by Sarah Lin
Pushing aside such thoughts, he rushed to help her. Though she was successfully warding it off with her shield, her attempts to strike back around it were almost completely useless, just thumping into the beast's hide. She managed to land one lucky blow on its head and the beast dropped back with a roar, but it responded by lunging forward.
This time, she didn't quite get her shield up properly. The gryphon's beak came down on the edge, puncturing the metal. Danniah gasped and held onto her shield, but the gryphon far outweighed her and jerked it from her hands, tossing it aside and rearing up with its claws flashing.
Bloodwraith hit from the side, his sword cutting into the beast's flank. It let out a shriek and lashed back at him, but he'd been prepared to dodge back. As it turned on him, he caught a glimpse of Danniah, staring at him as if she couldn't believe her eyes.
When the gryphon charged at him, Bloodwraith met it with a mana-fueled slice. To his surprise, the beast shot into the air, evading the line of force entirely. Now that it was airborne, it flapped higher, beginning to circle them. Not acceptable - it could either attack them from any angle or escape, and he wanted it dead.
Bloodwraith waited for it to begin to dive at him, then unleashed a burst of force from his hand. He clipped one of the creature's wings, sending it crashing down toward him. But he'd been expecting that too: Bloodwraith used the rest of the mana stored within his sword, meeting it head on now that the beast could no longer dodge.
His blow cut deep into the gryphon's chest, but failed to stop its momentum. The beast crashed into him like a wall, smashing him into the ground. Though blood gushed over him from its chest, it wasn't dead yet, lashing out at him. Though he tried to both defend his face and grab the hilt of his sword, its talons were so sharp there was little he could do.
At that point he heard a high-pitched cry and Danniah flung herself at it from the side, mace swinging wildly. In its injured state, the gryphon wasn't able to dodge so easily and she landed several heavy blows on its head. It shook its head, stunned, but then flailed at her, the movement of its neck sending her tumbling over the ground.
While it was distracted, Bloodwraith grabbed the hilt of his sword and shoved it deep into the gryphon's heart. Once the monster lay dead, he crawled out from underneath it and allowed himself a groan. No serious injuries, but he'd definitely felt getting hit with that much weight. He was covered in blood, but that wasn't so uncommon in this line of work.
Before retrieving his sword, he walked over to Danniah. She didn't seem too injured, just stunned. She smiled when she saw him and reached out for his hand.
"Oh, thank you, Rai-" She hesitated, then pulled her hand back. Staring at him suspiciously, she climbed to her feet on her own and went to retrieve her mace.
Sighing, Bloodwraith went back to the corpse and began working his greatsword out of it. A box appeared announcing that he had received 933 EXP for killing it, but he brushed it aside. It was nice to be closer to gaining a level, but he was more occupied with the way Danniah was staring at him.
"Nothing's been the same since we all split up." She wasn't quite looking at him, her eyes on her boots. "Things are hard on my own. But... I also feel like like things weren't always fair. Raigar... or whatever your name is... did you ever really trust me? Or was I just useful to you?"
"You were the best of them." Bloodwraith didn't look at her, finally wrenching his sword out and stepping away from the blood. "The others were out for themselves, but you tried to actually work for the team. I liked that. But if you keep acting that way, people will take advantage of you."
"Maybe you're right." Danniah wiped at her face, possibly removing blood and possibly tears. "I just... I thought..."
He hadn't wanted to get involved with something like this, but Bloodwraith didn't want to just leave her like that. Instead he walked over to her fallen shield and picked it up, noting that it was the same one that had been battered by the golem in the crypt. Now it had a huge bite in it from the gryphon's beak, and the box declared that its "Durability" was nearly spent. Still, he moved and handed it to her.
"I... thank you." Danniah sniffled and looked away. "I have to go. You killed the gryphon, so you can go get the reward if you want."
"It's yours. I just helped you because I wanted to." With that, Bloodwraith turned away, not having any more patience for such emotional conflicts. He glanced back at her once and saw her trying to hide her glances at him, but didn't think he'd make any more progress with her that day.
Strangely, he found that what he'd said was actually true. Bloodwraith had never felt any selfless impulses and he was completely unmoved when the various peasants thanked him for saving their farms or lives. But he didn't mind Danniah, and helping her had produced a good feeling. Perhaps it was just the foolish instincts of a living body, but there was no reason not to take advantage of those for now.
Meeting Danniah again distracted him, however, making it very difficult to return to purely abstract thoughts. Thinking about Meara and Danniah produced a flood of different feelings at the same time.
And those feelings pissed him off.
Bloodwraith retreated to the cold place he still remembered from being undead and considered everything dispassionately. He definitely thought he could blame Raigar's body for some of this, since it wanted to have sex with anything vaguely female that smiled at him. But some of the other feelings... those were actually his. It was frustrating to admit, but he wouldn't go back into self-denial.
Fine. He would deal with that one way or another. Though part of him longed for the unfeeling cool of his old life, that wasn't even an option for him at the moment. One way or another, he'd have to make the best of this.
Still, it was a relief when he finally spotted the target cavern ahead. For a while he could concentrate on accomplishing this quest and not worry about anything more complicated.
