Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 9-14 (Patreon)

Chapter 9

Velik didn’t know the man’s name, but that wasn’t unusual. He looked vaguely familiar – tall, lean, and muscled, with dusty tan skin and thick black hair. He stank of horses and beer, which meant he was probably part of the group standing near a produce cart with a ragged old mare hooked up to it. That was the only horse on the street aside from the wagon parked right in front of the general store, and that horse smelled better than this man.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve showing your face here,” the man snarled as he stomped down the street. “This town’s full of good, honest people, just trying to survive. They don’t need your trouble coming down on their heads.”

“I was just leaving,” Velik said woodenly. And this is exactly why I don’t like coming to the towns on the north end.

“You do that, but drop the bag. I don’t know what you stole from poor Fergus, but you’re not walking off with it.”

“I paid for this.”

The man snorted. “Not enough, considering what you owe all of us for what you did. Drop the bag and get out of here before I make you.”

[Predator’s Visage] worked on intuition more than raw numbers, so Velik didn’t know exactly what level or class this guy was, but he knew he was in no danger. The guy was strong for a local farmer, but combat classes had a different feel to them, and he didn’t have one. Velik wasn’t in any sort of danger, and there was nothing stopping him from walking away.

I don’t have the time or the patience for this.

The people who hated him wouldn’t change their minds no matter what he did, so the only real risk was alienating the people who didn’t think he was an evil monster-summoning scourge. He doubted any of them would blame him for not sticking around. So, Velik did the only sensible thing he could.

He turned around and walked away.

Either the man would sputter and bluster, or he’d try to do something. As long as he kept his hands to himself, Velik would be happy to leave him be. He’d long since learned to ignore the insults, and that beating on some random local accomplished nothing and caused more problems later. His reputation in Deshir was all the proof that he needed.

“Hey! I told you to leave the bag.”

Velik ignored the man and kept walking, but he wasn’t surprised to hear feet pounding against the ground behind him. A hand reached out to grab his shoulder, but the man’s physical was either pathetically low or it all went toward increasing brute strength, because it was trivially easy to dodge his grab. Velik slipped to the side and angled his trailing foot to catch on his attacker’s ankle, causing the man to cry out in surprise and a little pain as he went sprawling across the street.

Velik didn’t stop to check on him or see what he’d do next. He just adjusted the sack of food over his shoulder and kept walking. His attacker scrambled to his feet, but before he could lunge at Velik again, Fender interfered. The wagoner caught his arm and said, “What is wrong with you? You can’t just attack someone in the streets just because you don’t like them.”

“That’s not some random person!” the man hissed back. “That’s that Darshu damned monster magnet. We’re never going to have a night’s peace as long as he’s lurking around here.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t beat you to within an inch of your life,” Fender told him. He stopped and sniffed. “Are… Are you drunk?”

“I’m not drunk! I had a drink.”

Velik ignored the two of them and left town. [Predator’s Visage] included his old [Sharp Hearing] skill, which wasn’t something he could turn off, so he was forced to listen to the conversation, but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard many times before. They don’t matter. All that matters is finding the source and fixing it. This time will be different. It has to be.

He didn’t know how many more times he could keep trying before he gave up completely.

  *

Torwin wasn’t sure what annoyed him more, the fact that he’d slept until damn near noon, or that he’d still beaten Jensen out of bed. He’d pushed himself harder last night than any time he could remember in the last decade, which only made it all the more galling that he’d failed to catch up to that strange hunter. He hadn’t been able to get an [Identify] off, but he knew the boy couldn’t be anywhere near his own level.

He'd snoozed through breakfast, but Induar was a saint disguised as an innkeeper. He’d somehow predicted how things would play out when the old [Hunter] had walked in just before dawn and had a meal hot and waiting for him when he’d shuffled down the stairs five hours later.

“Rough night, huh?” Induar asked, sliding a plate of the usual across the bar.

“Praise Morgus,” Torwin replied as he licked his lips. “You are a miracle worker. And yeah, spent all night chasing after some teenager out in the woods. Somehow the little devil gave me the slip.”

“You must have had a chance encounter with the Black Fang.”

“I just said he was a teenager,” Torwin told him. He snatched up his fork and knife and eagerly started cutting into the slab of ham.

“Yep, that’s the Black Fang.”

How the ever-loving fuck does that work? I thought the guy had been active for years and years, Torwin thought to himself while he chewed. Can’t these people even get their stories about their local heroes straight with each other?

“He can’t be the Black Fang,” he said. “The Black Fang has been active for years. That kid can’t have gone through maturation and unlocked his class more than a year or two ago.”

Induar nodded along. “True, if he’d gone through maturation.”

Torwin’s fork froze half way to his mouth. “No. A class orb? Seriously? How old was he?”

“I couldn’t rightfully tell you. It happened up near Deshir. I guess he got it from some old dungeon ruins when he was a kid. The monsters started showing up in force the next day.”

“You’re telling me this guy’s been running around since he was, what… eight years old? Ten, maybe? Just killing monsters out in the woods. I don’t believe it.”

The innkeeper shrugged. “I wasn’t there. When I moved to Celarut back in ’77, there were already stories about him. He’s been active at least for the last six years.”

“Huh.” Torwin went quiet as he shoveled in his meal and washed it down with a mug of beer. The odds of a little kid surviving a class orb are low enough already, but for him to then go off into the woods to live by himself and kill monsters on a daily basis… Must have gotten one hell of a class.

“Why is he living out in the woods though?” Torwin asked. He knew that the Black Fang got a mixed reception wherever he went, but the kid was keeping the frontier towns safe, or safer, at least. Usually townsfolk appreciated someone killing off monsters.

