Luke Everhart
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Chapter 289 - Everyday Is A New Thing
🕑 Added 2025-07-07 10:30:01 +0000 UTCNar kept his hooded head bowed under that endless pouring of heavy, warm water, his eyes on the underbrush at his feet. The colors and the lights of the Brightnight were dimmed and obfuscated by the relentless rain that poured down from the canopy above, and Nar grimaced every time he stepped and jostled the water that had made it inside his jungle suit around. Even his supposedly waterproof boots were soaked, unable to keep out the flood of water and mud that he waded through.
Should have bought the more expensive ones, he thought idly, his brain seeking a break from pondering the implications of what he had potentially uncovered earlier that morning about his [Aura Blade].
“Ugh…”
There was so much water running down his face, that there wasn’t even a point to clearing it away from his eyes. All he could do was keep blinking and keep his eyelids semi-closed, and hope he didn’t trip and face plant into a centipede or something worse.
Can’t even hear anything in this, he thought, glancing back towards where they had come. At least we have Jul with us.
Looking forward once more, he quickly scanned the line of their team.
Leon led them from the front, his white and golden shield and sword catching the random glows of the mushrooms and foliage that he cut through. Apparently the aethermancers preferred to wear their gear at all times due to the stats and bonuses that it afforded them, and if they caught a few unwelcomed tagalongs, then so be it, and Era would deal with them.
Jul followed right after him, and was currently staring at something high up in the canopy that Nar couldn’t sense. Calli followed after Jul, with Cen, Sarke, Lim and Jasphaer following in her footsteps.
Nar closed the rear of the party, and kept them covered from that side as best as he could in that sense numbing rain.
“The teams make sense to me,” Kur had said, as they finalized the initial split of people. “But aren’t guys taking on too many ranged with you?”
Leon had shaken his head. “My taunting capacity is peerless, of that, I can assure you. Nothing is going to touch them. And wherever I go, I need Calli with me to fulfill the role as the party leader, as my skills demand my full attention.”
“Besides, like I said, I’m a mobile short and medium ranged fighter,” Calli had said. “As a Gunslinger Vanguard that actually means that I get face-to-face with the enemy all the time. Even shooting point blank if I have too. So you can think of me as more of a melee than a ranged.”
“Right,” Kur had said, though he still didn’t sound fully convinced.
“Plus, we’ve got Nar with us,” Leon said, wiggling his eyebrows at the Nar. “From what I saw of him, I think we’ll be enough to keep the range protected and dishing out their massive DPS without issues. Plus, if anything does happen, all teams are close enough to help each other out if the need arises.”
Kur had scratched his head.
“Let’s give it a shot,” Row had said. “We need to try different combinations anyways. If this doesn’t work, we’ll just change at lunch time.”
Kur had glanced at Nar. And Nar knew enough of his party leader to understand his reticence in letting Lim, Cen, Sarke and Jasphaer out of his sights with such an unbalanced party.
“We’ll be okay,” Nar had said. “Don’t worry.”
And with that, Kur had relented.
Row and Tun had headed out to forage as well, and their larger team had included Teb, Raf, Cor, Rel, Medis, Eum, Leta and Sej. With a good compliment of auramancers, Cor could use her buffing, the charge up [Gathering Tide] skill, if need be, and Medis could stay behind the auramancers and fire off her long-range skills without issue. Meanwhile Eum, whose skills pertained mostly to transformation and his own augmented bare body fighting, could fight within Cor’s area of controlled and gathered aura with minimal issues, as well as he didn’t use his [Blood Claws], a skill that Nar was curious to see at work.
“I’m not scared of a few bangs and sparks,” Eum had said, giving the worried caster a clawed, double thumbs up. “So go ahead!”
And if the time did come for Cor to unleash her [High Tides] skill, which was highly unlikely, then Eum had vowed to be fast enough to get out of the way… And anyways, everyone would need to get out of the way if she was to ever unleash that skill.
As for the last team, it was comprised of Gad and Kur, the DPS that needed to operate away from people, which included Mul, Mach and Viy, and then added Tuk’s multi-target range support and Jaz’s chaotic distractions, and finally Era to use her sleep debuffs and mental attacks, which targeted the mind directly and would thus not hit any aura.
With the [Pull of the River] aggro flows, Gad could direct the enemy to Mul and Viy, leaving Mach to act semi-independently, while Jaz, Tuk and Era ensured that nobody got overwhelmed.
Looking over his own team, Nar had to admit that the other two teams seemed a lot more synergetic than his own. However, there was no chance of actually knowing if they were ill suited or not until they had a chance to fight together.
