Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 26-30 (Patreon)

Chapter 26

10 years ago…

“My feet hurt. Can we take a break?”

“We’re almost there! Come on, another five minutes.”

Velik scowled at Chalin. “You’ve said that four times now.”

They’d been exploring the forest regularly all summer, oftentimes going on overnight camping trips so they could push deeper. At first, it had just been to see what was out there and because they didn’t have a lot of responsibilities at home yet. Their parents had encouraged them, hoping it would lead to an uncommon or even rare hunter-type class when they got older.

Then Chalin had come up with what had seemed like a good idea at first, but which Velik was rapidly becoming less and less enthused about. Chalin had revealed his master plan last night: to go see the ruins of the old dungeon for themselves. The reality of that had turned out to be just endless walking, with no idea how far they had to go or even if they were going in the right direction.

Just as Velik was about to open his mouth to demand a break this time, no more excuses, Chalin let out an excited yell and surged through the brush. A branch snapped back behind him, almost striking Velik across the face and causing him to let out an annoyed huff. That was forgotten a moment later when he saw what had gotten his friend so excited.

“There it is!” Chalin said, practically dancing in place as he gestured wildly ahead. A whole town was sitting ahead of them, but one made of stone instead of wood. A slope ran down a hundred feet to the edge of the first moss-stained building, one of a dozen that they could see from their vantage point.

Exhaustion forgotten, Velik jumped ahead and started running down the hill. “Hey!” Chalin yelped as he scrambled to catch up. “Don’t go in without me!”

  *

The upper ruins looked just like Velik remembered, except with another decade’s worth of moss coating them. That didn’t really make much of a difference, considering they’d had fifty years of growth before he’d seen them as a child.

Somehow, no trees or bushes grew between those houses, though the old cobblestone streets had long since been lost under a layer of dirt. The streets had been cleaner in the middle of the ruins when he’d been young, but time continued to bury the place. He imagined that one day the buildings would fall down or the dirt would pile up so high that the whole thing would be just another large hill covered in trees.

Today was not that day, however, so Velik started down the hill to begin his search for Torwin. He’d been hoping to avoid the conversation, but bringing the mana compass to the dungeon hadn’t done anything except change which direction the arrow pointed – away from the dungeon, for whatever that was worth.

The dungeon was a lot bigger than the buildings on the surface. Velik actually wasn’t entirely clear on why they were considered part of the whole thing, but everyone agreed that they were. Apparently, they’d been alive back before the core was broken. Monsters had spawned in the buildings, woven out of dungeon magic and ready to tear would-be hunters apart. Maybe that’s all it takes. But then, isn’t the whole forest basically one big dungeon if the only criteria is ‘makes monsters?’

Whatever the reason, the dungeon was weirdly empty. It was supposed to be dead, but not even animals made their homes in the ruins. Velik walked through it, heading for the well in the middle of town, and peered at the moss. It was whole, completely untouched by human hands. He paused to peer briefly at the open doorway of the nearest building, as empty of anything except for dust as it had always been.

  *

Velik scraped off a chunk of moss from the wall next to the door. “This one’s empty, too,” he yelled out. Chalin was in one of the other houses, looking for any sort of treasure they could take home with them. They probably wouldn’t find anything, but it was still fun to search.

He walked around the building toward the next one, only to fall back with a frightened screech when something leaped out at him. “Blehugahra!” Chalin bellowed, arms raised over his head as he loomed over Velik.

“Don’t do that!” Velik scolded, his breath coming heavy. “What if I’d stabbed you?”

“Nah, I’d just dodge out of the way,” Chalin said. He laughed and gestured behind him. “Those three are all empty, too. This place is lame. I thought there’d be something here, but…”

“There probably was, but other people already cleaned the place out,” Velik said.

“Probably.” Chalin nodded along. “That’s why we need to go somewhere adults couldn’t fit, so we can find the treasures they missed.”

“Like where?” Velik asked. As far as he could tell, they’d explored the whole dungeon between the two of them.

“Like there.”

  *

It was a little stone well, three feet high and two feet across. It had a little roof with a metal chain hanging down from it that might have connected to a bucket once upon a time. Or maybe not. It’s not like this was ever a real village. Maybe it’s always been a rusted chain leading down to a dry well since the day the dungeon formed.

The caves at the bottom of the well were the true dungeon. They weren’t really that big, but it was too dark to see unaided. That wasn’t an issue for Velik anymore, and he slipped over the lip to drop thirty feet to the stone. Other than the soft scrape of his boots touching down, everything was silent. His eyes traveled the length of the cave, noting the spot where he’d once piled up wood to make a fire so he could explore, now as bare and empty as everywhere else.

