“Fair enough,” Wes replied. “You ready to keep going?”
Eve nodded, pushing to her feet as Wes re-shouldered his pack. They left the gnoll corpses behind, unwilling to waste the time or effort skinning the creatures just to collect a few mangy pelts. Hells, they were just as likely to get fleas for their trouble as any money.
The knee-high grass swayed as the companions stepped back onto the road, quivering in a breeze which held a certain dampness and a certain weight to it. Eve watched the sky. Though the afternoon sun still shined unimpeded upon them, gray clouds rolled over the horizon ahead.
“I always liked the summer storms,” Eve thought aloud.
“Really?”
“Yeah. There’s something magical about rain on a warm day, like the heavens themselves know the sweat on your back and see fit to wash it clean.”
Wes snorted. “I’m the opposite. They scared me, growing up. I’d just be out enjoying a bright summer day and suddenly it’d just get so dark. Da used to say the thunder was the sound of Bandir’s mighty hammer and the lightning was Loia’s spear striking the earth.”
“Let me guess: if you didn’t do your chores, Loia would strike you.”
He chuckled, “Something like that. I used to think that’s how Ma died, pissing off Loia somehow and getting hit by lightning. I’d stay up all night praying She’d leave us alone.”
“That’s…” Eve raised a hand to her face, covering the grin she bore. “I know it’s sad, but it’s also really cute. I’m imagining a tiny you cowering under your bedsheets whenever a storm comes.”
“I didn’t cower!”
“And knowing you, you were never tiny either.”
Wes laughed. “Da always said I was a natural born blacksmith.”
“Are you? I know the Stones didn’t give you much of a choice, but he seemed more put out about it than you did.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hate working in the smithy, and everyone dreams about grand adventures and all that. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d stayed home. Like I said, I don’t really have an answer.”
Eve stepped out ahead of him, turning to look directly in the man’s eye. “If the best you can say about working with your da is that you didn’t hate it, I think that’s your answer.”
Wes met her gaze in contemplative stillness, taking a few seconds before quietly lowering his head in a nod. “Maybe you’re right.” He set off walking again, and Eve fell in line beside him. “What about you?”
“I knew I wanted to travel,” Eve said. “Thought I’d get some peddler class and sell things town to town. I like this better.”
“Even though it’s more dangerous?”
“Dangerous for you.” She smirked. “I’m a master of running away, remember?”
“Of course, Madam Courier, I am at your mercy.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
The pair walked on in mirthful silence, taking joy in each other’s company even as the storm loomed. They made it another hour before the rain came.
It began, as such storms often do, all at once. It fell in sheets, soaking both the road and the adventurers on it until not a spot of dry earth or dry skin was left to be found. Eve loved it. While not necessarily warm, the water wasn’t cold either, and she much preferred the fresh precipitation over the layer of sweat the summer sun often left her with.
She tugged at her blouse. Whereas most of the girls back home might’ve been embarrassed—and a few proud—by the way the water made the fabric cling to her skin, Eve didn’t particularly care. It wasn’t like she had much to keep hidden, and her only company was… well, Wes. He wouldn’t gawk even if she wanted him to.
Eve refused to even consider the question of whether or not she did. Now wasn’t the time.
Although the downpour was kind enough to wash most of the sweat and dust from her clothes, her shoes received the opposite treatment. It wasn’t long before the dirt road turned to mud, leaving the adventurers with the unfortunate choice of walking through the sticky quagmire or upon the slippery wet grass.
Wes opted for the latter up until he went careening forward as his foot slid out from under him. Twice. Eve stuck with the mud.
They didn’t spot any lightning so far from the storm’s center, but the crash of thunder echoed far across the open plains. Though he hid it well, Eve took careful note of the little winces that spread across Wes’s body whenever the cacophony rang out. She knew he didn’t want to hear it, but still she mouthed a silent “it’s okay” each time it happened. Wes never noticed.
