Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4)
Page 44
“Assuming that the ruins are a safe enough place to camp out for a bit, I think we can afford to rest there for a few hours,” I said as my swirling thoughts came to an end, silently hoping that my words came true. “If nothing else, it’ll give us better cover than just finding a spot to hole up in elsewhere in the forest.”
“Fantastic!” Caius replied with visible relief. “In that case, let’s start moving double time. The sooner we can get there, the sooner I can find a nice soft rock to lie my head on and pass out.”
Despite receiving a chorus of snorts and chuckles in response to his words, no one disagreed with the dark elf’s sentiment, our pace through the forest quickening as Kilgore continued to lead us towards the ruins he’d found.
I think Halcyon has to be right, I thought as we moved, my eyes keeping a careful watch of our surroundings for unexpected threats. Given that the old Irovian tower isn’t too far away from here, at least as the crow flies, and Khudazal is somewhere farther ahead of us, it’d make sense if this ruin we’re heading to is also Irovian. But at the same time, the Nafarr had claim to this region long before their war with the dark elves even began. I wonder why we haven’t seen any other ruins of theirs this far north. Maybe they were all destroyed in the war afterward? Or did they just not settle here for some reason?
Feeling more questions continue to bubble up in my mind as we moved, the journey towards the ruin passed quickly and without note, Kilgore’s words about the area being sparsely populated by creatures proving to be exceptionally true. That particular change proved to be an exceptionally welcome one for our tired souls, giving us a chance to simply move without worry and enjoy the forest around us.
“Okay, this is the part where you need to keep a sharp eye out for any Hartwyld vipers that you might see hiding in the brush,” Kilgore warned at one point, his voice bringing our wandering thoughts back into the moment. “The ones I’ve seen so far have all been level twenty-two, and they aren’t particularly hard to fight, but they have a venom that really hurts. I’m talking about two hundred to three hundred points of damage kind of hurt, per bite.”
“Noted,” Constantine replied, prompting a grunt of agreement from everyone. “Are they fairly common or rarer to spot?”
“I’d say rarer from what I’ve seen on both my treks so far, but they’re also the only creature I’ve seen in this area,” the half-elf answered with a shake of his head. “Given how small they are, I’m thinking that the behir probably ignored them as a food source and went after bigger creatures—enough so that it cleaned this area out completely. Once we get closer to the ruins, eventually even the vipers will disappear.”
“Hrm, so the big lizard must have been here for a while,” I said, glancing out into the trees briefly before a thought caused me to turn my attention back towards Kilgore. “Do you think there is more than one of them to worry about?”
“I have no idea,” the elf replied shaking his head. “I haven’t seen anything that would make me think there is more than one of them…but at the same time, I didn’t see the behir either until it jumped out and tried to eat us. It’d take a fair bit of bushwhacking going down the various tracks leading out from the ruins to be sure it’s the only one, and even then we could still end up missing it.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna say hard pass on that,” Halcyon stated. “After what we’ve been through so far to get here, I prefer to keep my extracurricular bushwhacking to a minimum. As it is, I’m already starting to get flashbacks of the Twilight Grove the longer that we’re in this forest.”
“Pfft,” Constantine grunted. “This place doesn’t have anything on the Grove—it’s actually nice and quiet for the most part. Peaceful, even. Hell, clear out a few spots here in the nicer parts of the forest and we could sell it to people as being Aldford’s cottage country.”
“Sure, sure,” Halcyon replied, adding an ominous note to his voice. “That’s just what the game wants you to think as it lures you into a false sense of security and you let down your guard. Then the next thing you know…boom! You’re being eaten by some sort of adventurer-eating Venus flytrap, or something equally ridiculous.”
“Well, isn’t someone feeling cheery today,” I commented dryly. “You really think we’re going to get eaten by a plant?”
“Either that or fall into quicksand,” Caius suggested, joining in on the conversation. “After that behir ambushed us from nowhere, you can just never know what the day will bring.”