Maybe we really were lucky in the aethermancer’s we found. Though I’m still not sure how this is going to work if we can’t use our widest, and potentially strongest skills while fighting together, Nar thought, eyeing Leon’s gleaming armor. I am really curious to see them in action, though.
The Navy had been an eye-opening experience, but even though not much time had transpired, the Scimitar’s fast-track program, as Kur had been calling it, was clearly working, and Nar considered himself to have come a long way since that fight in the Den. So, he was curious to see how he would match up against these academy trained delvers… And even how the aethermancers would match up against them, who had been forged through the hardships and horror of the Climb.
Up ahead, Leon raised a hand, and they quickly gathered behind him.
“We’re here,” the paladin said, pointing out in front of him.
Before them, the jungle opened into a wide clearing, a carpet of brightly lit yellow mushrooms extending as far as the eye could see under a much lower and thicker canopy of densely packed, very dark green glowing foliage.
“Looks like there’s not as much rain in there,” Leon whispered, an easy smile on his face. “We can take a rest from all this water.”
“That would be good,” Cen said wearily.
“Jul?” Calli asked.
“Looks clear to me,” Jul said, her eyes closed. “I don’t hear anything and I don’t sense anything either.”
“To have that attribute at such a low level,” Leon said, shaking his head. “That’s really something else. I can’t wait to get mine.”
At around level 100, right? Nar thought, as they left the heavy rain behind and stepped into the shaded, yellow glowing grove. I guess [Instinct] is famous enough that people know of it in some capacity…
“Do you know how to gather the chalemptnilus?” Sarke asked, keeping her tone down as they gathered by a particularly dense cluster of yellow glowing mushrooms.
“It was one of the main things we needed to gather, so we read up on it,” Lim said.
He cast a glance at Jul, their other gatherer, and she nodded.
“Us too,” Jul said.
“Alright. Let me see you do it then,” Sarke asked.
Lim went first, and Nar watched him harvest a particularly massive specimen of a mushroom with steady and sure gestures, using the short, round, mushroom cutter’s knife that they had all received before their first delve. With a final, gentle cut, Lim raised it up to Sarke, who after a quick glance, gave him a firm nod.
The gunman got up to his feet, and they watched Jul have the next go at it.
“Slower,” Sarke whispered, as Jul’s small and curved harvesting knife cut around the bottom of the mushroom. The knife was smeared with glowing yellow, and a dribble of it ran down the broken log the mushroom grew from. “If you cut it too fast, you risk missing too much of the juice, and that’s where all the XP is.”
“Sorry,” Jul whispered. “I also cut it too high, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Sarke said, though there was no reproach in her voice. “It’s alright for the first time, don’t worry. Just throw that one away, and pick another. Rule of thumb, if it leaks, throw it out. There isn’t that much in them in the first place, and there is plenty to gather around here.”
The reptilian glanced around at the glowing stretch of yellow mushrooms, her face poking from a tight hood that hugged her features in an attempt to keep off the worst of the rain.
“There’s a nice patch over there. They look big and juicy,” she said, pointing southwards. “Lim, why don’t you take it? Jul, I’ll stay here with you for a bit longer.”
“On it,” Lim said.
“Cen, Nar, why don’t you go with him?” Calli asked.
“Will do,” the caster said.
Nar gave the strategist a nod and the three of them stepped carefully through the groove of mushrooms until they reached the spot that Sarke had indicated.
“Alright,” Lim said as he knelt down. “This will probably be boring for you two.”
“Sorry that we can’t help you,” Cen said.
“Nah, don’t worry,” Lim said, smiling up at them. “I actually love this kind of stuff!”
“Really?” Nar asked.
He glanced around the yellow lit, silent grove as Lim got his knife around the first mushroom. It was a lot quieter in there, under that dense canopy, and his [Hearing] was a lot more useful, which was a big relief to him. He felt almost blind in that cascading rain.
“I do! I love being out in the dungeon,” the ranged said. “Camping. Gathering. Harvesting and hunting… It’s all a blast!”
“Even with this rain?” Cen asked, smiling.
Lim chuckled. “Even with this rain. Being in here is just… I can’t really explain it, but I just feel so alive, you know?”
He shook his head, and the mushroom he had gathered disappeared into his ring storage.
“I’ll probably always be a delver,” Lim said, scanning the glowing treasure trove of fungi around them.” It’s just… Nothing really compares to it.”
“No… I guess it doesn’t,” Nar said, as he scanned their surroundings.
