Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 15-19 (Patreon)

Author's Note: I'm still not quite far enough ahead of the RR release to do a single Monday chapter drop like I said I was planning. Soon, I hope.

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Of course it’s not over. This thing is a champion. Why would it be so easy that I could solo kill it in a few minutes?

Velik had no idea how agile a living wave of fire was, but he didn’t have a lot of room to run away, so he tried a different strategy instead. He charged at it, spear leveled and leading the way. Then, with only a few feet between them, he planted the weapon hard in the ground and vaulted straight up. A twist of his midsection reoriented him to get his feet facing the ground again, and he saw what looked like phantom arms made of fire reaching out of the top of the wave.

They weren’t fast enough to extend to his height in time, and he passed cleanly by them. As he flew overhead, he swiped his spear through one of the hands at the end, just to see if he could actually hurt Balzarith. The fiery hand parted from the arm and disappeared in a flash of light, which proved the weapon did… something. Whether or not that actually hurt the living inferno was still open to debate.

Velik hit the ground hard and rolled twice before coming to his feet. Some part of [Predator’s Visage] warned him of an incoming attack, maybe the crackling sound of approaching flames or the smell of scorched dirt, though both those things were all around him. Whatever it was, he trusted the skill.

He threw himself forward in a spin, his feet leaving the ground so that his whole body could twist and his spear could slash through whatever was behind him. A huge, fiery hand, each finger over two feet long, had been just about to close around his head. The entire mass of flame surged behind it, no more than fifteen feet, and his spear did nothing to slow it down. It did shear off three of the massive fingers, all of which met the same fate as that first, smaller hand he’d cut.

Is this how I hurt this thing – just cut it away, one sliver at a time? That seems too simple for a champion elite.

Even if he was right, there was no telling how long it would take to carve enough fire off the main body. It was getting hotter in the field with each passing second, and he was pretty sure the twenty-foot-tall wall that kept him trapped was actually tightening around him. One way or another, Velik was going to cook if he didn’t end the battle in the next few minutes.

The only good thing about his enemy’s new form was that, while it was just as fast as the original one, it was considerably easier to cut through. He could whip his spear through a dozen of those reaching hands in a second, dispersing them all while he backpedaled away from the main body. The problem was that it didn’t seem to slow Balzarith down at all. He’d stabbed that flame when it was still in its glass box and had seen its flickering countenance grimace in pain, but this fire now was something else.

That probably means there’s a central core I need to find inside the inferno, maybe linked to those strands of red tissue. Wait… Where are those now? Are they hidden in the fire?

Someone with a low mental stat would have lacked the capability to discern that kind of detail in the inferno, but now that Velik had thought to look for them, it was easy enough to pick them out. They were deep in the fire, well past the reach of his spear, but now they were packed into a sphere that looked like nothing so much as a ball of raw muscle fiber.

He hadn’t been able to cut through them before. Now might not be any different. If those were protecting the monster’s core—and he didn’t see any good reason to assume they weren’t—he was in trouble.

Okay, just think it through. You know how to get maximum penetrating power out of a strike, and you know that these things can be bypassed with a thin enough tip. How do you set yourself up to win?

It was hard to think while he frantically avoided flailing whips of flame that grew hands as they lashed at him. In a footrace, he thought he probably had the advantage of speed, but in an arena only two hundred feet wide, it was more about how well he could dodge. And an opponent that didn’t need to do things like turn around to face him had an advantage when it came to this game.

Balzarith didn’t seem to be getting tired, either. Or, if it was, Velik had no way to tell. Maybe the flames were a bit smaller from all the limbs he’d lopped off. Maybe not. Either way, he wasn’t going to win by just defending. He was going to have to brave the heat and land a definitive strike on the champion’s core.

Well, no time like the present.

Amateurs thought the heaviest hits came from above, when gravity and weight could help them. That was a strategy for people with a low physical stat. Gravity had nothing on Velik’s muscles. He could drive his spear harder and faster on his own than with a helping hand from physics, so that was what he did.

First, he needed an opening. There was no way he could cut through a dozen feet of living fire to strike at Balzarith’s core directly, but he could give himself enough of an opening to maybe not completely walk into the flames. His spear came up overhead, then he turned it sideways and brought it down like a fan, the blade as wide and flat as he could make it. Wind rushed between the spear and the fire like a titan’s breath, beating it back temporarily.

Velik lunged forward off his right foot, the spear already reforming its head into its long, needle-thin configuration. Three steps was all it took before he was surrounded by flames. Anything that wasn’t magical or thick leather started smoldering, and already he could feel the intense heat working to scorch his flesh through his high physical.