Her eyes fixed on her muscular companion, Eve didn’t see the grass quivering on either side of the road. Beneath the drumming of the deluge, she didn’t hear sharp-tongued whispering or the skittering patter of nonhuman feet. Hells, had the thunder not chosen to take that particular moment as a break from its rolling, the goblin battle cry might too have been drowned out.
It wasn’t.
A ragged ‘skreee!’ filled the air, matched in chorus six times by the three-foot green creatures that surrounded them. Though their fragile skin was only protected by hide loincloths, Eve cared more about the makeshift spears they each held.
The goblins charged.
Eve charged first. She activated Heave, bending low to whisk Wes off his feet. Taking care to scan her surroundings, the Courier picked her opening and went for it.
The goblin didn’t know what hit him. The poor creature didn’t even find a chance to lower its spear before almost four hundred combined pounds of human bowled it over. Eve dismissed the kill message as she trampled it.
One down, five to go.
She dashed through the plains, building up what distance she could between them and their short-legged pursuers while Wes threw darts over her shoulder. He only cast twice before their strategy fell apart.
“We need to get closer!” he yelled. “The rain’s extinguishing my flames before they can hit!”
Eve nodded, slowing her pace as she engaged in her own battle with the wet grass. I need to focus, she thought. One wrong step and we’ll—
Wes’s shout interrupted. “Lightning!”
Eve’s heart raced. Instinctively, she planted her foot hard to swerve to the side. It landed wrong.
Her leg slid out from under her, sending runner and mage alike tumbling to the soft ground. A bolt of electricity flew past, not from above, but from behind. Ayla’s tits, Eve swore. They have a shaman?!
Wes hurried to his feet. “That’s one way to dodge.”
Eve ignored the rolling ache in her arm where Wes had landed on her. Her footing escaped her twice as she tried to stand, eventually using the mage as a brace to pull her way up.
The goblins drew near.
Wes threw dart after dart, downing two of the attackers even as the majority of his spells missed or collapsed in a puff of steam under the dense rainfall.
Eve’s mind raced as her eyes squinted past the charging monsters. Back on the road, the shaman danced. Eve gulped. Whatever magic the creature worked, she needed to stop it. She pointed at the two goblins that still approached. “Can you handle them?”
“I can’t dodge its spells in this rain!” Wes drew his sword. “Can you handle the shaman?”
Eve nodded.
With a deep breath, she took off. At first she ran parallel to the road, unwilling to risk dashing straight for the spear-carrying goblins. Turning around would be the first challenge. She charted a wide angle, maintaining as much speed as she dared in the hopes her traction would hold.
It didn’t.
She caught herself on her hands as she skidded along the field, happy that her hands came up muddy instead of scraped and bleeding. Eve exhaled. She planted her left knee, placing her right foot directly beneath her as she carefully stood. Her heart pounded. Her instincts screamed she needed to move, needed to go faster, but her mind knew the folly of such ideas.
She’d only fall again.
Eve began slowly once she reached her fee
t, allowing her speed to build over time. In her periphery, a goblin shrieked. Get ‘em, Wes! she cheered to herself.
The crackle of lightning ahead wiped the grin from her face. Eve hastened, dropping twenty Stamina to activate Run Away. This time, however, she wasn’t fleeing.
Again, the Courier didn’t let herself jump straight to her maximum velocity, forcing herself to limit her pace even as the skill doubled her capacity. She couldn’t afford another fall. Eve sped on, setting her course directly towards the dancing caster. Tiny arcs of electricity jumped along the tip of its gnarled branch.
Across her body, Eve’s hair stood on end. Her pulse quickened. Her breathing matched it. Rain battered her, oft sending her sputtering as she gasped for air and instead found a mouthful of water.
Still she ran.
Her Stamina ticked down. Thunder rumbled overhead. The distance closed. Twenty feet. Ten.
The goblin leveled its staff, aiming the coming spell directly at her.
It fired.
Eve ducked.
