by Kyle Johnson
“Tonight, I do not wish to be strong, Aranos,” she breathed, pulling away from the kiss and staring into his eyes. “Tonight, I wish to be loved.” Aranos gazed at her a moment and nodded, rising to his feet and offering her his hand. She took it almost shyly and followed him as he guided her toward the tent.
“Tonight, you are, Saphielle,” he smiled at her gently as he led her inside, letting the flaps close behind him, blocking off all other cares for the night.
He awoke some time later, smiling at the elf woman slumbering peacefully in his arms. He took a deep breath and sighed; he was pretty content at that moment, for obvious reasons. Saphielle had been passionate and nervous in equal amounts, and he’d gone very slowly and gently until her shyness passed and she began responding to him. He wasn’t exactly inexperienced with women, but he wasn’t a ladies’ man, either, and something about that night had touched him more than the act usually did.
A sharp rap outside the tent drew his attention, followed by a deep voice clearing its throat. Aranos sighed and began extricating himself from the woman’s embrace as gently as possible. Seriously, Phil, you have to interrupt me now? Do I need to hang a sword on the tent flap or something next time?
He pulled his clothes from his inventory, glad that it was at least simple to get dressed at a moment like this, then slipped from the tent as silently as possible. The big Spellsword stood out of sight of the tent opening, tapping his foot and looking nervously anywhere except the tent Aranos was exiting. Once he was clear of the tent opening, Aranos sighed. Phil wouldn’t have bothered him if it wasn’t important.
“What’s up?” he asked the Spellsword. Phil jumped a bit, and Aranos realized he’d been trying so hard to be quiet that he’d actually slipped into Stealth. “Dude, we have to work on your Perception. I’m really not that great at Stealth.”
“Not much point,” Phil shrugged. “Perception’s a weak Stat for Spellswords. I’m proud that I got mine over 25, to be honest.” He glanced past the Sorcerer, who looked back and saw Saphielle emerging from the tent, fully armored, calmly binding up her hair. “So, um…nice night?” The Spellsword grinned at Aranos, who rolled his eyes.
“It’s been amazing, actually, right up until now. You want to tell me why you’re ruining it?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. It’s about the party of humans Silma detected. I know who they are, and I don’t know if we can wait until first light, Aranos.”
The Spellsword sighed and ran a hand across his head, straightening the braid of his dark hair. “You remember I was telling you about Martina, right? The Ranger that I was partied with before?”
“Yeah, Karen,” Aranos nodded. “I remember.” His eyes narrowed. “Wait…is she the one that’s in the city already?”
“Yeah, it’s her and Hector, the tank I told you about. I think we need to go help them, Aranos.”
The Sorcerer shook his head. “They’re Travelers, Phil. Worst case, they’ll go to respawn, no big deal. Why do you look so worried about them?”
“Well, I’m still friends with Hector, and he sent me a message and a screenshot. I guess they partied up with a Summoner and a Rogue and were following us to Antas, hoping to score some loot and maybe grab some decent Advanced Classes. Only, the Summoner betrayed them. She was in contact with the city the whole time, and now she’s got them tied up in a temple of Virnal, and she’s planning some sort of ritual using them.”
Aranos felt a chill go down his spine at Phil’s words. “Wait, she? A Summoner? Phil…” He froze as the Spellsword sent him the snapshot he’d received from Hector. The leering, delicate face and cruel features of the woman were burned into his brain.
“Yeah, she told Hector to say, ‘Hi from Lily’,” Phil said somberly. “Aranos, we have to go help them. We can’t leave them with her; you might not understand, but she’s not…she’s not right.”
Aranos stared at the grinning face in front of him and felt his anger rising. “Wake everyone up,” he said flatly. “I think it’s time I did something permanently about Lily.”
Chapter 14
The party roused from their sleep quickly when Phil woke them, although Longfellow complained constantly.
“Two bloody nights in a row!” the Archer muttered, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “I’m not going to be any good to you with an Exhausted debuff, now am I?”
