Makes your strikes and other combat techniques project 25% of their damage onto other enemies near the target, with a 15% chance of crippling them.
Cost to use: 10 spirit per hit (automatic).
Cost: 4 training points.
The last technique I chose was kind of a mini-Clarity. I took it for the option to increase my damage dealt in a short time even more.
Hurricane Ferocity, level 1
Active ability of the air element.
You gain the swiftness of a hurricane, moving and attacking 100% faster.
Cost to use: 500 spirit to activate and an additional 50 spirit per second.
Cost: 3 training points.
Hurricane Ferocity in Clarity meant… Damn. I’d be able to put the world on pause.
Oyama was in no hurry to leave after I said goodbye. Piercing me with his gaze, he said dryly:
“I heard of your victory over Abaddon.”
In all the time he spent with me, this was the first time he let on that he knew how the Demonic Games ended.
“Yeah. The demon mentioned that he remembered you. He recognized your style, master.”
“When we met, he hadn’t yet turned to Chaos, so he was interested in our Path. Chaos gave him more strength, and far faster than the Path of Spirit would have. But all the same, you defeated him. I am proud of you, apprentice!”
“Thank you, master.” My eyes stung. Praise from the legendary Grand Master meant a lot.
“The aether is full of whispers that you plan to go to the Inferno. Is that true?”
“I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but I have to get there. Not for myself, but for all Disgardium.”
“Well…” Oyama took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye. “I don’t believe in luck, so I’ll wish you a good fight instead, apprentice. May you return victorious.”
Chapter 11. The Gods Care Not For Justice
TUAF WAS A LARGE CITY in the southwest of the Commonwealth, perhaps the closest to Tristad. If the borders of the sandbox were opened, going through Tuaf would be the easiest way to get to Darant. That free human city had once been subject to constant assaults from the steppe nomads, whose blood was a mix of so many races that they had become a separate one themselves. Tired of the raids, the city elders made the decision to become part of the Kingdom of Darant.
It had been a thousand years since then, but the city hadn’t changed much. The nomads still gave it trouble, the same hot sea air still stuck to the skin, and the streets were still packed with the stalls of local and visiting merchants. Tuaf remained an important crossroad of trade in the region; it had a sea port and direct portal connections to all the largest cities of Disgardium. This meant that it had goblins, orcs, gnolls and all the races of the Commonwealth.
So it wasn’t hard for our four Threats and Crawler to get there through the transport guild portals to which the Awoken castle was connected.
I walked into the portal disguised as Ragnar, a level 150 viking I made up. The others took transformation potions. We wanted neither unnecessary attention nor a potential loss of reputation. I had to kill the Chief Councilman of Tuaf – I doubted that would go over well with the authorities if they found out.
As soon as we found ourselves in Tuaf’s lively portal hall, we headed for the exit. The city’s stuffy, hot air blasted us as we stepped outside, but I was used to worse in the Lakharian Desert.
“Split up,” I said quietly to the boys.
Without answering, they split into pairs and went their separate ways. Hiros and Bomber headed for the city hall, Crawler and Crag – for Rion Staffa’s home. Just like in Darant, we weren’t allowed to use our mounts here.
I walked into the shadows behind a column of the building, then went into Stealth and took off into the air. The hardest task for now was finding the Chief Councilman. The boys were headed for the two spots where he was most likely to be. I took all the other places Staffa visited in the course of his duties – the marketplace, the port, the auction house, the Guild Square. I didn’t know what kind of mob boss Nettle was, but as Chief Councilman he was very active. Nothing important happened in Tuaf without his involvement.
Like any large city, whether in real life or Dis, Tuaf was split into districts for citizens of various levels of wealth. I saw a homeless young orc digging through a garbage heap as the gilded carriage of a local merchant clattered by. Nergal’s magnificent temple was summoning the townspeople to morning prayers. Luxury carriages hitched to stunning horses and unicorns streamed towards it. One dwarf had his whole family with him, their carriage drawn by a set of five albino raptors, inhabitants of the steppes of Kharestan – the land of the dwarves and the brown-skinned steppe orcs who rejected the rule of the Empire.
In our second hour of searching, Crag messaged the group chat: Everyone head to Staffa’s house, he just got here! I shot over there, making it halfway before Crag updated us that Staffa had left the house and was headed to the north of the city. Crag and Crawler followed him on the ground while I flew, guided by their markers on the map.
The warrior and mage’s symbols moved for a while, then stopped. By then I’d already crossed almost all of Tuaf and caught up to the boys. Bomber and Hiros weren’t far from us either…
The figures of Crawler and Crag stood on the cobblestones between some two-story houses. I dove down to them, landed, looked around.
“Where is he?”
“Gone,” Crawler growled in frustration. “It’s like the cart vanished into thin air. Around here.”
“Are you sure he didn’t just teleport?”
