by Elliot Burns
Grizzly Forest Bear – Level 12 – HP: 287 / 287
“Hello again, buddy,” said Jack. “You’ve levelled up a couple of times since I last saw you. I’m guessing that killing me helped you with that.”
The bear roared in response. Once again, it stretched itself out to full height. At seven feet tall, it should have sent a shudder of panic through him, but that was when Jack realized something; he wasn’t scared. He should have been. Boy, should he have been - the beast had murdered him once already. Now, though, its size and the ferocious look on its face didn’t fill him with dread. Instead, he found himself smiling.
Mav stood up from beside the corpse of a wolf and pulled his mughal dagger. “Get back, Jack,” he said.
“Not this time.”
“We need to leave, pal. This thing will tear us apart.”
Jack shook his head. He looked at the bear. He stared deep into its eyes and he saw nothing but a predatory hate looking back at him. Then, he started to walk toward the creature. All the sounds of the forest disappeared. It wasn’t that the forest had suddenly gone silent, but more that Jack had tuned them out. In the same way, everything around him seemed to lose color and disappear from his peripheral vision. There was nothing here but him, and the bear.
He ran at the bear. Seeing its opponent rushing at it, the bear roared. Spit flew from its lips. Jack covered the ground quickly, until he was just three feet away, and then the bear swiped out with a paw. With barely a blink, Jack dispersed into a smoke trail, and he twisted around the bear, before emerging back into his normal form. Stood behind it now, he readied a force strike. The bear turned, but it was too slow, and Jack hit it with the full brunt of his force.
49 damage inflicted!
[70 ATT – 21 DEF]
The last time they’d fought, Jack’s first hit had taken a measly four hitpoints from the animal. This showed how far he’d come, but the bear still had too many hitpoints. He needed something else.
The bear dropped down to all fours. It pounced toward Jack, its yellow teeth ready rip chunks from his flesh. Jack smoke twisted again., losing sixty mana points to get out of reach. Now, he used his second steel baroque skill. He activated armor break, and a green flash of energy coated his dagger, mixing with the glow from his fire gem. He stuck the tip into the bears chest.
The bear roared again, but not in danger this time. The sound it made now was unmistakably a cry of pain.
Bear defence reduced to 1!
60 damage inflicted!
[61 ATT – 1 DEF]
His armor break skill let him penetrate not just armor but the defence of most creatures, and it had made light work of the bear’s muscle. The creature was slower now, with the cumulative effects of Jack’s attacks taking the wind out of it. It backed away just a step, wary of Jack but not wanting to give up the fight completely.
Jack circled it. He needed it to make the first move so that he could twist away and hit it on the counter, but the beast had learned from its injuries. Each time Jack moved, the bear turned to follow him, without getting closer.
This wouldn’t work. Jack’s defence was so low that the bear could still damage him. He knew from bitter experience that one swipe would take over a hundred hitpoints from him. That was the sacrifice he’d had to make; he couldn’t continue to level his attack and speed without neglecting his defence. The problem here was that if Jack was the first to lunge into an attack, he risked getting hit by a counter attack from the bear. Then, if it somehow dazed him, just six hits would finish him.
“You okay, Jack?” said Mav.
“I’ve got it. Just trust me.”
And he did. He knew what he had to do. In his head, he imagined the bear charging at him. With a sufficiently strong mental image of it, he said “Verso.” His Trueword overrode the bear’s instinctual caution, and the animal ran at him, its gigantic paws pounding over mud and twigs. Jack once again turned to smoke, twisting to the eight, and out of reach of the animal. Then, readying a force strike, he hit it again.
71 damage inflicted!
[72 ATT – 1 DEF]
The bear was down to just a hundred and seven points now, and it had failed to land a single hit on Jack. Any sane animal would have fled, but Jack’s Trueword verso was still tweaking its mind. His truespeech wouldn’t let the animal run, and instead, it charged at him. This time, the bear was so injured that Jack didn’t need to use powers to get out of the way. His levelled-up speed gave him the agility to strafe out of danger, before hitting the bear with three quick dagger slashes. With a final roar of death, the bear crashed to the forest ground, and then it was still.
Status gained: Predator
[You have killed the apex predator of the forest, and now you are the most feared creature within it. Forest animals will flee rather than fight you, unless cornered.]
Looking down at the fallen bear, Jack couldn’t help but pity it now. Once it had been the apex predator of this forest, but it had lost that title now. That title belonged to Jack. With that, he felt his confidence soar again.
Mav patted him on the back. He said something, but his words were drowned out. Instead, Jack stared out of the forest, knowing that it was time to leave it. He had to take the fight to Lord Henry soon, and it was thoughts of that future battle that occupied him now.
He shook himself out of it. “We had better call it a day,” he said. “I know Elena wanted a meeting later.”
