Watcher's Test

by Sean Oswald

  Had he lost his presence of mind, that could have been the end of him, but Dave was able to push through the pain, and even though he had no Sure Strike to guide his blow this time, the beast’s locked jaw which was crushing the bone of his arm also meant that it was a stationary target. His new massive strength drove his downward slash of the sword against the back of the dog’s neck, and soon, it was only a decapitated head that hung to his arm.

  The hound that he had bowled over had now risen to its feet with only minimal damage and was growling at him, lips pulled back revealing a jaw full of teeth. The rictus presented by the blocky jaw would have been comical if not for the pain in Dave’s left arm from the bite he had suffered from a very similar jaw. The two of them started a wary circling of each other, each trying to gauge the best way to attack, but Dave realized that this couldn’t go on for long as his 24-second timer had already run down to 12 seconds remaining. With a loud war cry, Dave stepped forward and swung his blade down in a tight arc and then was confused by the results. He saw his blade appear to land upon the shoulder of the beast, but suddenly and almost impossibly the beast seemed to move out of the path of the sword even as it made contact with its body. The situation was somewhat explained to Dave as two notifications popped up in his mind’s eye almost simultaneously. First, he was notified that he landed a successful hit for (26) damage, and then in the next instant, he was notified that the Horned Drey Hound had activated its dodge skill to negate an otherwise successful attack. Either way, the beast was back another two feet out of range and then rather than engaging further, it ran off into the forest. Even without Dave’s Heavy Armor, he knew that he would never have been able to chase it down. Before his size increase had even run out, the dog was out of sight hidden, by the trees and undergrowth of the forest, and only then did he get the notification from the two hounds he had killed.

  You have defeated: Horned Drey Hound Pack. (A pack is treated as a grouping of individual monsters and XP is awarded for each individual, but there is a pack bonus of +10% applied to each member given the superior teamwork which a pack may display.)

  2 Horned Drey Hounds Lvl 3- Each: XP: 18 x 1.6 (numerical bonus + pack bonus) x 2 (killing blow bonus) + 50% racial bonus = Net XP: 172.

  1 Horned Drey Hound- ESCAPED = 0 XP (The life essence of fallen foes is converted to XP. You gain no XP for an escaped foe.)

  Congratulations!

  Ding!

  You have obtained sufficient XP to gain level 4.

  You have 2 new stat points available.

  You have 8 new character points available.

  With the level up, he was immediately healed of the damage that the horn and bite had caused him, and he felt reinvigorated, almost as if he had another full night’s sleep. Apparently, he couldn’t get XP from killing an individual member of a pack but only got the XP after the pack was defeated. That was something he would have to keep in mind because he couldn’t count on a level up mid-fight with a pack to save his hide. On the other hand, the pack bonus was amazing when factored in with his other bonuses. He was going to have to take back what he had told Emily this morning. Maybe leveling these early levels wouldn’t be so bad. That fight had taken him all of thirty seconds including his prep time, and he had gained substantially more XP than any other fight had granted him. He also wasn’t blind to the fact that the way XP was awarded in Eloria seemed to favor solo fighting easier targets versus team fighting harder targets.

  He also had to think about if he was going to spend his new stat points or character points, but given the ease of this last battle, he felt he could afford to wait in assigning them. He was pretty blown away by the power of Minor Enlarge. Yes, it took one-third of his mana and yes, it only lasted twenty-four seconds, but it made him larger with a better reach and dramatically increased strength. Dave scrolled back up through his combat notifications and looked again at the first critical strike that he had landed, and it appeared that his strength damage bonus had more than tripled after he was enlarged. That obviously rocked. The only bummer was that it was going to take a full thirty-five minutes for his mana to regenerate to full, and he had promised not to start any battles without being full on mana.