“Do you actually have an Exhausted debuff?” McBane snorted. “Or are you just looking for sympathy?”
“Well, not as such, no,” Longfellow allowed. “But I won’t be surprised if I’m not at least Fatigued after a couple hours!”
Aranos silently agreed with the Archer – rest was important in the game, and not everyone’s Wis was high enough for them to replace it with the Meditation Skill – but he settled everyone down. He didn’t need them starting out grouchy.
“First of all, I’m sorry to have to wake you all up,” he told them. “I know it sucks; we’ve all had a long day. Phil got some new information about the humans that Silma spotted entering the city earlier, and that’s changed the situation.” He nodded to Phil, who quickly outlined what he’d told Aranos earlier. When the big man finished speaking, Aranos continued.
“Geltheriel and I have tangled with Lily before,” he told them, noting the flat, cold expression on Geltheriel’s face. Lily had been the architect of the Shadedancer’s imprisonment in Haerobel, the reason the woman had to go on this Cleansing Quest in the first place, and had done horrific things to her helpless captive. Geltheriel held a special hatred for the woman in her heart, and Aranos planned to give her a chance to work some of that out tonight.
“Lily was the first Traveler to appear in Eredain, before me. She delights in torture and torment. She thinks making someone else suffer is fun, and she’ll happily joke about it as she’s doing it. There’s no way we can leave someone in her hands. I don’t know how far the AIs will let her go before they forcibly respawn Hector and Martina or even log them out, but I don’t think we should find out, do you?”
“I remember the first Traveler,” Saphielle spoke up. “If anything, Aranos underestimates her cruelty. I was one of the ones tasked with keeping her from harming the people of Eredain, and I saw firsthand the sorts of things she can do. I believe she derives physical and emotional pleasure from tormenting others, for she always sought to hurt as many as possible, often in the most brutal methods she could.”
Geltheriel and Rhys both looked startled at Saphielle’s use of Aranos’ name, but after a moment, Geltheriel gave the Sorcerer a sly, knowing grin that Aranos ignored.
“Okay, so I think we all agree that we need to do something,” Meridian said seriously. “Still, traveling at night isn’t the safest thing around here. We’re not gonna help them if we’re too busy fighting for our lives.”
“I’ve finished that Spell to protect us in the city,” Aranos nodded. “I added an extra effect that halves the range that undead can detect us using their Life Sense.” He looked wryly at Meridian. “It’ll probably halve the range that either of us can detect anything, as well, though. Sorry.” The woman grimaced but nodded after a moment.
“I recall that the Traveler was a Summoner,” Rhys spoke up. “I know little else about her, however. As you have battled her previously, Liberator, perhaps you could enlighten us.”
“She’s a Summoner, yeah, but she’s also one of the more powerful Summoners I’ve seen. She has a tame aswang that she can make look human – that’s probably that Rogue of hers that Hector was talking about – and according to Hector, she’s picked up a massive repertoire of summons somehow.” Aranos took a deep breath and continued. “I also know that she’s worked directly for Morx in the past, and she’s currently performing a ritual in the Temple of Virnal in the city. I think we can assume that the ritual will give her power somehow or another, and I’d like to stop that from happening if at all possible.”
The others muttered but began preparing to leave, and Aranos sighed in relief. He had a feeling h
e knew what Lily was doing. She’d been actively committing evil acts, and the system would reward her for that with Corruption Points. By now, she had to be close to fully Corrupted. His best guess was that this ritual would complete that process and turn her into an empowered minion of Darkness. While he wanted to save Martina and Hector, his real goal was stopping the Summoner from becoming a force of evil incarnate.
As they prepared, Aranos’ eyes met Saphielle’s briefly. The woman gave him a single, shy smile that he returned before she turned away. As he returned to his own preparations, he caught Geltheriel looking at him bemusedly, and he found himself blushing furiously. The woman’s Perception was ridiculous, and nothing seemed to escape her, but Aranos would have been just as happy keeping some things private. Not that he could, in this case; even if Phil didn’t say anything, the only way to keep everyone from eventually finding out about Saphielle and him would be to stop the relationship…and Aranos wasn’t really interested in doing that.