“Naw, no portal,” Crag said. “Anyway, if the whole carriage had gone through a portal, first the horses would have disappeared, then the carriage, but this was all at once.”
I walked around, looking at the cobblestones of the narrow street, the closely spaced stone houses… The air shimmered along the sun-heated walls.
A cart pulled up nearby. Hiros and Bomber jumped off it. The warrior paid the carter and then nodded questioningly at us:
“Well?”
“He’s gone,” Crawler repeated. “Somewhere around here. He just disappeared right here along with his carriage and horses! A hobbit driver, two strong titan bodyguards, two bay horses…”
“Nether!” Bomber swore. “What now?”
“Well, panicking won’t help,” I answered. “Staffa will be back, he can’t have gone anywhere.”
“Damn, time for my flight,” Crag muttered. “The party’s soon, and here we are, stuck.”
Hiros gave an annoyed growl and looked at him in displeasure:
“Crag-san is wrong to be concerned about some party! Nothing should have greater priority than the master’s assignments.”
“The master?” Bomber rolled his eyes. “Who do you mean?”
“Hiros speaks of Scyth-san, Bomber-san. The higher powers determined that he be the chief above us by giving him the first letter of the Latin alphabet! And Hiros does not even mention that Scyth-san was chosen by those who do not wake, and that he is the clan leader. How can you think of anything else when you have been given the honor of helping the master, Crag-san? Hiros is astounded!”
The ninja clenched his fists, apparently in his extreme disappointment with Crag’s ignorance. Apologizing for allowing his anger to get the better of him, Hiros bowed and said more calmly:
“Master, please allow Hiros to stay and watch. When the target appears, Hiros will tell you. Master?”
While the ninja was giving his fiery speech, I explored the area and noticed a strange cobblestone with a strangely regular shape. It was a hexagon, and it glimmered barely noticeably, as if overshadowed for a fraction of a second. I beckoned the boys over.
“Over here. Do you see that?”
They surrounded me and stared down at their feet. Bomber even rubbed his eyes.
“What?”
“That!” I ran my finger down the suspicious block.
“Just an ordinary stone like the re
st,” Crawler said, looking at me askance. “What, you see something else?”
“It’s hexagonal, perfectly smooth and it’s glimmering.”
“Scyth-san sees five sides?” Hiros asked.
“Uhm, yeah, clear as day.”
“Uhh, it’s just a stone, Scyth,” Crag said. “No edges. Looks round.”
“All our perception should be at around the same level, which means it’s not that,” I said, feeling the cobblestone. It was scorching. I grimaced involuntarily. “Maybe it’s my high Cartography level…”
Click! I must have pressed too hard. The cobblestone sank noticeably.
You have activated Conveyor No. 7.
Select desired travel point: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, No. 8, No. 9, No. 10.
I lifted my hand and the text disappeared. Raising my head and looking at my friends, I smiled:
“Good news and bad news, boys. The good news is it’s a so-called ‘Conveyor.’”
“And the bad?” everyone but Hiros asked in unison.
“On activation, there are nine possible travel points. No descriptions, just numbers. Looks like there are ten in total. This is the seventh. You guys give it a try.”
My friends’ experiments were fruitless. We soon realized that the stone only worked if you knew it should work. Although… My friends did know – I told them! Nether. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t working for them, but it was for me. It must have been from the cartography ability to see hidden caches.
“Okay… Then hold onto me,” I ordered, activating the Conveyor again. “Let’s try travel point number one. Three, two…”
“One!” Bomber interrupted with a shout, and the street disappeared, replaced by a flourishing glade.
Looking around, we shrugged – nobody in sight. I took off above the trees and spotted a thin path disappearing into the bushes. No, if the carriage had come here, there’d have to be a road for it to drive on.
The boys were wandering around, looking for anything they could find, but didn’t run into so much as an aggressive mob. Just butterflies, grasshoppers and bees.
“Mark point number one on the map,” I said. “We can return through the depths if need be.”
“We’re in northern Latteria,” Crawler noted.
“There’s brick right beneath my feet,” I chuckled. “Right in the middle of the glade. Look!”
The boys surrounded me and stared at the spot I was pointing at. Bomber even screwed up his eyes, but didn’t see anything. He swore:
“Bullshit! This is a joke, right?”
“No, Bomb. How do you think we got here?”
“The depths..?”
“No, the teleport was instantaneous,” Crawler said, muttering a spell and gaining Eagle Eye. He looked around and shook his head. “I can see the hairs on the ants. One is carrying a grain of sand. Doesn’t look like brick to me.”
Crag rolled his eyes:
“Terrastera was more fun, right Hiros?”
“No,” the ninja answered. “It’s very beautiful here! Do you have experts in Herbalism? I think these flowers are a rare ingredient.”
“Sure, but not here,” Crawler muttered. “Anyway, she’s more of an expert in screwing up.”
