by Seth Ring
The main feature of corrupted creatures was a complete fearlessness and a deep bloodlust that would cause them to attack with abandon as soon as they discovered prey. While this made them very hard to fight, they didn't have to be chased down like normal wolves. As he moved forward, Thorn began to see the trees thinning out and the undergrowth disappearing. After a while, he noticed that the trees were bigger, and he had much less trouble walking under them.
The forest floor here was covered in a spongy layer of composting leaves and debris from the trees, fine blades of grass poking up wherever beams of light were able to pierce the thick foliage. Thorn was walking around a large boulder when his scalp prickled, and a dark shape came barreling at him from the side. Instinctively raising his right shoulder, Thorn felt a sharp pain as a corrupted wolf's teeth ripped into his skin, forcing him to stumble backward.
Still reeling in shock from the ambush, Thorn reached out, his immense hand curling around the corrupted wolf's chest. With a grunt, he heaved the wolf off and scrambled backward until his back was against the boulder.
Three corrupted wolves appeared, low growls issuing from their throats, and began circling him, looking for a weakness. Checking his shoulder, Thorn was relieved to see that it wasn't bleeding too badly. Still, he could feel his health trickling away, so he couldn't afford to wait too long. Seeing him look down at his shoulder, the wolf on his left howled and dashed forward, its claws flashing.
This time, ready for the attack, Thorn pulled his sword out with his right hand while shifting his weight onto his right foot and snapping a sidekick at the wolf as it jumped. Feeling his foot connect, Thorn borrowed the rebounding force to drop into a squat before shifting forward into a bow stance as he cut upwards with his blade, bisecting the wolf in front of him while dodging the snapping teeth of the wolf attacking from the right.
Without even looking, he reversed his swing and lopped off the attacking wolf's head with a neat slash. Turning to face his left again, Thorn's mouth dropped open. The first wolf to attack was also dead, its head crushed by his snap kick! Releasing a big breath, Thorn patted his chest. Real combat was nerve-wracking!
Collecting the tails of the three wolves to turn in for the quest, Thorn rested for some minutes before continuing forward. The attack had come out of nowhere; Thorn's perception wasn't strong enough to spot the hiding wolves, so he wasn't sure what else he could have done. He had heard people talk about being able to sense killing intent, but Thorn had grown up in the most peaceful environment possible, so he didn't even know what killing intent would feel like.
In fact, the countless hours that Ms. Chen spent forcing him to complete his slow Taijiquan moves and the fact that this was a game were the only reasons he could fight at all. Despite how lifelike the game was, Thorn was not able to suspend his disbelief completely, giving him something of a laissez-faire attitude when it came to things like getting hurt. This allowed him to be completely fearless when facing his opponents.
Advancing, Thorn had more warning before his next fight. He caught sight of another three wolves coming over a hill. Three bloody minutes later, he had earned three more tails and a nasty bite on his leg. Fortunately for him, in Nova Terra health regeneration was closer to a game than to real life, otherwise, Thorn would have been in a lot of trouble as the wounds built up.
After resting for a couple moments outside of combat, all of his wounds began to knit themselves back together, taking only a few minutes to heal completely. Emboldened by his two encounters, Thorn decided to speed up a bit and, covering vast amounts of ground with his enormous stride, ran into six more groups of wolves before dusk began to settle. Knowing that the thick layer of foliage would make the forest completely dark soon, Thorn decided to call it a day and head back for town.
After about forty-five minutes of walking, he made it back to Berum, picking up another three tails on the way. Over the course of the day, he had collected 27 tails, which, at 3 coppers each, came to eight silver and 1 copper. After a guard pointed him to a cheap inn, Thorn bought some dinner and went to bed. Even though he could stay up for a couple days in a row due to the time dilation, Thorn was not in any rush. After all, he had the next 14 years to do quests.
The inn was somewhat run down, but since cheap was currently the name of the game, Thorn did not care. He paid the gawking tavern owner and squeezed up the stairs to the small room he had rented. Like he had dreaded, the bed was a small single. Stripping the sheets off of it, Thorn lowered himself onto the groaning floor. Worried that the floor was going to collapse under him, he stayed as still as he could. Running through his breathing technique, more out of habit than anything else, he soon fell asleep.
At some point in the night, feeling a cold breeze, Thorn woke up. Sensing something wrong, he lay still, his eyes barely open. It took him a moment, but he made out a small figure crouched in front of the window. Dressed completely in black with a mask over its face, the figure seemed to have just come in through the slightly open window.
Reaching around in the dark, Thorn grabbed the first thing that his hand fell on. As the figure stood and snuck toward the window, Thorn hurled it at the thief!
Oberlin Danihoff, III, had been out of luck recently. Starting with that twelve-year-old kid from whom he’d tried to lift a magical tome. That kid had turned out to be an archmage of some sort, specializing in lightning. And to make a bad thing worse, the magical tome had almost eaten one of his fingers! Then it was the madman with the portal in his room who summoned some sort of eldritch horror. Ugh. He had been washing slime out of his hair for weeks.
