Writathon project: Duskbound Chapters 38-39 (Patreon)

Author's Note: Sorry, I didn't do any writing over the Thanksgiving holiday and am just now getting some work done. I should have another four or five chapters by Tuesday or Wednesday.

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Chapter 38

The parlor looked a lot like the common room, with an old, scuffed table in the center flanked by six chairs. A fieldstone fireplace dominated the back wall, and there was a faded painting of a young farming couple in front of a log house on the left wall. Whoever had done it wasn’t terribly talented, and years of neglect had left the paint flaking off around the edges.

“First of all, here’s this,” Torwin said. He handed over a pouch similar to the one that already hung from Velik’s belt. The primary difference was that the inside had been fitted with some sort of padded wooden framework, sized to slot up to ten potion vials into. All of them were full. “Healing potions, at about fifty decarma a piece. They’re not as good as the system store’s, but they’re far more affordable.”

I can’t believe I wasted so many thousands of decarmas buying directly from the system over the years. I don’t even want to try to figure out how many I’ve used.

“Thank you,” Velik said woodenly as he accepted the pouch.

“Your compass, fully repaired, and with a field guide explaining how to use it,” Torwin said, passing him a small wooden box.

Inside was the promised compass and a folded over slip of paper. Velik skimmed it and saw it had directions for how to change settings, what each setting did, the maximum range, and warnings about various skills or natural phenomena that could block the compass from detecting things.

That would have been useful a week ago, but better late than never.

“And with that, I’d like the return of my compass,” Jensen said, holding out a hand. “And, er… I wouldn’t say no to copying those instructions, if you don’t mind.”

“No need for that,” Torwin told him with a chuckle. He pulled out a duplicate sheet of paper and slid it down the table to his apprentice. “I had the tinkerer make a second copy for you.”

It was good to have the compass back, and even better to finally know how to use it. He still didn’t understand the symbols, but he could match the drawings to the compass itself. That was good enough. Probably the most exciting setting he hadn’t realized existed was that the compass could extend its range in a specific direction by foregoing scanning everywhere else. That would allow him to focus his search to make sure he kept moving deeper into the wilderness as he hunted down the champions there.

“Now, as to the gear, here are some things that were sorely lacking from your kit,” Torwin said. He set a pack on the table and opened it up. “First, a shirt enchanted with [Mending] and [Warmth]. Obviously, you don’t want to wear it during the summer days, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how nice it’ll be to have in a month or two when the weather turns.”

That was all well and good, but it was a light blue that really didn’t blend in well with the shadows. [Stealth] might be gone, but it lived on in [Apex Hunter], and the skill was telling him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be doing himself any favors if he wore it. Something to wear when I sleep, I guess.

“Weather-resistant cloak,” Torwin said, passing over the next piece. “Also enchanted with [Mending], and sealed with oils to keep the rain off. Those aren’t magical, and if the cloak gets too damaged, you’ll need to reapply them. You know how to do that?”

“I do,” Velik said. He didn’t have the supplies for it, but he could get them locally when he needed them. More importantly, the cloak was a dark, mottled green that would blend perfectly with the forest right up until the snow started falling. After the season turned, he’d need new clothes anyway. His old set had barely survived last winter, thanks mostly to a frostfang howler that had ambushed him right about the same time the snow started to melt.

“As far as the fun stuff goes, I got about forty thousand decarmas for those two champion seeds. Most of that went into these two pieces. You said you wanted something that would boost your mystic stat up, and this is it.” It was an earring, a white gold cuff that had been burnished to keep it from reflecting light. Torwin handed it to him and said, “I recommend using something else to pierce the hole. If you try to use this, you’ll probably break it.”

“I will,” Velik promised. “What’s the bonus on it?”

“+15. And that’s all it’s got. It won’t resize or repair or clean itself. It’s pure stats, and it’s delicate. Watch you don’t take any blows to the side of the head or it might just break.”