There were three exits, all of them leading to long, looping tunnels that wrapped around each other. Occasional intersections made the whole thing confusing to navigate, so much so that he’d wasted hours walking in circles back when he was younger. Eventually, they’d found the bottom, and Velik easily navigated his way back there now.

He’d last seen the door three years ago. It hadn’t changed one bit, except that it was propped open by a chunk of stone that hadn’t been there before. That’s a good sign for Torwin and his apprentice still being here.

The door itself was tall and narrow, or at least it seemed that way. In truth, it was just as wide as any average door, but being over ten feet tall made it appear stretched and distorted. It had no designs or handle, just a smooth indent with a lip about halfway up for him to curl his fingers around and pull. Otherwise, it was a featureless white slab of stone with hidden hinges to complete the illusion.

Velik cursed the day they’d discovered this door.

  *

It took the both of them working together, with Velik standing on his toes to get a grip on the indent and Chalin with his arms around Velik’s waist pulling him backward, but they got the door open. It swung open silently, ponderously, like it was reluctant to reveal whatever secrets were hiding beyond it.

The boys weren’t going to be denied by a rock that just happened to be extraordinarily tall, however. They’d already wedged their makeshift torches upright in a small cluster of nearby rocks, but both of them scrambled to claim the lights as soon as the door swung open.

“What happened here?” Velik asked in a hushed whisper as he surveyed the hall. At fifty feet long, maybe more, and half as wide, it was the biggest single room he’d ever seen. A series of pillars ran down the length of the hall on either side, each one thick enough that he couldn’t have gotten his arms around them if he’d tried.

It was also completely wrecked. Half the pillars had been knocked down and now resembled nothing so much as a line of crooked, jagged teeth. The ones that were still upright had chunks missing from them and a spider web of cracks covering their surface. He was sure that a single good shove was all it would take to tip them over.

“Guardian chamber,” Chalin said with a grin. “There must have been an epic battle in here. That means the core is nearby.”

“Was nearby. It’s dead now.”

“Right. It should still be here, right? They’re too big to haul away.”

Velik shrugged. “I guess? That’s what Dad said when I asked him.”

They held the torches up, really just sticks that were burning faster than Velik liked. But they had a whole bundle of them and plenty of time to get back up to the bonfire they’d built at the exit, so it was fine. Even if they somehow lost their light, they could get back by touch now that they’d explored the tunnels.

The far end of the room had another doorway, similar to the one they’d just opened, except it was two doors set into one frame this time. A line of symbols had been carved across their surface, smoothly transitioning from one door to the other at the seam.

“Magic letters,” Chalin said. “This has to be the place.”

“How do you know they’re magic?”

“How do you know they’re not?”

They pried the doors open and walked into the core room. Just like they’d expected, it was an inert pillar with a huge slice missing from it. The stories said that a living dungeon core was a brilliant glowing gem the size of a tree, filled to the brim with magic, but once they were destroyed, they turned to rock.

“This is a lot less exciting than I was expecting,” Velik said.

“Yeah.” Chalin sighed and peered around. “What a letdown. But, hey, what’s that over there?”

  *

Velik heard soft snoring in the core room and spotted the tripwire strung across the floor halfway through, just a simple, hair-thin cord wrapped around two pillars with a tiny bell hanging from it off to the side. He stepped over the tripwire with a slight smile, not that it mattered. Even with the [Silent] enchantment on his boots and his [Stealth] skill, somebody heard him coming.

“Was wondering if I’d see you here,” Torwin said as he stepped through the door. “Thought maybe not after you ran off the other way in the forest last week, but I guess I was wrong.”

Chapter 27

Velik halted twenty feet away from the old monster hunter. Torwin was holding his bow in his hand and had a quiver of arrows at his hip, but he wasn’t making any threatening moves with them yet. That hardly reassured Velik, however, as there was no doubt in his mind that the old man could have half a dozen arrows in the air in less than a second.

“I had something to do,” he said, “but I ran into a problem. You were the only one I could think of who might be able to help.”

“I’m a bit busy with my own work right now.”

“This won’t take long,” Velik said. “I just need to ask a question. We could do it in less time than it takes to finish a meal.”

Torwin chuckled. “I suppose that’s fair, considering how I ambushed you during yours. Alright, what do you want to know?”

The mana compass was sitting in Velik’s pocket where he could easily access it. He’d been taking it out and studying it as he traveled, trying to figure out what correlation there was between the direction the arrow pointed and that particular stretch of the deep wood. Fishing it out now, he held it up for Torwin to see.

“Can you explain how to use this?”

“A mana compass?” Torwin asked in surprise. “What do you have that for?”

“To look for mana.”

“Obviously. Why do you need to find mana?”