“Aye lad. You’ve killed enough for today.”
Just as they started to walk back toward the castle, Jack received a smoke-text alert.
Population decreased by 3 (Total: 92)
[3 peasant farmers have been killed]
This wasn’t good. It was the first time he’d had an alert like this, and there must have been a reason for it. Then again, some of the peasants were quite old., He guessed that eventually, some of them would die of natural causes. Three at once, though? No, that wasn’t normal.
“Something’s happened to the peasants,” said Jack. “We better go check it out.”
After leaving the forest, they walked to the peasant village. Jack couldn’t believe how much bigger it was. With the increase in population, there were many more houses. Most of them were of the easy-to-make peasant variety, but a few others had improvements, such as stone walls and glass windows. Although there wasn’t an official market stall, one area near the Sickle Inn had evidently been earmarked as a trading area of sorts. There, the weaponmaster, armorer, and a few travelling traders sold their wares. Laughter drifted across the village, and Jack saw that the Stuck Pig tavern was making a bustling trade, with dozens of peasants drinking beer outside it. There was a general clamor and chatter resounding through out the village that hadn’t been there before.
They came to a peasant house on the outskirts of the village, set apart from the other dwellings. The greater care spent on its construction marked it as different from the rest. Something had been applied to the stone walls to dye them a shade of blue. Multicolored flowers surrounded the door and lined the north-facing wall, and fragrant jasmine and lavender stalks had been tied with pieces of twine to the overhanging roof. Despite the attempt at making it homely, when Jack approached it he got the sense that something was wrong. It was a dark feeling, something deep in his gut.
“Mav, do you get the feeling something’s wrong here?”
“Something definitely ain’t right.”
“I lost some of my population this morning, and my gut tells me that whatever happened, it was in this house. Morale is gonna be low, and I need to show the people that I care. Maybe I’ll compensate the victims.”
“Victims? A strong word. We don’t know what happened yet. Maybe they just buggered off to a better place. This isn’t exactly the Arcus palaces where there’s so much flek people burn it to relieve boredom.”
“Nope. Something really fucking bad happened here.”
As Jack approached the house, peasants approached from across the way. Soon,
a crowd had gathered outside the dwelling. “What’s going on?” Jack asked them.
There were five men, three women, and a gaggle of children outside the house. The adults bore the stains of field work. The ragged children played with a pigskin ball, tossing it between them and getting rougher and rougher until one of the adults, a heavyset man with long sideburns, told them to stop.
The sideburn man was the first to answer Jack. “Nobody has been inside, Lord,” he said.
Jack could understand why. A sense of foreboding crept over him, as if a cloud had covered the suns of Royaume and cast a shadow. He would have to be the first to go in the house. First, he decided to look around the outside of it.
At the back, three slaughtered pigs lay on the ground. A sticky mess of blood surrounded them. Each had been cut open, but not for their meat. This wasn’t the work of a practiced butcher but instead looked as if some wild animal had torn them apart. The smell was overwhelming. What worried Jack more was that just across from the house, grey tendrils of smoke twisted into the air. What was once a crop field was now a charred mess. No animal could start a fire, which meant that a person had slaughtered the pigs, set fire to the crop field, and then…Jack didn’t even want to think what had happened to the peasants inside the house, but he was going to have to find out.
One man approached him from the side of the house. He looked just beyond middle-age and had tough, calloused hands. His back bent slightly to a stoop, no doubt set in that position from years of grinding crop work.
“Lord,” he said, with a tremor in his voice. “I beg of you…”
The rest of the peasants approached now. Jack was taken aback by the angry looks on their faces.
“You need to do something about this,” shouted a woman.
“Someone needs to explain what’s going on,” said Jack.
The older man cleared his throat. Something weighed heavily on him. “The fire,” he said, nodding at the curling smoke and ashen ruins of crops. “It…it spread to my field. Jendy and I tried to put it out, and we almost did thanks to your wells, but it was too fierce. The flames took hold and not a thing could hold ‘em back. We lost everything, Lord. Every crop, every inch of the field. It’s ruined.”
The peasants relied on their fields to feed their families. Not only that, but they relied on Jack, as their lord, to protect them, and he couldn’t help but think that he had failed.
“Mav,” he said. The thief was crouched near the slaughtered pigs. “Have the animals from our forest hunt given to this man and his family. If they’re salted, they should last long enough to see him through a few months.”
“Thank you, Lord,” said the man.
The people approve of your action!
- Population morale increased to 43
He’d helped the man, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to do more. If there was ever a time to earn the peasants’ trust, this was it. What could he do, though? What could he offer them? A solution came to him.
“Anyone whose fields were caught by the fire, I’ll have you allocated new land, at the cost to my treasury,” he said. “The meat should see you through until your new crops grow.”