“It’s never been quite clear to me what actually caused all the monsters to start showing up, you know? But those folks up in Deshir have their mind made up. Far as they’re concerned, the Black Fang is just trying, and failing, to clean up his own mess.”

“That’s ridiculous. A class orb has nothing to do with monsters. But then again… if he really did get it in an old dungeon…”

“Then he might have woken something else up when he was there,” Induar finished for him. “Right, that’s the thinking.”

“Seems easy enough to check. Just go to the dungeon and see.”

“And a bunch of folks did, or so I heard. They didn’t find anything, but that didn’t make the monsters disappear. I heard the Black Fang himself confirmed there was something else in there when he was just a boy, but I couldn’t tell you what.”

“No one knows?” Torwin asked.

The innkeeper shook his head. “Nah. Too many people thinking they know is the problem. Seems like every time I hear this story, it’s something new. I expect he probably did see something when he was a boy, and that got the rumors started. But then people started dying, and anyone who knew the truth back then isn’t around now.”

“Maybe I should go take a look at this old dungeon myself,” Torwin said. “If it is active again, that’d certainly explain the monsters. The job said they just started showing up in numbers about two months ago, so maybe something changed.”

“I heard a group went there to check a week before they decided to post the job, and that they didn’t find a thing,” Induar told him. “But then, they’re not gold-ranked monster hunters, so might be you could find a few clues they missed.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a voice from the back room. “Hey boss, I got the kegs from Fergus. You want me to leave any up here or put them all down in the cellar?”

“Excuse me,” Induar said. “I’ve got to go supervise this or it’ll be a giant mess to work around.”

The innkeeper disappeared into the back room, leaving Torwin to eat the rest of his meal. Definitely going to have to investigate this dungeon. There might not be anything there, and a trail that’s been cold for years won’t be easy to follow, but it’s a possible lead. I’ll need to get some supplies together, enough for two people for a week, at least. A map wouldn’t hurt, if I can find one around—

“You’ll never guess who I saw at Fergus’s place,” Fender said. “Dang old Black Fang himself. Some drunk was trying to hassle him, but I stepped in there. Probably saved the idiot’s life, attacking Black Fang like that.”

Torwin practically shot out of his chair. Wait, what? Where was this at?

Chapter 10

It took an hour or so to get used to having loose coins in his pocket, but it was easy enough to alter his gait to keep them from rattling against each other with every step. That did cause a few other problems with how he distributes his weight on the ground that Velik had to correct, but he was confident in his ability to get it all worked out, at least while he was walking around. Maintaining any sort of [Stealth] in a fight was going to be a different matter, and that was a problem.

While it was impossible for him to disappear completely against something that was actively trying to murder him, [Stealth] helped Velik keep monsters off-balance and vulnerable simply by making it more difficult for them to keep track of where he was. Most monsters he stalked and ambushed died in a single thrust, even the weaker elites, but against a pack or something that was legitimately strong like that massive flying squirrel, the coins were a liability.

Admittedly, they wouldn’t have made a difference in that particular fight. It was hard to avoid the notice of a creature that could feel everything around it through the very air it controlled. It hadn’t used anything so mundane as its eyes or ears to keep track of Velik’s position, but that didn’t mean the next elite would have the same abilities.

The fact that he’d encountered two elites in the span of two days was worrying. That had never happened before. It used to be months between sightings, and even with the way things had gone crazy over the last half a year, it still took a few weeks for another elite to appear. Something had obviously changed, but Velik had no idea what.

His original plan, to reach level 30 and unlock a new skill slot, wasn’t going to work. The way things were going, he didn’t have a month or more. By the time he was ready, there’d be two or even three times as many monsters in the forest, enough that they’d form a horde and start attacking the towns again. The simple truth of the matter was that he wasn’t killing them faster than they appeared anymore.

A new skill isn’t that important. I’ll make do.

With his decision made, Velik gathered his supplies, including the annoying pocket full of loose vitrunes, and started making his way north into the true wild lands. The lumberjacks and farmers thought they were at the edge of the civilized world, that they sweated and worked to push that edge just a little bit farther with every tree they cut down and every row they added to their fields. They thought they fended off the monsters that lurked out beyond the light of their lanterns and their torches.

They didn’t know what they were talking about. The forests around towns like Deshir and Celarut were tame, practically idyllic. The monsters were weak, barely even above level 10 on a bad day, and Velik could travel for miles between encounters. Even now, as bad as things had gotten in the last few months, it was nothing compared to the deep wood.

Nobody was out there, keeping the population down, pushing the monsters back. That was where they lived, where they fought and bled and killed – where they gained levels and power. There was a reason Velik had been planning to reach the next plateau before he risked another expedition.

The back-to-back elites were too much to ignore. He had to do something now before this whole situation got completely out of hand. The problem was that he wasn’t sure he was strong enough. I’ll just have to gain more levels on the way.

He shouldered his backpack, sealed off his tiny underground home, and started walking.

  *

A status window didn’t display how close a person was to leveling up again, but everyone could feel it. Velik was close, closer than he’d expected to be, anyway. Killing two elites had really pushed him closer to his goal, the second one more than the first. Most enemies didn’t feel like they did much of anything, probably because they were so weak, but that titanic squirrel had been a different story. Three or four more elites like that would be enough, but hopefully, they’d be easier to fight.

With his remaining daylight hours, he charted a course straight north. He was still inside his normal patrol routes, where the enemies were weak and predictable, but the farther out he went, the less that was true. After killing a trio of level 17 mist toads, both of which were so overgrown and bloated that they could stare him in the eye, he decided to take it easy until it got dark enough for [Duskbound] to trigger.

