More like using the Lizardmen as a buffer to keep away from Veronia, I mentally corrected, shifting my glance to see the woman standing by herself a few steps away from the group, her face completely expressionless as she gazed off into the distance, waiting patiently for us to get moving. After walking in on her and Aldwin arguing the other week, I’d barely seen her around Aldford. Save, of course, for the meetings she’d shared with Stanton. I’d since come to suspect that she was actively avoiding me whenever possible. Which will be hard for her to do tonight.
“Then let get moving,” Aldwin said with obvious relief as he took a step forward towards the wagon, his voice drawing my attention back to the present and out of my thoughts.
“I’ll drive the wagon there and back,” Léandre told us as he stepped up into the driver’s seat of the wagon and then motioned for the rest of us to climb on back, there still being plenty of room on it despite everything we were taking with us.
And then we were off.
Looking out at the town as we began to move, I couldn’t help but notice once more just how quickly things had changed in the last month. The place had gone from a rustic frontier village to a booming town in almost the blink of an eye, the changes only made more apparent by the fact that I’d spent the last week in the Grove. I could make out several new plots that I hadn’t seen before, their lines staked out near our path as we wound our way through the streets. Past them, I could also see the half-finished skeleton of yet another longhouse that I didn’t even know Léandre had started, leaving me to imagine what other countless details I had missed out on due to my absence.
Even with the majority of us gone, it doesn’t seem like the construction has slowed down at all, I thought with a shake of my head as we drew closer to the town’s edge and I saw the sprawling framework of the palisade come into view, noticing that the foundations for the northernmost section of the wall had already been prepared. I just hope that it all wasn’t for nothing.
Continuing out into the countryside, we left Aldford behind and made our way to the shortcut’s entrance, the journey passing by quickly and quietly, everyone in the group lost in their own thoughts. Before long, we were all watching the rear of Léandre’s wagon heading away from us as it faded into the growing night on its way back to town, the last rays of the summer sun vanishing over the horizon. With a final look at Aldford in the distance, we then each grabbed the supplies that we had unloaded and set off towards the camp below.
Having passed through them more times than I could count by this point, the ruins blurred past me without notice, my mind already mulling over what the night had in store for us.
Not your typical Friday night raid this time, is it, Marc? I asked myself as I walked. This one actually could have consequences if you fail. Far more than just a few digital coins to repair your gear and try again.
I couldn’t help but give Aldwin a sidelong glance at that thought, my mind then shifting as another realization bubbled to the surface.
If we fail…and Aldford ends up getting destroyed, we’ll all respawn back in Coldscar or Eberia, I thought, feeling a wave of sadness roll over me. Would we even bother to come out this way again, knowing that there would be nothing waiting for us? Or would we go somewhere else? Maybe try to find a place where we could restart without any guilt, and let someone else worry about the spirits here.
Similar thoughts continued to swirl through my mind as we descended deeper into the ruin, until excited voices and shouting from up ahead brought me back into the moment.
“Looks like everyone is already excited for the raid,” I mused, breaking the silence that had fallen over us as we approached the final turn towards the camp, the voices growing louder with every step.
“Ssseems like it,” Helix agreed, with a curious voice. “Yet…it was nothing like this when we left.”
“Perhapsss the spirits have surrendered?” Cadmus asked, barking a dry laugh afterward at the idea.
“As if thingsss would be so easy for us,” Abaddon answered with an amused scoff.
Driven forward by curiosity, we all quickened our pace and entered the cavern, hearing the dull roar of excited voices echoing out from almost everywhere at once as Adventurers rushed about the camp, grabbing weapons and donning armor as if they were preparing to head out at a moment’s notice.
“I thought we were early?” Aldwin asked me as we all took in the flurry of activity before us. “It seems like they’re all rushing to leave…”
“That’s what I thought too,” I replied, suddenly catching sight of both Constantine and, strangely enough, Ignis, rushing to the front of the camp together. Without a second’s hesitation, I called out to my friend before he could run past us “Hey! Constantine! What’s all the rush?”
“Lyr! You’re early!” Constantine shouted back, his head snapping in my direction at the sound of my voice and angling his run towards us. “That’s great! Perfect actually! We don’t have a lot of time; a huge opportunity just fell into our lap, and we have to jump on it fast!”
“We do?” I asked, surprised to see a wide smile come across both my friend’s and Ignis’s faces as they looked at me. “What’s going on?”
“We found another Runestone, Lyr,” Constantine replied with excitement. “Well, really Ignis did, but that’s not the only thing.”
“You did?” I exclaimed, feeling my heart skip a beat at the news. “Where is it?”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Constantine told me, both his and Ignis’s smile growing even wider. “It’s right outside The Beast’s lair.”
Chapter 50
“Everything looks to be going well so far, and we’re on track to be ready shortly,” Freya announced as she rejoined our ongoing meeting, her new spear clutched tightly in her hand. “All that new gear you and Léandre made is a hit with the guild. You wouldn’t believe the dirty looks that all of the other Adventurers are giving us.”
“I’ll find a way to live with it,” I replied, giving the woman a smile as she moved to stand beside me in the loose circle that we’d formed.
