by Kyle Johnson
The shield took far less time, since it was iron-banded wood rather than solid metal. Aranos transmuted the iron into truesilver again and High Enchanted it, giving it bonuses to Defense and magic resistance as well as the ability to emit a pulse of air that could knock back weaker creatures. To empower that, Aranos had to shift the metal stud in the center of the shield, giving it a hauratite core that would hold a magical charge.
Hector’s axe, though, was a larger project. Aranos shifted it from iron to high steel, rather than truesilver, then used the extra metal he’d gained from the Warrior’s chainmail to give it a deepsteel edge. Once this was done, Aranos carefully shifted the patterns of the metal, aligning them as precisely as he could. Slowly and cautiously, he trickled spirit mana into the blade, watching as it filled the patterns he’d made, adjusting the metal matrix as needed. The gleaming steel of the blade took on a duller, matte finish, with swirls of chromatic color surging through it. Once the patterns were complete, he cut off the flow of mana and examined his work:
Crafting Success!
You have Enchanted: High Faymetal Axe
Type: One-Handed
Damage: 19 - 27
Rarity: Exceptional
Quality: Excellent
Effects: Attack +91%; Armor Penetration +116%; Double damage to Summoned, Enchanted, or Spellcasting creatures; Triple damage to magical barriers or animated creatures.
Hector stared at the Sorcerer in amazement when Aranos handed over his new items. “Holy hell,” the Warrior breathed. “These are amazing, brother!” He quickly donned the armor and hefted the shield and axe, his eyes glazing as he checked his status. “That’s a 25% boost to my Strength and Endurance. My damage output more than doubled! This is like getting five levels just for grabbing my stuff!”
“Glad you like it,” Aranos laughed. “Now, you match everyone else. And I’ll do what I can for Martina tonight, although that won’t be as good since I can’t do as much with wood and leather as I can with metal.”
“Anything’s better than nothing,” Hector snorted. “But this isn’t just anything…you could get rich IRL selling this stuff, you know.”
“Maybe once the game goes live,” Aranos agreed. “That doesn’t mean I’ll do it, though. You never know who you’re selling to, and I’d hate for my gear to go to someone like Lily.”
“That is a fair point,” Hector agreed with a laugh. “I wouldn’t like that much, either.”
Aranos’ debuff faded while he was working, so he gathered the party and they discussed what they would do next. Geltheriel and Rhys both advocated waiting until the scouts returned with more information, while Phil and Longfellow both wanted to head up into the city proper and see if they couldn’t replace some of the XP they’d lost.
“You’ve all got valid points,” Aranos broke in when it became obvious that the discussion was starting to circle a bit. “If we wait for our scouts, we can get more information and maybe hit a target that’s valuable, rather than just wandering around and hoping not to get ambushed. At the same time, it’s only two days until log-out again. If we just sit around waiting, we’re missing out on valuable time we could be pushing forward into the city.” Everyone was nodding, so he continued with a grin.
“The thing is, before we can decide we need more info, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait for it.” He turned to Hector. “You can message Martina, right? Find out how she’s doing and if she’s got any good targets for us.” He looked back at the others. “And I can do the same with Silma. Hopefully, one of them will have found something. If not, then they might at least know where we can find a bunch of undead to hit.”
He silently sent a thought out to the fenrin, calling her name. There’s no need to shout, her voice grumbled back in his mind, sounding decidedly grumpy. I can hear you, pack leader.
Is everything okay? You sound upset.
You startled me. I’m currently sneaking past another group of undead, and I’m a little tense. What do you want?
We’re looking for good targets to hit to thin out the undead in the area, he sent back calmly, being careful not to sound pushy. Let me know when a good time is, and we can chat.
There probably won’t be a good time, she replied with a mental sigh. These tunnels are filled with undead. There are hundreds of them all around us. I don’t know if they’re always here or just come underground when the sun’s out, but it’s not going to be easy moving through these tunnels.
