Rather than just grind wishes and relax, the next day I decided to check in with the others (though I did store my eight scrolls in the ring before I left) . Vesper, Ray, Desria, and all my friends from the first round had been busy with their own trials, some of which had started while I was doing my thing. I found them all the next morning, eating breakfast together, and when I approached everyone seemed pleased to see me.
“Fist!” chirped Ray happily. “Well, look what the bird dragged in. Speaking of which is that bird on fire? Because I feel like that’s weird. I know we’re Ascendants so weird is relative, but flaming bird seems like an oddity. I might just be drunk.”
Desria rolled her eyes at him. “You haven’t been drinking. How would you be drunk?”
“Maybe I drank so much I forgot I started drinking,” he said triumphantly. “What do you think about that?”
Vesper sighed. “Please don’t answer that Desi. I can already tell it’s going to be unnecessarily harsh. Honestly you should take a day off. Go to a spa or something. If you spend another consecutive day watching him you’re going to stab someone. Where is your brother, anyway?”
“Cavallo is on a frog watching expedition,” she said with a shrug. “I told him I’d cover. Luckily our trial hasn’t started yet, and the mystery trials seem to be too tough for Rayden to manage.”
“So you started your trial?” I asked Vesper without paying attention to Desria’s sniping. Her friends weren’t around, so I figured they might be doing the trials separately. I was kind of curious exactly what theirs entailed.
She brightened. “Yeah! It’s actually been really fun. I was expecting some survivalist nonsense, but it turns out that Verdyn tries to softball the early trials. We’ve been wiping out invasive species. Our next one is this weird type of wasp larva that burrows into the brains of creatures and hijacks their bodies.”
“That’s…horrifying,” I said in an appalled voice. “How are you supposed to deal with that? Kill the hosts? Or is there some kind of nest or hive you can destroy?”
She grimaced. “Both. The larvae are psychically connected to the queen. We have to eliminate all of them before destroying the hive, otherwise one of them will mutate and spawn a new one. What’s worse is once they hatch from their host, they take on characteristics of the animal they nested in. Some of them are the size of bears and armed with natural weapons that make normal wasps look like fuzzy puppies.”
I glanced at Archie, who was looking surprisingly offended. I could feel his disdain for parasites like this, and his desire to purify them. I could feel that he had the power to wipe out the larvae with his purification flames.
Chuckling at the strong arrogance I was picking up from my phoenix companion, I turned to Vesper with a grin, “Apparently we’re interested in helping out. I have some time to kill, if you’re down for some help.” While the trials were my main interest here, and training Bella was taking up plenty of time, but honestly, having nothing of consequence to do except essentially relax between torture sessions was kind of getting to me.
It had been nice at first, but at this point I was itching for something productive to do, and I was planning to make some offers to my new friends before leaving, hopefully recruiting some of the ones who didn’t make it for my faction.
The ones who did…well, that might be trickier, I could only hope the other trials were as absurd as mine.
Vesper, for her part, seemed enthused at the offer of help. “Hey, I’ll take any help I can get. Will it just be you?”
“My apprentice is around somewhere,” I shrugged. “You guys met Bella. I’ve had her training pretty hard, and she could use some field work. These open freeform trials are fine to get help with right? My trial for Delthrys they allowed us to bring along helpers.”
“As far as I know,” she said with a smile. “I can’t tell you what a relief that is. I was dreading doing this one on my own.”
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Archie trilled and I rolled my eyes, jerking my chin at the bird, “He says we should get going and stop talking about it.” Vesper laughed, agreeing to get ready to go, and I went to go find my disciple, who was around the inn somewhere, to let her know we’d be doing practical field exercises.
While she was coming along well, I was going to send my phoenix with her just in case. Her Goetia Staff Art was still coming along, and it was kind of unreliable. She had enough techniques to get out of trouble, and her Escape Path made her unlikely to be pinned down, but having a healer slash bug purifier on hand would make me feel better about tossing her in the deep end so early.
To my complete lack of surprise, I found her out front, going through her stances. Slow and steady, she moved from one combat style to the next, and if I looked close I could see brief flares of power from the different forms.
Currently, she was working on suppressing those flares. While that might seen counterintuitive, if she could control the expression of the form’s energy, she should be able to increase it as well as throttle it back, which seemed like a good next step. Control was never something you could have too much of.
That exercise had been one I’d been fairly smug about formulating, and I felt it made me sound like a real teacher, instead of an under qualified thug trying to show my apprentice how to beat people with a stick in a more complicated manner than usual.
When she saw me approaching, she didn’t react right away, finished the rest of her rendition of her current stand before she snapped out of her concentration and turned to grin at me. “Breakfast over already? I expected you to be eating for the next hour or two. Also to possibly bring something for your favorite apprentice?”