“Actually, you guys know what a day brings?” Kilgore asked while glancing over his shoulder towards the two spellcasters. “Nice quiet walks through the forest where no one talks. How about we do that for a little while now?”
With everyone chuckling as our banter wound down, we allowed the elf to continue leading us towards the ruins, falling into a companionable silence. Along the way, I spotted three of the aforementioned Hartwyld vipers that he’d warned us about, one of them falling prey to a still hungry Amaranth, the cat pouncing on and killing the snake before it could even react. But aside from that single distraction, the trip was peaceful and quiet, allowing us to focus on traveling through the sometimes exceptionally dense underbrush.
Eventually, the trees around us began to thin, and the sound of water began to reach our ears, prompting us to move a little bit faster in anticipation of what was ahead. Shortly afterward, the trees around us almost gave way completely, and we found ourselves entering a sparsely covered meadow, complete with a large lake in the distance. A small, rocky beach lined the edges of the water, providing a thin buffer before what unmistakably was once a road appeared, its broken and overgrown path having largely been reclaimed by nature. Beyond the shoreline itself and into the meadow, there were stretches of lush grass intermixed with smaller bushes and plants, giving the place a rather idyllic and picturesque feel. But despite the serenity and peacefulness of the scene, our eyes were drawn to the larger ruins that sprawled out farther into the clearing ahead.
“And here we are,” Kilgore announced, not bothering to raise a hand to indicate the ruined structures in the distance, no doubt already sensing that our eyes were already fixed on them. “Cassius and Berwyn are already there poking around.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Halcyon asked excitedly without breaking his stride as he continued to walk towards the ruins, all of us following a few strides behind. “That’s where we need to be, too!”
Chapter 34
Standing, or perhaps more appropriately crumbling, near the edges of the lake stood the remains of several darkly colored stone structures partially covered in various layers of leafy vines and lichen. Age combined with weather had taken a severe toll on the structures, the few surfaces that I could see uncovered by the plants having been brushed nearly smooth, whatever decoration or adornment they might have once borne having since been lost to time. But despite the serene tranquility of the scene ahead of us, I could see that violence had once touched all of the structures before us, seriously damaging them, if not knocking them completely askew.
“Wow, this is a lot bigger than anything I was expecting,” I commented as we got closer to what we soon identified as Irovian ruins, each of us finally getting a sense of both their scale and the damage that they had suffered. “And yikes, some of these buildings sure look like they’ve had better days, or maybe even centuries. I’m surprised this one here is even standing.”
Topping out at what could be considered a generous thirty feet, the tallest still standing ruin accordingly looked to be the most damaged, as little more than the outside walls of the once tall square-like building remained intact. Neighboring it at about twenty feet in height stood a second ruin stretching nearly thirty feet in length, its walls looking in much better shape and even having a portion of its roof, or possibly what had once been an upper floor, still intact.
“You could say that again,” Constantine agreed from beside me as we continued to walk, our gaze angling itself towards another pair of buildings nearby
, seeing that they had both collapsed into one another, a good portion of their lower foundations nowhere to be seen. It was difficult to tell just how tall either of them might have once been during their prime, but all that remained now could be best described as a ten-foot mountain of rubble. “This…city? Or maybe town? Whatever it once was, definitely looks like there was a battle fought here—hell, maybe even a whole war judging from the damage.”
“Hey, are those friendly voices I hear?” Cassius’s voice called out as we continued to walk through the ruined promenade, the tall and muscular Eberian stepping out of the tall rectangular building’s entryway. “Ah! Great! You guys are finally here! Like what you’ve seen so far?”
“And how!” Halcyon exclaimed, waving a hand at all the ruins. “I wasn’t sure what to expect when Kilgore first told us about what you’d found, but it really wasn’t this. I was thinking it’d be a building or two…not this.”