Aranos’ eyes narrowed as an idea occurred to him. Hang on a minute, he instructed. Don’t go any farther just yet, okay?
You want me to sit here, just out of the range of a group of undead, because you’ve got some clever idea? Seriously?
Exactly, he thought with the equivalent of a mental grin. I knew you’d understand. As he cut the mental conversation, he was startled by the choice words the fenrin flung his way through their connection. He didn’t know where she’d learned those words, but she was using them pretty accurately.
“Ask Martina if the tunnels in her direction are packed with undead, too,” Aranos said aloud, glancing at Hector. The Warrior nodded, and Aranos turned to the party.
“Silma says the tunnels are pretty full of undead,” he told the others. “Now, that could be a bad thing, except that we’re sitting in a spot that is perfect for dealing with them. Rather than going out to them, I want to bring them to us…” He continued to explain his idea, and after some brief discussion, the other party members agreed.
The party waited impatiently in the room, the doors Silma and Martina had gone through hanging wide open, beckoning at the darkness beyond. There was a palpable tension in the room, mostly from Hector – the bearded Warrior hadn’t been a fan of Aranos’ plan, but Martina had embraced it wholeheartedly – but they were all concerned. This would either go very well, or very badly.
Aranos, Rhys and Meridian had made their preparations as best they could. The tanks were all boosted by Aranos’ Strengthen Metal and Greater Empowerment, as well as the more specific buffs that the divine casters could grant that Aranos simply couldn’t. Longfellow stood on an elevated stone platform Aranos had raised, giving him a clear view over the tanks’ heads into the melee that they hoped would be coming soon, while Aranos hovered in the air with his Flight Spell.
They’re coming! Silma’s voice rang in Aranos’ mind. There are a lot of them, pack leader! Aranos sent back a silent confirmation and issued a quick series of commands. Saphielle took her place just to the side and a few steps back from the door, giving the fenrin room to enter the safe space, while McBane stood off to the other side. Longfellow raised his crossbow, sighting at the door. A silver streak shot into the room as Silma raced through the doorway, and Aranos quickly raised a glowing, golden wall of life energy a few feet into the darkened corridor.
The undead erupted from his wall, scorched and smoking but seemingly unfazed by the damage done to them, and Silma spun around as Saphielle moved back to the center of the doorway to meet them. The undead monsters rushed into the room unhindered, since Aranos had dropped his Elemental Ward. He’d thought about keeping it up, but he was worried that the undead might not be able to get through the air barrier. If that happened, the party would either have been pinned down in the center of the room for several minutes while the undead piled up against the barrier, waiting for it to fall, or the undead would have retreated from the barrier and the forbidding space beyond, and the whole plan would have been wasted.
The undead staggered as they entered the combined effects of the Redeemed ground and the Radiance of Life Spell, and the three party members fell on them at once. They were weaker undead for the most part, jangshie and ghuls with a smattering of callicants, and the halving of their Physical Stats followed by the loss of 5 points had probably dropped most of them below ten in at least one of their Stats. Silma was right, there were a lot of the creatures – she’d managed to pull at least three-dozen undead into their ambush – but weakened as they were, the
entire horde fell in less than two minutes. When the last dropped, they slammed that door shut, and Silma opened a second one and slipped out into the darkness.
“Incoming!” Hector shouted, and the group on the other side prepared for the next assault as Martina raced into the center of the room and leaped atop the stone platform to join Longfellow. This attack was a bit more serious, consisting of draegs as well as the weaker ghuls, but the weakening effect of the room made the actual combat no more difficult for Phil, Hector, and Geltheriel. Three minutes later, another two-dozen undead had been destroyed, and Martina darted out into the darkness of another tunnel with a grin.
“Sniprgurl was wrong,” Longfellow observed from his platform. “This is by far the easiest XP we’ve gotten in game.”
“Yeah, sugar, but it’s not much, is it?” Meridian laughed in her exaggerated accent. “Check your notifications; I barely got anything from that.”