He shook off the distracting thoughts and cast his Composite Armor and Aura of Movement. He waited for the others to gather before taking a deep breath and gathering soul, life, and void mana and weaving them into a shell overhead. A dim, barely seen green glow suffused the inside of the room, one that wavered and gleamed fitfully as Aranos released twin streams of death and spirit mana into it. The shell shuddered for a moment, then solidified. Aranos sighed with relief as he cast the Spell for the first time, a sigh that didn’t quite go unnoticed.
“You didn’t know if that was going to work, did you?” McBane muttered quietly to him. “Is it always like that?”
“Not exactly,” Aranos hedged. “I mean, I always know that my Spells are going to work, but this is one of the more complex things I’ve done. I couldn’t really be 100% sure that it would work exactly the way I planned until I cast it.”
“And if it hadn’t worked?” McBane persisted.
“Oh, the basic function of it would have,” Aranos shrugged. “But it might have been so bright that it attracted more attention, or it could have made it hard to see out of. Then, I would have had to tweak it to make it work better. Fortunately, I designed it to not be very visible, so it worked out fine.” McBane gave him a look that was a bit askance but seemed willing to let the matter drop.
The trek through the pitch darkness was more difficult than Aranos had thought it would be, primarily because none of the humans had Night Vision. Aranos wasn’t sure if humans could even activate that Skill – generally, in fantasy works, elves had better night vision and overall senses than humans – but he didn’t want to use his Illuminating Mists Spell, either. In the heavy, moonless black of the night, the glow from that Spell would be visible from a long way off. After five minutes or so, though, he realized he had to do something; the humans were struggling so much in the darkness that the party’s movement had slowed to a crawl. Sighing, he cast his Spell slowly, trickling mana into it, giving it only the bare minimum SP it needed. The glow thus created was scarcely brighter than moonlight would have been, but it was enough that the players stopped tripping over their feet and could keep up a decent pace.
Their passage wasn’t without incident. They were attacked several times by the undead, although after the battle for the tower, the party found these fights something of a relief. A swarm of janghsie crashed upon them, but the two tanks formed up and took the charge easily. McBane, Geltheriel, and Silma moved out to the sides of the press of undead, cutting them down and pushing them toward the tanks’ shield wall. Aranos had very little to do except to call out orders as the mass of creatures shifted; in only a few minutes, the jangshie were slaughtered, and the party had sustained only a few minor wounds that Rhys and Meridian quickly healed.
Their passage continued like that for the most part. With Aranos’ Aura of Movement set to 55% and his Leadership Skill granting an additional 45% to their movement speed, the party was traveling at almost double their normal rate. They simply outran the larger, slower undead they encountered and only stopped to deal with the creatures that they couldn’t zip past. Whenever they were caught in a battle, Aranos used his Spells carefully and conservatively; he had a feeling that when they got to the city, he’d need his SP a lot more than he did now, and with his regen down to 65% of normal thanks to his Aura of Movement, he couldn’t count on topping back up between battles.
He also spent time carefully using his Inspection Skill, trying to tease out what the different streams of data radiating from each creature meant. It wasn’t until it occurred to him to compare some of the undead with Silma – whose status he had access to, and who could serve as an excellent baseline for him – that several of the streams clicked in his mind. The child-like undead battling Saphielle suddenly had a tag over its head that read
Callicant
Undead
LP: 27%
Aranos silently rejoiced as a similar tag popped into existence above each of the callicants’ heads. He didn’t know how much LP they had, but by tossing a simple Composite Bullet at one and watching its LP drop by a bit over 30%, he guessed they had around 300 LP max. He hit a second one with an Evolved Piercing Bullet and shook his head as its LP went from 94% to 0% in an instant; that meant that his guess about their max LP had probably been right, since one of his Piercing Bullets did about 400 LP damage or so.
