Second Realm

by Michael Chatfield

  “He doesn’t look like anything special. Why is he going toward the VIP entrance?” someone in the line asked.

  “Twenty gold just to attend! This auction will surely be rich!” another said in excitement.

  “I heard that there might even be fourth-level monster cores on sale! Imagine how powerful a formation would be with that level core incorporated into it?”

  “Look—there are the people from Kerose Institute!” another said.

  Erik heard this last one and looked over to the people from the institute.

  They had robes covered in different-colored threads that formed half formations, emitting a pressure that made one who was not from the Kerose Institute feel pressured and move out of their way unless they were sufficiently strong. They had an arrogant air about them, as if disdaining all they saw, only barely interested in the auction itself. They didn’t deign to look at the people who were lining up.

  These people were lords and ladies of large estates; even a few leaders from other cities had to move aside for the Heavenly sect, another group that controlled two large cities, bowing to them.

  The people from the Kerose Institute didn’t seem to even sense them; they moved into the Blue Lotus as if they owned it.

  Strength is the only thing that one can use to get respect around here. If you’re weak, then you’re useless. Erik had seen varieties of cocky people in his life. These higher realm practitioners were closer to a group of preening narcissists. Though, considering he didn’t have the strength, how could he say anything like that out loud? Erik shook his head and continued to the VIP area.

  ***

  Su Wei stood in the VIP area, greeting the more powerful people who had entered the Blue Lotus. When he saw Rugrat and his guard, he waved them over, finishing his talk with the latest person before moving to them. Pan Lim was off to the side, entertaining the Kerose Institute’s people. Unlike how they had been outside, now they were the ones looking up to Pan Lim with stars in their eyes.

  There was nothing greater than one’s power and Pan Lim was younger than some of their students but had the ability to create formations on par with their elders.

  “Rugrat,” Su Wei said in a quiet voice, greeting him personally. Seeing the items that he had created were all Journeyman class without fail and he had made so many of them in a short time, he was nothing more than an equipment-making factory compared to other smiths.

  Such a gem shouldn’t be let go. Even if he just continued to make Journeyman armors at that speed for the rest of his life, then he would earn the Blue Lotus a great amount of money.

  Juko cleared his throat beside Su Wei, trying to gain his attention but Su Wei ignored him, not wanting to slight Rugrat.

  He didn’t care for the guard behind him at all.

  “Manager Su Wei, it’s good to see you. I hope that all of the items were to your liking?” Rugrat asked.

  “They are. There have been a number of interesting entries near the end of the auction,” Su Wei said as Juko tried to gain his attention again.

  Su Wei glared at him but Juko looked helpless as he tried to signal something. Su Wei dismissed him.

  I thought that he might be good but he’s trying to interrupt my time with Rugrat. Does he not know the importance of this person? I gave him all the notes on the important people to make sure that this wouldn’t happen.

  “I’m certain that you will be able to find a great number of good items in the auction.” Su Wei smiled.

  Juko stepped forward and bowed to the guard behind Rugrat. “It is good to see you again, Master Alchemist.”

  Su Wei, who was about to yell out at Juko, felt his expression sour as he looked at the “guard” behind Rugrat.

  “Ah, Appraiser Juko, good to see you. So how did the testing go?” the man asked quietly but Su Wei could pick it up.

  “Very well. Your skill has left the Alchemy division in turmoil.” Juko laughed.

  “I hope in a good way.” The guard’s voice seemed to be like a nervous question.

  “Yes, yes!” Juko said, reassuring him.

  “See, I told you your potions wouldn’t be bad. Damn perfectionist,” Rugrat said to his guard, elbowing him.

  “Thanks, jackass,” the guard said back.

  “As the Blue Lotus, we would be interested in offering you a position within our association,” Su Wei said, recovering quickly.

  The two men shook their heads.

  “It’s not that we don’t like the Blue Lotus—we just like roaming around a lot,” the alchemist said.

  Rugrat nodded in agreement.

  “Very well. We understand. Still, we hope that this medallion might make things easier for you in the future.” Su Wei indicated to Juko, who pulled out a medallion and offered it to Erik.

  “You think mine looks better than yours?” he said, teasing Rugrat.

  “We’ll get to our seats then,” Rugrat said. The two made their good-byes and headed deeper into the Blue Lotus.

  The two Experts continued to berate each other as they moved toward their seats.

  ***

  “We’ve got another bandit group coming from the south,” Yao Meng said to Storbon.

  One couldn’t see the others who were in the small little depression. Their faces were covered in mud and paint so that only their eyes were visible, all of them focused on Storbon.

  He had become the leader of the very first special team.

  Once they had scouted Chonglu city and sent back reports, they had been okayed to move to the Second Realm. They were the first team to do so. With them, they carried supplies from Alva Dungeon. From weapons to armor and goods—all of it was supplied by the people of Alva.

  Quickly, once reaching the Second Realm, they realized that they needed to increase their strength. To do so, they went in search of various jobs. The harder it sounded, the better.