  So having some time to kill while waiting for his mana to regenerate, Dave started a casual walk back to the tree where his family was waiting. This gave him the opportunity to examine the forest, and the more that he looked around, the more unnerving he found it to be. There was still very little loose or dead wood lying around anywhere. The trees were clustered in groups of one massive tree such as their temporary home tree and then uneven circles of trees formed out around that larger tree. Even the smallest of the trees were easily fifty feet high and six feet in diameter, but the larger trees must have been over three hundred feet tall and some seemed to be perhaps as large as fifty feet in diameter. The underbrush almost appeared to be groomed, and there was something of a sense of clear pathways through the forest, almost as if the forest was tended and manicured by some invisible gardeners.

  As Dave got close to his destination, he saw a small creature running along the ground toward his tree. It couldn’t have been more than a foot long, maybe less and was shaped almost like a triangle. It was wider in the back and had two protruding hip bones attached to legs that seemed bent but springy. In the front, it narrowed down to an almost pointy head with what appeared to be two luminescent green eyes and two much smaller front paws. Its body was covered in banded scale-like armor which almost looked like an armadillo. While it was probably four inches wide at its back legs, narrowing into a small pointed tail, it was maybe only two inches wide at its front legs. He had never seen anything like it, although if pressed, he would have called it some sort of blend between a rat and an insect. Right before his eyes, it ran up the side of the tree a couple of feet and then into a deep hole bored into the thick bark. Before he could look any closer, he heard the howling of some sort of dog or wolf-like creature.

  Meanwhile, up above, Emily had her hands full. Sara was distracted easily enough with instructions to try to locate any birds or animals she could see from the woven platform of branches they were staying on. The platform, which they had not been able to examine quite as well the night before, was obviously a natural occurrence at it had no signs of toolworking or other marks to suggest that it was crafted. Yet it seemed odd for such a platform to exist on a tree like this. It extended out a good fifteen feet from the side of the tree and was perhaps thirty feet wide around the trunk of the tree. From what she could tell, none of the individual branches were more than eight or ten inches thick, but the entire platform must have been more than three feet thick with all the woven branches. What was even odder, though, was that as Emily looked around from her perch nearly fifty feet in the air, she saw similar platforms on all of the large trees. Some of them had more than one at different heights. There didn’t seem to be any uniformity among the platforms with some barely being five by five and others extending out in ways that seemed extremely unnatural. It just didn’t seem right that there could be a platform of woven branches extending out at least as far as the width of the tree, which served as its foundation.

  While Sara was easy to distract, Jackson was annoyingly persistent in coming up with reasons why he should have been allowed to go down the tree with Dave and no matter how politely Emily tried to redirect him, he wouldn’t listen. She eventually had to order him to be quiet and go sit next to Sara. As obnoxious as his questioning was, Mira’s silence was just as troublesome. Mira had seemed to come out of her self-pity late in the day yesterday when they were all at risk, but now having awoken again in an alien world with none of her usual comforts, she seemed to be burying into that type of angsty self-focus for which teenagers are so famous.

  Dave hadn’t even been gone half an hour, including the ten minutes he had taken to descend the side of the tree, and her mind was already imagining the worst. She tried to focus on meeting each of the children’s needs, but she was genuine
ly worried for Dave. She understood his reasoning even if she would have preferred to take the risk of trying to cross the river, but that didn’t mean that she could have a moment of peace while Dave was down on the ground and they were all safe up here. She would have gone with him, but again, both of them had known that was not the responsible thing to do. If Dave was right and he could gain several levels, maybe they wouldn’t have to worry about things like that monstrous crocodile. To her, it seemed more dinosaur than crocodile and the final argument that won her over to Dave’s plan for what he called “grinding” was the fear that crossing the river they would run into more of those crocodile beasts in their own home turf.