“We probably won’t get much, it’s true,” Aranos spoke up. “The, um, gods judge XP awards based on things like difficulty and how much danger you’re in. We’ll get the most right now, as a reward for a clever solution for clearing the tunnels, but pretty soon we’ll be lucky to get anything.”
“One might wonder what the point is, then,” Rhys spoke up. “If this will not restore what you Travelers have lost…”
“The benefits are clear enough and twofold, Druid,” Saphielle interrupted calmly. “We are clearing the nearby tunnels, allowing us to explore freely without fear of ambush. As well, we are reducing the numbers of local undead, forcing their masters to send more to replace their ranks and thus thinning their numbers elsewhere in the city.”
“There’s also the chance that we’ll pull something more powerful than these things,” Phil added. “If we can defeat something dangerous or noteworthy, we’ll get more XP and we’ll make a bigger dent in the local defenses.”
As Silma’s voice rang out in Aranos’ mind, he grinned. “Here we go again. First team, get ready. It’s a bigger pull this time!”
The rest of the day passed in spurts of combat, followed by long moments of waiting. As Martina and Silma ventured deeper into the tunnels to find undead to pull, the waiting periods became longer and longer, but the numbers of undead the scouts pulled rose steadily. Silma generally grabbed more undead than Martina; as Aranos had guessed, the undead had trouble sensing the daywalker, and she usually had to attack a group of them to get their attention. There were only so many groups she could hit without slowing down so much she risked the other creatures catching her. Silma didn’t have that problem, as she could easily outrun the undead and could grab the attention of large numbers of them at once with her howl.
Eventually, the pair had to move to the surface to find undead near enough for their purposes, and it was there that Martina almost met disaster. The Ranger pulled a group of creatures that included three bainshes, and the void-using mages managed to hit her with a slowing Spell. Martina was forced into a fighting withdrawal, managing to stay just ahead of the creatures until Silma could arrive and draw them off. The bainshes attempted a similar Spell on Silma, but the fenrin’s talisman allowed her to disjoin the slowing effect instantly, and she led the group down the escape tunnel into the party’s ambush while Martina slipped into Stealth and waited for the debuff to wear off.
At that point, Aranos recalled them both. The sun was starting to drop, and while he had no issues with sending the scouts up at night in the city, he wanted Martina to be more prepared. “You got lucky that Silma was close and not pulling a group of her own,” Aranos told the Ranger, who protested at being temporarily sidelined. “You can’t even hurt a bainsh with your bow right now, and if you’d been facing nurhuins instead of draegs you wouldn’t be here talking to us. You’d be sitting in your respawn room, pissed about the XP hit.
“You’ll be going back out,” he assured her. “We’re in a time crunch, so we’re going to be doing this into the night. I just need to give you some upgrades, is all.”
Enchanting some items for Martina didn’t take very long, relatively speaking. He couldn’t improve her bow or armor’s quality significantly, yet; all he could do was Enchant them for her. The bow, he gave bonuses to Attack and armor penetration, and the armor he Enchanted with boosts to her Defense, movement speed, and Stealth Skill. He also gave her bow the ability to fire mana or light arrows, which she would need if she faced more of the nurhuins or bainshes.
Since he couldn’t do much for her arms and armor, Aranos pulled out a simple copper headband. He gave it a central core of hauratite, then wove threads of auril throughout it, shaping them into runes below the surface of the metal. Between the runes, he forged bands of arcane silver and buried Enchantments in them, connecting the whole to a single, perfect garnet that he set in the center of the headband. Finally, he shifted the outermost layer to truesilver, giving the headband more strength and rigidity. When the headband was complete, he powered it with SP, smiling as he examined his work:
Crafting Success!
You have Enchanted: Daywalker’s Diadem
Type: Helmet
Rarity: Exotic
Quality: Excellent
Effects: Per, Agil, Dex +12; reduces the distance the wearer can be detected through Life Sense by 44%
On ActivatIon: Cleanse Aura – Remove all active Spells on the wearer. Disjoining a Spell requires an Opposed Check: Wearer’s [Cha + 65] versus spellcaster’s [Int + Spell Level]. If the Spell to be disjoined is actively maintained, the caster adds their Mana Manipulation Skill to this check.