  They knew that dealing with higher level and stronger opponents, they could increase their levels quickly.

  Their first mission was with a trading convoy, where they had found themselves in several fights with the creatures in the Second Realm.

  Then they had taken up an exploration mission, heading into a dangerous area to gather information on a bandit camp.

  They’d found the camp; the problem was getting that information back to the city was going to be a lot harder than they thought.

  “Fucking nobles,” Yawen said off to the side.

  “Well, we didn’t know that one of the nobles who was issuing the warrant was in league with the bandits,” Storbon said.

  In fact, the number of bandits was much greater than he expected. It looked as if they were mercenaries turned bandits. The way that they talked and moved showed they had some discipline.

  They only cared about money and what their gain might be.

  It also meant that every single one of them had a big stash of valuables on them.

  There was the sound of a crossbow being loosed and then rustling in the underbrush.

  All of them felt a faint increase in their Experience, removing some of their fatigue.

  “Looks like there were some more scouts,” Yao Meng said as they started moving. It wouldn’t take long until the higher ranks learned of their scout’s death.

  “I have an idea.” Storbon pulled out his map and read it by the single moon in the Second Realm’s sky.

  “Yao Meng, I want you and Tian Cui to lead the mercenaries toward this gully.” Storbon pointed to a location on the map that they had checked over earlier.

  “They’re going to know that there’s an ambush in that gully,” Yao Meng said.

  “There will be one—just not inside the gully.” Storbon pulled out one of the FABs that Rugrat had created—a fuel air bomb—and passed it over to the rest of the team.

  Yao Meng and Tian Cui dropped back to cover up their trail and guide them in a new direction. If it looked deliberate, then the mercenaries mig
ht catch on. They were humans, not beasts, after all.

  Storbon, on the other hand, moved with the rest of the team, planting the FABs in the ground and hiding in the forest.

  ***

  “Captain Tiere! We’ve got a trail! The scouts are closing in on them!” A man pulled out a map and showed where the last scouting party had been killed.

  “I thought that our source said they were just level thirteens at most,” Tiere grumbled. Two more dead meant she had to hire two more people to fill their roles. “Take three hunting groups and track them down.” She looked over the map. There was a hilly area nearby. The fastest way to traverse it was through a gully and a one-hundred-meter wide pass.

  “If they go toward the gully, don’t go in after them,” Tiere said. The gully was thin and only one or two people would be able to pass through at a time. These people didn’t seem like the easy suckers her employer promised her. If she were them, she would hold in that gully; that way, she could use her full strength while limiting her enemies, cutting them down.

  “Have one of the hunting groups at the entrance into the gully, then send the other two through the valley passage here.” She pointed to the open area.

  “Yes, Captain!”

  He ran off as Tiere let out a sigh. She wasn’t a person to talk of absolutes. She might send strong people after them, but this group would hide or ambush them, only fighting when it was to their advantage. They weren’t like other groups that would fight it out, talking about things like honor and a stand-up fight. Tiere had seen it plenty: when fighting against someone who overwhelmed you in level, you had to hide, or else be destroyed. Valiantly challenging them and rushing forward with all of your might to pull off a final victorious battle? That only happened if the much more powerful opponent wasn’t aware of or prepared for the attack.

  Stealth, planning, and preparation: that meant that with one strike, all problems would be removed.

  She might admire this group’s abilities, but her contract was signed and a mercenary who would run away from a fight they had been paid for wasn’t a mercenary anymore.

  The night was falling away and rays of light started to come in with dawn when she got a message from the lead group.

  “We tracked them to the gully. Two of the groups are running around through the plains,” the officer in charge reported.

  “Very well.” Tiere closed the sound transmission.

  ***

  Storbon was lying on the ground underneath a rotted log. He was covered in dirt, trying to hide his shivering from the puddle he was in as he saw people moving through the hill’s second passage.

  He waited, watching them and gripping the two strings tight in his hand. Just a little bit more. Come on in—nothing but a safe little valley.

  There were nearly one hundred mercenaries in the valley, moving forward quickly.

  They had angry looks on their faces as they had been chasing after Storbon’s group in the dark. Storbon’s smile only deepened as they rushed forward, some swearing as they found potholes in the ground.

  There was a ringing noise as the lead mercenary ran into a thin line connected to a set of bells.

  “What the—” His sentence was ended by rolling explosions ripping through the valley. All of Storbon’s team heard the bells. When they did, they ripped the deploying cord.

  They were the same weapons that had surrounded Alva Village and used to create a wave of destruction to kill hundreds of beasts.

  Now they tore people apart with ease.

  The explosion passed quickly. Storbon looked up as trees had been torn apart and dirt thrown around, smoking craters where the explosives had been ignited.

  Storbon stood and pulled out his sound transmission device. “On me!” he yelled out. He and the others had been hiding on the side of the valley that the mercenaries had come from.

  Now they all joined up and started running to the south, where the gully was.

  “Yao Meng, move to phase two,” Storbon ordered.

  “Understood.”