Your gesture has pleased your population!
- Population morale increased to 45
“As well as that, I’ll place a water well next to each field so that fire can’t spread like this again, and I’ll double the number of watchmen on duty. As long you live on my lands, you will be safe.”
The peasants’ mutterings turned to gestures of thanks, and the angry looks left their faces. He got the sense that they saw him in a new light now. Whether he could keep his promise was another matter.
You have reassured your people!
- Population morale increased to 47
It made him good to think that he’d manage to turn panic into calmness, and that despite the damage done to the peasants’ fields, they had ended up trusting Jack even more because of it.
“Now I better see what happened to this poor family,” he said, and walked around to the house and to the front door.
A small hole had been smashed into the door to allow access to the wooden latch, which suggested that someone had forced their way into the house. Inside, the solitary room was a mess of broken furniture and crockery. On a table were three plates of barely-touched bisse meat and corn, which meant that something had happened while the peasant family had sat for their evening meal. Two candles had completely burned down to a gloopy mess. Peasants often didn’t eat until their field work was done, which was usually before the setting of the second sun. Consequently, the peasants evening feasts were called Candlelight Feasts. Something had interrupted this unfortunate family’s meal.
The keen sense that something was wrong grew stronger the longer he spent in the house. He saw drops of blood on the floor. Not much, but enough to be suspicious. On the floor near the table, there was a leather pouch that was empty save for sprinklings of glass.
Mav stayed at the doorframe and blocked the inside of the house from view. Jack hadn’t wanted the peasants to see whatever was inside. He looked at the sprinklings of glass on the floor and he realized that they formed a trail that led to the corner of the room. There, underneath a bundle of stripped cow hide, he found something.
“It’s a crystal,” he said, turning to Mav.
The thief stayed in the doorway, but faced Jack. “A memory crystal?”
“Looks like it.”
“Better hold off,” said the thief.
“I can’t help feeling that I was meant to find it. Someone left it here for me.”
“I sound like Elena here, but maybe you should be careful.”
“I need to watch it,” said Jack.
He reached out and touched the crystal. A shudder ran through his chest, and the room around him faded into ashes and fell to the floor as if carried by a breeze. Then, piece by piece, the memory patched itself together until Jack was stood in it.
He was still in the peasants’ house, he realized, but at a different time. The room felt stuffy, but an opened window let in a little breeze. Next to it was a square wooden board which would be used to block the window while the peasants slept, since glass was rare among the poor. Outside it, the second sun was almost finished setting, and its faint red light mixed with the oncoming dark of night in a dusky soup.
He heard a bang. He jumped at the sound and turned to see that the three peasants were sat at their table. He was shocked to see that all of them had cloth bags over their heads, and the openings of the bags were tied around their necks by string. Four burly men, both armed and armored, stood watch beside them.
The father of the peasant family struggled to reach his cloth hood, but his hands were bound. The mother and child shivered with fear. Jack couldn’t help experiencing a sense of dread of his own. There was something palpable about these vicious raiders standing in the peasants’ home, a place that until then the poor family would have thought of as a secure place, the heart of their lives.
Three of the raiders stepped forward and took places behind each peasant. They held daggers against their throats. This was done with utter silence, broken only when the fourth raider, stood at the head of the table, spoke.
“Remember the name: Lord Henry Veik,” he said. He seemed to be saying it not to the peasants, but to some unseen presence in the room.
With that, the three raiders sliced their daggers across the peasants’ throats. The sound was sickening, and Jack flinched. He wanted to turn away, but he was a spectator in this memory and couldn’t move. He instead focused on a point on the ceiling above their heads, but that didn’t spare him from the raspy dying breaths of the family, and a crash as the peasant man fell off his chair and to the floor.
At that, the vision ended. Jack felt shaken, and he was sure his face must have gone pale. He was back in the room now, the real one.
With a sense of horror, he realized that this performance had been for him. When the raider said, “reme
mber the name: Lord Henry Veik,” he hadn’t been saying it to someone else in the room. He must have known that the memory of the event would be put in a crystal, and that Jack would watch it. Henry Veik had set this up for Jack to see. Not only that, but he must have had Bruce Frier create the crystal memory, which meant that Bruce had been in Jack’s lands again. Veik was trying to intimidate him. The problem was that it was working.
“You okay, lad?” said Mav.
“You better watch this,” he said.
As he went to hand the crystal to Mav, the gem suddenly shattered and broke of its own accord, and Jack found that he held just a pile of broken glass.
He looked at the scene around him. None of this made sense. Slitting three throats would produce an ungodly amount of blood, yet there were only a few drops of it on the floor. Not only that, but the crystal breaking by itself had been no accident. Whoever had left it for Jack, hadn’t wanted anyone else to see it.