“To see if the monsters are coming from where the mana is.”

Velik had no idea if it would work, but he didn’t have a better idea and he needed to try something new. Besides, he’d already wasted all his decarmas on the compass, not having realized it had a bunch of customizations and no instruction manual.

“Is there… a reason you think there’s some connection between pockets of mana and monsters appearing?” Torwin asked slowly, a thoughtful frown on his face as he absently scratched at his beard.

“I think champion elites can only claim an arena where there is enough mana for them to grow from their seeds. If that’s true for champions, why can’t it be true for weaker monsters?”

“What? No, that’s not true at all,” Torwin said. “Champion elites are created by dungeons to guard specific areas. The dungeon itself feeds the seed the mana it needs to grow into a monster. Truthfully, that’s how it makes all of its monsters. That’s why everyone’s first guess about the rising monster population was that this old place was active again.”

“But it isn’t, is it?” Velik asked. Nothing looked different from the last time he’d been here, but he hadn’t gotten a look at the core yet.

“No. It’s definitely dead. There are no monsters coming out of this dungeon. I don’t think you’re going to find any random mana pockets out in the forest that are spawning monsters, either. But… hmm… this dungeon might be dead. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another one somewhere else.”

Velik looked down at the compass in his hand. “Dungeons produce mana, so this could lead me to it if there is one?”

“In theory,” Torwin said. “It depends on the range of the compass. There are a million acres of untamed forest to comb through, so it could still be years of searching. Can I see it?”

Velik tossed the compass over, and Torwin caught it easily. He let out a low whistle as soon as he looked at it and shook his head. “Spent a good chunk of decarmas on this thing, huh? I don’t even know what half these runes mean.” He flipped it over and looked at the ruby set into the back. “Did you even attune yourself to this thing yet?”

“Attune myself? Like I did with my spear?” Velik hadn’t realized he’d need to. He’d been thinking of it more like a potion, just a tool that he used when he needed it.

“Exactly. Right now, it’s just pointing at whatever the closest source of mana it can detect that’s within the default threshold and parameters. You’ll need to attune yourself in order to change those.”

“What do the symbols you understand mean?”

Torwin shrugged. “I know this top slot is for environmental or living mana, maybe a few other things. I used one once when I was hunting down a wyvern out by Mestia, but someone else configured the compass for me so that it would exclude anything under a monster of a certain level of strength. Took three tries, but my team got the wyvern in the end.”

“What about the rest?” Velik asked.

“More filters for what kind of mana you’re looking for. I think this one is for how chaotic the mana is here on the left side, and the opposite one measures an elemental affinity. I’m not sure about the rest.”

With another shrug, Torwin tossed the compass back to Velik. He studied it for a moment, committing the symbols—runes, he called them—to memory. Now that he knew he needed to attune to the compass like any other piece of gear. Should have thought to do that, myself. I can’t believe I wasted days walking out here for a thirty-second conversation about this thing.

Something must have been showing on his face, because Torwin said, “If it makes you feel any better, when you’re done with that thing, you can probably sell it at the second-hand market in Cravel. Depending on how good you are at haggling, you can get at least half what you paid for it back.”

“I’ve never been to Cravel,” Velik said.

“Three hundred miles south of Alnsberth. Just stick to the road and follow the signs at intersections. The speed you move at, I'm sure you could be there in under a week.”

If it was open road, Velik was guessing more like two days, especially if he started the journey at sundown and didn’t stop for sleep. Of course, once he got there, he’d be completely out of his element, having never set foot in a town with a population bigger than five hundred.

“Thanks. I’ll consider it,” he said.

“Mind if I ask you a question, too?” Torwin said suddenly.

“I don’t promise an answer.”

The old hunter barked out a laugh, loud enough that someone stirred in the core room. They both glanced back through the open door and he said, “My apprentice.”

“Jensen,” Velik said.

“Yes. You know him?” Torwin blinked in surprise.

“No. Heard you say his name a few weeks ago.”

“When did you… never mind. I was hoping you could show me where you found the class orb when you were a kid.”

“Sure, it’s back behind you.”

“In the core room?”

“No, behind one of the walls.”

“The walls?” Torwin glanced back over his shoulder through the open door. “How in the…”

“There are plenty of cracks. We were seven. It wasn’t hard to squeeze through one.”

“Okay, but why is there another room behind this one?”

“I never thought to ask,” Velik confessed.

“Hidden treasure room, maybe. But the team that cleared it should have found it. And if they didn’t, there would have been more than just a single class orb in there,” Torwin muttered to himself. He shot a look at Velik, then added, “If it even was a class orb.”

“If that’s all, I have my own work to get back to,” Velik said. “Thank you for the help.”

“Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like to walk with you for a bit. I want to discuss coordinating our work to resolve this whole monster problem.”

“Coordinating?” Velik repeated. “Why?”

“Look, we’re obviously both trying to do the same thing, here. Sharing some information can’t hurt, right? You probably know a lot about the area that I’m still getting caught up on. I bet I know a few tricks you haven’t thought up yourself yet. We can help each other out here.”

“I don’t like working with other people,” Velik said flatly.

Torwin nodded along. “And I get that. I’m not asking you to follow me around and take orders. I’d just like to avoid duplicating effort. The faster we get this infestation cleared out, the better it is for everyone.”

It made sense, but Velik was hesitant to trust someone so strong. Even this conversation was a risk, though less of one with the moon in the sky. If Torwin did attack him, he was confident he could escape and outrun the older hunter. He’d made sure to keep some distance between them and his back lined up with the exit. There were enough intact pillars to give him some cover if it came down to it.

“I don’t think there’s anything more to talk about. I’m going to hunt for sources of strong mana. If this ends the problem, you’ll know for yourself soon enough. If not, then I’ll think of something else to try.”

“Yeah, I thought that’d be your answer. Kid, you’ve lived a hard life and relied on nothing but yourself. I respect that. And you’re strong, so I’d say you’ve done alright. But you need to learn to accept help, and how to trust other people.”

“Thank you for the advice,” Velik said as politely as he could manage. Then he turned and started walking away.

Thankfully, Torwin just let a heavy sigh escape his lips before walking back into the core chamber. A few minutes later, Velik ran between two buildings and out into the trees, leaving the dungeon far behind. The whole time, he looked over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being pursued, and he spent the rest of the night using every trick he knew to obscure his trail to keep from being followed.

Now I just hope that he doesn’t have his own mana compass that will point him in the same direction as mine. No way to avoid that, though, not and still learn what I needed to.

Hopefully, the gamble had paid off.

Chapter 28

Torwin scratched at his beard as he paced back and forth. That kid needs some serious therapy. I mean, I don’t blame him. What that town did to him was atrocious. It’s no wonder he doesn’t trust anyone and spooks like a startled rabbit every time he sees me.

“You alright?” Jensen asked.

His apprentice was sitting up on his bedroll, a blanket still draped across his legs and bunched up around his waist. His bow was propped up against the wall and his armor sat in a pile next to him. Admittedly, it would only take a few seconds to slip it on, but a few seconds was the difference between life and death in an ambush.

“I can’t believe you slept through someone walking within twenty feet of you. And then you missed half the conversation!”

“I knew you were talking to someone,” Jensen said hotly. “I figured if you needed me, you’d say so.”

More like you were too lazy to get out of bed, Torwin thought sourly. And you were doing so well this last week. Maybe not [Ranger] good, but still, better.

“The Black Fang paid us a visit,” he told his apprentice.

“That guy? I didn’t miss much then.”

The jealousy was obvious, and that was at least partly Torwin’s fault. He’d let slip how impressive he’d found the boy’s performance against that wind-shaping elite, and Jensen had taken that personally. A little rivalry could inspire students to reach for greater heights, but in this case, the difference in skill was too great. Jensen just wasn’t at the Black Fang’s level, unique class and actual level notwithstanding.

Without his daddy’s money, he’s not even on the level of other hunters who are actually at his level.

“He had a mana compass and an idea about tracking areas of high mana density to look for the cause of the monster infestation.”

Jensen yawned and stretched, then clambered to his feet. “You think that’d work?” he asked as he slipped his enchanted leather tunic over his head.

“I don’t know. Depends on how well he can use the compass. Even if he finds high density areas, that doesn’t mean the monsters are spawning there.”

“Might be worth looking into anyway. It’s not like we found anything useful here.”

While Jensen was getting dressed and stowing everything away in his pack, Torwin did a lap around the room and peered through every crack more than a few inches wide. The east and west walls showed nothing but dirt, and the north wall was in good enough condition that it didn’t really have any cracks at all.

I should have had him point it out before he left. How annoying. Where did you go when you were a child? There’s nothing here.

“What are you doing?” Jensen asked.

“The Black Fang told me he crawled through a crack in this room as a child, that he and his friend found the class orb that gave him his class on the other side. None of these cracks have anything behind them, though.”

“Maybe the room collapsed later.”

“Maybe,” Torwin said, but he wasn’t convinced. What am I missing?

He crouched down, trying to get himself at eye level with a child. This is the angle you saw the world from. What did you see that I don’t?