As soon as it was night, he was off again, this time easily slaughtering anything and everything he came across. Velik didn’t let himself get distracted, though; he had a long way to go and he needed to find a place to hole up during the daylight hours. The monsters were already up into the high teens and low twenties for levels, but he didn’t encounter any elites. As long as they didn’t come at him in packs, he was fine.

If only it could be that easy, he thought to himself as he crouched on a tree branch thirty feet off the ground. Ten worgs, all of them over level 20, prowled through the brush, their noses to the ground as they hunted for his unfamiliar scent.

One of them crossed directly under where he was crouched, and Velik saw an opportunity. With no other monsters within fifteen feet, he let himself fall, spear leading. The worg died in a single strike, prompting a system notification to confirm the kill.

The remaining nine worgs noticed immediately, of course, and the closest two were already on their way in before Velik even ripped the spear free. He darted to one side, just in time to avoid snapping jaws coming at him with unnatural speed. This one’s got some sort of movement skill.

Mentally marking it to be wary of its next attack, Velik pivoted in place and dragged his spear across the next worg’s flank. The shaft of the weapon shortened and the tip curved to give it more of a slicing edge, allowing Velik to easily cut deep enough that the worg’s back leg practically fell off at the joint.

Then the rest of them joined in, and Velik proved why it had been a wise decision to wait for nightfall. Everything was chaos for the next three minutes, with snapping teeth and scrabbling claws coming at him from every direction while he put every single point of his physical and mental stats to work keeping ahead of the worgs. Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed as he whittled their numbers down, Velik started landing hits.

By the time the fourth worg was laying on the ground, its chest rapidly rising and falling as it wheezed out its last breaths, he was firmly in control of the fight. Soon after, the first of the worgs tried to slink off into the shadows, only to be pinned to a tree as Velik danced past two other monsters to run it through. No one gets away, he thought grimly.

The remnants of the pack broke when he brought their numbers down to just three. Things got trickier then. Only the closest worg failed to break away, having instead received a spear blade across the throat for its efforts. The last two went in opposite directions, and they were fast. Velik chased after the one without the injuries if for no other reason than the other one was going to leave a blood trail for him to follow later.

It barely took two minutes to run it down and behead the monster when it broke through the brush onto an open trail. He’d beaten it there by about ten seconds and perfectly predicted where it would force its way through.

[You have slain black hallowed worg (level 23).]

One more. Now where are you?

He wasn’t worried. It wouldn’t get far before he caught up with it. Unfortunately, the first worg’s frantic flight had drawn some unwanted attention. Four different monsters were closing in on Velik’s position, two from the south, one just a hundred feet away from the east that would get there first, and, unless he greatly missed his guess, some type of elite that had picked up the trail when he was still chasing the worg. It wasn’t fast, but it was coming straight for them.

The closest one burst out of the trees at a height of about nine feet. Velik had just enough time to pin it as some sort of rabbit, only fifty times bigger than normal, with jagged bone spikes poking out of its fur and eyes like two puddles of blood. Then all he saw was a mouth full of needle-like teeth coming directly at his face right up until he put his spear into it and slung the monster sideways. It slid off the blade and crashed into a tree before falling limply to the ground.

[You have slain flash maw hare (level 19).]

The two paired monsters appeared seconds later, a set of identical black bears, each about four feet tall at the shoulder and covered in armored plates instead of fur. One of them charged in, all aggression and flashing claws, while the other circled through the brush to come at Velik from behind. His spear skipped off the bear’s plating, barely drawing a scratch across its surface, but he wasn’t worried.

There were plenty of gaps to exploit, and a series of quick stabs proved that he could still draw blood from them. The problem was that these particular monsters were going to take too long to kill, and the elite he could feel approaching was almost on them.

The cracking of trees as they gave way filled the air. One right next to the trail splintered, then pitched over to crash against its neighbor, revealing something that slunk in, close to the ground on four legs and covered in shaggy brown and black fur. It had intelligent eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth that it bared at all three of them. Is that a monster version of a wolverine?!

[Predator’s Visage] was screaming at him to be careful, that this monster was stronger than it looked, and the sudden fear in the two armored bear’s behavior confirmed that belief. It studied all three of them for just a moment, then leaped at the closer of the two bears. Rising up on its back legs, it lashed out with both claws, easily tearing through metal and ripping the monster’s face off.

[You have helped slay a steel pelt bear (level 22).]

Oh… Shit. It did that quick.

The monster turned to face Velik.

Chapter 11

Monsters killed each other all the time. They had to in order to level up, just like people. As far as Velik was aware, they didn’t have classes, so they couldn’t earn levels from doing other things like cooking or carpentry like those who possessed a crafting class could. One monster attacking another wasn’t much of a surprise, especially when they were two completely different types.

That meant that the only thing Velik really needed to do in order to bring this fight down to a one-on-one was to get out of the new monster’s way and let it go through the bear all on its own. That, he could do. It was a simple matter to leap straight up into the trees and let the two monsters fight. He’d take on the winner, not that he had any doubt which one that would be.

At least, that was the plan. What actually ended up happening was that the moment his feet left the ground, the wolverine jumped on him. Velik got his spear up between them, but the spear failed to pierce the monster’s fur. The only reason it didn’t snap was its [Shape Shifting] enchantment, which allowed for enough give that it bent instead.