She fell into a skid, sliding along the rain-soaked grass on her side. The lightning bolt shot through the air above her. Eve’s momentum carried her forward. Her extended foot struck the shaman’s leg, sending the creature into the mud.
Eve was the first to her feet, already practiced in the art of finding traction on the slick grass. She snatched the fallen staff.
It took three solid hits to the goblin’s head before the thing stilled and the kill message appeared.
You have defeated Level 19 Goblin Shaman: +100 exp!
You have successfully wielded a weapon beyond your Intelligence: +1 Intelligence!
Eve let out a breath. She smiled. Her fingers wrapped tight around the wooden staff. It felt more like a large wand in her hand. Hells, she thought. In Wes’s it’d probably look—shit. Wes! She pivoted, scanning the open field to find her friend limping his way back to her.
“Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine!” he answered. “Last one got me in the leg. Hurts like a bitch, but I can still walk. I see you handled the shaman.”
Eve laughed. “I made the slickness work for me. Once he hit the ground, I had him. It’s good you’ve got that ring,” she changed the subject. “Without it you’d probably have six different infections by now.”
“Yeah, yeah, we can’t all escape unscathed.”
She handed him the staff. “Can you use this?”
He took it. “Says it’s an uncommon ‘Wand of Minor Arcing.’ Not sure what that means, but I’m not a lightning mage.”
Eve chastised herself for forgetting to Appraise the damn thing. “Maybe you can add it to the trash heap you call equipment. I’m sure eventually someone will want it.”
Wes shrugged, making a point not to acknowledge her comment as he stuck the item through his belt. “So what else did you get?”
With a grin, Eve pulled up her remaining messages.
You have defeated Level 14 Goblin Spear-Bearer: +30 exp!
You have defeated Level 12 Goblin Spear-Bearer: +18 exp!
You have defeated Level 13 Goblin Spear-Bearer: +24 exp!
Eve noted with interest that she got credit for the two goblins Wes had killed while she carried him, but not those he defeated afterwards. “A hundred for the shaman, seventy-two for the others.” She smiled as she watched her level and Endurance both tick up.
“Two fifteen for the spear-bearers, none for the shaman. You got him all on your own.”
Eve did her best not to beam too visibly at his praise. She was only somewhat successful. “Get anything good?”
It was Wes’s turn to grin. “Level seven and a longer range on Fire Dart. It doesn’t say how long, but I’ll take it.”
Eve bristled, “I’m still mad you get a skill upgrade every level and I just get more Endurance.”
“Hey, don’t forget I get Intelligence and Spirit too.”
She smacked him.
“Yep, yep, I deserved that. Guess you’ll just have to hurry up to twenty-five so you can promote again. Beating a goblin to death with its own staff has gotta be worth something, right?”
“Gods, I hope so. Can you imagine if I get stuck with a third common class? What would that even look like?”
“Better Courier?” Wes joked as he took off down the muddy road. “Maybe Royal Messenger Girl.”
“Ooh.” Eve took a quick step to catch up with him as she joined in the silly conjecture. “Maybe if I’m lucky, I can even make Page. Or Bread-Fetcher.”
“That’d be perfect for you. Maybe from there you could evolve to the fastest Baker’s Assistant the world has ever known.”
They continued together along the road. Though the rain still fell and the lightning still struck, the rolling thunder fell away into the background, drowned out by the raucous echo of two adventurers in shared laughter.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Welcome to the Guild
THE GLASS WALLS of Lynthia glimmered in the distance, its many prisms shattering the afternoon sun into a thousand rainbows. Wes approached. Eve, on the other hand, did the sensible thing and stopped dead to gawk at the work of art before her.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It is,” Wes called back at her, “and you’ll have plenty of time to stare at it as we walk.”
Eve forced her gaping jaw shut, quickening her pace to catch up to her large companion. “It’s gotta get hot in there,” she said. “All that glass must…”
“I doubt it. The walls are a quest reward from Ayla herself. She’d be a pretty shit goddess if they made the city miserable.”