Though he was on his guard for something horrible to rush at him, as he entered the cavern he didn't encounter any great danger. In fact, it seemed as though few had been through recently, judging from the dust on the ground. He could actually see the tracks of the group before him, presumably the nobleman's son and his group.
The fools had gone recklessly into the caves in a straight line, doing little exploration. Bloodwraith moved more carefully, examining each side cavern carefully. Unlike the crypt, there were no traps and nothing to loot in the side rooms, but they could still contain things of note.
When he stepped into one of the caverns, he heard a fluttering sound and then bats flooded at him. They were no mere animals, either: the monstrous bats latched onto him, clawing at his armor, trying to sink their teeth into any flesh they could find.
Though he swung his sword through the swarm of them, he failed to hit any of the swift creatures and they were soon mobbing him. He felt one dig into the flesh of his arm and began to lap at the blood, and judging from the pain he understood how they could kill an adventurer.
An average adventurer. But one advantage of having this brutish of a body was that the bats simply weren't that great a threat to him. Bloodwraith reached up and grabbed one of the bats from his neck, crushing its feeble body in his hand. He stopped trying to use his sword, just threw himself against one of the walls, crushing the bats behind him. The others kept attacking in a frenzy, but he grabbed and killed them one at a time.
When it was over he was bleeding from many small wounds, but he barely even felt them. Bloodwraith grunted and looked for more, but...
[Victory! You received 181 EXP and Blood Bat Fangs x11.]
Apparently they were called Blood Bats, then. Since the boxes considered their fangs worthy of collection, unlike so much else from corpses, Bloodwraith bothered to collect them all. By the time he was done, he could already feel his health beginning to restore itself. The injuries still itched and the blood kept flowing unnaturally, probably from the bites, but it just wasn't a threat to him. He wouldn't even need to use a potion.
Still, Bloodwraith moved through the other caverns more carefully, prepared for more bats. He encountered two smaller swarms and retreated in each case, preventing them from swarming him all at once so he could kill them methodically. Not difficult to deal with at all.
Yet as he moved forward, he found his first corpse, a man in a mage's robe who looked as though all the blood had been drained from him. How had a mage fallen to creatures like these? Simple flames should have been enough, not to mention more creative solutions - mages were practically built to deal with small creatures like the bats.
Though Bloodwraith felt scorn for the incompetent mage, he tried to temper it. Perhaps there was a greater danger in the caverns, and if so, he should avoid becoming overconfident. He stripped the mage's equipment, but found nothing that was useful to him. Not even any +1 equipment, either. Was he really just unprepared for a few bats?
As he continued inward, he got confirmation of that theory: another corpse bundled in the webs of some giant spiders. Normally he might have ignored it, but the corpse might have been the nobleman's son. How had the fool have blundered straight into webs like this?
Bloodwraith was extremely careful as he killed the spiders lurking nearby, in case there was some other threat, but encountered no problems at all. These spiders were even weaker than those in the crypt - honestly, it took a great deal of mana to turn a giant spider into a real threat. Even weaker than wolves.
Once the area was secure he opened up the wrapped body, which had also been sucked dry. This one had been a woman wearing light armor, so not his target. Some of the armor actually looked decent, though none of it would fit him and none of it was good enough to qualify for Meara's quest. Pity.
Trying to be generous, Bloodwraith considered that there might be some sort of magical effect that had led them to hallucinate or become muddle-headed. That might explain why they'd done so poorly. But as he continued and found yet another corpse, those explanations started to feel rather thin.
No, they were just idiots. The kind that he should either subjugate or crush beneath his heel. Bloodwraith might feel kinship with Meara and affection for Danniah, but that did not extend to everyone. Comparing those two to these fools was downright insulting.
As he moved forward, the cave gave way to a carved hallway. Not particularly complex carving, but clearly made by intelligent hands. More notably, he didn't have to go far in them until he reached a crossroads with a body in the center of it.
After checking the area carefully, Bloodwraith advanced and checked the body. Though partially decomposed, judging from the elaborate armor, this was the nobleman's son. He was supposed to have a necklace with a ruby on it, but though it wasn't there, it seemed obvious that it had to be him. Bloodwraith stared down at the body, considering whether he should just take it back and finish the quest.
Could it be so easy? That felt almost wrong, especially because Meara had chosen this quest. True, selling off the adventurers' equipment would make it slightly more lucrative than average, but that would be disappointing. Then again, he couldn't rely on her to work miracles.
Or perhaps the real purpose of it had been to send him to help Danniah? That would be quite a coincidence otherwise, but he could imagine that Meara's intuition might have noticed it. Yes, that would be a reasonable explanation. A better-than-average quest and the encounter with the gryphon placed this well ahead of the typical busywork quest.
Just as Bloodwraith began to consider it finished, several details tickled at the back of his brain. No, he was missing something. The absent necklace wasn't a mere coincidence, especially because it had been mentioned specifically in the request. Not only that, something had been strange about the body... Bloodwraith rolled it back over and looked again.