When the battle was over, he pulled up the notification that had appeared when his Inspection had shifted:
Skill Enhanced: Inspection has become Enhanced Inspection!
Rank: Student 5
You can gain more precise detail from your Inspection Skill
Effect: You can see the name and race of any creature whose race is Abundant or Common, or if you are familiar with their race already.
Student Effect: You can see a creature’s general LP state. You can see information about Uncommon races.
Enhanced: You can see name and racial information for any creature, regardless of rarity, although other information is still limited by the creature’s rarity. You can see specific instead of general information when performing an Inspection. For example, you can see a creature’s specific LP percentage instead of a general range.
Skill Synergy: This Skill has synergy with other Lore-based Skills. If you have ranks in Lore about the creature you’re attempting to Inspect, these are added to your Inspection Skill level to determine your effective rank in Inspection.
Per +1
The new Skill boost was useful, since it allowed him to Inspect pretty much anything and at least get a name for it. He found that even as the party ran past undead, his Inspection Skill could still tell him a bit about them. The giant, rotting corpses were called vyrkas, and the worms they shed were rot larvae. The void mage creature, he discovered, was a bainsh. As it turned out, not only had he boosted his Inspection Skill, using the Skill on all the undead also raised his Undead Lore Skill to the Student level, although it was still Untrained. He glanced at that notification briefly and put it aside; he’d look over it in more detail later.
He had to renew his Death’s Ward twice before the party reached the tunnel entrance. As in Haerobel, it was set into the side of a massive tree, but the hidden door that would probably have concealed it from anyone but the most fervent searchers hung open, exposing the interior. The tunnel was long, straight, and obviously artificial, with flagstone floors and carved walls and ceiling.
Aranos immediately saw the human tracks that Silma had spotted, and he easily picked out which ones belonged to which human. Hector’s were the easiest to spot; the Warrior was big and heavily armored, and his prints had impacted with more force than the others. Martina’s were softer and blurred at the edges; the woman had been moving in Stealth. Another track that almost looked human seemed to have followed right behind Martina. The steps were strange, though, as if the creature making them hadn’t been comfortable in its body – that would be Lily’s tame aswang disguised as the Rogue Monetta, a fact that his Scent Ability quickly verified.<
br />
The last tracks held his attention the longest. Like Monetta’s, they weren’t quite right. They looked to be made by a human about Aranos’ height, but there was a weird hesitancy to each step, as if the walker had cut their stride shorter than normal for some reason. That meant that the human was probably actually a bit taller than Aranos but had walked as if used to shorter legs. Lily, he thought darkly as his Scent Ability picked out the familiar trace of the woman. She could shift her body, but apparently, she couldn’t change her smell enough to fool his Skill.
“Nothing’s been this way in a while,” Aranos murmured to the others. “Silma was the last one to go through this place.” He glanced at Geltheriel grimly, and the woman nodded.
“You fear a trap, Oathbinder.”
“Well, of course it’s a trap,” Longfellow protested. “I mean, the lady showed herself to Hector, didn’t she? Obviously, she wants us to come save them.”
“Aranos fears a trap not of the Summoner’s making,” Saphielle corrected softly. “While the Summoner may have some connection to the city, surely she could not arrange to keep the undead of Antas from wandering this path, nor those who rule the city from replacing the watch upon it. This much is obvious, Archer.”
Longfellow opened his mouth to protest but froze. “Oh, bloody hell,” he muttered. “She’s right.”
Aranos nodded. “The worst part is, we can’t even scout it out, because Silma can’t leave the Death’s Ward or she’ll be affected by the necrotic zone. We’ll be going in blind.”
You’re making an assumption, pack leader, the fenrin corrected silently. In fact, I’ve been in the green light already, and so far, it hasn’t hurt me. Aranos stared at the wolf for a moment before narrowing his eyes as he realized what she was saying.