It was impossible to deny the beauty of the place, and even knowing that danger could be lurking from anywhere, anytime, the soft, rippling glow of the mushrooms was almost impossible to look away from. They glowed in a unison wave of bright and dimming light, as though they were a single connected organism, and the effect was so soothing it was almost hypnotic. And the more subdued sounds of the rain singing from above them only made the location all the more idyllic.
Blinking away from that nearly sleep-inducing glowing pattern, Nar glanced down at Lim instead.
“Can I ask you something?” he asked him. “If it doesn’t distract you, of course.”
“No, I can do this with my eyes closed,” Lim said, grinning. “Ask away.”
Nar nodded.
“You use a gun, right?” Nar asked. “Like Sej, and I think Calli too? Though hers looked smaller.”
“That’s right,” Lim said, his eyes still on his task. “Guns are a new type of weapon that they introduced to us in the Ranged Hall. It uses bullets instead of arrows. Here.”
He raised a hand up and his gun materialized from his storage ring. Nar reached down to take a hold of it, and raised it up to his eyes. The bullet was a small, metallic object that was flat on one end, and had a narrow, sharp tip on the other.
“I’m not great at cycling and keeping control of my aura inside an arrow,” Lim explained. “But I am pretty good at cycling quick bursts of aura, which is what you need to operate a gun. The gun handles all of that aura control for me, and because I can cycle it quickly, I can power my shots quite fast, even for long distance ones.”
“You need to power the actual gun itself?” Cen asked, when Nar passed her the bullet.
“With a bow, the weapon itself provides the propelling power for the arrow,” Lim said, and another glowing mushroom disappeared from his hand. “While for the gun, you need to use your aura to power the weapon itself, yes. That means that if I don’t cycle enough aura into my weapon, my shots won’t go as far.”
“Oh, wow…” Nar said.
“I don’t need to control the aura, but I do need to spend an extra amount for powering the shot itself,” the gunman explained, bending around another mushroom. “That’s a big con if you don’t have enough aura or if you can’t cycle it fast enough, but on the plus side, guns are easier to learn than bows, and have on average more penetrating and stopping capabilities, and deliver a higher DPS when comparing a single bullet versus a single arrow.”
He lifted a mushroom and looked it over.
“Well, that’s on average. In reality, it depends a lot on the specific bow and gun, and the ammunition used,” Lim said. “That one in your hands is an armor piercing round, which means that it does less damage than my regular bullets, but on the other hand, it’s capable of penetrating armor that would stop or greatly reduce the effectiveness of normal bullets. Of course, it also requires more aura in order to have the higher strength it needs to punch through armor, and it works best with my [Empowered Shot] skill.”
“Wow,” Cen said, handing the bullet back. “Every day’s a new thing.”
“Do you have many types of bullets, then?” Nar asked.
“A few,” Lim said, cutting another mushroom. “Normal ones, armor piercing and explosive rounds for now. But there’s lots of bullets out there with lots of effects. Poison. Corrosion. Shocking. Freezing… You name it, and a gun can usually handle all of them, provided it’s the right caliber. Erhm, you can think of it as it being the right size for the gun, I guess.”
He took out his gun next, and handed it over for Nar and Cen to examine.
“This gun in particular is called a marksman’s rifle,” Lim explained. “I can cycle enough aura into it to reach almost 2600-feet.”
“What?” Nar asked, smiling in disbelief. “That’s insane!”
“It does take me a good while to power a shot of that distance, though,” Lim said, grimacing. “And I'm still training my aim. Since my control is weaker, I can only trust in my initial aim, and so far, I haven’t hit anything that far in the dungeons.”
Cen patted his shoulder with a gentle smile. “You’ll get there.”
“Thanks!” he said, grinning back at her.
2,600 feet? Nar thought, as he handed the gun back, and scanned the jungle around them again, measuring the distances with his eyes. That’s insane. Imagine dropping your target without them even knowing you’re there… Ranged classes can be so crazy.
“Are you also training to be a sniper, then?” Nar asked. “I think Rel is doing the same.”
The marksman nodded, his eyes going wide. “I am. I’ll eventually get a longer sniper rifle, but I’ve seen Rel’s colossal bow. That thing is terrifying!”
Nar nodded in agreement. He had held the bow once, and the power of that tightened, tensed sheer strength in the thick bow was undeniable, and it had made even him nervous.
“For now, though, I’m more like Sej, minus the traps,” Lim said. “And I’m so happy she’s in here with us. She’s already been giving me really great pointers!”
“Oh, that’s really nice of her,” Cen said.
“Oh, and in case you’re interested, Calli’s guns are called handguns. They look longer, and are also a lot fancier than the ones I’ve seen aboard the ship, though.”
