The man just stared at her, cheek twitching.
“It’s my final answer, Greel. At least until we have the fifth relic. So if there’s nothing else?”
Seeming to master himself, he took a breath and straightened—as much as his twisted spine allowed. “Actually, there is. It’s the reason I came, but after hearing this nonsense about providing sanctuary, I felt I must raise the legal issue.”
“And this reason is…?”
“I’m coming with you to the Stone Forest. Your party needs someone with major single-target damage.”
Devon blinked. That wasn’t exactly what she’d expected to hear. “Well, you’re right, to be honest. Chen’s pretty good, but he’s more of an off tank. Unfortunately, I can’t take anyone but starborn. The problem is, we have to go on bicycles, and if you don’t already know how to ride, there’s just no time to learn. Hate to say it, but it’s a starborn skill.”
Greel rolled his eyes. “Which is precisely why I’ll be bringing my servant—I mean apprentice. All I need is for you to create one of those bikes with an extra seat for me.”
Devon glanced at poor Valious, who was cringing even harder now. Why on earth had the man agreed to let Greel boss him around this way? “No offense, Valious, but I don’t think your mentor has explained what you’d be getting into.” She turned back to Greel. “We’re already going to have Tamara along to protect. It will just make our job harder if we have two low-level people to look out for.”
At this, Greel smirked. “But you see, it’s not only for his ability to rotate those pedal things that he should be there. Apparently, the man has a destiny assigned by Veia herself.”
At this, Valious stood straight up, eyes wide. “What the…?” he managed to croak.
“Aravon—that incompetent tank trainer—told me personally that he couldn’t shake the feeling that Valious was important. Normally, I wouldn’t put any importance on that, but then Shavari had her first Seeing since Veia’s touch left her months ago. Guess who was right there along with your little party as you entered the Stone Forest.” He jabbed his thumb at Valious. “And then I had a revelation, and I suddenly realized what the man’s combat class should be.”
Greel turned, and with a flourish of his hands, leaned in and muttered something in the man’s ear.
Valious scratched his head. “I don’t understand. What’s a unique class? You mean no one else gets to have it?”
Greel sighed loudly and nodded.
“But what does the Frenzy class do? Does that mean I get to be a tank?”
Clamping a hand on the man’s shoulder—hard, judging by the whitening in Greel’s knuckles—the lawyer flashed her a dismissive sneer. “So you see, we’ll be coming with you. I’ll explain the new party additions to Chen and Tamara.”
Devon sighed and rolled her eyes. She supposed she could always just have Tamara give them an impromptu lesson in riding bikes off cliffs if they caused too much trouble.
“Don’t bother yourself. I’ll go talk to them now.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
HAILEY PAUSED INSIDE the wicket gate leading into Stonehaven. She had one last chance to change her mind here. The orders were in place with the nursing staff, but she could still log out and cancel them. Once she found Devon and agreed to party up for the journey through Ishildar, though, she wouldn’t be able to back out.
Well, technically, she would be able to—until her body quit, she’d have the option to log out. But Hailey had already ditched her friend once recently. She wouldn’t abandon her again, especially when that would be the last thing Devon and the rest of the group would remember about her.
She stepped inside the town, then put her back to the wall and leaned the back of her head against the cool stone. She could do this. Bob had explained that it was critical to be herself. The group would need her healing and crowd-control abilities, and the wisp would need her…sparkling personality, as he had sarcastically put it. The patterns must be established if this was going to work.
Outside the game, her body now lay in the clean-room bed, tubes snaking from just about everywhere it was possible to attach them. She would be fed through the tubes, given water and medicine. For a few hours every day, her mind would be put into a drug-induced sleep-like state, triggered when she logged out from Relic Online, but taking hold before sensory awareness returned.
The end-of-life provisions had been put in place to allow someone to let go when the pain became too much. Hailey was using the law differently, forcing an interpretation that allowed her to remain alive as long as possible, maximizing her remaining time by taking advantage of the game’s time compression. She would be spared the final pain of her body shutting down, something that, a few months ago, would have struck her as weak. Now, she had a greater purpose and a reason to take what felt like the easy way out.
Thinking of that purpose, she gritted her teeth and pushed off the wall. According to Bob’s latest message, the group would be gathering tomorrow in the central square before their departure on…bikes. Hailey didn’t know much more about the plan, but the wisp had made a point to let her know they’d ordered a bike for her, too, despite not having seen her in days. The notion raised a faint pang of guilt—what had Hailey ever done to deserve friends who would make space for her even after she’d ditched Devon on Christmas, even after she’d spent the last few days just wandering aimlessly through the game world, ignoring their messages?
But even if she didn’t deserve them, she could try to express her gratitude in the best way she knew how. By being a kickass group member when her friends most needed her.
