sky. On the mainland, the ocean was only to the north, so she was most likely on one of the arctic islands that she had recently learned littered the sea they were traveling through.
Then she remembered that she was a properly prepared Caster who knew things like magic rituals and pulled out her Wand of the Snow Queen, which she had gotten what felt like ages ago, to cast the simple cantrip to make the wand spin to point north like a compass. She hadn’t gotten lost so badly to need that spell in quite a while.
The cantrip confirmed her suspicions, and she began moving east—the direction their group had been heading before to get to their destination. Her book also tried to be helpful by displaying a map of the region she had traveled through while apparently drifting across the ocean. She was far off course. She was so far off that she wondered if she had been unconscious for days to have landed where she was.
Hopefully, her party hadn’t gotten so derailed and would have continued to their destination. She wasn’t sure how likely that was since they had only been about a quarter through their journey. Would they think going back to Tulimeir was the better choice? Maybe the Lover had some way of giving them all a similar quest, too?
While she walked along the blindingly white beach with the pale blue ocean on her right and a dense forest of glassy trees carved from crystalline ice on her left, she was reminded of her first days in this strange world. She had been alone with no idea where she was and no real plan except to move eastward. Her book —and apparently the gods— guided her then, too, leading her toward Paul, her first real ally in this new and terrifying world.
She wished he was here to guide her now. To scold her for getting into this situation in the first place. To prompt her to think of a solution… But she was alone.
“Rude,” Tala retorted to the unspoken thought.
She winced and said, “We can be alone together. You can’t honestly tell me you don’t wish at least one of the others was here with us, can you?”
Phoenix felt an odd sense of awkward embarrassment well up from within her as Tala quietly admitted, “You might be right, but I remember what the shiny one always tells us. We’re never alone.”
She understood what her Familiar was trying to say, but as she looked around the deserted beach it was hard not to feel small and very much on their own.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Can you portal back? I know the quest said to go to Serenydi, but maybe we can get the flying fox to help find the others?”
Phoenix tried opening a portal back to Tulimeir but could sense it was too far as the abilities failed to trigger. She didn’t know any place nearby that she could portal to that wasn’t just ocean. Ships were unviable portaling targets because they moved, and the aural imprint wouldn’t last long enough to matter because the environment around it drastically changed as it moved… Which her ship definitely had now that it was likely reduced to driftwood.
“I’m too far from any of my imprints now,” she responded, even though she knew Tala heard all of her surface thoughts. If she didn’t want to feel utterly isolated, speaking to Tala might help her avoid that.
“Perhaps there’s some random village here on the island? Someone with a boat?”
She expanded her aura all around her to see if she could pick up anything and immediately registered two Sapphire Caste auras. One seemed small and fairly close and her eyes snapped to the tree line where a small green-feathered bird currently sat watching her.
Her confusion only lasted a moment, however, as the sensation of her aura senses expanding alerted the farther away Sapphire, and she felt it begin to move quickly in her direction. She couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but she did know it was some kind of monster.
With a repetitive burst of mana with each step she took, Phoenix launched herself down the beach, trying to put distance between her and the threat. When it finally broke the tree line behind her, she spared a glance backward to assess the new enemy.
It looked like a fluffy spider the size of Po’s carriage with fur that was almost as white as the snow around them, but she couldn’t tell if it had a front or back. Instead of four legs on each side of its body, this creature had twelve legs equidistant around its spherical center mass with a forest of tentacle eyes like a crab’s sprouting from the top of it and searching for its prey in all directions at once.
Phoenix couldn’t see a mouth, but she heard the unnatural squeal come from it as it caught sight of her and continued pursuing. It vaguely reminded her of the very first Crystal Caste monster she had fought in this world, in the sandy dunes of the Reality Rift she had followed Paul into, and she wondered if it had the same vulnerable underbelly. To test her theory, she’d need to figure out a way to get under it through the mess of legs that basically acted as a moving shield.
She summoned her [Night Armament] in one hand and Sanctified Hope in the other as both seamlessly shifted into matching swords. She began running back towards it, both of them having a clear path to each other, and they were almost matched for their base speed.