But there was nothing, just four walls, the door, and the broken dungeon core. The pillar was dark and lifeless, unmarred but for the huge slice taken out of it five feet up from the floor. It was easy enough to see what had happened, too. Someone with a ridiculously strong class had struck the core with a horizontal swipe of some heavy weapon, probably an axe or pick, and sliced a chunk two feet wide out of the stone. It had fractured into a thousand pieces and left pock marks all over the far wall.

Dungeon cores were actually remarkably fragile, barely stronger than regular stone without mana to reinforce them. Teams usually exhausted the core by killing every monster it could produce, then destroyed it in a single blow, exactly like what had happened here.

Still crouching, he scooted forward a few steps. Nothing. He scanned the room again, but the new angle didn’t help. There was nothing to see, nothing except—

“The core!” he said.

“What about it?” Jensen asked, torn between confusion and laughter at Torwin’s antics.

“Hah! I was right.”

Torwin leaned down and looked at the damaged spot, specifically at the top of it. Anyone over five feet tall would have missed it, but to a pair of inquisitive children, it would have been the first thing they saw. Extending up through the pillar itself was a crack, a foot wide and almost twice as long. He stuck his head into the gap in the core and looked straight up.

“There’s a room above this one,” he said. “When they broke the core, it must have split it all the way up the center. Nobody else saw it because they were too tall. Or maybe they did see it and just didn’t care. But those kids saw it, and they climbed up there.”

It looked tight, but Torwin was flexible and, if he did get stuck, his physical was high enough to break stone. He’d be fine. “Watch the door for me,” he told Jensen, not that he expected something to burst through, but he’d be vulnerable and it was best to plan for unlikely surprises.

Setting his bow aside and unstrapping his quiver, Torwin started to wriggle his way into the crack.

  *

Chalin was the first one through, with Velik right behind him. In hindsight, he should have waited a minute so that all the pebbles resting in the crack that Chalin had kicked down wouldn’t have fallen on him. He’d been too impatient, even after the first one had hit him on the head, and he’d paid for it.

“Sorry,” Chalin said.

“It’s alright as long as we finally get some treasure.”

Getting a lit stick to the top had been the hardest part, but they’d managed to set one on fire and throw it all the way to the top without it falling back down on them. Twenty feet didn’t feel like a lot, but it had been a tricky shot to make. Not willing to give up, they’d tried dozens of times before managing to make it work.

Eagerly, Velik snatched up the fitfully burning stick and held it to another one he’d carried up with him. It caught and he handed it to Chalin so they could look around. “Well, it certainly looks impressive,” the boy said.

The walls were covered in intricate grooves like some sort of massive spider’s web, except they curved around and swooped through each other instead of going straight. The grooves continued across the floor, all eventually leading to the center of the room where they’d climbed up. “What do you think it does?” Velik asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing now, I guess. Maybe back when the dungeon was alive, this had a purpose. Now it’s just a fun design.”

“But no treasure.”

“No,” Chalin agreed. He peered around, holding his makeshift torch up and scanning the room. “Nothing but a bunch of weird lines.”

“Wait, there’s something!”

Velik hurried forward and scooped up a stone off the floor. Unlike the rest of the ruined dungeon, it was glossy and smooth, a perfect orb of glass. “Wow!” Chalin said. “That looks expensive. Still think this trip was a waste of time?"

"How much do you think it’s worth?” Velik asked as he peered at it. Light reflected from the torch in his other hand, seeming almost to dance inside the orb like it was alive.

“A lot. Here, let me see.”

Chalin went to claim the orb to investigate, but the instant it touched his hands, it formed a bridge between the two boys. At that same moment, light flared inside it, no mere reflection, and words appeared in Velik’s mind.

[Parameters have been met. Guardian role selected.]

[User has not reached maturation.]

[User’s racial profile will be updated to accommodate class selection.]

“What’s happening?” Velik yelled, or at least he tried to. His body was locked into place, rigid and stiff with the orb halfway between his hand and Chalin’s. No words came from his mouth as the seconds stretched on.

A wave of pain rolled through Velik’s body, like he was holding his hand too close to the fire, except it spread to cover his whole arm, then his chest. In an instant, no part of him didn’t feel like it was burning, but he couldn’t scream. Then the light winked out as suddenly as it had appeared, and everything went dark.

  *

Torwin crouched down and picked up a glass orb, four inches wide and split down the middle. One side was perhaps slightly larger, but he’d need one of those fancy merchant scales to weigh each piece to know for certain. He wasn’t too worried about that particular detail, however.

Holding the two pieces together, he turned it to look at the orb from different angles. No matter how he looked at it, he was sure of one simple truth. The problem was that it just didn’t make any sense to him.

“Whatever this thing is, it’s not a class orb.”