  She would have killed for her Apple Watch or even a plain wall clock just so she could keep track of the time and know when to expect Dave back. He was supposed to report back to the base of the tree to let them know he was okay at least every hour or as accurately as they could track an hour. Emily was roused from that musing by what sorta sounded like the howling of a wolf, but it was higher pitched and yippy, if that was a word. She stood and walked to the edge of the platform and saw movement in the north, a series of disturbances in the underbrush that could only equate to bodies running in their direction. This prompted her to look down to see if she could see Dave toward the south where he was supposed to have gone and when she did, she was pleased to see Dave directly at the bottom of the tree. That pleasure turned to panic when she saw what appeared to be some sort of gray dog leap at Dave as it came running around their tree. She was pleased to see him fighting the wolf or whatever it was off but then worried as she saw numerous others of the same kind coming around the tree to make quick snapping attacks at her husband. She thought he might be able to handle one of those dogs even before the changes wrought when they came to Eloria, but there had to be at least fifteen animals attacking him now. She screamed for Mira to come and help while she started to climb down the platform.

  Mira heard her and ran over. She quickly took in what was going on below and saw her dad in obvious trouble, flailing about with the sword in wide arcs around himself trying to keep the pack of wild dogs away. Her mother quickly informed her that she was going to climb down far enough to be able to cast her healing magic on Dave, but that she had to be within thirty feet of him according to the spell, so she was going to have to try to cast it while hanging from the side of the tree. Mom told her that she was in charge and to see if she could cast any of her magic without hurting her dad. She immediately felt Jackson and Sara next to her on either side, looking over the side, which made her bark at Jackson to pull Sara away. She didn’t know what was going to happen, but she was afraid it was something that Sara shouldn’t see. As had happened in combat before, time seemed to slow down. She knew it was less than two seconds since her mother had climbed over the side of the platform and onto the trunk, but it still seemed to stretch out. What shook her out of her staring was a realization that her mother was practically climbing like a monkey. Any other time and that would have been worthy of all of her attention, but now she needed to focus entirely on her dad and figuring out what she could do, as it was clear that he couldn’t last long in his current situation.

  Going through the spells that she knew in her head. Only two of them would actually be able to reach down to the ground, assuming that her father’s estimated height of the platform at fifty feet was correct. She realized that if she spent her remaining stat and character points, she could increase the power of her spells, and then her Minor Charm Enemy and Ice Dagger spells might be helpful. So without thinking any further, she mentally willed her four unspent stat points into her Intelligence stat since it was the one that would increase the amount of mana she had and the amount of damage she could do with spells. She felt her eyes shoot open as her mind seemed to race. Things seemed to slow down even more around her, and she felt a clarity of thought that she had never experienced before. What a rush, but with that added intelligence also came the clarity of thought to realize she couldn’t spend any more time trying to enjoy this feeling. Instead, she sank 9 of her remaining character points into Evocation Magic and the last 7 into Charm Magic. Then at the speed of thought or rather the speed of her new and enhanced thinking process, she picked the biggest one of the beasts that she could see and aimed her charm spell at it.

  Down below, Dave was bleeding from a half dozen minor wounds. A couple of horn thrusts had broken small holes in his arm and more than one bite had broken his skin inside his armor even if they hadn’t actually rent his armor open. He was barely keeping the beasts back with his spinning wide arcs with the blade. He couldn’t let the arcs be too wide or he would leave an opening, but he couldn’t let them be too narrow or the beasts would lunge in from the side. He relied upon his common sense and the knowledge that his skill level 5 in Long Blades imparted to him, and as he started to get winded, he was glad for the extra point that he had put into Endurance. In fact, as he thought that, he proceeded to put his two newly acquired stat points into endurance and felt flush with increased stamina. It was lucky that it was only the work of a thought to assign the points because it was hard to focus on anything other than keeping those terrible jaws away from him. He laughed at himself, remembering how grand he had felt after ending a couple of these horned drey hounds now that he was surrounded by who knows how many of the beasts. He had lost count after noting ten of them and wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that there were twenty beasts all taking turns leaping at him and all seemingly hungering for a taste of Dave. It is always odd the way the mind works because in that moment, he was wondering if beasts would end up asking ‘where’s the beef’ when they tried to eat his flesh through the heavy scale mail armor.

