C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 149 - Rain
🕑 Added 2025-04-05 20:11:08 +0000 UTCWait. The three hells are real?!
- Corinth Devardem, shortly after falling through a portal in the wilderness
The rain tapping against the transparent dome of my ship creates a strange sight. The water lands, splatters, and sticks until a large droplet passes by, collecting momentum and size as it curls downward. Hundreds of small rivulets streak past as the ship smoothly glides along, making it almost appear as if I am sailing through stars.
Watching the night is interesting for the first few minutes, but it grows old rather quickly. I turn away, snatching a fresh cookie from the basket that the woman in the town before gave me. They are amazing, and I found that I can keep them warm with just a bit of energy. The delicious snap of cinnamon lingers on my tongue as I stare at the map in front of me.
Over the course of the day and into the night, I have visited eighteen of the small towns and villages within the sphere of Maidenlake’s influence. At least half sit abandoned, the people in the villages recalled to at least the nearest town where a token force of low-tier adventurers can guard them. Illigar’s plan and insistence on securing the entire area with ranging bands of adventurers make more sense after the last day.
Even a team of competent adventurers will find themselves unable to handle a full horde of beasts, even if almost all of the monsters will still be in the first rank. It seems to be the theme of the beast tide that monsters gather together where they would usually compete against one another. If a force of a hundred monsters rushed a village, they would massacre everyone and everything in an instant. Even if they set themselves upon a town, it is unlikely that the adventurers there can handle them long enough for someone powerful to arrive.
I had seen that before when coming to the Mari Duchy. If Dovik and I hadn’t interceded, the small town would have been overrun by the stampede. Before this afternoon, that never settled on me, not until I saw the aftermath of such an event.
The town had been labelled as Cloverleaf on the map, one of the smaller settlements that was narrowly too large to be considered a village. Four bronze-rank adventurers had been left to guard the nine hundred souls living there.
I came upon it as the sinking sun was growing the shadows long and thin. Blood lingered in the streets. Of the original nine hundred inhabitants, a bare sixty-three still lived, and of the four adventurers, only one remained. The scout that prompted my being sent out to make the rounds was among the dead, a man in his early thirties who, I was told, took down the remainder of the horde when he found them attacking Cloverleaf. He succumbed to his wounds from the battle just a few hours later, the healer that had been sent to the town already torn to pieces by the locust-like monsters.
The look of their hollow eyes as I opened the door to the church still lingers like a figment imprinted on my eyes: an old woman in a brown nightdress rocking back and forth in a pew, muttering prayers to an elven goddess that despises her. The mayor was among them, a man barely coherent but still able to follow my directions better than the almost catatonic adventurer they carried away on a stretcher. I told them of the safe road back to the closest town before I sped down along the path to make certain it was clear.
I found a similar scene in a village just a few hours later. The blood there was old, staining the ground and the small houses brown. There were no survivors of whatever happened that time. Not even their bodies remained. I don’t know how long I lingered there, staring blankly at a doll sitting clean and untouched on a rock in the middle of the village. Sound didn’t even choose to linger in that place, not until the rain began to fall, washing it all away.
The crack of thunder in the dark stirs me from my reverie. I find the half-eaten cookie in my hand crumbled, the crumbs in my palm having gone cold.
“Damn,” I mutter, shaking the crumbs off my hand. I turn my mind back to the task at hand. I have managed to visit most of the sites given to me by Illigar, mostly completing the task that he told me would take three days. Despite my frustration at being taken out of the fighting by the man, a small part of me had coped with it by imagining that I must be some kind of important agent for him to be sent out on this mission. Now, I know it is just because I possess a ship. After seeing Cloverleaf, though, I can’t blame him for it any longer. This needs doing.
Relinquishing navigation of the ship to Galea, I turn my thoughts back to myself, back to the things I should be focusing on. The feeling of impotence still lingers. Just as haunting as the memory of that woman’s vacant eyes in the church is the memory of watching my friends weave in between huge monsters, each strike of a mandible or clawed foot easily enough to main and kill if not avoided. I stood there, safe on a pillar of stone, throwing fire at the monsters as they poured from the hive. Only, no matter how much dragonfire I spat at the termites, I didn’t accomplish much of anything.
I hadn’t been the only one. Several of the mages in the army had been driven to overextend themselves along with me, the magical attacks they could muster sliding off the hard carapaces of the monsters just as my dragonfire had. That hadn’t been the case for everyone; some, a lightning mage in particular, found their powerful attacks quite effective against the creatures. The only reason I can think of as to why they had found success while I struggled until eventually passing out was that the lightning mana was especially effective for some reason.