Velik was thrown backwards from the force of the impact, while the wolverine went slightly to the side. They landed at almost the exact same moment, mere inches apart. Snarling, it scrambled to its feet and raked its claws across Velik’s leg. He flinched away and flung himself off the ground with one arm, but he wasn’t fast enough to fully avoid being hit. His pants tore and blood splattered into the dirt, but the hooked claws failed to drag him in.

He flipped back up to his feet, wincing as pain shot up his leg, but confident he could still fight. Fully focused on the wolverine, he didn’t realize that the armored bear monster was right behind him now. It had charged forward in the last second, and Velik honestly wasn’t sure if it was targeting him in particular or if he just had the bad luck to be closer. Either way, its jaw closed around his forearm and tried to drag him back to the ground.

Velik didn’t have 97 physical for nothing, though. The bear was strong, especially considering its size, but when he flexed his leg muscle, its teeth couldn’t penetrate like the wolverine’s claws had. A quick chop of his shortened spear on the bear’s face was all it took to get it to release him, and just in time, too.

Wolverines weren’t noted for their calm, docile behavior, so it wasn’t very surprising when it didn’t stand still and wait. By the time Velik was free, it was already wading in to rip everything it could reach to shreds. Fortunately, this time it overcommitted to the attack and he was able to get out from between the two monsters.

Another notification flashed across his vision, crediting him with an assist on the second steel pelt bear, not that he felt he’d done much. If anything, the bear was helping him. He circled behind the wolverine while it savaged the bear’s corpse, reshaped his spear’s tip into what was basically a needle, then slammed it in with all the [Duskbound] strength he could muster.

The good news was that it slipped through the wolverine’s fear and sunk into its muscled back. The bad news was that, if anything, it grew even more frenzied. Armored flesh flew in every direction as it tore the bear apart, perhaps mistakenly believing the other monster was the cause of its pain. Does it even feel pain though?

Velik pulled the spear back out and tried to line it up for a second strike, but [Spear Warden] failed him. He couldn’t control the monster’s movements because it didn’t care about getting hit. Its fur was too tough for anything but a direct piercing strike to get through, and it was so enraged that lining up a clean shot was almost impossible.

I might just have to run from this one. Maybe it’ll stay here and eat its kills instead of chasing.

That was a longshot. Monsters weren’t known for ignoring people, especially not ones that were running, and Velik wasn’t sure he was faster than this thing, even at night. He definitely didn’t think he could face it during the day. [Predator’s Visage] was sure of that. If he could run, he would. If it chased him, he’d have to stand his ground and fight. Leaving the wolverine alive to see the next sunrise was a terrible idea.

He darted down the trail, but a second later, the wolverine took off after him. Hissing and spitting the whole time, its waddling gait would have almost been funny if not for the fact that it was covered in gore from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail. It was also freakishly fast when it wanted to be, and Velik immediately abandoned the idea of running. Forget worrying about fighting it after dawn. I don’t think I could actually get ahead of it!

There was nothing for it but to stand his ground and fight. The trail wasn’t big enough for him to use his spear to its full effect, but it didn’t matter. The wolverine wasn’t afraid to take a few hits to get to him anyway, so he shortened the shaft by two feet so that he could swing it without worrying about it getting caught in the trees.

Then it caught up and the fight was back on. Velik ducked when it leaped at his face. He skittered backwards when it tried to rip into his calves. He jumped nine feet straight into the air and hooked an arm around a low-hanging branch when it lunged at his groin, only to immediately drop back down and skewer it with his needle-tip spear.

Pinning it to the ground would have required him to outmuscle the monster, something he couldn’t do. It snarled and spit and thrashed its way free, ripping itself open in the process as he widened the blade of his spear slightly and gave it edges. By the time it managed to break free, blood was leaking freely from its belly and matting down its back fur.

And it was still going strong, somehow. Is this thing actually moving faster now?! This has to be some sort of skill. There’s no way—oh shit!

The berserk wolverine hurled itself through the air, all four legs pointed in Velik’s direction and spread wide as if it were planning to catch him no matter which way he dodged. There was only one way he could go: straight down.

Dropping to his belly, he rolled as the wolverine soared past him. It rebounded off a tree, losing none of its momentum in the process, and leaving Velik scrambling to get back upright before it pounced on him like the world’s most deranged house cat finding a mouse in the larder. He could already imagine those hooked claws slicing into his flesh again.

The dead bear saved him. He never would have gotten out of the way on his own, but the wolverine slipped on a strand of entrails in its frenzied rush to reach Velik. It wasn’t much of a slip—four-legged animals generally had excellent balance no matter how low their stats were—but it gave Velik that fraction of a second he needed to regain his feet and get his spear up.

The next fifteen minutes of his life were among the worst he could remember. There’d been hard fights in the past, especially when he was still a kid, wielding nothing but a slightly-crooked tree branch with an end he’d sharpened using a pocket knife he’d stolen before he’d been kicked out of town. But this was something else. The wolverine was almost impossible to even hurt, and it didn’t seem to care when it did take a hit. It just kept coming, no matter what.

Considering its relatively small stature, Velik would have expected it to bleed out by now. Morgus knew he was feeling dizzy enough from his own blood loss, and he’d only taken a half dozen hits compared to the fifty or more the wolverine was suffering from. Its whole body was a matted black mess of monster-blood-soaked fur.

It kept going full tilt right up until the end, when it died mid-air while flinging its whole body at Velik’s face. He saw the instant the life went out of its eyes, with its face still locked into a snarl and its body coming straight at him. He dropped to a knee and let the wolverine’s body fly over his head.

[You have slain a gloan wolverine (level 26).]

[Spear Warden has advanced to rank 5.]