It’d been a whirlwind of activity since Constantine and Ignis dropped their bombshell on us and we’d all rushed to get the newly crafted equipment distributed to the guild, knowing that it would take time for everyone to sort themselves out. Thankfully, the three Thunder Lizards along with Veronia and Aldwin had volunteered to take charge on that front, giving me a chance to regroup with both Sierra and Freya who had taken on the task of preparing for the coming raid.
“It’s great to hear that we’re on time so far,” I said, turning my attention back towards the rest of the group. “What else do we have outstanding right now?”
“Not too much actually,” Sierra answered, glancing down at a list that she’d written for herself. “We’ve already told everyone to start forming themselves into parties, and that we’ll extend raid invites to the group leaders shortly. Healing potions have already been distributed, and everyone should have at least one on them, though we told them to only use them in a real emergency since we’ve pretty much blown through our entire stock handing them out. I have Drace and Huxley out and checking on everyone, but at this point, we’re just giving the stragglers a bit more time to finish repairing their gear and get ready.”
“Good,” I said with a nod as I checked over my Raid Leader interface and made a few adjustments, choosing to designate both Sierra and Freya as Co-Leaders. “I just added some raid permissions to both you and Freya to help me manage this upcoming mess.”
“Gee, thanks; here I thought you’d take over now that you’re back,” Sierra replied in a sarcastic tone, but I could see her eyes lose focus as she read something that appeared in her vision. “Actually, on second thought, this doesn’t look too complicated to manage.”
“It really doesn’t,” Freya agreed as she too scanned through the interface. “We can extend raid invites to group leaders, and it’ll auto-add their entire party without us having to micromanage ea
ch and every person. Then we can filter our own Raid Sense, to get an idea of where all the group leaders are, and focus down onto their parties if we need to.”
“We’ll see how it works in practice, but that piece alone should make things easier,” I said, happy that the game had a way to prevent me from automatically sensing where each and every single raid member was. With us expecting to have easily a hundred Adventurers joining us tonight, that sort of information overload would be impossible to ignore.
“Alright, that settles our preparations for leaving, now we just need to figure where it is exactly that we’re going,” I continued, dismissing the raid interface from my vision and turning to look back towards everyone else who had been patiently waiting through the interruption, my attention landing specifically on Ignis. “Now where did you exactly find The Beast’s Lair, Ignis?”
“It’s on the western side of the jungle, about two-thirds of the way into the Grove,” the half-elf replied eagerly, his eyes darting over to look at me as he spoke. “There’s a pretty large cave there, likely an old lava tube, or something similar.”
“And you found The Beast in there?” I asked curiously, not having had a chance to hear the full story yet.
“Uh, no, we followed it there actually,” Ignis replied with a shake of his head. “My group and I were trying to scout a path through the jungle again, looking to see if we could find anything useful for tonight’s raid when we heard The Beast roar from practically right on top of us.”
“At first, we thought it’d found us and that we were dead,” the half-elf continued. “But we were wrong; it actually ran into a bunch of spirits that were roaming through the jungle just ahead of us.”
“I can’t imagine that they managed to do much to it,” I commented, trying to picture The Beast attacking the Nafarrian spirits.
“I don’t doubt it,” Ignis replied with a shrug. “Though none of us saw the fight directly, just heard it, along with the spirit’s chant…at least until it stopped. But once it was over, we did manage to catch sight of The Beast as it left the area. It was then we decided to follow it. We all felt so bad about the…thing yesterday…and wanted to try and find a way to make it up to you all…”
“Hang on,” Freya said with a frown, jumping into the conversation. “You got back together with your old group?”
“Huh?” Ignis looked confused for several seconds before he gave us all an embarrassed nod. “Oh, yeah…that. Uh, well, we sorted out our issues, and things are…okay, for now.”
“That was…fast,” Freya said slowly.
“Well, realizing that no one else in the town would group with any of us had a lot to do with that,” Ignis replied in a bitter voice, before managing to get it under control. “Anyway, we were hoping that being ‘useful’ somehow would convince everyone to give us a second shot…then we could all go our separate ways after.”
“Fair enough,” Freya said, conceding the point before steering the conversation back on track. “So, you followed it?”
“We did,” Ignis confirmed. “Carefully, and from as far away as we could manage, but we thankfully didn’t have far to go until we reached its lair just as it went inside.”
“And what about the Runestone?” I asked, not wanting to forget about what was arguably the most important thing in the Grove at the moment, even more so than The Beast. Everything hinged on us finding the spell fragments written on the Runestones in the Grove in order to even have a chance at sealing the Ley Line. “Where did you see that?”
“It was right by the mouth of the cave,” Ignis said almost apologetically. “We all saw it light up while trying to figure out what to do, but none of us wanted to get any closer, just in case.”
“Probably a good idea,” I agreed. “And unless I miss my guess, the rest of your group is watching over the place still?”
“Yep,” Ignis confirmed. “They haven’t moved much since I left, and with Party Sense leading the way I should be able to take you all there easily. Though Hido is the party leader now…so you’ll have to invite us when we get there.”