Two more steps brought him directly into the fire, and his world turned to pain. Velik ignored it, planted himself, and heaved the spear forward with both hands. His arms reached their maximum extension and he launched the weapon, its tip only eight inches away when the shaft left his hands. It penetrated the red fibers, all the way down to the stubby cross guard Velik had placed at the base of the blade, and the core and spear both were flung away.

Velik hadn’t expected the core to actually move. Much like when he’d stabbed into the glass chest during the first portion of their fight, he’d thought to meet resistance, but he supposed it was just floating in the air now, suspended in a formless mass of living fire.

Regardless of an only vaguely understood ‘why’ of the situation, the simple fact of the matter was that the instant Velik’s spear hit the core, they both went flying away from him. And with the amount of strength he’d put into that stab, the spear carried the red fibrous blob a good fifty feet before it tumbled to the ground.

More important was that the instant the core was ripped out of the fire, it all went out. Even the ring circling the field seemed to flicker and dim, perhaps because Balzarith was truly injured for the first time. Velik didn’t have any answers, and he was too hurt to care. It was just a relief that he was no longer actively on fire.

He watched the core warily as he approached to reclaim his spear. He hadn’t struck it at enough of an angle to pin it to the ground, nor was the spearhead long enough to reach through the other side. Right now, it looked like a red ball of muscle on the end of a stick, just lying in the dirt – gross, but ultimately harmless.

Velik knew better than to relax. He hadn’t received a kill notification, which meant no matter how he might have hurt the monster, it wasn’t dead. Living monsters were a threat, always. That was why he grabbed the spear by the very back end of the shaft and held it at arm’s length while he studied his foe.

Liquid fire dribbled out from between the muscle fibers and splattered against the ground with a soft hiss, where it remained burning despite having nothing to consume. I bet some water mage would have eaten you alive. Being melee was a bad matchup, but this still feels too easy. It’s supposed to take whole groups to kill a champion.

He whipped his spear straight down, sliding the mass off the end to smack hard into the dirt. It impacted with a heavy thud, then sat there, quivering gently as it wept more fire. Frowning, Velik stabbed down again, and again, each strike puncturing something unseen. Was it really just a trick of finding an almost invisible core amidst the living flames? I suppose getting a shot at it was difficult. An arrow would have burned up before it ever reached the core even if the archer could spot it.

Another minute of brutalizing the fleshy orb finally yielded the notification Velik was hoping for, along with a few unexpected ones.

[You have slain Balzarith the Living Inferno (champion elite, level 35.]

[You have taken a champion seed from its former owner, Chalin.]

[Champion seed’s current reserves: 0/175.]

“Chalin,” Velik gasped. The memory of his childhood friend’s quirky smile flashed through his mind. Velik hadn’t seen him since the day he’d become a [Duskbound]. “You’re still alive?”

Chapter 16

Deshir locals were pretty much the same as everyone else living in a frontier town – a mix of friendly and mistrusting, willing to hear a stranger out but not necessarily to go out of their way to help. It was about what Torwin expected, which was why he was so surprised to find out the entire town had such a sore spot when it came to its own history.

Specifically, they didn’t much like talking about the Black Fang. He’d mostly gotten variations of, “That damn kid cursed the whole area, got his family and who knows how many others killed, and didn’t even have the decency to die with them,” from every single person he’d tried to talk to.

The level of hostility was unexpected, given that the topic was their own town’s history, but he was more than willing to keep chipping away at the problem. Unfortunately, the local innkeeper had overheard him questioning some of the regulars, or maybe they’d tattled on him while he was distracted. However the man had found out what Torwin was asking people about didn’t change that he wasn’t happy and had kicked the [Ranger] out.

“Well, shit,” Torwin said, scratching the back of his head as he looked up and down the street outside the Brave Boar. Jensen was still inside, somehow. Presumably, the owner hadn’t realized they were together, or maybe he had and was just more willing to tolerate the guy who was spending money on beer.

Just go find someone else, I suppose. Who’s not so busy that they’d mind me asking them some questions, and old enough that they might actually know the answers?

The farmers were out in their fields, but Torwin doubted he’d get a friendly conversation from any of them. Jensen probably had the right idea. He needed to spend a little money; that’d loosen up someone’s tongue. And what he had sitting on his status screen in decarmas was enough to buy the whole town a dozen times over, then knock it down and build something a little less rustic in its place.

He quickly located an herbalist’s shop a street over from the Brave Boar. Perfect. Anyone dealing in herbal remedies has probably been around for a while. Nobody trusts a young doctor. I’ll just buy a few things off the shelf to grease the wheels, then we’ll see what’s what.

There was nobody on the shop floor when he peered through the window, but the shutters were thrown open so he assumed they were open. Walking through the door, he took a good look around and nodded to himself. There were racks of clay flasks, carefully labeled, beyond a shopkeeper’s counter, all made to cure common ailments. A row of plants in ceramic pots sat on a table below the window with a sack of soil and an old tin watering can tucked underneath. A work bench on the opposite wall had a pair of pruning shears, six metal bowls, and a mortar and pestle that was stained green laying on it.

“Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”

An old man poked his head out from around the corner. “Huh? Who’re you?”

“Just passing through,” Torwin said. “Thought I might pick a few things up.”

“That so?”

The old man stepped fully into view, revealing a rather scrawny frame partially supported by a walking stick. His beard was pure white, a bush of wires shooting off in every direction, and contrasted with his head, which was bare but for a few cloudy wisps on the side and deeply tanned. The man looked like old leather wrapped around bones with a fat blob of a nose between two pale, rheumy eyes.

He hobbled over to his counter and dropped into a hidden stool, then groaned and leaned forward. “What’re you needing?”

“Common remedies for road ailments,” Torwin said. It wasn’t true, of course. His physical stat was far, far too high for him to have to worry about things like fevers, blisters, or fungal infections. Even Jensen was getting to the point where he was functionally immune to the kind of things a common herbalist could treat, and he wasn’t even level 20 yet.

“And how much you looking to spend?”

“I’ll take whatever you can spare.”

The old man cocked a bushy eyebrow at him. “Let’s put some coin on the table before we go any further.”

“Fair enough,” Torwin said with a wry smile. He materialized five decarmas and let them clink onto the wood.

Letting out a whistle of appreciation, the old man lifted one up to the light. “Don’t see these too often. For five, I think I can stock you up with enough to get you all the way back to the city, maybe more if you walk as fast as I think you do.”

“I am a fast walker,” Torwin admitted. “You kind of have to be with my job. I’m all over the place hunting monsters.”

The old man grunted. “You the one they pooled the money together and hired to take care of the infestation?”

“Me and my apprentice. And let me tell you, I’m glad I brought him along. I was not expecting there to be quite so many of them. The job posting really undersold how bad things are up here.”

“Wasn’t deliberate, I’m sure,” the old man told him. He reached back behind him and started pulling flasks down blindly. “[Willow Wort], for fever. [Sage], [Yellow Bark], and [Crown Thistle] for coughs. This one’s a salve for cuts to stop bleeding. It’s made of ground up [Builder’s Root] and [Ash Fern] with a boiled water base.”

“All handy things to have on the road,” Torwin said. “How many of each can you spare?”

“For five decarmas, let’s say six of each.”

That was a blatant rip off, more than three times how much the medicine should have cost, but Torwin was happy to pay it if it kept the herbalist in a good mood and answering questions. “Anything special I should know about any of these?”

“Nah, they’re all standard. Should last for about four months before you’re going to want to toss them out. If you hang onto them after that, you’ll just make yourself sicker trying to use them.”

“Sounds good. By the way, you’ve got to know this forest pretty well, right?”

“Been harvesting from there for forty years, so I’d say so,” the old man said.

“Any idea what’s causing the monster surge?” Torwin asked. “We’ve been out killing all week and it barely feels like we’ve made a dent in things. None of the town mayors seem to have a clue, but I figure a fellow woodsman like yourself probably knows a thing or two.”

If not for his over fifty levels of stat increases, Torwin might have missed the herbalist’s eyes flicker down to the pile of decarmas and back up, or the grimace that started to form on his lips. The old man did an admirable job keeping his face blank, good enough that nobody around here would have spotted it, but Torwin did. That’s right, information is what I’m really buying. You want that money, you have to answer the question.

“Monsters have been showing up here for years,” the old man said slowly, almost chewing the words before he let them out. “More so in the last few years. Started getting real bad this summer.”

That wasn’t new information. Torwin didn’t say anything, just waited for the old man to continue. Seeing that his customer wasn’t satisfied with that explanation, he grunted and added, “Best guess is the old dungeon in the deep wood about forty miles northwest of here. Supposedly it was destroyed, but where else would all the monsters be coming from?”

“I heard some wild kid was responsible for them,” Torwin threw out. “No one seems to know why, though.”

Somebody walking by the shop froze right near the window, just out of sight, but Torwin could hear them breathing. The old man hadn’t noticed whoever it was though, or if he had, he ignored them.

“Some folks think the kid was the one who woke the dungeon back up, him and that friend of his.”

Friend? That’s new.

“Doesn’t matter,” the herbalist said, forestalling Torwin’s next question. “The other kid never came back, and even if they were the ones who woke the dungeon, they were children. It wasn’t like they did it on purpose.”

The eavesdropper scuffed a foot on the street, loud enough that there was no way the old man hadn’t heard it. Torwin inwardly groaned, but tried to keep the conversation going anyway. “I get the feeling that’s not a popular opinion around these parts.”