Velik’s very first action was to reach into his waist pack for a healing potion. Thankfully, system glass was near-indestructible, and the vial was intact. He tilted it back and swallowed the whole thing in one go, then sighed in relief as it went to work.

And it wasn’t even an elite! he thought as he eyed the system notification. Why was it so damn strong? Maybe I was right to think I wasn’t ready for this yet. This is only the first day and I… well, I don’t want to say it nearly killed me, but it came a lot closer than anything else has in years. Two monsters like that could do it, especially during the day.

But all the reasons he’d had for venturing into the deep wood were still valid. He needed to figure out what had caused the sudden spike in monsters, and that wasn’t going to happen if he just stuck to his normal stretch of forest and killed monsters as they appeared. With an unhappy sigh, he started walking farther north. He had a worg to hunt down, and several more hours of darkness before he needed to find a place to sleep.

Chapter 12

[Stealth has advanced to rank 7.]

Guess the coins did the trick, after all. Or maybe it was just what I was up against.

Velik no longer tried to kill every monster he could find. There were too many for that, and they were doing a fine job of attacking each other. Joining in would completely stall out his progress, so he’d opted to put his skills to get word and threaded a way through instead. It didn’t always work, but he’d avoided more fights than not.

By his reckoning, he was about fifty miles northwest of Deshir, well into the deep wood where even normal animals were strong enough to threaten someone with a combat class. The monsters were all in the mid-twenties level bracket, with some of the standouts reaching low thirties. Thankfully, he’d managed to avoid the one elite he’d spotted, that being some sort of massive fifty-foot-long snake at a staggering level 38.

It was a sobering reminder of his own weakness. Killing monsters fifteen levels below him was easy. Punching up even five levels was not. He could do it, especially if there was only one monster, but they were fights, not clean ambushes like he was used to. [Predator’s Visage] gave him a bonus to damage when he struck from hiding, and he’d underestimated how important that was against opponents with high enough physical to stop his normal attacks from piercing their skin.

The silver lining was that he’d seen absolutely nothing like that wolverine from the first night in the last two days. Even enemies up to level 35 were easier to kill than that thing, as long as they were alone. Velik hadn’t risked pressing his luck with any pack monsters.

It hadn’t been like this a few years ago when he’d tried to explore the deep wood. Everything back then had been at least ten levels lower and it had taken half the time to get this far. Now, he wasn’t even sure it was going to get as far as he’d gone before, let alone see anything new. He’d brought enough food for a week, maybe ten days if he rationed things, and then he’d be foraging to survive. Considering how dense the monster population was here, that was probably a losing proposition.

The way he saw it, he really only had two options. He could stay in the deep wood and hunt monsters closer to his own level to increase his strength, or he could retreat back to the frontier where he could cull the population to keep the towns safe. The problem with the first idea was that it left the towns unprotected—the local watch could barely handle level 10 or 15 normal monsters, let alone elites—and would most likely result in them being overrun. But his backup idea was nothing more than a stall for time.

Or I could just find the source, destroy it, and solve this problem once and for all.

[Stealth] might be enough to get him there, if the monsters didn’t get any stronger. But he didn’t have an answer after that. He had only a vague idea of what the source even was, and no clue if he could actually destroy it. Figuring that out was half the point of this expedition; finding it in the first place was the other half.

He knew he could find it if he just got close enough, but the untamed wilderness was huge beyond imagining. The best Velik could do was keep following the now years-old trail from the dungeon and hope he was searching in the right direction. That would have to be enough, for as long as he could keep going.

  *

“Is this the right place?” Jensen asked. “All these towns look the exact same.”

They stood on the road, a quarter mile south of town and surrounded by fields. The houses were all built in typical frontier style, with a lot of wood, narrow windows, and rough stone paths. They had sharply pitched roofs covered in wooden shingles, unfinished floors with a number of gaps in them that let the chill of the earth up into the rooms, and doors made of wooden planks nailed together instead of being one solid piece.

Torwin honestly couldn’t tell if his apprentice couldn’t spot the little differences or if he was just whining. Either way, it was a bad sign. “Jensen,” he said with a heavy sigh, “some days I can’t tell if you’re serious about all of this or just wasting everybody’s time.”

“What? Of course I want my class evolution.”

“Oh, I believe you want it. I just can’t tell if you want it enough to put in the work that comes with it.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I’ve been going out killing dozens of monsters every day, haven’t I? What more do you want from me?”

“You do it, but it’s always begrudgingly,” Torwin explained. “It seems like you want the prestige of a rare class without the actual job itself. Sometimes I wonder if this is just something your father pushed you into.”

Jensen snorted. “My father wanted me to take a merchant class. He was quite cross with my decision to take [Tracker].”

“Why’d you take it then?”

“I loved exploring the manor grounds when I was a kid,” he said. “I’d find little corners tucked away in the gardens, or behind the stables, places where no one else went, where no one else could find me. I always wanted to go out into the rest of the world and find bigger versions of those places.”

Torwin listened intently. He’d never gotten much from his student on his history and had relied on a lot of rumors and hear-say to try to fill in the gaps. “That sounds like you should be aiming for something like [Explorer] or [Traveler] then. [Ranger] has a lot of elements of protecting others in it.”

Jensen looked down at his bow for a moment and shrugged. “The Hunters Guild can help me reach my goals, and there’s nothing wrong with having a great amount of personal power to ensure my freedom to do what I want, my father’s wishes be damned.”

It sounded like [Ranger] was a compromise to Jensen, a balance between what he wanted to do and the prestige of a rare class and a high rank with an esteemed guild. It would reflect well on the Alderworth house to have a powerful scion, and it would give Jensen himself a measure of authority to ensure he was more than a pawn to his family’s political maneuverings.