“That’s fine,” I replied, pausing for a second as I thought over the half-elf’s description of The Beast’s lair, while silently cursing the AI that ran the game. Placing the Runestone so close to the cave was a perfect way to force us to confront the creature if we wanted to get the spell fragment it contained, but that in itself presented risks that I wasn’t sure I wanted to take.
On the one hand, this gives us a perfect opportunity to kill The Beast, and ensure it can’t bother us anymore…while also getting a small measure of revenge for all the trouble it’s given us over the last week, I said to myself as I considered our options. But on the other, it means that we’re going to be fighting a cornered animal…
“What’s on your mind, Lyr?” Freya asked, noticing that I’d fallen silent.
“Just wondering how we can tackle all this in the smartest way,” I answered. “Can we really afford to get into a fight with The Beast right now? Even if everything goes right…we’re bound to lose people.”
“I think the better question is can we afford not to?” Constantine countered, speaking up for the first time in a while. “Runestone aside, this is the first chance we’ve managed to get The Beast in one spot. The last thing we need is for the stupid thing to sneak up on all of us in the middle of the jungle, or jump us when we’re fighting another horde of spirits.”
“Constantine has a point, Lyr,” Freya said. “If we miss this chance…we might not get another one. Besides, even if we take casualties killing it, it’ll still be gone for good. All we’d be out is an hour for everyone to get back down here from Aldford and push through their Death Sickness.”
“Yeah…” I acknowledged with a sigh, then reached up to scratch the side of my head, a nervous tick that I felt myself exhibiting more and more often lately. “You’re both right, if we have a chance to take The Beast out, we’d be idiots not to take it, especially with the whole night, and day tomorrow, to work with.”
“That’s the spirit, Lyr!” Constantine said excitedly at my response. “Don’t forget about the loot either! That thing is bound to drop something awesome!”
“Let’s worry about killing it first,” I chided, despite feeling a bit more confident about our plan going forward. “Or better yet, getting there.”
“Well, if there’s nothing else we need to talk about, let’s get a start on that second thing right now,” Sierra said, taking a step out of our circle and turning towards the front of the camp where all the Adventurers were gathering. “It’s about time we started the raid invites anyway.”
“Sounds good to me,” I replied as we all turned to follow Sierra.
It didn’t take long for us to walk through the partially rebuilt camp until we reached the waiting crowd of Adventurers, many of them having formed into their own clusters, based on their guilds or their chosen party for the raid tonight. Looking around us as we made our way towards the front, I couldn’t help but notice the sheer quantity of people around us, and how almost everyone glanced in my direction as I passed.
“This is the first time that I’ve seen all of Aldford’s Adventurers in one place,” I whispered to Freya beside me as we walked. “Even in the Town Hall we never saw so many at once.”
“Well, I can’t think of many better motivators for showing up than being among the first to kill a raid boss,” she replied. “That or respawning days away if things really end up going south.”
“Good point,” I grunted, noticing that the crowd around us had started to look familiar and that we were finally amongst our Virtus guildmates, all of them dressed in the equipment that Léandre and I had brought down. A wave of cheers and words of thanks called out as I walked through the ranks, and I couldn’t help but smile and wave back at everyone, despite doing my best to hide my inner thoughts.
Sure, they’re happy about getting new gear now, I thought as we moved through the waiting guild members and towards t
he front, where I could see Drace, Aldwin, Ritt, Jenkins and Shelia standing in a circle while chatting amongst themselves. But when they find out that I’m planning on using them as the tip of the spear because they’re now the best-geared Adventurers in Aldford, I’m sure they’ll be less happy.
“Ah, there are you all are,” Drace greeted us with a wave after we’d finally made it through the crowd. “You ready to get this show on the road?”
“Yeah, we might as well,” I replied, turning around to take in the milling crowd of Adventurers. “I have a feeling this will be like herding cats at first.”
I paused for a moment to glance down at my familiar as I considered my statement. “No offense, Amaranth.”
“I actually don’t think it’ll be that bad,” Drace said, motioning towards a group of Adventurers that were all standing separate from the larger crowd. “I had all of the group leaders stand in one spot so that we can sort out invites quickly, plus we should be able to give them marching orders and rely on them to get their troops moving.”
“Oh, that’ll be a huge help!” Sierra exclaimed with relief, then looked over towards me. “Lyr, if you give Drace the same invite rights Freya and I have, the three of us should be able to have this sorted out quickly.”
“Sure,” I replied, opening my Raid Interface and granting Drace the Co-Leader role. “There, it should be set now.”
“Great,” Sierra replied, before beckoning the others to follow her. “Alright, let’s go start the invites, and while we do that, Constantine and Ignis, you two can give everyone a rundown about where we’re going. I don’t want this to end up as one of those raids where we spend two hours getting ready, and then another hour getting to where we need to be.”
“God, I’ve had my fill of those,” Constantine grumbled, hearing similar responses from both Freya and Drace as everyone turned to followed Sierra, leaving Amaranth and me with Aldwin and the others.
Legacy of the Fallen Page 69