Needless to say, his often impeccable luck had recently been complete garbage. It was so bad, in fact, that he, the greatest thief in all of Angoril, had been reduced to scrounging for coins in a dump of an inn in the middle of bloody nowhere. Shaking his head in frustration, he continued to move forward slowly until a cold breeze blew across his back.
“I thought I latched that!” he thought, swearing to himself. A quick glance at the bed showed that it was still empty, but Oberlin was a professional, so he turned to close the window. When he got to it, he realized the latch was actually broken, explaining why it had swung open behind him. As he began to re-affix the latch, he heard a heavy creak behind him and turned his head in time to see the entire bed flying across the room at him, a gargantuan shadow monster that filled the room rising up behind it!
With an ear-piercing scream, Oberlin dove through the window in an attempt to avoid the bed hurtling toward him, all the while cursing every god he could think of.
Startled by the loud commotion, the inn's owner rushed out from the back, his nightgown askew, clutching a comically large axe. Thorn pulled the bed out from the hole he had created and looked down. The bed frame had smashed out some of the wall next to the window, allowing Thorn to squeeze his bulk out of the hole and drop to the ground next to the thief, who was on his back groaning after falling 15 feet.
Landing with a thump, Thorn watched the unresisting thief, who was muttering something about quitting this stupid game while he waited for the innkeeper to come out. The commotion, resulting from the loud smash as the bed frame impacted the wall moments after the thief dove out the window, seemed to have roused the whole inn.
Still fuzzy, Thorn was unsure of how to proceed. Before he could decide if he should find a guard or take the thief to jail himself, the innkeeper rushed out the door of the inn, his giant axe waving around him in the air. The innkeeper looked around wildly, and, upon spotting the gaping hole in his wall on the second story, let out a furious shriek!
"WHO SMASHED A HOLE IN MY WALL?!"
"Um, that was me," Thorn admitted, raising a hand.
"HOW ABOUT I SMASH A HOLE IN YOU?!" Apoplectic, the innkeeper tried to grab Thorn by the collar, but, due to the difference in height, he only managed to grab Thorn's shirt near his ribs. "YOU… you…" realizing that he was currently threatening someone twice his size who, moments before, put a massive hole in the w
all, the innkeeper trailed off, deflating.
"Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I didn't realize I had grabbed the bed," said Thorn, rubbing his nose. "I was trying to scare off this thief."
"Well I'd say you succeeded," muttered Oberlin to himself, trying to push off the ground.
CHAPTER TEN
Seeing him trying to stand, Thorn grabbed Oberlin and picked him up. Setting him on his feet, he left his massive hand resting on the thief's shoulder, his fingers ready to squeeze should the thief try and make a run for it. Surprisingly, Oberlin made no attempt to free himself, seeming completely resigned to his fate.
The innkeeper, too scared to continue yelling at his giant customer, ran to the end of the street to get a city guard. While he was leaving, Oberlin looked up at the mammoth figure holding onto him and grimaced.
"Greetings, my good man. Given the dubious nature of this initial meeting, why don't we start over? I'm Oberlin Danihoff the third, last in a long line of professional swipers. Being that we are both of the non-digital variety, and you haven't lost anything, do you think you could do a chap a favor and let me scoot before the constabulary show?" Oberlin looked at Thorn with a hopeful gaze.
It took Thorn almost a full minute to understand what the slim thief was saying, but once he got it, he couldn't help but chuckle. Shaking his head, he continued to hold the thief, impervious to his babbling until the guards arrived. Once he saw the guards, Oberlin gave an explosive sigh, looking up at the sky.
Rejecting the guard's offer of having Oberlin give him compensation, Thorn expressed his desire to go back to sleep, so the guards dragged the depressed thief away with them. Over to the side, the innkeeper was staring in despair at the hole in his wall. He had been tempted to raise a fuss so that Thorn would pay for the repairs but had abandoned that plan as soon as he saw the giant.
As for Thorn? He yawned, and stretching out an arm, he grabbed the exposed floor of his second story room, pulling himself back up to squeeze through the hole. Fluffing the small pillow he had been using he lay back down on the floor of the room and was soon fast asleep. Gulping, the innkeeper swore to himself that he wouldn't be involved with this freak!
"Who climbs into a second story without jumping? Wait! Forget jumping, who does it at all?" he thought, dragging his axe back into the inn.
Thorn woke up early to bright morning light streaming through the hole he had made. Examining the damage, Thorn could see that the walls were made of plaster-reinforced wood with wooden frames around the windows. The plaster on the inside of the wall had been pulverized, and the exposed wood had been splintered beyond recognition.
After taking a good look at what was needed to fix the problem, Thorn made his way downstairs to the dining room. A quick look around confirmed that none of the rather spindly chairs would be able to hold his weight, so Thorn took a seat on the floor and waved over one of the staring waitresses.
"Morning, do you sell breakfast?"
"Yes sir," she replied, pulling out a menu for him. "It's two copper for the standard breakfast, which is two eggs, breakfast potatoes, toast, and juice."
"Excellent, I'll have six." Thorn handed the menu back. "You can scramble the eggs."
"Six, sir? Six eggs?"