“Oh, is that so?” Cen said, glancing towards the others.
Nar followed her stare and found the others gathered around Jul and Sarke. The guide and professional gatherer seemed to be demonstrating to Jul how to do it, and Calli seemed to want to join in the effort as well. But even from a distance, Nar could tell that Jul’s eyes didn’t lit up as Lim’s did, whenever he beheld a new mushroom.
I guess he really loves gathering and harvesting, Nar thought.
And then his [Awareness] singled out a very slight, very faded wisp of a sound. It was almost like a sigh, and blinking, Nar turned around cautiously.
Cen was saying something to Lim, who was busy with another mushroom, but there, just a few steps in front of Lim, a little head had popped up from amongst a dense cluster of mushrooms.
Holy shit… Nar thought, his heart dropping. You’ve got to be kidding me!
The little beast was coated in a soft, black fur that was devoid of any glow, and its little nose twisted in the air, sniffing in their direction. Its whiskers moved on their own accord as well, as if to sample the very air around it. If not for the express warning that they had been given about the beast, Nar would’ve found the display nothing short of immensely cute, but as it was, the reality was much, much different.
“Everybody be quiet,” he said, through their combined party chat. “There’s a groundling.”
The low conversation coming from the other group died.
“Lim, back away slowly,” Sarke said. “Cen, come back, slowly and carefully. Nar, stay where you are for now.”
“Got it,” Nar said. “Jul, are there more?”
“Not that I can hear them,” Jul whispered, with a touch of guilt and regret. “I didn’t hear it at all…”
“They are very, very quiet, and very hard to spot, even for a seasoned guide,” Sarke said. “But when there’s one, there’s usually more. Luckily it just seems to be a foray of workers, and one that is quite young. As long as we don’t behave threateningly, we should be able to leave without issues.”
Nar clenched his jaw, and he heard Lim swallowing audibly as the gunman backed away.
Just our luck, Nar thought, eying the black, furry creature.
A groundling worker wasn’t much to fear, but that was by itself. If it started a Crying, other groundlings would quickly spread it towards either their underground home, or towards all the soldier groundlings in the area. And that, according to their research, was one of the most dangerous things anyone could face in the Jungle Tops, as well as the cause for half of all of the deaths that occurred in the Jungle Tops.
A Crying could send several nests of groundlings into a frenzy, and thousands of angry, uncommon soldiers would pour out from the ground, ready to aimlessly slaughter anything that looked like a threat, which usually meant everything and anything, from beasts to delvers.
This particular groundling simply stared at them, sniffing, its whiskers continuing to probe the air, and Lim and Cen managed to pull back to safety.
“Now you, Nar,” Sarke said.
“On it.”
He backed away slowly, keeping what he hoped was a harmless stance.
“I hear them now. There’s more around us. At least ten I think,” Jul said.
“That means there’ll be at least fifty, then,” Sark said. “Once Nar gets back, we’re retracing our steps and leaving this mushroom grove.”
Nar made it to the others without incident, though he did notice a couple more heads popping out of the mushrooms as he retreated.
“Right, slowly, let’s get out of this grove,” the guide said, her tone just as calm and neutral as always.
A few more heart throbbing moments later, and they had made it back to safety of the torrential rain.
“Are we safe?” Leon asked.
“We are, but we’ll need to give up on this grove,” Sarke said with a hint of frustration. “It’s a shame. It was such a good spot too.”
“Do we need to move camp?” Kur asked. “We’re only about two miles from there.”
“No need, unless we spot another foray of them closer to us,” Sarke said. “Usually, unless it's for a resource-rich location like this, they will just avoid us, so let’s mark this area and give it a mile radius. That’s usually alright.”
“Got it,” Kur said. “Are you heading back then?”
“It’s still early,” the guide said, and glanced around at the team. “There’s another place nearby. It’s filled with toxitoads and asretar flowers if you want to go there?”
“A poison pond?” Calli asked, frowning. “Aren’t those usually guarded?”
Sarke smiled at them.
“They usually are,” she said. “But I thought you wanted to get some combat anyways?”
Leon nodded effusively.
“Let’s go!” he said. “I mean, Kur… Is it alright?”
“Sure. Go for it,” Kur said. “Can’t avoid combat and the sooner we start practicing all together the better. We’ll make ourselves ready to rush over just in case. Be safe!”
“Will do!” Leon said.
“Alright, lead the way,” he asked Sarke, his glowing eyes swirling with excitement.
Comments
Pierre-jean Samaran
Thanks for the chapter !
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