The old herbalist grunted and swept the coins off the counter. “Forget the kids. They don’t matter. You want my advice? Go look at the dungeon.”

“I’d like to know more—” Torwin started to say.

“No more to tell. Now, I’m busy and you’ve got monsters to be killing. Best take your medicine and be on your way.”

It wasn’t much, but it was a new lead. He’d already known about the dungeon, but that two kids had gone out there right before the monsters started appearing was new. Or rather, that there were two of them and one hadn’t come back was an additional piece of the puzzle. Some sort of blood sacrifice, maybe. That might wake up an old, broken dungeon. None of that fits with the Black Fang and his class orb, though. There’s got to be somebody who actually knows what happened and is willing to talk about it.

With a sigh and a nod, Torwin collected the flasks and stowed them away in his pack. He walked back out onto the street and glanced over at the person, wondering if their presence was what had caused the old man to clam up. To his surprise, it was a young lady, no more than eighteen or nineteen years old.

“You’re the hunter they hired,” she said.

He inclined his head. “I am.”

“Why are you asking about Velik and Chalin?”

“Tell me what you know and I’ll tell you why I want to know it.”

The girl glanced around once, then nodded resolutely. “Follow me.”

Chapter 17

It was generally considered rude to use skills on another person without their permission, even something as benign as [Identify]. Torwin wasn’t a stickler for manners, but considering how little danger he’d be in even if the whole town banded together and had a serious go at trying to murder him, he felt like he could run the risk of following an unknown teenage girl to a secondary location.

Besides, there’s no point in antagonizing her when I’m hoping to get some information out of this conversation. Morgus alone could find another person within ten miles who might actually tell me what I want to know.

They entered a leatherworking shop three streets over. “We can talk here,” the girl said. “My mom owns the place.”

There were no customers, nor was there anyone else in the building. It was just her, a lot of belts, coats, boots, and gloves on display, and him. He shifted in place and peered curiously at the wares. This stuff’s not bad. Jensen would turn his nose up at it, but the boots look like they’d hold up to someone with physical 30 running on them, and that’s without any sort of enchantment.

“I appreciate you helping me figure this out. My name’s Torwin. What’s yours?”

“Sildra,” she said.

“Alright, Sildra. Tell me the story, please.”

“I don’t know all of it. I was just a kid myself when it happened so this is just what I remember. Nobody really told me what was going on. Someone came to the house and talked to my parents, and then they got me and asked if I’d seen Chalin and Velik. I told them I hadn’t, didn’t think much of it, and went back to whatever it was I was doing.

“It wasn’t until a few days later the monsters started showing up. I remember because at first no one was worried about it. I mean, monsters happen. The local watch took care of them, everyone talked to their kids that evening about staying close to the village and running away if we saw a monster, and we all went on with our lives.”

She paused for a second and thought. “I do remember some of the adults speculating that the two missing boys might have been killed by the monsters. They’d been gone for a few days by that point, and the timing made sense. Chalin’s dad got into a fist fight with someone over it.”

It wasn’t hard to picture that scene. In fact, something similar had happened in the village Torwin had grown up in thirty years ago. The only difference was that he’d already been an adult with a family, not a kid on the periphery of what was happening. He could still distinctly remember the twisting ache in his gut when his hunting party had found the missing child, or what was left of him, about a day before the horde had reached the village.

“Everyone thought that was the end of it, but then the next night, a bunch more monsters invaded,” Sildra continued, oblivious to Torwin’s own reminiscing. “That was when the bodies started piling up. Twenty people died before the watch got things under control. We found out later that a few of the more remote farms were completely overrun.”

He didn’t need the play-by-play, not for an all-too-familiar story, but Torwin didn’t rush the girl. He’d ask his questions when she was done. Hopefully the answers would help him get this whole problem sorted out.

“There were three attacks, I think. I guess it depends how you count them. We were still fighting off one wave when another one hit the last time,” she said. “Chalin’s father lived through them, but Velik’s whole family was killed.

“Velik showed back up the next day, somehow. Nobody was expecting him to still be alive. They took him into the biggest house and got him to tell them what happened. Chalin’s father tried to kill him there, I remember that. He ended up tied to a hitching post out on the street to keep him under control. No one would tell any of the kids what was going on, just that Chalin and Velik did something stupid and riled all the monsters up. Pretty much everyone knew whose fault it was right away.”

Sildra sighed and shook her head. “Maybe if we weren’t still being attacked, or if people hadn’t died… Chalin and Velik were my friends, you know? I wasn’t close with them or anything, but we were the same age and it’s a small town. So we were friends. Learning that Chalin had died, and then they drove Velik into the woods when we were besieged by monsters, which was as good as killing him themselves, that was the worst of it for me. The adults were supposed to protect the kids, not throw them to the wolves.