“I feel that,” the man replied with a nod. “We were pretty surprised too when we suddenly found this place. Though I have to say, it is a whole lot better than an entire nest of those behirs.”
“That it definitely is,” Halcyon agreed, the mage continuing to glance around his surroundings as he spoke. “I don’t even know where to begin exploring here. There’s just so much.”
“Well, while I haven’t yet been able to take a look around at everything here just yet, I think I can offer you guys a starting point,” Cassius offered, a hand coming up to wave at the building he’d exited. “Berwyn and I found a couple interesting things in here that I think you should all see.”
“Oh?” the mage asked excitedly. “What is it?”
“The behir’s nest for one,” Cassius answered. “I don’t know what this place might have once been in the past, but it sure made itself a pretty big home inside what’s left of this building here.”
“And what about the second?” I queried, narrowly beating Halcyon who was about to voice the same question.
“Yeah…that one is actually a little hard to explain,” the tall Eberian replied, an uncertain look coming across his face as he spoke along with his voice dropping an octave in volume. “We found a room farther underground in here, past the nest—”
“Wait, there’s an underground part here too?” Halcyon interrupted, barely able to contain himself as a renewed surge of excitement entered his voice. “Is it anything like the ruins at Crater Lake? Or maybe like the Irovian tower?”
“Uh, no, it’s nothing like what you found there,” Cassius replied, shaking his head as he answered the question. “And it’s just a single room with…uh, I don’t even know. Honestly, it’s probably better that I show it to you guys, rather than try and explain it. Come on, Berwyn is down there now, and we can stop at the nest along the way.”
Waving for us to follow him, Cassius turned to lead us back the way he’d just come from, with all of us eagerly following on his heels. As we moved, at first through a small hallway before entering into a larger, partially collapsed chamber, the man continued to give us a rough overview of his and Berwyn’s exploration so far.
“So, after making sure that these ruins were completely abandoned, we did a rough search of the area, and it looks like the behir has been the only living thing that’s made its home here in recent memory,” he explained as he led us into the rubble and dirt-filled interior of the ruin. “Neither of us have spotted any signs of fires, makeshift shelters, or really anything else that would show anyone’s settled here in a long, long time.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said thoughtfully as I glanced around the ruined chamber for anything of interest, my eye landing on a large hole in the wall on the opposite side of the room. Leading directly to the outside, I was able to see several claw marks along both the ground leading to it as well as along the wall itself, no doubt from the behir’s comings and goings. “This place isn’t exactly convenient to get to, being where it is. Plus, given what it tried to do to us, I can’t imagine that our scaly friend was exactly inviting if he happened to find a few orcs in his path.”
“I’m thinking that he definitely wasn’t,” Cassius agreed as we came to a stop roughly in the center of the chamber, directly in front of a large set of stone stairs leading to a level below us. “And I’m also thinking that it was more than just a few orcs he found in his path, among other things.”
“You do?” Constantine asked in a confused voice. “I thought you said that you didn’t see any signs of anyone being here.”
“Actually, I said that we didn’t see any signs of living things here,” the scout replied, offering the rogue a tight smile before he turned to descend down the open stairway. “Or at least I sure hope they weren’t living for long.”
Sensing that there were hidden depths to the man’s words, none of us said anything as we moved to follow him down the stairs, simply exchanging a series of blank glances with one another. Fortunately, none of us had to wait long to discover exactly what Cassius had meant as the lower level started to come into view.
“A-are t-those…bones?” I whispered halfway through our descent as the floor at the end of stairs finally came into view, its surface completely covered with countless grey-white shapes of various sizes.
“They are,” Cassius confirmed, the rest of our short journey passing in silence until we all reached the lower level—and, by extension, the behir’s nest.