That would certainly give him a sizable boost to the stat. More importantly, it would let Velik get a feel for exactly how useful mystic was with his new skill so he could decide if it was worth it to keep investing his free points into it. As long as the gains were enough to allow his phantasmal spears to pierce through the hides of deep wood monsters, he’d consider it worth the time and effort.

“You said there was a second piece?” Velik prompted.

“Yes. This is actually what I spent most of your money on. It wasn’t something you asked for, but once I explain what I learned, I think you’ll agree that you want it. Here, it’s an amulet that increases your resistance to mental intrusions.”

“Why would I need something like that?” Velik asked flatly as he eyed up the amulet Torwin was holding out to him. It looked like an old coin, an inch across and with a circle of the same kind of symbols the compass had. The coin sat inside a little steel wire mesh that was braided into the chain, itself also steel. He made no move to accept it.

“Correct me if I’ve made any mistakes in this sequence of events. When you were a child, you and your friend went into an old, destroyed dungeon and found a class orb. It granted you your unique class and changed your race, and your friend… If I’m understanding things correctly, you thought your friend died, killed by a monster.”

“He may have survived. The champion seeds were his before I killed the monsters that grew from them,” Velik said. “More likely, the class orb turned him into whatever that monster was just like it turned me into a duskbound.”

“My thoughts exactly, except for one thing. I found the orb after you came to the dungeon the other week, and it’s not a class orb. It’s way too big, class orbs don’t change races, and they don’t work on two people, then break. I took it with me and asked the guild archivist to look into it. If he’s right, what you two found was actually a dungeon seed.

“Normally, the seed grows into a core, and when that core is destroyed, the seed is destroyed with it. My first thought was that the team who’d originally broken the dungeon had made some kind of mistake, but when I looked into things, that theory doesn’t really fit. This thing looks like a dungeon seed, but it shouldn’t exist and even if it did, it shouldn’t have done what it did to you two.”

“It was from the dungeon core,” Jensen said. “You just told us that.”

“No, you don’t understand. You can’t get a seed back out of a core. That’s like prying an acorn back out of a fully grown oak. It just doesn’t work that way. It looks like a dungeon seed, but it can’t be from the dungeon.”

“What are you saying?” Velik asked. “That someone came to the dungeon after it was destroyed and put a new seed in it?”

“That’s a theory. Dungeon seeds are incredibly rare, but apparently, it’s possible to revive a dungeon by planting a new seed in the broken core. It wouldn’t be the same dungeon as before, but the new dungeon could cannibalize what’s left of the old one to speed up its growth. That explains how the seed got there, except that, again, a dungeon seed cannot do what happened to you.”

“Why not?” Jensen asked. “Other than that the guild doesn’t have any evidence that it’s happened before, what’s stopping it?”

Torwin shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just repeating what they told me. It looks like a dungeon seed, and we have a possible theory as to how it got there, but nothing should have happened when you picked it up. Everybody I described the situation to agreed that it should have been harmless to pick it up. Whatever caused your race to mutate into that subtype and granted you a class, it wasn’t the dungeon seed.”

“It has to be involved, right? I mean, this whole thing is too much of a coincidence otherwise,” Jensen pointed out. “No way something else transformed them at the same moment they find an abandoned dungeon seed inside an old, dead dungeon.”

“I agree, which brings me back to the amulet.” Torwin held it out again, and this time Velik hesitantly reached out to take it. “While I don’t think the dungeon seed is directly responsible for all of this, I do believe it influenced the change. New dungeons invariably have one thing in common: they have a core and they have a guardian. I think that your friend gained a class akin to the core, and that you gained one to fulfill the role of its guardian.

“If I’m right, then it’s entirely possible that the ‘core’ part of your bond will be able to control you should you ever get close to it. Gear that makes it harder to take over your mind can only help in a situation like that, no?”