“But then he didn’t die. He survived, and he’s strong now, out there hunting monsters. I hear he goes to the other towns sometimes, but never here. You can’t blame him. The adults back then made it clear they blamed him. His whole family was dead, and no one else would take him in.”

She went silent and turned her face so he wouldn’t see her brush at her eye. After a moment to compose herself, Sildra said, “That’s the broad strokes of what happened. I know Velik is still alive. They call him Black Fang now.”

Torwin scratched at his chin for a moment and thought it over. So two boys go out to the dungeon. Something happens. One of them dies. Monsters start showing up everywhere. That’s all normal enough if they accidentally unsealed something or even if they somehow brought the dungeon back to life. But it doesn’t explain why nobody shut it down in the last decade if they knew about the dungeon, or why it’s suddenly ramping up in the last few months.

“There’s got to be more to it,” he said. “What about the dungeon? Why wasn’t anyone called in to take care of it when the monsters first started showing up years ago?”

“I don’t know. It was destroyed back when my grandmother was a little girl, about fifty years ago. Supposedly people went out to investigate it after the incident, but there wasn’t anything there. All the monsters made it difficult to reach, so I don’t think there was any follow up after the first time.”

“It’s possible they missed something then. And what about this Black Fang guy? You said that’s Velik, but how do you know it’s the same person?”

“Oh, I saw him a few days ago. I hired an escort to help me harvest some [Moonsilk Blossoms] and we were attacked by an elite monster. Velik showed up and killed it in one hit. It was over practically before I even realized he was there.”

That tracked with Torwin’s own estimates of Velik’s prowess. The boy had to be at least in the mid-thirties to be that strong, maybe even low-forties depending on his class. If he’d really had his class for a decade, the level itself wasn’t that astounding, though it still indicated a respectable work ethic. The real stumper was how a boy of only seven or eight years had managed to survive to grow into the man he was now.

“I’d like to talk to this guy. He probably knows way more about what’s going on with the monsters than anyone else,” Torwin said. “I don’t suppose it would be possible for you to arrange a meeting?”

“Me?” Sildra laughed. “I haven’t seen him since we were kids, then when I did finally run into him, he pretended to be someone else and ran away. Velik avoids this whole town, and it’s hard to blame him.”

Torwin had more questions to ask, but he could hear two people walking down the street. They stopped right outside the door, then pushed it open. “Sildra!” one of them said. “Your mom about?”

“Not at the moment, but your order’s ready. I can grab it for you if you’ve got the payment,” she told them.

“Sure thing, young miss,” the man said. He had a woodsman’s ax over his shoulder and the rough, calloused hands a man used to swinging it. His partner was more of the same, but shorter and broader through the shoulders. Both men eyed Torwin with something somewhere between curiosity and animosity.

“New face in town, huh?” the stouter of the two asked.

“Hired to kill monsters,” Torwin said. “I was just looking at the lovely selection of boots on display here.”

“Make sure that’s all you’re looking at,” the tall lumberjack said darkly.

“Knock it off,” Sildra scolded him. “Mr. Torwin wasn’t doing anything like what you’re trying to imply. He’s been nothing but professional and courteous.”

“That so? ‘cause I heard he got thrown out of the Boar for hassling people about that fucker who nearly got the town wiped out. Not a good look on a man, that.”

If I push now, it’s going to make trouble for her. I think I’ve got the shape of things, and there’s probably not much she can tell me that’s actually relevant. It’s beyond obvious that I need to check on this old dungeon to see if it’s come back to life, and also that I need to cuss out whoever put together the job posting and neglected to mention that fact.

“I’ll come back some other time to praise your skills,” Torwin said. “Maybe when your mother is here so nobody gets any untoward ideas about my motivations.”

“Ah… Sure,” the girl said, her brow furrowed as she watched him leave. “It was nice meeting you.”

“You as well,” he said.

Torwin exited the shop and circled around to get away from the windows, then paused to listen to the conversation not so far away.

“I hope you weren’t running your mouth to that outsider,” the stout one said.

“I’ll talk to whoever I please about whatever I please,” Sildra snapped back.

Got spine, that one, more than some of the new hunters I’ve seen.

“Nobody’s going to save you if you get yourself in trouble. Don’t go screwing with things that are over your head,” the tall lumberjack threatened. “Here’s your money. Tell your mother I said thanks for the quick work.”

Torwin waited to make sure both men left the shop, then went to go fetch his apprentice. He’d learned what he needed and confirmed his next move. It was time to get out of Deshir before his presence caused problems.

Chapter 18

Velik wasn’t really sure how he felt. If the system notification was to be believed, Chalin was the previous owner of the champion seed. To Velik’s mind, that implied that Chalin was alive, or at least that he had been sometime in the past after they’d gone into the destroyed dungeon. When he’d woken back up, Chalin was already gone. There was nothing but the monster, and he’d done the only thing he could do: he’d run for his life.