Yes, the nobleman's son had been stabbed in the back. Though some monsters could wield weapons, there had been no sign of such in the cavern.
Then there was more to this. Bloodwraith brought up the quest box again, and to his surprise, he found that it began to blur, more text appearing.
[Quest: The Nobleman's Son
Retrieve the nobleman's son's body from the cavern.
Optional Objective: Discover the reason the son was exploring the cavern.
Optional Objective: Locate the bodies of all party members.]
Bloodwraith grunted in surprise. Perhaps he had suspected such things in his subconscious, but it seemed that the boxes had new information from him. Or maybe this was Meara's influence?
In any case, he had learned several new things. If the box was telling him to find all party members, there must be more of them. It also reminded him that he didn't know why they were blundering into this cavern. The boxes seemed shortsighted about the quest in general, but he kept those thoughts to himself and let them develop in the back of his mind.
For now, he focused on more obvious clues. Though they were very faint, he could make out footsteps that went down one of the corridors, away from the body. Perhaps that was the person who had stabbed the son in the back, though why he would run in that direction was uncertain.
He got the answer to that soon enough: a halfling body lay at the end of the corridor, covered in bite marks and drained of blood. More importantly, he clutched a ruby necklace in one hand.
Given that they must have been fleeing from bats, the halfling wouldn't have stabbed his ally in the back and stolen his necklace on a whim. No, he had been planning it from the start. That also explained something else that had been bothering Bloodwraith: the description of the request itself. The nobleman had said he wanted his son's body, but he seemed more concerned about family heirlooms than he should have been, for a grieving father.
Exactly what power did this necklace contain?
[Ruby Necklace
An elegant necklace set with a valuable ruby.
Classification: Loot (this item is only valuable for selling]
Bloodwraith grunted in irritation. Unless the boxes lied, then this was all just a matter of greed. He glared at the necklace's box the entire time he stripped the halfling's body, but didn't uncover anything new. Perhaps this really was just a mundane affair.
When he rose back to his feet and examined the quest box again, he discovered that the line about finding all party members had turned green. What the hell did that mean? He poked at it mentally and eventually another box appeared and explained that the objective had been completed. Why would that result in changing color? And why green? Sometimes the box gods were entirely incomprehensible.
In any case, he could reliably assume that he had found the entire party. That meant he could take the corpse and go, but he might as well loot the nearby area.
Though a few groups of spiders and bats infested the area, they provided no real challenge. Bloodwraith carefully cleared the area, learning what he could. It seemed to be a dwarven burial ground, but one that had been looted long in the past. There was nothing of value, even in the sarcophagi - those contained only dwarf bodies, not undead.
As he entered the final chamber, Bloodwraith was beginning to feel disappointed in the entire experience. He entered the tomb cautiously, in case there was a guardian... only to find nothing. That made more sense, of course. Only the type of insane people who could build entire crypts would choose to spend money on golems or undead guardians. This was just a burial ground for local dwarves.
Yet he realized that there was one thing in the chamber that hadn't been looted: the large sarcophagus in the center of the room. When he got closer, he understood why: it was built from reinforced stone and sealed with wards. That seemed to have been enough to repel the looters from the past.
It wouldn't be enough to stop him. Bloodwraith took a step back, concentrated mana in his greatsword, and slammed it down into the sarcophagus. He needed three blows to crack it open, stopping to drain more mana into his sword, but eventually he broke the seal and fragmented the stone lid.
Even his muscles strained to push it aside, but he did so in seve
ral heaves. Lying in the center of the sarcophagus was a dwarven corpse, wearing untouched burial garb. There were a few pieces of jewelry around the body and small religious icons. The value of all of them wasn't much... though Bloodwraith considered looting them all anyway, he decided to leave the body be. This dwarf hadn't been an idiot adventurer, just someone who lived a normal life. His corpse could rest in peace.
But Bloodwraith's respect didn't extend to everything. As he examined the inside more carefully, he noticed a pair of gauntlets lying above the dwarf's head. They were quite large, both due to being made of thick steel and with an interior larger than suitable for dwarven hands.
[Gauntlets of the Tyrant
Armor: 7
Might +1, Quickness +1
Durability: 45/50
Rarity: Rare
NOTE: This item is part of a unique set.]
Yes, his respect for the dead definitely wouldn't stand in the way of taking those gauntlets. Bloodwraith checked carefully for traps or wards and found nothing. Yet when he picked up the gauntlets, he was still startled as several things happened at once.
First, the quest box appeared, the optional objective turning green. Second, his quest to acquire equipment appeared, declaring that he had found 3/10 pieces. Third, another box announced that the cavern had been cleared, whatever that meant. And finally, a fourth box explained what a "unique set" was, as if he needed an explanation of simple words.
"Know your place, boxes!" Bloodwraith waved them aside, but he couldn't stay too angry at them, not when they were declaring his success. Not only had he completed his objectives here, he'd acquired a very valuable pair of items.
They were so large that they fit over his gloves, which meant he didn't even need to give up the special leather gloves, once he acquired them. Yet when Bloodwraith pulled on the gauntlets, they immediately felt as heavy as if they were made of lead.