“I only have one apprentice,” I pointed out. “Which by definition also makes you my least favorite. Sadly for you that precludes breakfast.” She slumped, looking sulky, but I just laughed and waved her to relax. “I actually cut things off. Vesper needs some help with her next trial, and I thought we could do some practical applications for your training.”
The way her face lit up you’d think I told her I was buying her a small planet. “Wait, really? You’re taking me with you out into the field? What are we doing? Fighting pirates? Another mystery? SKIING?”
“No, no, and why would you possibly ask that?” I said in exasperation. “How is that a practical application of anything?”
She pouted. “I could use the staff like one of those skiing guide poles.”
Snorting, I filled her in on the trial. I expected her to be underwhelmed, but she actually seemed kind of pumped. “How big are the hosts? You mentioned bears? I want to fight a bear!”
“You really don’t,” I said firmly, thinking of Randall. “But you might have to. I don’t know the specifics, I assume Vesper has some way of tracking them, otherwise we’d be screwed. Finding a bunch of larvae in the brains of any of the undoubtedly massive number of creatures on this planet would be pretty much impossible in a short amount of time. Speaking of, here she comes, so we can ask her.”
Vesper, it seemed, had gotten ready fast, and was coming out of the inn carrying a large pack she hadn’t been wearing earlier. “Alright, I’m ready to go!”
“You sure?” I said wryly. “ You might not have packed everything. Did you manage to stick a bed in there? Don’t you have a spatial ring? Why do you need to carry that much on your back?”
She grimaced. “Once we wipe out the stragglers, we’ll need to blow the nest. The explosives they gave us are spatially reactive, because much like pretty much everything Ascendants make, it’s bigger on the inside. Unfortunately, that means they can’t go in a spatial ring or it might set them off.”
“Huh,” I said with interest. “That’s actually pretty cool. I’ve never heard of spatial explosives.” I made a note to pick some up for Abel. My mentor might get a kick out of studying something like that.
“Anyway, I heard what you were saying earlier,” she continued. “And yes, I do have a way to track them. Here, come see.” Walking over to a nearby tree, she unrolled a map, pinning it to the bark with a pair of knives. She then reached into her pouch and pulled out a long, silver chain with an amber stone on the end.
Taking out a match, she lit it, holding it up under the stone. Light sparked inside, revealing a small insectoid lump in the center, and then a series of small beams shot out, burning a few dark spots onto the map’s surface.
“Is that witchcraft?” I asked with interest. I’d seen my mom fight someone who used witchcraft before, it tended to focus on sympathetic links. That was obviously one of the larva, though how she’d gotten one frozen in amber I had no clue.
She shrugged. “Maybe, they gave it to me for the task. My first trial was finding one of these things and retrieving it intact, then they made me this thing to track the rest. We’ll probably have to use it again a few times, I have other maps. In any case, looks like we have one pretty close by we can check out, do you want to go together or split up to start.”
As much as I trusted Archie and believed in Bella’s ability to escape if needed, I decided some supervision wouldn’t hurt to start. “Why don’t we do the first one as a team so we know what to expect. Have you killed any yet?”
“One or two,” she said with a grimace. “Looks like we have about ten more. Probably lucky it's only that.”
And so we set off, following the map. When she said the larva was ‘close’, she’d been speaking relative to our travel speed. It was more like twenty miles out of town. Luckily even at a brisk walk that was nothing to an Ascendant. We took our time and still made it in about ten minutes.
As we approached, we slowed down to scope out the situation, and I triggered Eye of Revelation to scope things out.
I didn’t see a larva, but I did see what was probably the host. A large shaggy bear with deer antlers and the face of an ant, which was objectively pretty unsettling. Pointing it out, I saw Vesper grimace. “It’s a Shaunus. They’ve got tons of Might, that’s not ideal. It’s going to be much more physically powerful than almost anything else we could’ve run into.”
Cracking my neck, I grinned. “Well, then I’ll handle this one. If you don’t mind.” She nodded and I grinned, triggering Limbo.
I only had five minutes of my domain, but I was confident that would be enough. Rushing forward into the rapidly expanding mist, I lashed out with my staff, an explosion of black flame coming forth to destroy a potential timeline.
Because of its stupidity, straightforward nature, or possibly because of the larva, this particular enemy had a much more limited pool of potential options for combat, which meant this fight would be easier than expected. With Limbo active, I had access to both Belial and Mephistopheles, so I started my work, whittling away at its potential fates to entrap it into the corrosive destruction attacks as I dismantled the monster. It was nice to fight something I had a hefty advantage over again. In the end it didn’t even take me five minutes. I got it done in three.