Did I abandon him? I thought the monster had eaten him, that it was coming for me next. Maybe he got away. Wait, did he abandon me? He was already gone when I woke up.

He could vividly remember those first few seconds. His mind had been flooded with messages, notifying him about his racial subtype and his new class. The feeling of elation that had swept through him upon realizing that the class orb had worked would remain with him forever, but it would always be paired with the horror he’d felt seconds later when he saw that pulsing heap of flesh crawling out of the darkness toward him.

The gaping maws were the worst of it, all of them filled with gnashing teeth that opened and closed rhythmically as the whole thing undulated across the floor, moving in part by heaving its own mass and in part by dragging itself forward with grasping limbs that sprouted from its body like thick hairs.

Chalin had been nowhere to be found, and Velik’s imagination treated him to an image of his friend being pulled apart and stuffed into different mouths. He’d turned and fled, running like he’d never been able to before. That had been his first taste of the power of stats that came with having a class.

The champion seed had been added to Velik’s inventory in his status. He pulled it up to read the description, hoping for some clue about what it actually was, and how it was related to his childhood friend.

[Champion Seed: Used to grow a champion elite monster to guard a specified location. Requires mana to flourish.]

[Champion: Balzarith the Living Inferno (level 35).]

[Current Owner: Velik]

[Current Reserve: 0/175]

There was nothing there about Chalin now that Velik had claimed the seed, and he wasn’t sure what would happen to the seed’s ownership status if he died. If it remained his until somebody else picked it up, that it might not mean anything beyond the fact that Chalin had lived and gotten a few miles away from the dungeon.

Though I’ve never heard of a champion seed and I don’t know where he got it. Did it come fully powered up, or did he find a way to do that, too?

When they’d stumbled across the class orb, they’d decided to activate it while they both held onto it, that way they’d both get classes. It didn’t work that way, of course, but the logic had made sense to their seven-year-old brains back then. Velik had always assumed he’d been the lucky one who’d actually gotten the class, and that Chalin, unable to defend himself from the monster, had died.

That didn’t explain where the monster had come from, but ‘somewhere deeper in the dungeon’ had felt like a reasonable explanation. By the time he’d been strong enough to return years later, monsters were everywhere, both inside the dungeon and out. There was no way to tell where they were originating from.

If he proceeded under the assumption that Chalin was alive, though, that meant his friend was somewhere out here in the deep wood. He might know how to stop the monsters from appearing. This seed thing says it takes mana to make the champion show up. Is that how all monsters appear? Did this whole area just get flooded with it coincidentally? And if so, how do I fix that?

All he could picture was a primed water pump spilling glowing magical water out everywhere, with monsters growing out of the puddle and wandering off. That probably wasn’t remotely close to accurate, but for all Velik knew, it might be. He needed a way to detect mana, and that meant spending some of his hoarded decarmas in the system store.

Before that, however, he needed to do something about his burns and find a safe place to camp. The field was no longer on fire, but it was still a giant swath of charred dirt. Safety out in the deep wood was difficult to find, however, and Velik’s standard strategy was to go on a massacre and kill everything within a thousand feet of wherever he was setting up. It didn’t prevent new monsters from finding him, but it gave him a bit of warning when he did. The rest was just being a light sleeper.

He left the field a few minutes later with one less healing potion in his pouch and one champion seed. He’d already poked through the system store and had discovered a few different pieces of gear that would let him sense mana in different ways, everything from a blindfold that let him see it while making it impossible to see the world around him to a pair of gloves that let him feel it, supposedly a useful trait for an enchanter, to an earring that would hum at various intensities and pitches depending on local mana conditions.

Velik had no idea which one of those would be the most useful but they all sounded terrible to him. Unfortunately, the kind of mana-detecting gear that came without weird downsides was so far out of his price range that he’d need to spend months in the deep wood doing nothing but slaughtering monsters sixteen hours a day to save up for them.

His other idea was to find somebody with some sort of magic-using class. Presumably, they’d have the ability to sense mana without a special piece of equipment, and if he could bring them out here, they could poke around and report back on what they’d found.

Now I just need to find somebody like that. Easy, right? It’s not like I’m a hermit who’s been living in the woods for a decade with no friends.

His musings were interrupted by a pungent aroma hitting his nostrils from hundreds of feet away. Eyes widening in alarm, Velik started backtracking. He’d dealt with that animal before, and had no desire to see the monster version of it. Its musk could probably melt through leather and wood.

Shamelessly, Velik fled to a safe distance and watched a skunk the size of a horse cart trundle through the trees, completely and utterly secure in its own superiority. He noticed that no other monsters got near it either.