Charged Item: Cleanse Aura requires 3 charges per use.
Current Charges: 415
Martina examined her upgrades carefully before shaking her head. “I can’t accept these,” she told him. “It’s too much. You barely know me...”
“You’re part of the party, though, and that’s what matters,” Aranos interrupted. “I did the same thing for Hector earlier, and I’ve done this for everyone in the party.” When the woman hesitated, he added. “No strings attached, Martina. Those are yours. Even if we decide to part ways, you keep those, with my blessing. Okay?”
The woman bit her lip but took the proffered items. “Sorry,” she said finally. “I’m not used to people doing things like this without some ulterior motive, is all.”
“Well, there is an ulterior motive,” Aranos chuckled. The woman looked sharply at him, and he shrugged. “I’m not a saint or anything, and helping you helps me. It’s selfish, in a way: with these, you’ll be better at the role I’m asking you to take, and that will help everybody, not just you. I can send you out farther into the city without feeling guilty, and you can get into places you might not otherwise.”
Martina nodded. “That – actually makes me feel better. You help me, I help you, and we both get stronger together. I can work with that.”
Aranos looked a bit sadly at the woman as she walked away, donning her upgraded items. Something told him she’d had to fight for whatever she had, and she didn’t seem to trust easily. Quid pro quo was easier for her to accept than generosity. That’s a tough way to look at things, he thought silently. No wonder she had so much trouble admitting she was wrong with Phil.
The sun fell below the horizon, but they continued their tactics into the night. The undead were far more plentiful in the darkness, and the scouts were able to pull larger numbers, but as Aranos predicted, the XP they were gaining per pull had dropped precipitously. Once the scouts found themselves going farther afield to find new targets, Aranos called them back.
“There’s not much point to keeping this going,” he told the gathered party. “The XP are going to keep dropping until we’re getting a pittance from killing these things, unless we change stuff up or find something more dangerous to pull, and we could all use some rest.”
I’m fine to keep scouting, pack leader, Silma told him silently. We haven’t found our goal, yet, anyway. I’ll go look for it.
That’s fine, Aranos replied a
mental shrug of resignation. It should be closer to the city center, on the north side. It’s going to be heavily guarded, though. Lily knew about Geltheriel’s Cleansing Quest, so I’m assuming Zoridos knows about it, too. They’ll have laid an ambush there for us.
I’m not a puppy, pack leader. Of course, they’ve set a trap for us, and our target is bait. That’s why you need me to go find out what’s waiting for us. Without another word, the fenrin loped off down the tunnel leading into the city, vanishing into the green glow of the necrotic zone.
“She’s going to go look for the Library,” Aranos told the others. “Everyone else should try to get some rest. We’ll have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
Hector and Phil volunteered for first watch, and Aranos set up his tent, smiling as Saphielle came over to help him. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to join me, with everyone close together,” he murmured to the woman as they slipped into the shelter, gratefully closing the flaps to block out the light streaming from above.
Saphielle shrugged. “Soldiers and guards rarely worry about such niceties. We are used to sleeping in close quarters, and none would begrudge another whatever comfort they could find. When every night can be your last, you try to find what joy is possible in it.”
Aranos frowned inwardly; he’d forgotten that in the Stronghold, the elves were used to nightly attacks, which the guards had to repel. Not only was death a possibility for them, it was a certainty: at some point, you would dodge too slowly, or you wouldn’t notice the attacker behind you, and that would be the end. Death was a guard’s close companion; it made sense that they’d seek less grim ones to ease that burden, even for just a night. For a moment, he wondered if Saphielle had sought that sort of comfort, and who she’d found it with, but he shook off the thought. It wasn’t his business, for one thing, and it wasn’t like she was the first woman he’d slept with, either. The past was the past and didn’t really matter today.
