I launched arrow after arrow as fast as I could, but the cat simply swatted them away. By now, the rest of the clan had almost made it to the cavern's entrance, but not before the razorclaw once again bounded after me.
So, I did what any self-respecting person would do, I ran for my life. I could hear each footfall the beast took and could almost feel its breath on my back as I emerged from the cave and immediately dove to the left.
The beast had once again gone airborne in an attempt to reach me but missed only by a hair and instead went tumbling down the hill into the forest.
“Aren!” Elsie shouted as she came out of the cave.
“I’m here,” I said from the ground, one arm pushing myself into a sitting position.
The others joined us a moment later, Rayf and Von already holding balls of magic in their hands, poised to strike.
I climbed to my feet and looked over the edge where the razorclaw had fallen, hoping beyond hope, that it had impaled itself on a tree branch or something. But no such luck as the great cat began to stand once more.
Rayf launched an ice spear at the same time that Von loosed a fireball. Both made direct hits on the beast, but their effects negated the other, leaving the creature bruised but otherwise unharmed.
“Fan out!” Von shouted.
Rayf, Elsie, and Von all tapped blue stones on their armor, and a shield popped into place around them. Leon didn’t appear to have any blue stones, instead he pushed a black one, and his body winked out of existence entirely.
Shaking my head, I turned my focus back to the razorclaw, who was busy swatting at Elsie with its great paw—or rather its claw. I loosed five more arrows in rapid succession before realizing I only had three left. It wasn’t worth shooting the last of them when they were plainly doing very little to slow the beast.
Without a high enough level to engage in physical combat, what else could I do? Then I looked down at the gauntlet—not the crappy one from the dead guy in the cave—the one I’d paid good money for. I didn’t have much choice, I needed to augment it and help my newfound friends.
Pulling the Lightning stone from my pocket, I slotted it into the gauntlet with a satisfying click. My hope was that I might be able to paralyze the razorclaw or slow it down long enough for Rayf and Von to land solid hits.
So, how does this work then? Rayf just pushed here and—
I tapped the green stone, and a blast of lightning shot the ground at my feet, sending dirt flying into the air, which caused me to jump back in surprise.
Well then.
Looping my bow over my shoulder, I ran through the forest until I was behind the cat, then I lifted my gauntlet and tapped the stone. Lightning arced out and slammed the razorclaw’s rear… and did absolutely no damage to it once more. Having felt something probably akin to a pin prick, the beast’s head whipped around, it’s eyes zeroed in on me.
Chet.
In one of my braver moments, I stood my ground. That is until it started coming at me. I tried to run once more, but out in the open, I had nowhere to go, and the cat was faster.
I heard it roar right behind me followed by an intense pain along my back as its razor-sharp claws tore through my leather cuirass and broke the skin beneath. The force of the beast’s blow knocked me to the ground, and I just curled up into a ball, waiting to die—but death did not come.
While it was distracted, Rayf had run up and plunged his greatsword deep into the cat’s side. He yanked it free, sending blood and gore spilling onto the ground. But still, the cat... Would. Not. Die.
I fired another blast of lightning into the razorclaw. And another.
Ahh!
A pain unlike any other I’d ever felt coursed through my body.
Did I just shock myself? No, I plainly saw the lightning strike the cat.
With a trembling hand, I raised my gauntlet once more and reached for the stone. Leon winked back into view the second I touched the stone, and plunged his knife into beast’s side. Before he could dodge, my lightning hit him and caused him to seize up and freeze in place. If that wasn’t bad enough, another surge of anguish coursed through me.
The razorclaw swung its paw at the new threat and sent Leon flying through the air until his back slammed into a tree and his body slumped to the ground.
“Leon!” I shouted as I left the fray, hobbling toward him. Different colored magic flashed all around me, but my focus was on my fallen friend. “Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead.”
“Ugh,” Leon said as his eyes opened. “What happened?”
“I—I hit you… accidentally of course,” I said. “And I think I hit myself, as well. The last two times I’ve fired my magic, I’ve gotten these pains. I—I think I’m dying. The razorclaw got me.”
Leon strained to get a good look at my back then winced.
“It’s really bad, huh?” I asked.
“I’ve had worse paper cuts,” he said with a laugh then cringed. “I think I broke something.”
“Stay right here, I’m going back to help,” I said as I started to leave.
“Wait!” he called out with quite a bit of effort. “These pains you’re experiencing, is it only when you use your magika stones?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, glancing over my shoulder as I caught a glimpse of Von landing a huge blow to the cat’s head, causing it to stumble and fall. I turned and raised my gauntlet to help keep it down.
“No, don’t!” Leon shouted. “You’re MP has gone negative. Every time you use magic when you’re out, you’ll suffer from manaburn, which permanently lowers your max MP. Do it too much, and you could enter a magicoma or die.”
Gah!
I ripped the gauntlet off in a flurry of panic and tossed it aside, not wanting to take any chances.
In the time it had taken me to do that, the razorclaw had somehow ended up on top of the hill in front of its cave. It leaned back on its haunches and prepared to leap. I followed its line of sight and saw Rayf with his back turned.