Still, I don’t think he’ll ever get the class evolution. His heart’s not in it. He doesn’t want to be a [Ranger]. He just wants the power to be free. Even that’s tempered by the fact that he’s kind of lazy. I don’t think he’ll ever make it to a high level in any class, let alone achieve a rare evolution.

For all that, Torwin finally felt like he understood his student a bit better, and the truth was that he should have pushed for this talk a long time ago. He’d been tiptoeing around it because he was wary of the politics surrounding Jensen’s appointment as his apprentice, but that wasn’t doing the boy any favors.

“Alright, it’s time for some hard truths then,” Torwin decided. He was done handling this sham of an apprenticeship with kid gloves. “I don’t think [Ranger] is the right class evolution for you, but if you’re determined to shoot for it, then some things are going to have to change. You show me you’re serious about this, and I’ll give you everything I’ve got to help get you there. Deal?”

“What… kind of things?” Jensen asked warily.

Oh, kid, that was the wrong answer. You’re supposed to want it so bad that the costs don’t matter. Maybe your father was right about something like [Trader] or [Caravan Master] fitting you better. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be the perfect compromise class if it wasn’t uncommon rarity.

Despite his reservations, Torwin bulled ahead. “Your discipline is lacking. No more sleeping in every day. You need to learn to cook your own food, and to make do with what you can forage. All that gear is helping you kill monsters, but it’s doing all the heavy lifting. You need to either find stronger monsters to kill to offset it, or you need to take it off.”

“My gear?” Jensen repeated. “Wouldn’t that be dangerous to fight without it?”

“[Ranger] is a dangerous job,” Torwin said simply. He glanced at the town again. “Come on, we can talk while we walk. I have a lot of questions for the people of Deshir and I suspect getting answers isn’t going to be easy.”

“About this supposed Black Fang guy?” Jensen asked. “What’s left to learn? We heard the stories back in Celarut, and we’ve seen him fight in action.”

“I want to know how he got his class. Hell, I want to know what his class is. I couldn’t get an [Identify] off on him when we saw him, and he gave me the slip when I tried to chase him down. Why do they even call him Black Fang? Nobody seems to know.”

“And you think all the answers are here,” Jensen said, looking doubtfully at the town.

“I do.”

Jensen’s mouth firmed into a line and he nodded. “Alright then. You’re the master. Where do we start?”

Attaboy. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.

Chapter 13

Five nights into his expedition into the deep wood, Velik decided it was time to turn back. He’d passed by the old dungeon without setting foot into it three days ago, killed so many monsters that he was sure he’d reach level 29 before the sun rose again, and accomplished precisely nothing of his real goal beyond exploring a few more square miles of the deep wood.

More levels, he decided. Even if he couldn’t find the source, he could still go on a killing spree, thinning out the thousands and thousands of monsters here and maybe gain more than just one level. It was dangerous, but that was nothing new. Besides, it was refreshing to fight enemies that he couldn’t effortlessly cut down for a change. It forced him to come up with new tactics instead of relying on his stagnating skills.

[Predator’s Visage] gained another rank on the fourth day, and [Stealth] did the same six hours later when he accidentally wandered into the hunting territory of something too big to properly fit between trees but more than strong enough to push its way through anyway. Velik hadn’t seen much of it beyond that it was bipedal and had arms thicker around than his chest. It was brown and green and hunted by smell, which made hiding from it a non-starter.

His decarma counter also rolled over to three thousand before he decided to turn back. Surprisingly, level 30 seemed to be some sort of threshold. The system almost always awarded him a decarma for each kill, and sometimes two. Once, when he killed a level 34 stone skewer boar, he got three.

What he didn’t get was the skill merger he was hoping for. [Stealth] was getting stronger, but it wasn’t folding into [Predator’s Visage], and he thought he knew why. He was using it to avoid fights instead of to hunt. That idea was part of what motivated him to give up on pushing deeper into the wilderness. The low food reserves certainly also contributed to that, as well.

Truthfully, Velik wouldn’t have even pushed things this far if not for the fact that he knew those two hunters were hanging around, killing monsters near the towns. For the first time in years, he felt like he could stop away without a horde overwhelming a town and killing everyone, and he was determined to take advantage of that while he could. There was no telling how long the hunters would hang around before they got whatever it was they wanted and left.

So, he made himself a secure day to sleep in during the day where the monsters didn’t get up past level 25 or so, where he could pick off targets as long as he was cautious about it. At night, when [Duskbound] activated, he went farther north and started tearing through the monsters there instead.

Level 29 came on the sixth day, and with it another four points of physical and one of mental. His skills still refused to merge, but he could feel he was getting closer. He spent the night roaming the deep wood, killing various monsters as long as they didn’t live and travel in large groups, and even got an elite owl that almost managed to pick him out of a tree when it swooped down on him from behind.

The thing didn’t have the physical to stand up to his spear, though, and once its ambush failed, he quickly grounded it with a stab through its shoulder, then finished it off easily. The system awarded him five decarmas for the kill, a new personal record for Velik.

Things were going well – so well, in fact, that Velik was starting to get a bit paranoid. Something had to go wrong, and the longer it took to happen, the bigger he expected it to be. It wasn’t a rational fear, but he couldn’t dismiss it. He was in the deep wood. Disaster was to be expected. It was just a matter of seeing it coming from far enough away to survive.