Chapter 29

The mana compass was far too complicated, in Velik’s opinion, and he didn’t understand why it needed to be attuned to him in order to function. It didn’t seem to do anything different from when he’d first acquired it, other than that he could now rotate the symbols by prodding them. That caused the arrow to flicker in seemingly random directions, but without knowing what the symbols actually represented for sure, it wasn’t helpful.

He set it to ‘monster’ and started following the compass with the hope that it would lead him toward the closest mana with a high amount of mana concentrated in it. In that regard, he was disappointed to find a weak level 27 a mile away. This’ll make killing them more efficient, I suppose, but it doesn’t really solve my problem, he thought as he stared down at the arrow, which had shifted direction to point slightly off to the right the instant the monster had died. Maybe if I adjust this part here…

A bit of experimentation of the next few hours taught him a bit about how to set the threshold, which wasn’t based on a monster’s level, but rather by how much mana it had in it. As far as he could tell, the more radically mutated from the base animal the monster was, the stronger its mana signature was. Presumably, those monsters that were born from pure mana would be prime targets for the compass.

What he really wanted to find was another champion elite. Velik was hoping they’d lead him to Chalin. Somehow, his childhood friend had lived through that night. For all Velik knew, that monster might have been Chalin, transformed by the same thing that had turned him into a Duskbound and granted him his class.

If that was the case, and Chalin was in fact the source of all monsters, then Velik had to admit he had no idea what the class orb had given his friend. As far as he knew, people couldn’t make monsters. Even if they could, they certainly couldn’t make hundreds of thousands of them.

Velik spent the night following the compass and messing with its settings. Slowly, his decarama count started to build back up, at least enough for him to start looking at purchasing some replacement potions for emergencies. The compass didn’t do all that much to speed things up, not when the monsters were dense enough that he could move from one to another just by following his own senses, but he was slowly getting the device tuned to lead him to bigger and stronger prey, which meant more money.

Eventually, the compass led him to a peculiar stand of trees, all planted in evenly spaced rows running in parallel. Well, if the compass is right, there’s a monster here right in the middle of all this. And considering how damn weird this looks, I’d say I’m about to walk into a fight with another champion.

The question of why the champions had arenas out in random stretches of the deep wood was not lost on Velik, but he didn’t have an answer. All he could do was follow the trail and hope it led him where he wanted to go. Unfortunately, to do that, he needed to kill the champion elite hiding in the strange grove so that the compass would point the way to the next one.

He’d gained a new skill, a few ranks, and a level since he’d fought his first champion. Beyond that, he had weeks of additional experience fighting monsters that were a higher level than him, something he hadn’t had to do since he was a boy just starting out. Picking a fight was a gamble, but so was everything else he did. His whole life had been a series of calculated risks, so it was hard to be scared of the latest one on the stack.

His spear slithered down his arm and solidified into its combat shape and he stepped out into an open row. Nothing happened immediately, certainly nothing as viscerally violent as a ring of fire springing up around the grove. Everything was quiet, but it was the natural silence of a forest, comfortable and filled with the chirpings of bugs and the rustle of leaves as birds flitted through them.

Where are you? Come on out, I know you’re here.

His eyes flicked back and forth, looking for some signs of the monster his compass had told him was lurking in the grove. Just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there, of course. He relied on his other senses to get a feel for what was going on around him in an environment so heavy with visual obstructions, and they weren’t giving him anything.

Velik came to a stop in the middle of the grove and turned in a circle. Tree. Tree. Tree. No undergrowth. Branches are all at least ten feet off the ground. Trunks are all the same size. No bugs on them anywhere. No animals at all. Does the monster eat them, or do they know better than to come here? That’d be—what was that?

His eyes had almost slid past a gossamer line anchored between two trees at the far end of the grove. That hadn’t been there before. Spider webbing? Hidden spiders? That line is too thin to be made by anything big. There’s no movement, but a horde of normal spiders could hide easily.

If the champion was some sort of sentient colony of spiders, this was going to be a messy fight. Velik was specialized for killing large, singular monsters, but he was tough and fast enough that a cloud of biting insects was generally more of an annoyance than a true threat. When that cloud was composed of champion elite monsters, he suspected he’d encounter a few surprises.

He completed another circuit and found a new line of spider silk between two nearby trees. The monsters were boxing him in, cutting off his options, and he hadn’t even spotted them yet. He needed to view the scene from a different angle, literally, so he took off in a burst, traveling fifty feet in a quarter of a second and spinning to see the backs of the trees where the spiders were lurking.

Except, there were no spiders. There wasn’t anything at all. Are they invisible? If so, then he’d bitten off more than he could chew. This kind of champion would require some sort of mage class capable of splashing fire or acid all over the grove, something that was completely outside his capabilities. Retreat was the only viable option.