  The mercenaries might not have trained in moving through the forest, but the special team had done it extensively—before when they were training in the defense of Alva, and then when moving through Beast Mountain. For them, moving through the forest was much easier.

  All but one of them held bows in their hands, who was none other than Yuli, their mage. Her staff already glowed with a buildup of Mana.

  It didn’t take them long to reach the gully.

  A scream rang out.

  “Shit! They’ve got archers in the gully! What do we do?” one mercenary yelled out.

  “Where do we go? There’s nowhere to hide!”

  “Didn’t you hear that explosion earlier? That must have been their hidden card. They shouldn’t have anything left!” The mercenaries were in disarray as Yao Meng and Tian Cui fired on them with their bows from within the gully.

  “Spread out,” Storbon said.

  The special team moved out and then started moving forward.

  Storbon pulled out a piece of paper with runes covering it. It was a kind of formation except it was created with special paper instead of being inlaid into metal and other hard materials.

  Storbon felt pained as he thought of a target and tore the piece of paper apart. A countdown appeared in his vision.

  ==========

  Magic scroll: Lightning Retribution scroll activating

  0:05

  ==========

  The timer counted down as the clear sky turned dark; clouds appeared out of nowhere and the wind was churned up.

  “Close your eyes and protect your vision,” Storbon said as he communicated with the rest of the people in Special Team One.

  ==========

  Magic scroll: Lightning Retribution activated

  ==========

  A thunderbolt shot out of the heavens, smashing downward and striking the ground, vaporizing the mercenaries who had just started to look up.

  Thirty-seven were vaporized right away. The rest were left stunned and incapacitated by the lightning effects.

  Thankfully they all grouped together. Storbon raised his crossbow and fired. These crossbows had been further upgraded before they left Alva Dungeon. Against the weakened and paralyzed mercenaries on the ground, they reaped more lives.

  Tian Cui and Yao Meng came out of hiding to help.

  Lightning gathered around Yuli. As an elemental mage, she focused on using the power around her to her advantage.

  With the ambient lightning Mana, her power increased dramatically. She only had to redirect it toward the mercenaries, maintaining their stun and killing the heavily wounded ones.

  Storbon rushed forward, using his spear to kill off the stronger people who hadn’t been killed with arrows.

  He was no longer the weak, younger man who worked day and night to try to make ends meet after he had been crippled.

  He was a man of Alva Dungeon, a man of the Special Team One. He had thought that he was strong in the First Realm, but reaching the Second Realm, he found that he was nothing but a frog in the well.

  Still, he had his training—everything that Rugrat and Erik had grilled into his very bones, the orders that resonated through his soul with Blaze and Glosil’s yells.

  He didn’t give up; instead, he moved forward to become stronger. There was no other path. If he wanted to be able to help Alva Dungeon, he needed to become stronger.

  Storbon flicked his spear, clearing some of the blood on it as it started to rain with the gathered clouds. He surveyed the mercenaries. All of them lay dead now. “Gather the storage rings. Five minutes then we’ll move to the east! Yuli, Tian Cui —watch our backs and make sure no one sneaks up on us.”

  “Time we turned in this quest,” Yao Meng said as they bent to gather up the storage rings, weapons, and armor. Everything could be used or sold later.

  Storbon checked his level. “Time that we leveled
up again and see if we can’t get more of those spell scrolls,” Storbon said. “We’re all out of Rugrat’s FABs.”

  “Adapt, overcome, maneuver, destroy.” Yao Meng replied with words that Rugrat had grilled into them before they left.

  Chapter: Auction Begins!

  Rugrat and Erik moved through the Blue Lotus, heading for the ground floor seats.

  “Can I help you find your seats?” an usher asked as they looked at their tickets.

  “Please,” Erik said, offering his up.

  The usher looked at it, before coughing lightly. “Esteemed guests, these are not for the floor seats but rather for the fourth-floor VIP suites,” the man said with an awkward smile.

  “Nice. Never had a suite before,” Rugrat said.

  “Don’t go all metal concert and trash the damn thing,” Erik muttered.

  “If you want, I can guide you to your seats?” the man asked.

  “Nah, we’ve got it. Where are the stairs?” Rugrat said.

  “Over there through the doors and on the right,” the usher said.

  “Thanks, man,” Rugrat said. The duo went up three floors of stairs before they found their suite.

  All of the suites were isolated from one another. The glass window had a formation on it that allowed one to see out but not in. It could be deactivated if someone wanted but Erik and Rugrat left it how it was as they paid more attention to the snacks and drinks that were placed along the wall for them to try out.

  They loaded up two plates and took them to their chairs.

  “Kind of looks like the booths that someone would get at a sporting event.” Rugrat looked at the other boxes. Some were open, others not.

  Most of the ones on the fourth floor were open. These people didn’t deem it worthy to hide their identities from one another.

  They were clearly the big players at the auction today.

  “I thought that the fourth floor was pretty high. I didn’t think that it would be the top floor. You must’ve impressed Su Wei a lot. How has your smithing gone?” Erik asked as he tried out some of the new food on his plate.