Drawing my bow, I nocked an arrow and ran as fast as I could.
The cat jumped.
And Rayf started to turn.
I slammed into him, knocking him out of the way, then aimed and launched an arrow straight into the razorclaw’s eye.
Pain gripped a hold of me once more and caused me to collapse, then everything went black, and I felt the crushing force of a thousand men pressing in on me.
So, this is what death feels like. Eternal pain and torment.
All of a sudden, the pressure subsided, but the darkness remained.
“Aren!” a voice called distantly into my haze.
My eyes blinked open to the sight of Elsie and Von looking down at me. The sun had set, and the sky above grew ever darker with each passing second.
“Rayf?” I asked.
“Off somewhere venting,” Von said. “He won’t go far.”
“And Leon?”
“I’m fine,” I heard him say somewhere above me, or behind me, or wherever he was; I was a little disoriented.
Sitting up, I noticed a small black stone fall onto the ground.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“That’s a Class 2 Stealth magika stone,” Von explained. “Razorclaw’s are known to drop them when they Fade.”
“I guess this belongs to you?” I said, offering it to Von.
He shook his head. “It belongs to the one who killed the beast.”
“Rayf, then—”
“No, that would be—”
“You idiot!” Rayf yelled rejoining our group. “I’m glad you’re not dead because I’m going to kill you.”
“Easy, Rayf,” Von said. “He thought he was saving your life.”
“He stole my kill!” Rayf protested.
“I did what now?”
Rayf spun on me vehemently. “My kill. You stole it and took my EXP bonus. I did all of the heavy lifting, why should you get the killing blow?”
I didn’t quite understand what he
was going on about, but I got the gist of it. Apparently, I killed the razorclaw. “So, the magika stone—”
“—belongs to you,” Von said.
I looked down at the black stone once more and rolled it around in my palm.
A Stealth stone. I wonder what it does?
“Is this your first Class 2 stone?” Von asked.
I nodded.
“Well, before you go willy-nilly adding it to the first piece of armor you can, I’d think long and hard about where you want to put it,” he said. “Augmenting your boots with Stealth will dampen the effects of your foot falls. Putting it in your gauntlet makes you a better pickpocket, and adding it to your chestplate gives you Leon’s little trick: invisibility. But be careful, he just learned the hard way that it not only hides you from enemies, but allies as well.” Leon rubbed his still sore side and gave me a wry smile.
Score!
There was only one problem. I had no boots, my gauntlet was already auged, —is that what they called it? —and my cuirass was thrashed. I could put it in my second gauntlet, but that one was in pretty poor condition, too.
While I was debating what to do with the Stealth stone, Leon hobbled over and tossed my discarded gauntlet into my lap.
“You’ll want to take better care of your gear,” he said. “And keep a closer eye on your MP in the future.”
“Did you get manaburned?” Elsie asked.
“I think so... ”
“Rayf, don’t you have a draught of aloe?” she asked as she turned towards him.
“So, what if I do?” Rayf said. “I’m not giving it to the Killstealer.”
“He burned himself because he thought you were going to die!” Elsie protested.
It wasn’t entirely true, but I wasn’t going to correct her. Yes, I did think he was going to die, but I also had no idea what I was doing.
Rayf pursed his lips in defiance then caved. “Fine," he said as he slung his pack off his back, dug around inside for a minute, and finally tossed me a small vial. “If you drink that within the first hour after a manaburn, it’ll slowly restore your max MP over the next day or two.”
I tipped my head back and poured the vial's contents into my mouth. The cool, creamy liquid running down my throat felt like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was kind of weird.
While I climbed to my feet, Von walked off to the side and executed a series of taps and swipes on his power tracker. A moment later, a small pulse of energy burst forth from Von’s and Leon’s affinity marks.
“What’d you do?” I asked.
“I designated our bounty as complete,” Von answered. “5,000 EXP and 300 rifs have just been deposited into each of your accounts.”
“So, it’s done then,” I said. “Now what?”
“Now, we go back to the Windcutter and take another mission,” Elsie said.
But I had other plans—other needs, like finding Claire. 300 rifs wouldn’t get me very far, though, if one cuirass cost north of 500. How would I ever afford a decent set of armor let alone secure passage to Obsidia?
That line of thinking raised another point—right before the razorclaw attacked, I had seen the sun ready to explode, but then it wasn’t. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a memory, just like Claire. But now, the sun seemed fine.
Either the danger had passed, which seemed unlikely given the extinction-level catastrophe or—
I had been sent back in time.
Seven
Chet.
Time travel. That explained a lot—the broken magika stone in the dagger, the amnesia, and my reset level. Suddenly, Claire’s parting words to me all made sense.
"Save me," she had said.
She wanted me to find a way to stop her from dying in that throne room. But more importantly, I think she wanted me to stop the sun from exploding.
There was only one problem: I still couldn’t remember anything else.
It’s one thing to understand what you have to do. It’s another to know how to do it. I might have regained a bit of my memory, but I was no closer to finding Claire or stopping gods-know-who from doing only gods-know-what.