There were some things that everybody knew better than to mess with.

  *

Velik found a clean stream to set up camp in an area that had an abundance of fruiting trees. He didn’t particularly enjoy the diet, but he’d survived on worse, and his goal right now was to kill as many monsters as possible, as quickly as possible. He’d worry about meat once he got back.

His decarma count quickly climbed up past five thousand, enough to replace the haste potion he’d used, but he held off on that. Part of him was itching to replace it just in case, but he needed some way to track mana levels or whatever they were called, and since his thriving social circle probably wasn’t going to yield any positive results, he decided to focus on the backup plan.

Every morning, he returned to the same den beneath the roots of a massive oak tree and pulled a tangle of branches across the entrance to hide him while he slept. Three times, he woke up to the sound of a monster sniffing around outside and had to go kill it, then drag the body away. In that way, his planned week-long trip extended first to two weeks, then to three.

Eventually, he grew so weary of the non-stop killing that he was ready to return home. Only sheer stubbornness kept him in place, grinding out decarmas as fast as he could and hoping to hit level 30 soon. With each kill, he felt himself growing closer. Over the last day of his expedition, he kept expecting each fight to be the one that pushed him over the edge, only to be disappointed when he didn’t get a notification.

He was on his way back one morning, half an hour after the sun had risen and [Duskbound] had deactivated, when some sort of sparrow swooped down on him. Rolling his eyes, he batted it out of the air with his spear, only for it to explode into a cloud of feathers and blood.

[You have slain a common wood sparrow (level 3).]

[You have advanced to level 30. +2 Physical, +1 Mental, +2 free points.]

[You have unlocked a new class skill slot.]

“Wait, what? Seriously? From that, of all things? Not the poison-spitting giant toads? Not the dragonfly that was longer than my arm? Not the Morgus cursed swarm of fucking rats that blew up when they died?”

The system, as usual, didn’t answer him.

With a sigh, Velik resumed trudging back to his campsite. He’d pick his new skill, get a few hours of sleep, and then start the long trip back home.

Chapter 19

Originally, Velik had been looking for something to give him a bit of range to help with hunting, but really, that wasn’t his style. If he absolutely needed to, the [Shape Shifting] enchantment on his spear let him reshape it into a javelin to throw, though that left him with nothing but a skinning knife as a backup weapon. His other idea was to fill a hole in his toolkit by finding a skill that would make it easier to kill whole packs of monsters all at once.

Having spent two weeks in the deep wild fighting monsters with high physical stats, he could comfortably say that neither of those were what he needed most. No, he needed armor penetration – a skill that would let him drive his spear through a sheet of one-inch-thick steel. Too many times, he’d been forced into harrying an enemy he couldn’t actually hurt, trying to get it to open its mouth at just the right time so he could stab his spear into it.

He was sick of trying to hack through thick, shaggy pelts and even thicker leathery skin. If he’d had a skill that could just stab through all of that, he’d have reached level 30 days ago. That was definitely the way to go if he was going to keep fighting monsters that were a higher level than him, especially since physical attacks were the only real way he had to hurt something.

Selecting a skill wasn’t a complicated process, but it was a decision with a lot of options. For the most part, it was a safe bet to just skim the general skills lists the system presented him with. There were new options that had been unlocked by upgrading his stats repeatedly since his last skill slot at level 20, but his class skills were almost always far, far better. The only reason to take a non-class skill was to merge it into a class skill, like he’d done with [Identify] and [Ambush Tactics]. Both of those had quickly folded into [Predator’s Visage], and he was still hoping to add [Stealth] to that combination soon.

Class skills, on the other hand, were much, much harder to merge together. Even so, he’d worked diligently to combine the various spear skills his unique class, [The Black Fang], offered him. Despite how many people seemed to think it was a title, it was so much more. Someone had used [Identify] on him back when he’d first gotten the class a decade ago, and somehow, it had spread from there.

The class focused on melee combat, wilderness survival, and monster hunting, which suited Velik just fine, as those were all things he cared about. A bit of ranged offense would be nice, but the truth was that he didn’t want to carry around some bulky longbow or a quiver stuffed full of arrows anyway. He preferred to travel light; that was why he’d only brought a week’s worth of rations in the first place.

His class skill options focused around that trinity, but he’d long ago picked over what he thought would be useful to him with an eye on selecting skills to merge. Thanks to that, he had ten skills filling three slots, and he saw no reason to switch up the strategy now.

So, I need something that will fold into [Spear Warden] that gives me better penetrating power. [Serpent Strike] helped a little bit by bumping up my speed and accuracy, but that’s more for exploiting vulnerabilities, not for stabbing through armor. What can help me with that?

