Duskbound

Velik sat with his back against the wall, his spear laid out next to his leg, and took shallow breaths as he watched the hallway through half-closed eyes. For two days now, he'd been fighting an unending battle with the monsters that filled the bizarre underground labyrinth. There was no peace. There were no safe rooms. He got what rest he could a few minutes at a time, never more than lightly dozing.

Truthfully, he didn't need to sleep yet. His high physical could keep him going for a few more days before that became a problem, but the lack of food and water was starting to get to him. He'd had a little bit on him when he'd come in. That was gone now, and he wasn't to the point where eating raw monster meat sounded better than starving.

He'd survive, one way or another. If he'd killed less than a thousand monsters in the last two days, he'd be surprised. His decarma counter on his status certainly supported the idea that it had been a wholesale slaughter, and he was sure he was getting close to leveling up again. [Apex Hunter] had advanced to rank 4 a few hours ago when he'd successfully fended off an ambush of eight monstrous centipedes that had crawled out of the flesh covering the ground.

For all that he'd accomplished, however, what he hadn't done was find the source. More and more walls had popped up to seal him off from the surface, always an invisible membrane that ate the skin off his arm if he did any sort of damage to it. His spear survived, but not unscathed. [Mending] was working hard to keep it in good shape.

It was all to herd him into a trap. He'd become convinced of that. Every time he encountered an enemy by itself or in a group, every time he found another wall blocking his way, there was always a path of retreat. Always, that large cavern at the bottom was waiting for him to step foot inside. He wanted to force the issue, but the constant stream of enemies hunting for him just kept getting worse.

There had to be an end to them. There couldn't be an infinite number of monsters living underground, but Velik was afraid he'd find the bottom of his own endurance first. He needed to get free and retreat, but by now, all the ways out were sealed off. [Phalanx] couldn't break through, not even enhanced with [Kinetic Charge].

About twenty minutes after Velik sat down, he heard the squishy scratching of scorplings moving in his direction. His eyes snapped open and he was on his feet in an instant, ready for the next fight. By the time they actually found him, it was too late to set up any sort of ambush. Velik slaughtered them, then he was off, running through the dark again and trying to kill as many monsters as he could to thin their numbers.

* * *

Torwin was breathing hard when he finally reached Deshir. He'd made excellent time, even taken a few risks he normally wouldn't have to cut down the total distance of the trip, and he was eager to find his apprentice. The message Jensen had sent him mentioned both reaching the level 20 threshold to unlock a new skill slot and receiving class evolution options.

He hoped Jensen hadn't already made irreversible decisions without Torwin there to offer input. The young nobleman was still stubbornly insistent on charting a course to a destination Torwin doubted he'd ever reach, and this was probably the best—maybe only—chance he'd ever have to steer his apprentice in a direction more suited to his talents and temperament.

He was still half a mile from the village when he paused to study it. There was a smell in the air, mostly blood and entrails, but something else, too. It was like rotten fruit and moldy grains mixed together and stuffed into an animal carcass, except not really any of those things. What happened here?

There were still people living in the town, all of them ignoring the stink. He hadn't paid much attention to the townsfolk when he'd come through asking questions, but he thought he recognized several of the faces. Presumably, those were the seed bearers Jensen had mentioned in his whispering wind message. Whatever battle had taken place for control of the town, they'd obviously won.

He circled the outside of Deshir, looking for clues as to what had happened to everyone else. The way Torwin saw it, they'd either been driven out or they'd been killed. It was possible they were still trapped in the town, but that didn't feel right with what he knew about monster behavior. Then again, the seed bearers were a very unique type of infiltrator, one he'd never seen the likes of before. He really couldn't be sure of anything without more information.

He found the tracks of a great deal of people, at least three hundred, leading into the woods from the south gate. Survivors. Maybe pursuers?

If he were a group of frontier-hardened townsfolk fleeing their homes after losing them to an invasion of body-snatching monsters, he'd want to head for the nearest bastion of civilization he could find. In this case, that probably meant Beldrit. Just to be safe, he did a full lap around Deshir, but there were no tracks in any appreciable numbers going in other directions.

The survivors had left a trail of trampled brush a blind man could follow in the forest. There was plenty of dried blood, too, which he took to mean their exodus hadn't been uncontested. On four separate occasions over the next half an hour, he found bodies left where they'd fallen with gaping, bloody wounds in them. Some had been picked at by local scavengers, but they were all still recognizably human.

All told, he traveled about fifteen miles before he found a makeshift encampment made of felled trees and salvaged cloth. A local huntsman intercepted Torwin as he approached, the man having been hiding behind a clump of bushes just off the side of the trail. "Hold!" he called out as he popped up, an arrow aimed Torwin's way.

The old [Ranger] cocked an eyebrow at him. He'd already spotted the huntsman and used [Identify] on him five hundred feet back, and knew he was only level 14. Still, it was admirable that the man was working as a sentry for the encampment and placing himself in danger to get between them and an intruder.

"I'm looking for my apprentice, a young man by the name of Jensen," Torwin said. "Is he here?"

"How do I know you're not infected?" the huntsman yelled back, his arrow never wavering from Torwin's chest.

"If I was, I hardly think I'd be stopping to answer questions."

"Hard to say what those monsters would or wouldn't do. They're good at pretending to be human."

Are they that good at it? I need to get the full story out of Jensen. This could be worse than I thought.

"I'm going in now," Torwin said. "If my apprentice isn't here, I'll do what I can to help your group, but then I have to go find him." Your journey continues with empire

The huntsman moved out of the brush, but didn't relax his draw on his bow. "No sudden movements. I'll be watching you the whole way."

"If that's what makes you comfortable," Torwin told him placidly.

He could understand having an overabundance of caution, given what the town had gone through, but it really was laughable that any of them thought they could do anything to him. Pretending to be on the same level as civilians was an old game that he and all the other high-ranking monster hunters played. It helped keep politicians and government officials calm to pretend they had some sort of power over the high levels.

The encampment was a ragged thing, more people huddled under the boughs of trees than with any real sort of shelter. That was strange to him; the frontiers were all logging towns and he would have expected them to be able to build some sort of basic lodge, even if it was all roughhewn wood.

The huntsman cast him a dark, suspicious glance, and moved past him to whisper to another man in what he probably thought was too soft a voice for Torwin to hear. Dutifully, he pretended not to be able to pick up the words, but inwardly he smiled when he heard the man say, "He says Jensen is his apprentice. I think this is the monster hunter the towns hired last month. Can you go get him for me while I keep an eye on the guy?"

The second man ran off, and the huntsman moved close again. "It's going to rain soon," Torwin said casually. "What will you all do tonight?"

He was no stranger to getting rained on, but he was willing to bet the average physical of the people spread out around him was single digits, and he saw more than a few injuries that had been roughly treated with ragged strips of cloth instead of given any real medical attention.

"Got a few hours until nightfall," the huntsman replied. "We'll get some help before then. Don't you worry about the details."

Food's probably a bigger concern than keeping the rain off them for the moment, but they'll care about the weather soon enough. There's no way to tan the hides fast enough, but a herd of deer could provide enough leather to stitch together something to keep the rain off. I could probably bring something back in an hour or two.

While he was musing over what exactly the battered group of refugees needed to survive, a familiar face emerged from the far side of the encampment. He paused when he saw Torwin, then let out a great sigh of relief.

"There you are!" Jensen said as he hurried across the open ground.