  A pair of snapping jaws which almost latched onto his sword arm, which would have most certainly been his end, brought him back to the reality of his situation. He didn’t want to spend his character points, but saving them now seemed more than miserly; it seemed downright idiotic. So feeling that his Minor Enlarge spell was his most powerful tool, he sunk all of his 8 points into his Shaping Magic skill just for the increase in duration it would give him on the buffing spell. Even though all of these mental activities didn’t take much effort, they still distracted him, and he was afraid he might not have the mental focus it would take to cast his spell. He did look at his mana pool and realized that it was close to 100. Within another minute or so, he would have enough mana to cast Minor Enlarge twice. The trick would be casting it while trying to keep from being torn to pieces, so he tried to scan around with whatever free movement of his eyes he could spare to look for anything that could act as a distraction.

  Just as he was giving up on that plan and preparing to try to cast his spell despite the obvious difficulty he was going to have focusing on it, he was provided with the distraction that he needed. One of the hounds which hadn’t attacked at all so far but instead stood in the back of the pack suddenly leapt into the midst of the ones closest to Dave and started biting and snapping, waylaying his unsuspecting packmates. Dave could only assume it was Mira’s charm spell at work because otherwise, he didn’t want to know what sort of chaos Eloria was unleashing on him. Even as that thought crossed his mind, he realized he had no room for delay and had to take advantage of the opening provided, so he started the three seconds of casting required for his spell and none too soon because he barely finished the spell before the greave on his left leg was crushed in the jaws of one of the more persistent drey hounds. If it weren’t for the effect of his spell suddenly increasing his size, his leg likely would have been broken but as it was, the sudden change shocked the beast enough that it let go of his leg and Dave was able to assume his new 9-foot size.

  Pleased to see the 11 ticks on the spell timer in the corner of his mind, he started to swing, but not simply to keep back, rather to try to inflict some of the fear and pain that this pack had been inflicting on him. He chose his target well, aiming for one of the hounds that was currently being attacked by
the larger charmed beast. His sword blow was a quick thrust into the unsuspecting side of his target, and with his massively enhanced strength, he was able to drive it through the heart and both lungs before twisting his blade as it came out. He ended that beast, but the flow of battle had started to shift once again. The pack came to understand that the charmed hound was as much of an enemy as Dave was and seemed to be split between the two of them. He took a pair of stabbing wounds from their small spiraled horns as the price of his fatal attack. Now though, because he wasn’t keeping the hounds back, they started to pile on him and only his increased size served to keep him standing. The secondary effect though was that his sword blows couldn’t miss, but also couldn’t get as much momentum into them. The war of attrition was at full steam now as each second he took another bite or horn thrust. None of them in and of themselves being all that serious but losing ten or more health per second meant that he would be dead before his buff ever ran out.

  That grim fact acknowledged, he was giving as good as he got and had already ended another three of the hounds. It just didn’t seem like he could keep up with the nearly dozen dogs biting at him, or at least it seemed that way until he got a sudden infusion of health. He couldn’t see her, but he knew what Emily’s healing spell felt like, and he was grateful even if the 60 health it restored wasn’t going to be enough. He did not let discouragement sink in though. If both Mira and Emily were helping him, he was not going to let them down. He surged forward with renewed health and started trying to make use of his Unarmed Combat skill as well as his longsword. Quick cuts of his sword were combined with snapping kicks intended to push away the hounds as much as to hurt them. It was then that multiple spinning translucent blue blades flew downward and into the backs of several of the unsuspecting hounds. The wounds didn’t seem to be fatal, but they did distract their targets by instilling a freezing cold into the muscles of their back and by making them spin around, trying to find where this new enemy was.