“Makes sense. Just explain all the hundreds of problems with glass fortifications as divine intervention.”
Wes shrugged. “I didn’t put them there. Take it up with Ayla.”
“Oh, of course. Let me just pop over to the divine plane for a chat with a goddess.”
“If you put it like that, it almost sounds as hard as popping over to the next town for a loaf of bread.”
Eve winked. “Almost.”
As they walked on towards the sparkling city, Eve slipped a hand into her pocket. Two copper pieces rested there, the same two her mother had given her to pay for her bread. It had only been a few days since she’d left Nowherested, but already the distance seemed an eternity. Multiple brushes with death had that effect.
She absentmindedly rubbed the coins against each other for good luck. In a city like Lynthia, there’d be more than one baker. One of them had to have a loaf for her, right? Only so many bakeries could burn down before whatever curse or divine interference that plagued her made itself too apparent. Or so she hoped.
Eve quietly chuckled at the idea of every bakery in Lynthia simultaneously bursting into flame the moment she stepped through the gates. Would the authorities run her out of the city? Could they even hope to discover her connection to a suspicious bread shortage? As per usual, she had no answers. At least the questions were amusing this time.
As it turned out, the only thing that happened when she stepped within the city boundary was a direct assault on all things olfactory.
Lynthia stank.
This wasn’t the foul scent of manure in a freshly fertilized field or fumes wafting from the local tannery or the fetid decay of a trash heap in the summer sun, but a demented panoply of all that and more. It clung to Eve’s nose, tracing her every step as she walked the rough cobblestone.
How do people live like this? the Courier wondered. She swallowed down bile as a breeze blew a fresh wave of the sickening mixture into her face. She hated it. Even as the walls loomed above in all their towering splendor, the stench and the filth and the thickness to the air grated against Eve’s very being.
Ten minutes later she’d already grown accustomed to it.
By the time they stopped to ask a uniformed guard for directions, the stink had already faded to the back of Eve’s mind. By the time they crossed the threshold of the local adventurer’s guild, she had more pressing m
atters to think about.
The place was a menagerie.
Ice Mages and Axe Throwers and Hedge Knights milled about the common room, laughing and drinking with men and women of every class Eve could’ve imagined, and a few she’d never have thought to. Interestingly enough, not a one of the guildsmen she Appraised had a higher level than she, though Eve was smart enough to know they outclassed her.
Rarity trumped level. An uncommon class five levels lower could easily double her stats, and nothing about these adventurers could be called ‘common.’
Their diversity astounded her. The pale, freckled skin and chestnut hair that all citizens of Nowherested shared was practically absent. Guild members displayed every kind and combination of skin tones and hair colors, including a few shades Eve would’ve thought impossible without magical or alchemical intervention.
Her eyes grew wide when she spotted a gnome, but the nonhuman vanished in the crowd before she could point him out to Wes.
Two queues lined the inner wall, one for drinks and one for the clerk. Eve and Wes joined the latter.
“Let me guess,” the woman behind the desk greeted them, “the Stones gave you a quest and your backwards town shipped you off to be their great hero?”
Wes reddened. Eve snickered.
“And you,” the clerk turned to Eve, “are his naive young lover who left your quiet life to follow him, not because you’re destined for adventure, but because your love is special.”
Eve’s jaw fell open as her brow furrowed in offense. “Excuse yo—”
Wes cut her off. “My sister and I want to join the guild. We’ve seen battle on our way here. I’m sure you’ll find we’re more than qualified.”
Sister? Really? Eve supposed it would at least dismiss any assumption they were lovers, and they did look the part. Compared to how different the adventurers all were, she and Wes could practically be twins.
The clerk nodded. “You, I can help. Uncommon classes at tier one are… well they’re uncommon. Mages are in decently high demand right now, so you could find a team pretty easily, assuming you aren’t a dick, of course.”
This Quest is Broken! (This Trilogy is Broken (A Comedy Litrpg Adventure) Book 1) Page 6