  *

“I… do not know what I’m looking at,” he admitted to himself on the afternoon of his ninth day. The food he’d brought with him was almost completely gone and he’d taken to supplementing what little remained with foraged berries, tubers, and, once, a regular non-monstrous pheasant he took down by throwing his spear—shaped like a javelin—and skewering it mid-flight. That he’d cooked in a fire he’d lit in a hole in the ground to block the light. The smell alone had been enough to draw no less than six different monsters in over the course of an hour, and he was quick to abandon the temporary camp as soon as he’d finished eating.

Now, he was staring at an open field, or rather a hole in the deep wood made from a fire that had presumably burned out of control and cleared out an acre of trees. The strange thing was that there were no signs of fire damage on the edge of the field, meaning it hadn’t happened this season, but the ground was completely black and barren.

At casual glance, this fire had just burned itself out in the last few days, but nothing supported that idea beyond the field itself. He was hesitant to step out past the trees, just in case whatever had done this was still lurking around, but the truth was that this was the first unusual thing he’d found. It might just be a clue as to where to find the source. For all Velik knew, it might very well be the source. He doubted it, but he couldn’t just walk away without investigating.

The ground was charred and crunched under his feet, despite his [Stealth] trying to muffle the sound. Velik took a few steps in and crouched low, his spear in his hands and his eyes darting around. It was barely an hour past dusk, with a fresh moon risen overhead. Nothing was going to sneak up on him, not even another of those owls.

When no monster appeared to challenge him, he took a few more cautious steps forward. After repeating that cycle another three times, he straightened with a frown and prodded the cracked earth with his spear. What is this place? Is it really just some spot that lightning struck and burnt out? It can’t be with those clean edges, can it?

He was a hundred feet in when the trap sprang. A wall of fire flared up in a ring all the way around the field, easily ten feet tall and rising with each passing second. By the time Velik had spun in place to make his way back, it had risen to twenty. There was no way he was getting through without getting burned, but he was prepared to accept the punishment and use a healing potion if that was what it took to escape the trap.

Except the fire was getting thicker. It started as a wall perhaps a foot across, but he could see it rolling forward to two feet, then three. By the time he reached the flames, it was thirty feet high and he guessed at least ten feet wide. More than that, the heat rolling off it was so intense that he couldn’t even get close.

Passing through that wall was likely to kill him before he even reached the edge, and even if it didn’t, a healing potion was not going to fix injuries that bad. The monsters would get him before the next dawn. He needed a different option.

Velik backpedaled, then spun on his heel when a loud crack split the air. There, in the very center of the field, the ground had split open, and something red and black was climbing out of it. Its torso looked like it was made of black glass with fire swirling around behind it, and its limbs were charred earth with brilliant red veins cutting through the dirt.

It pulled itself upright to an impressive twelve feet in height, vaguely humanoid in that it had a trunk, two legs, and two arms, but that was where the similarity ended. Its limbs didn’t seem to have any joints, being more like tentacles than anything else. It had no head, though Velik got the brief impression of a wickedly laughing face in its chest fire before the visage disappeared.

Fully clear of the fissure, the monster took a single step forward. The ground closed up behind it, leaving Velik in an arena of scorched earth, surrounded by a wall of incinerating flames, and facing a monster twice his height made of earth and scorched fury. [Predator’s Visage] screamed in the back of his head that he was overmatched, that he had no chance at winning this fight.

To make matters worse, the system gave him a new notification, one he’d never seen personally, but which he was very much aware existed. Everyone knew about this message, even if only the most powerful monster hunters ever encountered it.

[You have entered the domain of a champion elite: Balzarith the Living Inferno.]

Yep, I’d say I’m just about fucked all the way around. Probably only got one shot at winning this one, he thought to himself, his hand straying to his hip pouch.

Chapter 14

Some hunters had a sort of psychological block, where they were afraid to use a powerful and irreplicable potion because there might be a better opportunity to use it later. Velik could understand that, up to a point. He certainly wasn’t going to use his trump card on the first tough fight he found himself in.

That having been said, it was a champion elite. If ever there was a time to pull out all the stops, this was that time. There were three potions in the pouch. Two were for healing, rated to restore life-threatening injuries immediately and patch him up to the point where he could function over the next few minutes. The third was something else.

It was a dark golden color and thin like water, except it didn’t move at all when he held the potion up. It wasn’t until he flicked the cork off with his thumb and tilted it back that the liquid all rushed out at once, like it had taken until just that exact moment to become unstuck in time.

There was just a bit under two hundred feet from wall to wall, and the champion elite had appeared right in the center. That left maybe seventy or eighty feet between him and Balzarath, a trivial amount of space that he was sure either of them could cross in less than a second. It even lurched forward, no doubt starting its run with whatever strange form of movement its tentacle-like limbs used.

The golden liquid touched his tongue, and the world seemed to freeze. Velik swallowed, fully imbibing the potion, and then turned his head to watch the suddenly ponderous monster surged forward, its body undulating strangely to push against the ground. He could see the tentacles flexing in slow-motion, and  easily tracked the movements.

Completely worth five thousand decarmas, he thought with a wolfish grin.

Then he leveled his spear and charged, his own body moving at its normal speed. To his eyes, Balzarath just stood there, waiting to take a spear to the chest. Or is it the face? Eh, who cares. I’ve only got thirty seconds to demolish this thing if I want to survive.

The potion didn’t increase his strength, only his speed and perception. Fortunately, Velik had spent the last week figuring out how to punch through the armored fur and skin of all sorts of monsters, and while he hadn’t encountered one made of living dirt and fire before, he was confident he could crack its shell, too. That glass looked fragile, but he was betting it was the strongest part of the champion’s body.