"No, six of the standard breakfasts. That would be 12 eggs. Plus all the other stuff."
"Y... Yes sir," replied the waitress. Bemused, she walked into the back, returning five minutes later with a massive tray with three breakfasts stacked on it. Letting Thorn know that the rest of the food would be coming, she hurried away.
Thorn, excited to be eating something other than bread, devoured the potatoes first, before putting the eggs on the toast. Each piece of toast was polished off in two bites, and the rest of the eggs were inhaled, as well. Thorn was enjoying his juice, the plates in front of him empty, when the waitress came out to deliver the second set of food. At the sight of the empty plates, the waitress almost dropped her large tray in shock. This time she stayed in the dining room and watched in awe as Thorn shoveled the new food into his mouth as fast as the last.
Paying for his meal, Thorn heaved himself off the floor and went in search of the innkeeper. He found him outside talking to a dwarf with a thick leather apron. Thorn apologized again, and after some discussion, convinced him to not only let Thorn pay for the repairs, but to also rebuild the bed in that room into something that would fit Thorn's massive size.
That left Thorn with almost no money. So, after getting a few supplies and some food for lunch, Thorn readied his sword and headed back out to the old growth forest where he had encountered the corrupted wolves. Arriving without issue, Thorn ventured deeper into the forest.
The corrupted wolves seemed to travel in packs of three, which made them hard for a normal individual to hunt. At the same time, the low price per tail made the bounty unattractive for groups who would have to split the profits. Thorn, however, was not normal. His martial arts training, coupled with his size, made it easier for him to hunt. By lunchtime, he had a tidy pile of tails.
Noticing that the deeper he went into the forest, the greater the frequency of his encounters with the corrupted wolves, Thorn did his best to range around the outskirts of the forest while keeping a sharp lookout to make sure he did not encounter multiple groups of corrupted wolves at the same time. While he could deal with three wolves at once, he could not do so without injury. Adding another three wolves was beyond what Thorn could handle at the moment.
The next few days passed in a familiar routine. During the day, he would hunt corrupted wolves around the edge of the old growth forest. When evening came, he would make his way back to the city to turn in the quest. Seeing how willing Thorn was to pay for the wall repair and bed upgrade made the innkeeper much friendlier, and he happily continued to reserve Thorn's room for him.
Although the money was only trickling in, Thorn was content. He had no particular desire for money, so he was not worried that the task he had taken barely paid for his daily expenses. Every day he made a couple of silver that he stashed away after paying for his colossal meals and his room.
Once Thorn had been hunting corrupted wolves for a week, he decided to make another visit to the Training Hall to pay for the sword he had borrowed. Waving to the guards, he ducked into the hall. Hamm, about to start his familiar speech, saw him and brightened up.
"Hey, kid! You're back! Ready to learn how to wield that junky sword?"
"Good morning." Thorn smiled back at the friendly trainer. "Actually, I'm here to return the sword. I borrowed it last time I was here, but now I have enough money to buy one for myself."
"Wait, that is one of my swords?" Surprised, Hamm grabbed the sword from Thorn and examined it. Seeing the familiar handle but damaged blade, he shook his head in disgust. "What were you doing with it? Chopping rocks?! What did I tell you about control, kid? Look how trashed this blade is! After only a week too. Sheesh. You know, I'm starting to think you are not suited for swords."
Glancing around at the hall, empty in the early morning, he turned back to look at Thorn. "Listen, kid, you better scram before Janus gets here, unless you want to spend the next year practicing shooting arrows. She threw quite the fit that you ran off last time. But I've got a tip for you. Out in the mountains, north of the city, is a friend of mine who might have a combat style that is more suited to you. If you want to go further on the martial path, you should look him up."
As Hamm finished speaking, a notification popped up, asking Thorn if he wanted to accept a new quest. Agreeing, Thorn opened the quest details.
A Hidden Master
The martial path is long and fraught with danger. Having learned all that you can from Sword Trainer Hamm at the Berum Training Hall, you have been given the opportunity to further your training with a mysterious master who lives in the mountains to the north.
Find Master Sun
After getting rough directions from Hamm, Thorn thanked him and immediately left the Training Hall as fast as he could. J
anus had reminded him of his aunt, and he was especially bad at dealing with those types. Since Hamm had recommended that Thorn not bother with a sword, he spent a couple silver on a heavy machete that came with a sheath. Then, after having the smith who was selling it add a few serrations to the thick spine and sharpen the swage, Thorn tied it onto his lower back for easy access.
The directions that Thorn had been given were not very precise, so he stopped back at the inn to let the staff know that he may be out for a couple days and to stock up on some food that he could cook in the wilderness. Thorn had never been camping before, so he was eager to try spending a couple nights out in the open. He had bought an extra-large blanket earlier in the week to cover his new bed, so he brought that along, as well.
After a quick stop at an adventurer's shop, Thorn gathered up his gear and left the city through the north gate. To the north of the city, a large plain ran up to a small, mist-covered cluster of three mountains. Bisecting the plain was a lazy, winding river, a ferry waiting to take Thorn across for a single silver.