Filled with bones as far as any of us could see, the entire chamber was best described as a charnel house, the vague, musty smell of rotting meat and excrement slowly wafting up to greet our arrival. Vaguely rectangular in nature, at least where it hadn’t collapsed, the behir had made use of the entire place to display its hunting prowess, piling crushed and half-eaten bones along its outer edges. Yet for all its impact on us, the ghastly décor surrounding the room itself was a minor feature when compared to the bed that the creature had made for itself. Shaped into a wide bowl at the far side of the room, enough so that the behir would easily be able to coil itself into, was a particularly large mound of crushed and shattered bones. Enough so that it almost completely blocked a smaller doorway behind it at the farthest reaches of the chamber.
“Well…isn’t this place cheery,” Constantine said in a hushed voice. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many bones before. And I kinda hope that I never do again. This is…just…whoa.”
“Whoa is right,” Caius agreed as we all slowly fanned out into the room and continued to take in our surroundings. “By the looks of it, our guy here was a pretty vicious hunter and here for a very long time.”
“Or at least I’d sure hope so,” Halcyon said, adding onto the warlock’s statement. “If it ate this much in a short time…then yikes.”
“Rest assured that I don’t think that’s the case,” Cassius said, reaching into a bag on his hip as he spoke. “Because after Berwyn and I found the place and had a bit of a look around, we managed to find a few interesting things here scattered in the bone and they all look to be pretty old. Like really, really old.”
“What kind of interesting things?” I asked, my curiosity unable to help but be piqued as I saw the man pull out a piece of bone that vaguely resembled a knife, the blade portion of the weapon appearing extremely damaged. “Wait, is that…”
“A relic, yeah,” the scout affirmed, shifting the bone knife into his other hand and reaching back into his bag for a second time. “Like I said earlier, I’m pretty sure that the behir found more than its fair share of orcs…or whatever else that might have lived in this forest at one point in time because Berwyn and I both found quite a few items here buried among the bones.”
Rushing to gather around the man, we all then promptly forgot about the behir’s nest as Cassius began to pull a variety
of items out from his inventory, passing them one at a time for us to inspect. Having positioned myself near the man, I fortunately didn’t need to wait long until the items came my way, their descriptions appearing one by one in my vision.
Shattered Bone Longsword
Item Class: Relic
Item Quality: Mastercraft (+20%)
Strength: +15 Agility: +15
Shattered Bone Dagger
Item Class: Relic
Item Quality: Mastercraft (+20%)
Strength: +15 Agility: +15
Shattered Bone Staff
Item Class: Relic
Item Quality: Mastercraft (+20%)
Intelligence: +15 Willpower: +15
Ring of Shielding
Class: Relic
Item Slot: Ring
Use: When activated, this ring allows its wearer to channel a 2000-hit-point Force Shield in the direction that the ring is facing for up to 30 seconds, after which its energy will be depleted and require time to recharge. Whenever not in use, the ring will slowly regain its strength over the course of ten minutes depending on how fully it has been depleted. Due to the magic empowering this ring, it requires three free ring slots on a hand to function.
Ring of Healing
Item Class: Relic
Item Slot: Ring
Use: When activated, this ring enhances all healing magic channeled through it, increasing its effects by 25% for the next 30 seconds, after which its energy will be depleted and will slowly recharge itself over the course of five minutes. Due to the magic empowering this ring, it requires three free ring slots on a hand to function.
Ring of Force
Item Class: Relic
Item Slot: Ring
Use: When activated, this ring allows the wielder to channel a wave of force outwards from the object in three different ways. First, as a weaker blast force in every direction around them that deals minor damage to those affected and shoving them away. Second, as a potent blast of force directed in a 120-degree arc of their choosing, dealing moderate damage to those affected and potentially knocking them off their feet. Or third, as a single strong blast of force on a target they strike with the hand wearing the ring, dealing high damage and potentially knocking their target back a large distance. Once depleted, this ring will require ten minutes to recharge. Due to the magic empowering this ring, it requires three free ring slots on a hand to function.