Hailey took a deep breath and headed off to tell Devon she was coming on the journey.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“OW!” DEVON SAID aloud when her neck cramped as she tried to look around the side of the mountain of laundry she was carrying down the stairs. If the lack of visibility wasn’t bad enough, the basket was missing one of the plastic handle thingies that made it easier to grip, and a harsh edge was digging into her palm. As she felt blindly with her toe for the next step, she wondered whether she could get some sort of laundry service to take over the chore in the same way she’d started having her groceries delivered.
Of course, she’d still have to put the clean stuff away, which was as much of a problem as washing it in the first place. And it meant some stranger folding her undies. Ew. So no. No laundry service.
Her foot finally slid over concrete down at street level, and, freed of the confines of the narrow stairwell, she was able to turn sideways and walk while actually watching where she was going.
Unfortunately, though, when she executed the maneuver, she saw that a man had been waiting at the bottom of the stairs until she was clear. He’d probably watched every agonizing inch of her descent. After an awkward moment of staring, she realized it was the guy that lived a few doors down, the same man she’d seen taking his much more modest load of laundry down a few days ago. He was probably holding an internal conversation right now about how slovenly she must be to have piled up this much dirty stuff.
Of course, she didn’t know that it was all dirty, due to her recent problem of comingling the contents of her baskets. But given that the items of unknown classification had been strewn across the floor, no doubt walked on during a nighttime trip to the bathroom, they probably needed a wash anyway.
The guy gave her a friendly smile. “I was going to offer to help you on the stairs there, but I didn’t want to startle you and send you to your death.”
Devon felt her cheeks turn red. “I guess I let my laundry get a little out of control.”
He laughed. “Happens to the best of us. I finally had to put an app on my phone that makes me do chores before I’m allowed to use it for anything else. I could cheat by moving around and making it seem like I’m cleaning, but if I’m going that far, I figure I might as well just run the damn vacuum.”
“I just ordered one of
those robots,” Devon said, then immediately wished she had a hand free to smack herself. The statement was true—as she’d collected her items of dubious cleanliness, she’d got to thinking that the carpet was probably kind of gross since she managed to clean it herself about once every three months. Now that she had a real job, she could afford the simple luxuries like cleaner bots. But that didn’t mean she should blab her whole life’s story to a stranger.
The man grinned. “Nice. That’s even better than an app.” He glanced at her basket. “You got it from here?”
She suppressed a grimace as a dart of pain shot through her hand carrying the side of the basket with the missing handle. “Yup, thanks.”
Before he could say anything else, she hurried awkwardly around him and headed for the laundry room. Tamara and Hezbek would be proud of her for handling an actual encounter with a stranger, and more than that, for managing to exchange three or four sentences of small talk. But Devon wasn’t feeling like social self-improvement at the moment. She had way too many preparations on her mind, starting with a list of real-life crap she had to take care of—grocery shopping and unpacking being the most critical, seeing as she hoped to be online as much as humanly possible between when the group set out on their cycling adventure and the recovery of the relic.
She was also working on a list of provisions for the adventure, stored in a notes file she could pull up in game. That level of organization wasn’t typical for her…back when her guild had run complicated raid content in Avatharn Online, bean counters like Chen had put together the lists of expendables and spare gear and other incidentals they’d need. But with Tamara going along for the ride—literally—she felt responsible. It was a weird feeling, like she was a parent or something. But also, drawing up a list was a whole lot easier to stomach now that Hezbek’s potions didn’t taste like skunk barf.
Devon backed into the laundry room and, with a sigh of relief, set her basket down on one of the tables. She shook her hand out, opening and closing her fingers.
“Okay, then,” she said, turning to the machine. “Let’s see if we can avoid filling the room with suds this time, huh?”
As she loaded the top layer from the basket into the machine, she glanced again at her messenger icon. Still nothing from Emerson. Which was another reason she wasn’t really in the mood for skilling up her social interaction. Writing that message to him had been hard. She’d felt totally self-conscious and had basically forced herself to send it.
Only to hear back…exactly nothing. If she let herself sit idle too long, anxiety about whether she’d said the wrong thing started to eat at her, so at this point, the only thing she could do was get ready for the journey through Ishildar.
At least, if she’d needed a reminder of why she typically avoided people, she now had it.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
EMERSON MIGHT HAVE blown off the raid-boss-difficulty message she’d made herself send, but at least Hailey had come back. The woman had even apologized for leaving suddenly before, saying that there was no real excuse, but that the best she could give was that Christmas tended to mess with her head.
Devon didn’t need to tell her that she understood. She had the feeling that Hailey just got it.
Regardless, it was nice to have her old friend along for the journey, and she had a feeling Hailey and Tamara would get along well. Hailey’s streaming and Tamara’s brief stint as a sponsored mountain biker meant they both had experience with public attention, something that Devon avoided as much as humanly possible. She looked forward to seeing what the women had to talk about.
The adventuring party was due to depart in just an in-game hour or so, and Devon had the familiar excitement-slash-butterflies sensation in her belly. It had been a long time since she’d headed out in pursuit of an objective with this amount of planning and pressure. Since the Avatharn Online days, really. She and Hailey had run into each other as they were both making their way toward the settlement’s central square, and it just felt right to have her long-time guildmate walking beside her.