He found a skill called [Venom Slash] that promised to inflict agonizing poisons that seared his target’s flesh, but while it might help eat through fur and hide, it felt more like it was designed to destroy muscle after he’d already made contact. Worse, it was reliant on mystic, which was by far his worst stat. He kept the skill in mind, but he wasn’t excited about it.

A better choice was something called [Burden of the Beast], which also used mystic, but which claimed to make a victim’s body heavier with each successive hit, regardless of whether it drew blood. The drawback was that it only worked if he was fighting a beast. The definition felt a bit loose when he considered it, like maybe the skill lumped reptiles, birds, and fish in as well.

It wasn’t quite what he was looking for, but if he could slow an enemy down enough, it’d be easier to get his spear into the spots that weren’t well protected. He hadn’t fought anything yet that had no weaknesses, but he was aware that it could happen, especially as the monsters kept going up in levels. So while [Burden of the Beast] was again a possibility, it wasn’t quite what he was looking for.

Finally, he found what he was looking for, a skill called [Kinetic Charge]. For the cost of adding a small bit of resistance to his movements, he could save up power to be unleashed all at once. The conversion ratio wasn’t great, requiring at least a few minutes of constant movement to get one good shot off, but that was once again the fault of his low mystic stat. It wasn’t worth sinking his free points into it, not when he could simply build up the charge before battle and open with a devastating blow, then proceed to dismantle the monster like usual.

Perfect.

[You have gained the skill: Kinetic Charge.]

Velik swung his spear a few times to get a feel for the increased resistance. It was a bit harder to control, almost like it was poorly balanced with the extra weight on the bladed end, but nothing that he couldn’t handle. The extra points in physical helped compensate for it, not that he needed them. He’d been using this spear since his physical was less than half what it currently was.

Once he’d fully charged his new skill, Velik went looking for a target to test it on. He quickly found a stone paw rabbit, which was far less docile than its name suggested. The little buggers were fast and conjured up rocks that they kicked with frightening accuracy and speed. They weren’t particularly hardy, but Velik had killed plenty of them over the last week. He knew what a normal strike felt like.

[Kinetic Charge] hit with at least three times that amount of power. It flashed through the air so quickly that a flash of pain shot up his shoulder from the movement, and his eyes had trouble aiming the attack. The rabbit, swift as it was, didn’t stand a chance of getting clear in time.

[You have slain a stone paw rabbit (level 23).]

“Well,” Velik said, looking from the tip of his spear to the tree now painted with fur, blood, and guts, “I guess that works.”

It was tempting to extend his stay in the deep wood, but he was completely out of food and foraging was a pain. More importantly, it had been two full weeks now and he’d only stayed that long because of that monster hunter that had shown up with his apprentice. He was trusting them to hold things together since they’d proved competent enough to handle the weaker monsters near town, but he needed to get back and confirm everything was still standing with his own eyes.

Before that, he needed a few hours of sleep. Velik arrived at the den he’d claimed for himself, slipped inside, and dragged his tangle of scrub brush in front of the hole. Sleeping in the dirt was another facet of the expedition he wouldn’t miss, even if his real bed was barely more than a few layers of cloth wrapped around a board.

Two weeks was long enough.

  *

The last two weeks had been hell. Jensen hadn’t realized how lenient his master had been with him, not until they’d had their little heart to heart and Torwin had decided to start taking things seriously. Worse, the monsters seemed to have doubled in number practically overnight. They were up before dawn every day now, and Torwin no longer accepted excuses. Jensen had tried to catch an extra hour on the third day, only to wake up to a bucket of cold water being dumped on his face.

They’d just finished yet another night and were wearily marching back to the Raven’s nest when Torwin said, “That bow is something else. I’m sure it was expensive as hell, but I think I might get one just for the arrow generating ability. I’ve got two fletchers working full time just making me new ones and they’re struggling to keep up.”

“It’s actually the bracer that makes the arrow,” Jensen said. “And it wasn’t that bad, only thirty thousand decarmas.”

“Not that bad,” Torwin repeated with a chuckle. “That’s more than a lifetime’s savings for most people.”

“Is it?” Jensen asked, surprised. He peered down at the bracer, which was made with some sort of leather he couldn’t identify and banded in what looked like systilver. It wasn’t even in the top three most expensive pieces he was wearing.

“You get a decarma once every… what… four kills? Five? You’re not even level 20 yet, but how many monsters have you killed? Imagine doing that for years and years. Maybe by the time you’re level 25, you have enough for just that bracer. Not the boots. Not the ring or the necklace. Definitely not the bow. Just the bracer.”

“Oh, I… suppose I never really thought about it.”

“Just don’t flaunt it around people and you’ll be fine. Now let’s get this hike over with. I want a warm meal and a cold beer before we head to bed. It’ll be another early day, tomorrow.”

Jensen just sighed. When will this nightmare end?