Before the monster got close enough to spring, she enacted the only plan she could come up with in the limited time. She used the Sapphire part of her [Ruler of Relativity] to conjure a blackhole in the air above them to start pulling the monster toward it.
It was enough to lift the monster as it lunged toward her, and as she turned to attack its underside, she discovered where its mouth was. Instead of a soft belly, she was met with multiple rings of prickly teeth like a lamprey.
With a loud mental, “NOPE!” she used her gravity ability once more to send her conjured blade towards the shrieking maw and then pushed against the monster itself to try and get more distance between her and the hungry beast.
She sensed the triple instances of [Mana Siphon] take effect from her two weapons and the pseudo blackhole while her swords both added [Life Siphon] stacks as well. The creature squealed in anger as its legs thrashed towards her.
It was when it managed to scratch her and she didn’t feel like it was stronger than her that it finally clicked in her mind that this wasn’t actually like her first days here in this alternate universe.
She wasn’t powerless and inexperienced. She wasn’t weak and in need of someone else to save her. Just because her party wasn’t beside her didn’t mean she was useless.
Phoenix knew that she would destroy anything that came between her and her new quest, including some horrifying fuzzy-vampire-spider-crab-chimera-thing.
She transformed her weapons into a pair of spears and reversed the gravitational pull of her ability to drag the creature down toward her instead, plunging the sharp Radiant tips deep into the monster. Feeling the new boon take effect on her, she grinned.
Status Effect: Divine Dragoon
Type: Boon (divine, radiant)
Effects:
* Strength is increased.
* Attacks made against Corrupted or Blood-Attuned targets have increased effect.
* Elemental abilities inflict increased damage.
Phoenix felt the points at the end of the monster’s legs stab into her, but she ignored the pain as she pushed herself away once more with a burst of mana. She landed back on the snowy beach below them for only a heartbeat before reversing direction one more time.
Pouring her mana into enhancing her next jump and pushing away from the ground as her blackhole held the monster in the air for her, she led with the spears to send them and herself straight through the trapped beast.
As she fell back to the ground in a rather acrobatic flip, she saw the monster go limp for a moment, then begin dissolving into blue ash as her aura looted it.
Feeling victorious despite the fact that she was drenched in gore and ichor, it was only another moment before it, too, began to dissolve, leaving only her own blood and the sand staining the currently white armor. Phoenix smiled at her success before frowning when she realized that Saiya was no longer there to use her [Cleansing Stream] spell to wash her down. Due to having the much cheaper alternative of her friend’s ability, she didn’t own any of those gross Golden Shower potions but finally debated about always carrying some as backup from then on.
Taking a quick and freezing dip in the ocean to get most of the sticky blood and invasive sand off of her, she used her brush to try and tame her silvery blonde hair back into a braid and continued her trek across the beach once more.
She decided to keep her aura expanded while she traveled and couldn’t sense anything nearby anymore. The main reason for this was in the hopes of finding a person or town that might not have been right on the shore. A long shot, she knew, but potentially worth it. The second reason was to train. If she could find more Sapphire Caste monsters to push herself against, she could work more towards hitting Emerald and get closer to waking Paul back up.
Her strategy seemed to work as she ran into a couple of monsters that had been left relatively alone on what appeared to be a deserted island so far. It seemed like it hadn’t been cleared out since the blood moon had ended, so their numbers had built up a bit.
It was a good experience for Phoenix as it forced her to push her abilities in new ways without her party to fall back on. She was also able to get more comfortable with her newest weapon, shifting its type frequently to practice the different forms of her martial style that she had been neglecting outside of the training arena.
As she found herself facing different types of monsters, she learned to truly appreciate the versatility of the weapon, her martial techniques, and even her powerset, allowing her to maneuver, burst, or slow burn an enemy down, adapting to whatever situation she found herself dropped into.
She never thought her powers had a very unified theme, nor had phases that told a story over the course of the battle, nor intrinsic synergy in the way many other Casters did, but they helped her survive, giving her solutions to whatever she encountered. If she didn’t have a solution to beat them with destructive power, then she had the tools to flee or hide. Her illusions and Familiar could act as decoys aside from the extra damage they provided. She had ways to boost her regeneration along with a shield and heal to help her last longer, and if all that failed… well, she’d still survive.