Inside of the overlapping soul presences, I found myself stripped of my black sand and came to realize how much of my strength it now makes up. If I join the army in another battle, I will find myself in the same situation, meaning that I only have half a day at most to figure out the issue.
However, it isn’t as if I don’t already know the answer to the problem. It isn’t as if I haven’t encountered monsters who are resistant to my fire, no matter what affix I use with them. The final monster I fought before taking my first steps into the second rank comes to mind. At that time, I had to use lightning treasures to destroy it as all three types of my affixed fire were just about useless against it.
Monsters are, at their core, beings created from mana. By their nature, their bodies are constituted of affixed mana, making them more resilient to certain kinds of attacks. Throwing dragonfire against stone had proved as effective as throwing it against the termites, no matter what affix I infused into the dragonfire: fire, cold, corrosion, or even growth, none of it was able to penetrate their thick carapace and deal effective damage. That didn’t mean all mana was ineffective; the sole lightning mage in the army was a clear example of that. Even for monsters that have incredible defenses against magical attacks, there should be some affix that they have trouble defending against simply due to their bodies being made from mana. My only issue was that I didn’t have an affix that might work on them.
It isn’t as if fire, cold, and corrosion are the only affixes that I have imprinted so far, but as far as I can tell, they are the only important ones when it comes to dragonfire. Growth was out if I was considering fighting in a formation. All that affix does is slightly increase the potency while making the fire more likely to spread. All my attempts before at infusing sky into dragonfire has seemingly done nothing, and for some reason, the ability won’t even accept my attempts to incorporate my newly acquired steel affix into it.
It isn’t as if the answer to my issue with the termites eludes me. All I need to do is simply attack them with an affix they can’t defend against. According to my understanding, every monster will have at least some weakness to a certain kind of mana, the same way as they will be strong against another. My ability, Emperor’s Prerogative, reveals itself more and more as being the cornerstone of my life as a magician going forward. The fact that I can incorporate any affix I find into my soul is not only unheard of, but it should allow me to fight and conquer any monster out there.
There are two paths open to magicians who focus on magical attacks in the second and higher ranks. They can overpower their enemies, fragrantly not caring if they are in a good or bad matchup for the affixes they have access to; Corinth is likely one of those. Halford told me once that the man killed a dragon, and by Corinth’s own admittance, he only has the one affix, fire. The other kind of mages are those that seek out monsters their affixes match up well against, often becoming wandering adventurers who look for specific bounties. Thanks to my unique circumstances, I might eventually be able to do both.
The issue returns to the fact that I simply haven’t had the time to head out into the world and devote myself to accumulating affixes. It isn’t as if I can simply buy enchanting mediums and take the mana from them. My disenchanting ability only pulls the mana out of natural treasures, and those things are hard to come by outside of wanton slaughter of monsters. The only other way I know of so far is to eat monsters, but that path is slow, requiring that I both find monsters who I can extract magic from the meat of, and that I have the time to eat enough of it to accumulate the corresponding affix in my soul index. I can only eat so much, after all.
I sigh, biting down on another cookie and staring out into the pitch dark of the night. Something about the cookie sparks a hazy memory. There was another kind of fire that I hadn’t tried on the termites yet.
It is difficult to remember exactly with how drunk I had been at the time, but during my duel against that woman Priscilla, I had conjured a different fire for a moment. That brown fire had struck into the flying demon and started to turn it into dust at the barest touch. I have never seen anything like it, not that I know how I did it. As soon as the demon attacked me, I tried to push corrosion into my dragonfire to attack it back, but something had gone wrong. The fire affix hadn’t left the dragonfire, what normally happens when I use a different affix. Somehow, that resulted in the brown flames.
Other than the growth affix, I have never been able to use more than one affix in the dragonfire at a time. There is some limitation to the nature of the magic, as if it needs to be directed by one affix and take on its properties to function. It isn’t even as if I haven’t tried putting them together before, it simply won’t work. Sitting on the deck of my ship, I conjure emerald flames into my right hand and orange in my left. The two blooms of color light up the interior of the ship, playing off one another, trying to dominate the light.
I discard the idea that something went wrong with the ability as I bring the two flames together, allowing their branches of fire to intermingle and phase through one another. I also don’t think that I had pushed two affixes into the ability at once. No, something else had happened, something every law of magic I have read about in my pursuit of enchanting says should be impossible. Somehow, bringing the two affixes together at once had created something new, a new mana. Staring at the flames flickering in my closed hands, I strain my eyes, looking but seeing nothing but the intermingling swirl of green and orange. But to my other sense, my burgeoning mana sense, there is a taste of something different.