They impacted, spear to chest, and that was the moment Velik learned that Balzarath wasn’t just big, it was heavy. Its chest repelled the spear, sending it skittering off to the side as Velik arrested his momentum on his leading foot. A spiderweb of thin cracks appeared, giving him some hope that he could break through with enough effort, but that assumed he had enough time.

Let’s see how well those limbs do.

He widened the tip of his spear into a flat, double-edged blade and slashed downward, hacking deep into the monster’s right hip where glass transitioned to red-veined dirt. The spear sunk in half way, but the veins didn’t cut with the dirt. Instead, they stretched until they were pulled taut, or until there were just too many for him to push through. Either way, he failed to cut them, which meant that dismembering Balzarath probably wasn’t on the table.

That didn’t mean he hadn’t hurt the monster, and he was quick to spin his spear around to cut more mass off from the leg. Dirt might not be muscle, but it was obviously performing a similar role. If Balzarath couldn’t support its own weight once Velik finished carving up its legs, it would be easy to finish the monster off even after the potion ran out.

Just to be safe, though, I should probably take out the arms, too. Don’t want it pulling any tricks on me.

He raced around the champion elite, circling it over and over as his spear flashed through the air. Hundreds of pounds of blackened dirt fell from the monster’s body, and without that filler material reinforcing it, the network of red, stringy veins couldn’t keep it upright. It didn’t just stand there and take it, of course, but with Balzarath moving in slow motion, it was trivial to avoid its attacks.

Thirty seconds wasn’t a long time, certainly not long enough to win a fight against a champion, but Velik could—and did—do his best to stack the odds in his favor. He crippled the monster, then resumed hammering on its glass chest. He wasn’t sure exactly what would happen to the fire inside, but he was betting it wouldn’t be good for Balzarath when it spilled out.

Then the world snapped back to normal, sending a wave of vertigo through Velik. Worse, the monster’s movements were no longer laughably slow. Even wounded, its arm lashed out like a whip, catching Velik across the chest and picking him up off his feet. He landed fifteen feet away, shook off the accompanying dizziness, and rushed back in.

Now that he was moving in real time again, he could see something he hadn’t really noticed before: Balzarath was healing. Scorched earth climbed up its leg, packing itself in between the red veins and building on what was left between them. It wasn’t an instantaneous process, but it did put some pressure on Velik to end the fight before the monster got back up to full strength.

Doesn’t seem to feel pain. Can’t permanently destroy a limb or cut through the veins. I managed to slow it down, but I need to break that glass. Hopefully that ends the fight, otherwise I’m screwed.

He slipped under its lashing tentacle arm and dragged his spear across the glass core, chipping it slightly at impact but otherwise doing nothing but scratching the surface. The good news was that, unlike the limbs that were pulling in new earth to replace what he’d carved out, the torso didn’t seem to be healing itself.

But he was worried about just how little damage his attacks were doing. The only openings he could see were where the four limbs attached to the center, but those were just seams that were flooded with that red, squishy vein substance. He’d already proven he couldn’t cut through them individually or in bulk, so that didn’t seem like a viable point of attack.

He backed off when Balzarath started kicking at him, apparently having given up the idea of regaining its feet. Its limbs were spindly, barely more than the vein net with almost no mass held inside it, but the monster was still fast enough to make those whip-thin attacks draw blood if Velik wasn’t careful.

He kept his distance, deflecting the flailing tentacles with his spear while he tried to figure out what to do. Some sort of long hammer was probably the ideal weapon, but the [Shape Shifting] enchantment couldn’t alter his spear’s shape that far from baseline. He could make the spearhead wider or flatter, pointed or broad, everything from a needle tip to something resembling a thin shovel, but he couldn’t turn it into a solid block of metal.

Again and again, his eyes were drawn back to the seam. It was less than a quarter inch wide and completely filled with gummy red veins. They were elastic, and he could pull on them, but he couldn’t cut through them. He’d proven that with every strike against its tentacle limbs. If I can’t cut, but I can push them aside, could a long enough and thin enough spear head slip between them?

It was worth a shot. He shaped his spear to have a two-foot tip that tapered down to a point, then selected Balzarath’s left arm as his test target. It was in the worst shape and also the easiest to access. That didn’t mean there were no problems, as all four limbs could easily attack him at once, regardless of where they were anchored to the core, but Velik was at the height of his strength and agility.

He twisted, dodged, blocked, and otherwise slipped past the attacking limbs, lined his spear up, and jabbed it straight into the seam. To his delight, his hunch was absolutely correct, and the blade sank a full foot into the champion elite’s glass chest, skewering the living fire trapped inside. Nothing he’d done before had gotten a reaction, but that face appeared again, this time screaming in pain.

I’ve got you now.

The fight had taken about two minutes of total time for Velik to figure out Balzarath’s weakness, and he was honestly kicking himself for wasting the haste potion earlier. Then again, crippling the monster’s limbs had made it far easier to handle once he was back to moving at normal speeds, so it wasn’t like he’d accomplished nothing.

With his spear embedded deep in the monster’s main body, Velik heaved upward, holding the creature overhead for just an instant, then brought it down to slam its body against the ground. Clumps of blackened dirt went flying everywhere, and more cracks spread through Balzarath’s glass chest.

Velik brought it up again, then slammed it back down. Wisps of fire started leaking out as the cracks went all the way through the glass this time. A third attack was all it took for the chest to fracture completely, and the monster split into pieces as its shell shattered.

Flames roared out in every direction, forcing Velik to leap back a full twenty feet just to avoid getting burnt. Then they started to pull themselves back into the center, and Balzarath rose back up off the ground. It had no discernable shape, but that laughing face mocked him as it surged forward, a wave of living fire intent on engulfing Velik.