“All right, Knights, one more minute to rest—or gather your arrows,” Von said, casting a glance in my direction, “and then we head out. I meant it when I said I don’t like being in these woods after dark.”
I assumed that was my cue and walked off to sift through the underbrush. If I was right, though—and I believed I was—then I had time to help my sister. Claire wasn’t in immediate danger, and the world wasn’t about to end, but at some point in the future, it was all going to take place.
How far had I gone back? Where was Claire now? And how much time did I really have? These questions rolled around in my mind as I gathered my arrows, which, unfortunately, had been spilled all over the place in the fight and made finding each of them difficult. Self-reflection and rumination would have to wait.
In the end, I could only find ten of my arrows, and one of those had snapped in two. That left me with eleven usable projectiles altogether and my dagger. Not great odds if we came across another razorclaw on the trek back to the ship.
I made a mental note to stock up on as many arrows as my quiver could hold—probably forty by my best guess.
As we started to leave, Leon came up beside me and whispered, “Want to check your stats again?”
I looked around at the others. Elsie had looped her arm through Rayf’s and was practically on top of him as they walked a short distance ahead. Von was off to the left trying to stay as far away from the mushy lovebirds as he could. None of them seemed to be paying any attention to us rookies.
“Sure,” I said. It seemed like knowledge was power, and I needed to know exactly how much MP I had to avoid a manaburn in the future.
Leon passed me his tracker, and I slipped it on like last time.
67/67 MP
6,080/7,000 EXP
6 AP AVAILABLE
Ouch, 67 MP?
If I was reading it right, I received 10 MP for each level, meaning I was now a level 7. But every magic attack I’d performed since running out of MP had reduced my max by 1. It wasn’t like I was in any danger of reducing my max to 0, but still, I couldn’t make it a habit of killing my stats.
“Can the tracker do anything else, or is this it?” I asked.
“It can also show Fame and the amount of rifkels in your account, just swipe the display,” he said.
Swiping to the left, I saw the following read out:
15 FAME – UNKNOWN
660 RIFKELS
“I thought Von said we only got 300 rifs each for that bounty?” I asked, noticing I had way more money than I expected.
Leon glanced over at the tracker. “Whatever animals or monsters you kill also award you a modest level of money. It’s a government program to reward the Sworn for their efforts. It happens automatically and is linked to your affinity mark. You get 10 rifs for each level from the beast that you landed the killing blow.”
My eyes widened with understanding. “So, not only did I take Rayf’s EXP bonus, but—”
“You also took his rif reward,” Leon said, nodding grimly.
“Can I transfer the rifs to him?”
“You could, but I think that would make things worse,” Leon said. “Augers are a very… prideful lot. You killed it. For him to accept the money that you earned, well, he’d have to be very desperate, and by the sounds of it, he more or less wanted the EXP. Remember what I told you about getting double for monsters that are higher than your level?”
I nodded.
“He probably would have leveled up had he landed the killing blow, so he’s just perturbed he has to wait or go grind it out somewhere else,” Leon explained. “Speaking of, what level are you up to?”
I swiped back to the original display and showed him the tracker.
His jaw dropped.
“What? Why do you always do that?” I asked. “Is it bad?”
>
“No,” he said with the shake of his head. “Just the opposite. I ran the numbers; I kept track of your hits and kills. I might be a little off because you also get experience for just using magic, but I thought you’d be a level 4 or 5 at best. Somehow you’ve gained at least double what I expected.”
“What’s that mean exactly?” I asked.
“I—I don’t know, but—”
A torrent of rushing wind threatened to knock me over as we emerged from the tree line into the open plain. At the same time, a bright light turned on with a deafening boom, blinding me. I staggered in my steps and raised my hand in front of my eyes to fight against it. A quick glance to my side told me that Leon had done the same.
“Oathbreakers, we have you surrounded,” a voice said, filling the air. “Lay down your weapons and surrender.”
Oathbreakers? What’s going on?
Through my fingers, I could see the red and blue flashing lights of a military-grade air cruiser hovering fifteen feet off the ground in front of us. The headlights from the vehicle lit up the whole area, including where Von, Rayf, and Elsie stood.
Smaller lights flickered around in the field below, and I heard the distinct bark of dogs over the deafening sound of the cruiser’s engines.
“Run!” Von shouted.
I didn’t know what was going on, but I wasn’t about to wait around to find out. I ran back into the forest with everything I had. As I glanced over my shoulder, I realized that Leon wasn’t behind me. I did a quick spin, scanning the whole area, and noticed that I was completely alone.
A dog barked as one of the errant lights I’d seen before entered the tree line.
Well, not completely alone.
Turning around, I pressed on. Where were Von and the others?
Von had seemed pretty frightened by the prospect of being in the forest at night, so perhaps he had run north along the tree line, rather than back into the woods. I was beginning to think I had made a terrible decision. And now, I was probably going to die at the hands of some feral creature like that of a razorclaw or worse.
Sworn Guardian: A LitRPG/GameLit Adventure (Forbidden Magic Book 1) Page 5