It isn’t possible. Combining two affixes does not create a new one. That isn’t how it works. That isn’t…
“There is someone here,” Galea says, a bit of alarm in her voice.
My head snaps up, the flames dying away. Around me, the rain trickles down in rivulets along the outside of the ship, falling at a relaxed pace before disappearing below the platform. We have stopped.
“Where?” Standing, I approach the edge of the ship. Down below, the vague shapes of ramshackle buildings stand out against the black. I squint into the dark, but my eyes fail to notice anything strange about the village we hover above. We must be too high up.
“There.” Galea makes a spot stand out to me, a hovering window down below with a single name written upon it in azure ink.
Izmeralda Cadivan
Before I can comment on the name to Galea, three other windows appear before me.
Steamfang Lycanid<Level 75>(Rank Two)
Steamfang Lycanid<Level 76>(Rank Two)
Steamfang Lycanid<Level 73>(Rank Two)
I am out of the ship in a flash, icy rain splashing across the wings that unfurl behind me as I descend. My staff appears in my hand as mana begins to collect in the head. As I near the ground, the village down below comes into sharper and sharper contrast, and the sight in front of me makes me stay my hand.
I expected to see three huge monsters menacing a woman. Instead, I find something else. The three monsters, who appear like huge and lithe hounds, sit in a pile around a woman who leans against and pets one of their necks. The huge beast nuzzles at her face, neither caring for the torrent of water pouring down on them from above. Instead of staring at the relaxing monsters, I find my gaze drawn to the woman in their midst.
At first, I think she must be human, but one look at her face banishes that thought. Her eyes are strange, beastial, and a horn curls out of the side of her head. Her face is disfigured, stretched forward, and hanging loose off of a skull bent in the wrong places.
Lightning flashes through the clouds overhead, illuminating the village, a scene of destroyed houses and torn-up ground on the bend of a river. The light lingers in the rectangular pupils of the woman below me as she stares up at me. We stay like that for a moment, two people staring at each other.
She yells something to me, but the thrash of the rain blows away the words. The monsters around her stand, turning toward me, their haunches rising as they bare their teeth. The growls they loose vibrate the air, seeming to shake the rain with their power. She yells something again, pointing up at me, but once more, I catch none of the words.
I am still trying to put together the scene, this strange woman standing out here in the storm, petting monsters, when Galea screams in my mind.
“Left!”
Movement in my periphery. I spin away, flinging myself to the side in the air as a burning pain cuts across my wing. Balance abandons me. Magic abandons me. A huge shape soars past me in the air, a sharp talon catching the final reflections of a lightning strike before disappearing into the dark sky. Collision.
Air explodes from my lungs as my back collides with a rooftop. I gasp in a mixture of rain and frigid air while loose shingles crumble beneath me. I make it to my elbows in time to see a shadowy bulk lunging at me out of the dark. The face of a snarling beast comes lurching toward me, the jump to the roof not even the barest impediment as pearlescent energies begin to coalesce about it. My staff rises to meet it, and I see in the instant just before it closes the distance hate in eyes illuminated by orange flames.
The explosion of my blast of fire against the monster’s chest is blinding. A fraction of a second later, the dead maw of the creature collides with my shoulder, tearing at the fabric of my spidersilk shirt but finding no purchase. The bulk of the creature follows behind.
Damaged shingles dig into my back as the roof of the building falls in. Whether it is the explosion of dragonfire or the weight of the monster corpse pressing down on me that does it in, I don’t know. I tumble through space for ten feet before hitting the sodden floor inside the building, a dead monster and broken building following close behind.
In the second of silence that follows, it occurs to me that I am uninjured, my new equipment to thank for that. The dead beast on top of me vanishes in a puff of pink smoke as I pull my way out of the crumbling flooring of the building. Mana gathers into my staff as six buzzing balls of black sand spin to life around me. The door explodes in a shower of splinters a moment later as I charge out once again into the rain, my left wing dragging limply behind me.
The monsters are gone. My eyes are drawn upward, where the shadowy sight of a woman clinging to the talon of a massive, winged monster sails into the storm overhead. I lose sight of them an instant later.
The beat of my heart runs rampant in my chest as I stare about the small village, but for the minute I wait, nothing comes for me. I am utterly alone in the rain.
“What was that?”