Something flashed by him, and a line of burning fire drew itself across his back.

Velik spun, his spear whipping around to catch his attacker, but it was gone. Only the hot blood seeping down his back proved there’d been anything at all. It hurt far more than it had a right to, so much so that Velik’s mind immediately jumped to some sort of poison. That would be on theme for a spider monster.

He ignored the pain and kept up a slow rotation while moving closer to the edge of the grove. As far as he could tell, there was nothing keeping him from fleeing this time, and he’d clearly run into a bad matchup for his skill set. It wasn’t often he was forced to run, but he wasn’t stupid enough to let a little pride keep him in a bad situation.

He saw a streak of black out of the corner of his eye and turned, his spear leading, to slash at it. Despite his speed, it was gone before he could bring it fully into his range of vision.

Not invisible, just ridiculously fast.

This time, he wasn’t distracted by a fresh injury. He heard the soft crunch of something hitting bark on the tree next to him, but it was gone before he could spot it. [Predator’s Visage] was giving him nothing to work with, either. Whatever this spider monster was, he needed to get out of its hunting ground.

Still spinning in a slow circle to watch around him, Velik started walking toward the edge of the grove. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have sworn he was alone. Just going by the size of this gash, it’s got to be bigger than a regular insect. Not a swarm, then. No way a thousand spiders that come up to my knee are hiding here. But, if it’s just one… Where is it?

Something pressed into the side of his leg, just below the top of his boot. Velik froze and looked down to see a hair-thin slice in the leather and a line of spider silk pressed up against it. It was barely even bowed out, certainly not enough to snap it. Cautiously, Velik pulled his leg back and dipped his spear down to slice through the line. It parted, but scored a line across the spearhead.

How sharp is this webbing? This is insane!

He glanced back up at the edge of the grove and frowned to see no less than a dozen strands running from tree to tree in his way. The monster had predicted his exit path and taken steps to block him off. He could cut through them, but not without damaging his weapon. The [Mending] enchantment would fix that if he gave it enough time, but he might not live that long if he rendered the spear useless in the middle of a fight.

Shifting directions and making sure to walk sideways so he could keep an eye on his path while watching for monsters was difficult, but Velik made it work. That was how he spotted the line of spider silk zipping through the air to settle in place, then go taut against the other tree. Something black and green darted up the trunk and into the canopy, silent as a breath of air and far faster.

Found you.

Chapter 30

The spider was bigger than he was expecting. Its exact size was still obscured, but it had to be at least two feet long, not including the legs, which were thin and delicate. Somehow, it had enough agility to slip up and down trees and across branches without so much as shaking them. That probably meant it was extremely light in addition to being adept at distributing its weight across all of its limbs. There could be some magic involved in the process to account for its incredible speed, or that might just be raw stats.

Either way, it was blocking his escape routes. The idea of trying to navigate his way through strands sharp enough to cut through leather that brushed up against it while simultaneously fending off a lightning strike in arachnid form did not appeal to him. That meant he needed to find a different way out of the grove, or he had to kill the champion.

Hard to fight a monster I can’t keep track of, he thought as he scoured the branches overhead for even the smallest signs of movement. It wasn’t a good strategy, not against something so quick and nimble. However the monster was doing it, its movements were practically undetectable.

Velik was usually the one doing the ambushing when he found a monster, but there’d been occasions where he’d been caught by surprise back before he’d forged [Predator’s Visage] out of its disparate skills. Most of them had been sensory skills, but they also included one called [Ambush Tactics] that helped him pick out vulnerable targets and find places to hide while he waited to strike.

Except I don’t need that now. I’m the prey this time. Well, two can play at this game. Maybe I can’t find it, but with [Stealth], I can make it harder for the champion to find me.

A cat and mouse game with two cats wasn’t what Velik had been planning when he’d stepped into the grove, but if that was what it took to kill the champion, he’d do it. [Predator’s Visage] had only gotten a glancing look at it, but that had been enough to confirm how dangerous it was. He could kill it if he could catch up to it.

Fading back behind a tree to break line of sight from where he’d last seen the spider, he leaped up into the branches and paused to listen. There was nothing but the breeze in the trees and some bugs in the background. A bird flew over the grove, something blue with black bars across its feathers. It got halfway across before it suddenly burst into a cloud of blood and meat.

The blood ran down an otherwise invisible silken line that had slashed through the bird. Territorial little bastard, aren’t you? But that was a mistake. Now I know where you are.

He crept out on the branch, his balance perfect to keep it from shifting as he moved. It was thick enough to hold his weight, but he could only get a few feet from the trunk before that changed. That was enough to give him an opening to leap to the next branch without touching anything, though. After shrinking his spear down to something only two feet long, he made the jump. [Stealth] flared in his mind, guiding his body to keep him quiet as he touched down and the wood absorbed his momentum.