Velik wasn’t sure he believed everything Torwin had just told him. There were a lot of guesses in there, and even if he accepted it all as fact, it raised even more questions. But if the veteran hunter had the right shape of things, then he’d made a good call with the amulet. Velik needed answers, and now he had the tools to find them.

He slipped the chain over his head and tucked the old coin under his shirt. “Thank you for sharing your theory with me,” he said. “I have work to do.”

Chapter 39

Velik left the Raven’s Nest ten minutes later, having waited just long enough to receive close to five thousand decarmas that had been left over from the sale of the two champion seeds and to deflect some questions about his plans. Torwin had strongly hinted about forming a partnership, and if it had been just him, Velik might have considered. The old monster hunter had the levels and skills to keep up, but his apprentice didn’t.

He'd restocked his supplies for his next trip north while he was waiting for Torwin to return, and thanks to both his time spent practicing with Jensen’s compass and the instructions Torwin’s artificer friend had given them, Velik was confident he could track down what he was looking for. He wanted a few hours of sleep before he left, but then he planned on finally ending this decade-long ordeal.

In a way, he was thankful that the monster population had exploded. If he’d been able to keep it under control forever, Velik probably would have spent his entire life going up and down a hundred mile stretch of wilderness frontier killing monsters over and over again, and the mere thought of that exhausted him in a way he hadn’t thought possible. It wasn’t the fatigue of a hard day’s work or of laying somewhere, wounded and waiting for the pain to stop. He couldn’t quite describe why he recoiled from the idea—he’d already been on the job for ten years, after all—but Velik very suddenly realized that he hated his life here.

It was the hot meals, the conversations with a person who didn’t look at him like he was scum, the answers the other hunters could just give him without any struggle to try to piece it together on his own. The actual monster killing part, he still enjoyed. Despite how he’d come by his class, he was grateful to have [The Black Fang]. But he was ready to do it somewhere else.

Not until this is done, though. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I’m going to find you, Chalin. We’re going to end this once and for all.

The plan was simple. If Chalin was making champion seeds somehow, then he had a class that was similar to a dungeon. The only difference was that instead of becoming tied to a single location and reclaiming those seeds if a team of hunters happened to come in contact with him, he’d left them scattered about the wilderness for some reason. Velik had no answers for that behavior, but he also didn’t much care what the reason was.

If he could follow that trail, then eventually, he’d find Chalin at the end of it. Once they met, one way or another, that would be the end of things. And then Velik would leave the frontier and maybe get to have something resembling a life. If he collected enough champion seeds, maybe he’d even end up rich enough to do whatever he wanted.

Velik settled into his hollowed-out den and went to sleep for what he hoped was the last time ever.

  *

Jensen watched the local kid walk out of the inn and rolled his eyes. “Melodramatic, isn’t he?”

“He’s young, but truthfully, he’s gone through a lot. He was essentially exiled from his home after his own actions caused monsters to attack it and orphan him. That’s a tough way to live as an adult, let alone when you’re seven. It’s obvious he’s completely lacking any sort of education or training. Everything he does, he’s making up as he goes along. Despite that, he’s managed to thrive as a hunter.”

Torwin lapsed into silence and stared at the door. Whatever else was on his mind, he apparently wasn’t in the mood to share. Jensen hoped he wasn’t thinking about trying to pick the kid up as another apprentice. That would violate the terms of the contract between the Hunters Guild and the Alderworth family.

He kind of got the impression that his master wasn’t thrilled about having Jensen as an apprentice anyway, though he wasn’t sure if that was because he didn’t like Jensen in particular or if he just didn’t want any apprentice. For as much as his father was paying to have the best the guild had to help him gain a rare or better class evolution, Jensen didn’t see what Torwin had to complain about. Completing this contract would set someone like him up for life.

This whole job was supposed to be a way for Jensen to practice some skills and pack on a few levels, but Torwin was more interested in Velik just because of his unique class. If he’d just taken the job seriously, they’d have cleaned out every monster within fifty miles of the towns by now. Instead, he was inventing some sort of mystery to keep in contact with Velik.