Neither woman spoke as they approached the central square, Devon’s boots and Hailey’s leather-soled slippers thudding lightly on the cobblestone path. The grass to either side of the walkway nodded in a light morning breeze, the fields pulling back from their legs as the path widened to an actual street wide enough to accommodate a wagon. To either side, cottages and barracks gave way to the storefronts and workshops of downtown Stonehaven.
At the edge of the central square, Devon stopped and took in the sight. It had been quite a while since she actually noticed how the look of the settlement was changing. Rather than appearing like knocked-together shacks from which itinerant merchants hawked a few items, the shops had taken on a sense of permanence. Shutters were thrown open to show the wares hanging inside the front rooms of the shops. Potted flowers drank the sunlight to either side of open doorways. Many of the establishments had hand-painted signs and hitching rails out front—not that there were many horses around yet.
Hailey must have noticed how Devon’s gaze traveled over the scene because she smiled a bit wistfully. “Your baby is growing up, isn’t it?”
Devon laughed. “I guess you could put it that way.”
“Hey, Devon.” Tamara had been standing beside the collection of bikes leaning against an adventuring supplies shop and now jogged across the square to meet them. In the two days since she’d logged in, the woman had managed to secure herself a fitted leather tunic, a pair of leather bracers, and pads of thick canvas that strapped over her thighs. Devon blinked in surprise when she noticed what looked like brass knuckles on the backs of Tamara’s fingers.
“Been learning combat between bike rides?” Devon asked.
Tamara grinned. She glanced toward an aisle between buildings where Jarleck had just stepped from the shadows. He walked over and clapped Tamara on the shoulder. “I heard you gave a speech about how us advanced citizens should be taking apprentices to get Stonehaven ready for war. Figured this one looked like she could go toe to toe with the best of them. Seemed like a knuckle duster sort of woman.”
“Go on. Check me out,” Tamara said with a little wiggle of the shoulders.
“Did you just shimmy?” Devon asked with a laugh as she used Combat Assessment.
Tam - Level 5 Brawler
Health: 162/162
Combo: 0/8
“Wow! Tamara, that’s awesome. You chose a class.”
“And I have 8 skill points in Brass Knuckles, and 4 in Knife Fighting. Figured if I’m going to have to jump off my bike and fight stuff, it would be easier not to have to deal with a sword.”
As she watched her friend clench and release her fists and shift her weight through combat stances, Devon felt a strange warmth in her chest. Pride? Happiness? Devon wasn’t used to the emotion in any case.
She took a satisfied breath and nodded her thanks to Jarleck. “Hey, speaking of your role in the settlement, I’ve been meaning to get back to you about the cave—”
“I heard you cleared out the whole den,” the man said. “According to the caravaneers, there hasn’t been so much as a peep coming from that cave.”
You have completed a quest: Investigate the cave to the northeast.
You receive: 100,000 experience
“Thanks,” Devon said. “It was a good quest.”
Jarleck blushed a little. “Actually, there’s one more thing related to the cave. The caravan members are relieved to be free of that worry, and they were wondering if there was anything else they could do to reward you.”
“Actually…” Devon said as she pulled up her quest log and scrolled down. “Since they’re traveling back and forth from the Argenthals, think they’d be willing to keep an eye out for Light Green Lichen of Moderate Flakiness with some Orangish Spots?”
Jarleck blinked. “Well…I guess. Any particular reason?”
Devon glanced at the repeatable More, More, More quest she
’d received from Hezbek, a request for components to make more Lightfooted and Phoenix Spirit potions. She could tell him the reason she needed the lichen. Or she could just leave him guessing.
“Maybe I like to put it in my tea…” she said with a wink.
Jarleck laughed. “Well, whatever the purpose, I’ll deliver your request. Now, if you don’t need anything else, I was planning to stake out the foundation lines for the new armory.”
“I won’t keep you,” Devon said, sticking out a hand to shake. Jarleck looked at it for a moment, then seemed to remember the starborn gesture. He enveloped her hand in his massive paw and pumped his arm awkwardly.
“Good luck out there, Mayor,” he said. His face worked through an expression of worry that he quickly covered before nodding curtly and hurrying off.
“He kinda reminds me of my dad,” Tamara said. “I like him.”
“Me too,” Devon said.
The mention of potions reminded Devon to recheck the stocks in her inventory. She planned to distribute many of them among the party members, but for now it was easiest to keep the stacks of each item together to make sure she had enough. Plus, it made her feel better about her ridiculous backpack. She slung it off her shoulder and activated her inventory UI by opening the strap, then selected the option to filter by the proper item type.
Expendables:
29 x Spiced Antelope Jerky
17 x Anteater Surprise
7 x Termite Turnover
2 x Phoenix Spirit Potion
4 x Lightfoot Potion
Vault of the Magi: A LitRPG Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 5) Page 21