It shifted ever so slightly, just enough to rustle the leaves once. It could have been a stray breeze, but Velik was counting on the champion to know it wasn’t. He knew where it was. Now he knew where it was going. All he needed to do was adjust his position to catch it on its way in. To that end, he dropped lightly to the ground and ghosted two trees over in the row.

That was the dangerous part. He couldn’t assume the spider would move in a straight line, but if it did, the trees would block its line of sight. If it angled in from the left, he’d also be fine. If it came from the right side, though, it would definitely see him. Two in three chance this works.

He jumped up to his new perch, his spear ready in his hands. If he was right, the spider would pass right in front of him on its way to ambush him. If not, he was about to get hit again. But he knew where his blind spots were, and there were only two possible angles the spider could hit him. Both of them required the spider to either circle the entire grove or to pass through other areas he could see in order to reach him.

It was a faint rustling that saved his life. Whether the monster had some way to sense his position or had just known enough to eliminate the other possibilities and predict where Velik had hidden himself—or had just gotten lucky and cut across the grove at the one angle that Velik couldn’t hide from—it had decided to avoid his trap altogether and had taken to the tops of the trees. The canopy hid it, but not even its skills could keep it from shifting branches with its weight.

Velik looked up just in time to see it dropping down from above. For a fraction of a second, he got a good look at it – eight thin, tapered legs with barbs and hooks at the joints and what looked like dagger tips at the end, a segmented body of green and black covered in fine, spiky hair, and a pair of wickedly curving fangs with a horror-show of a mouth between them. Its eyes were a ring around the front half of its head, all of them dull and black, the passionless eyes of a predator.

Then he realized the spider wasn’t falling. It had flung itself off a branch, likely what had caused it to rustle, and it was moving far, far faster than merely falling could account for. There was no time to bring his spear around, not before the monster hit him. And he did not want to be trapped between the legs of a spider that could give him a full-body hug, so he did the only thing he could do.

Velik threw himself backwards off the tree branch. Other, smaller branches struck him on the way down, most of them snapping under his weight, but a few of the larger ones smacking and jostling him. At the same time, his spear grew another two feet and the tip sharpened into something similar to a sword’s blade.

Pain shot through him as he struck the ground, back first, right where the spider had cut him before. He ignored it and readied the spear to drive it right through the monster’s abdomen when it tried to land on him. It was in a freefall now; it couldn’t possibly avoid being impaled.

Inches away from contact, it was suddenly pulled sideways, where it did an impressively acrobatic flip in midair to land on the side of a tree. Already situated, all eight of its legs propelled it up into the canopy and out of sight.

No, you don’t! Velik jumped to his feet, intent on chasing the spider down. He froze halfway there, just barely in time to avoid wrapping the slicing line of spider silk it had used to pull itself out of the way of his spear around his face. By the time he’d slipped around it, the champion was gone again.

Damn it! Where’d you go, you little shit?

This thing was the ultimate ambush predator, and if he was going to kill it, he needed to start thinking like it. He’d tried to set a trap, but had failed to think in three dimensions. This was a champion elite. The grove was as much a part of the battle as the spider itself. So, I’m a giant, murderous spider intent on killing the intruder in my territory. I want to ambush the human, and I’m light enough to move completely silently anywhere but the very top of the trees. I also shit out silk lines strong enough to hold my weight and capable of scoring enchanted steel.

He had to keep moving to avoid getting caught in the spider’s net, and it knew that. It was probably predicting his moves because it knew which directions it had already cut him off in. A damn spider was outthinking him no matter what he did. As Velik slunk through the grove, pulling hard on [Stealth] to keep him hidden, he realized that he was never going to spot the spider before it attacked. It was too good at what it did.

He needed to outflank it instead of waiting for it to come to him. There was no turning its ambush back on it, not as quickly as it moved and not without the ability to actually hide. The only way to win was to do exactly what it was doing to him. How does the predator move? And how does the prey protect itself when it can’t see the predator, but it knows something is there anyway?

By being acutely aware of its own weaknesses. By knowing where it’s most vulnerable, and ensuring that those vulnerabilities can’t be exploited. The prey that survives does so by being prepared for the predator to attack long before the predator even shows up.

It was something that seemed so obvious in retrospect that Velik couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. Too many years of playing the predator had blinded him to the opposite side of the cycle. But he knew what to do now. It was just a matter of doing it.

[Stealth has advanced to rank 9.]

[Stealth has been folded into Predator’s Visage.]

[Predator’s Visage has become Apex Hunter.]

[Apex Hunter set to rank 1.]