It was obvious that the dungeon seed the guy had found when he was a kid had screwed his life up, but there was no way his buddy was out there, walking around like some sort of living dungeon, shitting out monsters every five steps. That guy had probably died a decade ago. They could go find the source of the monsters, maybe Velik’s childhood friend’s grave, and take care of it, but that wasn’t the contract they were out here for.

“Let me ask you a question,” Jensen said.

“What’s that?”

“What should I be doing to evolve [Tracker] into [Ranger]?”

Torwin let out a heavy sigh. “Jensen, you’re a smart man. I understand that you have constraints on your future, but in my opinion, you will never achieve a class evolution into [Ranger]. There are other classes that would suit your personality far better”

“I… wait, are you just giving up on me?” he demanded. “We have a contract!”

“Your father and the guild have a contract, and if you want someone else to help you, I won’t take offense. But I don’t think I can get you to where you want to be. I was going to put this conversation off until we were done here, but I’d like you to consider an alternative.”

“The contract is for [Ranger]. My father won’t accept alternatives.”

It had been hard enough to get him to accept [Ranger] for Jensen. He’d wanted some sort of noble profession, something like [Merchant Lord] that would allow Jensen to oversee the Alderworth financial holdings while his older brother ruled the family. It was only when his sister, the middle child of the three, had developed her own class that Father had finally agreed to let Jensen keep his original class of [Tracker], and only under the condition that he grow it into something of at least rare quality.

“Then I’m sorry to say that your father is bound to be disappointed,” Torwin said, turning his attention fully to Jensen. “I can’t make you act like a [Ranger], Jensen. And I’m sorry to say that you don’t have the right motivation to be one. You don’t care about these people.”

“Why would I? They’re strangers. We came here to do a job, and that was to kill the monsters around the village.”

“So, if you were in charge, you’d say we should go out, wipe out everything within so many miles of the border, collect our fee, and leave?”

“That is exactly what we were hired to do.”

“And that’s why you won’t ever evolve your class into [Ranger]. A [Ranger] has to care about people, to be a hero to those in need. You’re not a hero. You’re a mercenary – an honorable one, maybe, but a mercenary, nonetheless. The sooner you square yourself up with that truth, the sooner we can start looking into an alternative class that actually fits you. Or you can keep on trying, but you’re never going to succeed.”

“But…” Jensen sat there, unable to think of what to say. He had to become a [Ranger]. It was the only class his father would let him keep that was remotely close to what he wanted to be. If he failed, he’d end up shackled to an office somewhere on the family estate, or banished to an outpost stewarded by one of his many cousins.

“I’m sorry, son. I truly am. You’re caught in a hard place, torn between the class that’s right for you and your family’s demands. Why don’t you take some time to think things over. I’m going to follow our new friend out into the deep wilds and put an end to this monster incursion. All I’m asking you to do is keep a lid on the monsters showing up around here for the next week or two. Train your skills. Gain some levels. When I get back, we’ll have a real discussion about your future.

“Don’t lose hope,” Torwin told him as he stood up from the table. “I might not be able to guide you to [Ranger], but if your father’s primary requirement is the prestige of a rare class, well, I have something else in mind that he might like even better.”

“You don’t know him,” Jensen said numbly. “Once he’s made up his mind, it’s impossible to change it.”

“Oh? Even if I could offer an epic rarity class instead?” Torwin teased.

Epic! Something that he thinks would fit me?

“What… What is it?”

His master winked at him and said, “For now, you just focus on keeping these villages safe. Once we’ve finished up this job, we’ll talk more. We’ve got some people I’ll need to get on board, including your father, before we start the process.”

Torwin swept out of the common room, leaving Jensen sitting there by himself, his mind awhirl with confusing and contradictory thoughts.