“Get over here, guys!” I shouted. “We’re moving on. This brick is a Conveyor too. Number one, just like it should be.”
The next four points also took us to unpopulated places in Latteria without any sign of Rion Staffa. It was a mystery who had created the strange portal network, which seemed to connect arbitrary points on the map with no logic whatsoever. I carefully studied each one, looking for caches and hiding spots, but there were neither people nor mobs at the travel points. They were all far away from populated areas.
Point number five turned out to be near the Lakharian Desert. Even sixty miles away, the air shimmered with heat, and the sun was so hot that Crag and Bomber took off their armor. The bad news was that I couldn’t seem to find the Conveyor there.
“Check the map, Scyth,” Crawler said. “Look, I marked all five points. Try to mentally connect them with a line.”
“Hmm… It’s kind of crooked. Like a profile view of Pinocchio’s nose on his face.”
Hiros touched his nose and sneezed, interrupting Crawler, who continued to talk excitedly:
“Do you see where the seventh one is? Guys, do you see it?”
“Crawler-san! You’re a genius!” When Hiros got excited, he had a way of making the object of his excitement want to sink into the ground. “Your mind could cut adamantite!”
“What..?” Bomber said in confusion. “What d’you mean?”
“He’s saying I got a sharp mind,” Crawler said, grinning. “Thanks, Hiros! Look, you can see where the supposed seventh point is – the first one we found, in Tuaf.”
“Nether!” I said, finally getting it. “Tuaf is the same distance away from the first and fifth points!”
“Scyth, if we draw a line between them all, it makes a star. A five-pointed star!”
I remembered drawing the Summoning Pentagram for Despot – it looked just the same as the joined points of the Conveyor system in my imagination now, including the remaining ones.
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the back of my head and taking my gear off like the others. “So we can draw the figure ourselves by symmetrically arranging the four missing points. Only we don’t even have a damn route laid. And I don’t know how the hell it’ll help us find Staffa.”
“Boys, talk like this makes me wanna fall asleep,” Crag said, yawning to demonstrate. “Can I go? I ain’t much good at geometry.”
He kicked the ground hard with a plated boot, spraying us with dust and earth, then yawned again, far longer this time.
“Hey, lift your foot,” I said. “The grass looks weird.”
At the spot he kicked, the stalk of a weed had survived – yellow, but standing up straight, not at all damaged from the warrior’s mighty kick strengthened by Unity and Synergy.
The weed turned out to be Conveyor No. 5, and it sent us on. Based on that example, I realized that I needed to look for the Conveyor in the exact spot where I appeared after the teleport. As long as I didn’t move, the portal item was beneath my feet.
The sixth point was to the south of the Lake District, where I once hit level 40 in the Abandoned Ruins of Dothleran and raised my first zombies.
A clump of clay stuck fast into the earth returned us to point number seven – to Tuaf, and the cobblestone road not far from the house of Tuaf’s Chief Councilman. We could have skipped it, but we had to check whether Nettle had come back.
Hiros slipped into the house in stealth and returned shortly after:
“Councilman Staffa is not at home.”
The eighth point was to the south of Darant, the ninth not far from Tristad, judging by the map. The tenth returned us to Darant, only this time in the north. Nettle, better known as Chief Councilman of Tuaf Rion Staffa, was nowhere to be found.
You have activated Conveyor No. 10.
Select desired travel point: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, No. 7, No. 8, No. 9 or return to base.
“What now, do we split up?” Crag asked.
“No, there’s a new option…” I said. “Return to base. Staffa’s base.”
* * *
We found ourselves in a dark room that smelled of hay and manure. A horse snorted nearby.
“Alright, we’re right in the center of the pentagram,” Crawler said. “According to the map, we’ve been brought to the estate of the Ravajo family.
Hiros walked away from us to a square of light falling from a tiny window, and opened a door. Sunlight flooded in. We turned out to be in a stable.
“Take a look around, Hiros,” I said. “Guys, you stay here. I’m going to look around too.”
The ninja disappeared into thin air, but as his group members, we could still see a ghostly outline around him.
I went into Stealth too, and flew outside. Ascending a littl
e, I saw a gloomy three-story house around forty yards away from the stable.
I entered Clarity, shot towards the building, saw windows wide open on the third floor and flew into a small and cozy bedroom. There was nobody inside.
After flying through all the rooms, I finally found Rion Staffa. He was a stately middle-aged man, broad-shouldered, with a thin mustache and sideburns. He stood with his mouth open, pointing his cane at a gray man standing to attention in the room with him. That was Raul Ravajo, the house’s owner and a level 72 farmer. He didn’t interest me, so I just grabbed him, flew out the window and left him on the roof, put to sleep with Lethargy. It was against my principles to kill an unarmed farmer for no reason.
Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series Page 21