Chapter 45: New Quest
He came back the next morning out of habit more than plan.
One more visit before the carriage. He had told himself that on the path down.
The warmth met him at the entrance the same as it always did, but the quality of it was different from yesterday. Yesterday it had been concentrated, deliberate, the warmth of something that had made a decision.
This morning it was quieter. Present but held.
He sat down in the center of the floor.
"I leave this night," he said. "The carriage is at the gate by the second bell."
The warmth held.
"I know I said tomorrow yesterday," he said. "The schedule moved."
He sat for a while. The cave was very still around him.
The system panel opened before he had decided to open it.
[NEW TASK ASSIGNED.]
[A Level 5 Mutated Daemon has been detected wandering the eastern sector of the Northern Forest. Active for three days. Moving toward inhabited territory.]
[Objective: Locate and eliminate.]
[Reward: 300 Ink.]
[Penalty: If the daemon reaches inhabited territory and causes casualties, 500 Ink deducted.]
Huh?
Level 5. One through three were things trained soldiers handled in groups. Four and five were the line where people stopped sending groups.
He looked at the warmth concentrated around the upper stone.
"I have to deal with something first," he said. "I will come back before I leave."
The warmth shifted. Attention rather than acknowledgment.
He stood and walked back out into the forest.
The eastern sector was further than his usual range.
He knew the terrain up to the ridge and back. East of the ridge the forest changed. Older growth, denser canopy, the undergrowth thicker and less predictable underfoot. The light was more filtered here, the canopy too thick to let much through.
He moved with Ether Authority running low in the background. Hell’s Fire ready but not drawn. Three months ago he would have been running through the tactical options, calculating odds. This morning he was just walking and watching the trees.
The birds stopped first.
Then the undergrowth.
Then everything that had an instinct to stop used it.
He slowed. Then stopped.
He felt the daemon’s presence before he located it. A density in the mana field ahead, the ambient mana pressing outward around something solid.
He pushed through a line of undergrowth and found a clearing.
The daemon stood at the far edge of it. Substantially larger than anything he had hunted.
It had not detected him yet.
He took half a second to read it. The neck moved wrong for a natural animal.
He raised his hand.
The daemon turned its head.
He stepped left before it finished turning and sent Wind Blade at the knee joint. The blade connected. The daemon’s leg buckled once and straightened.
It crossed half the clearing before he finished processing the beginning of the movement.
The impact took him left side first. Then there were trees passing him at a speed he had not chosen and the ground arrived and he lay on it for a moment taking stock of what still worked.
Most things still worked. His ribs had an opinion about the future. He cast Remis and pushed himself upright.
The daemon was already across the clearing.
He moved right. Wind Blade to the knee again. Same joint, different angle. This time he watched what it did, which was slow the leg by a fraction of a second before the daemon corrected. The joint was the right target. A single blade was not enough.
He threw three in sequence, staggered.
The third hit something under the hide that was harder than hide had any right to be and skipped off entirely.
Plating at the joint specifically.
He filed it and circled.
The Remis was still working. The circling was buying time and also burning position, and the daemon was reading the pattern. He changed direction and it adjusted with him. The correction was faster than he expected.
He cast Gale Vortex. Two seconds.
He used them. Wind Blade to the knee three times, all below the joint, below where the plating sat.
The daemon pushed out of the vortex.
He hit it with Fireball. It kept coming. Hit it with another. The hide absorbed the heat, not at the rate he was spending mana to generate it.
He switched to Vector Authority across the clearing.
The daemon slowed, pushing through the gravity with the same indifference it had shown everything else he had thrown at it.
Iris at least looked inconvenienced, he thought.
He kept the gravity active and focused on the knee joint, below the plating. Three Wind Blades. The third found the gap he had been working toward. T
he leg went down properly, the daemon’s weight driving into the damaged area, and it stumbled. He moved to widen the gap before it recovered.
Then it stopped.
It raised one limb, opened what passed for its mouth, and a fireball came out. Dense and fast, with real mass behind it.
He threw up a Wind Wall and pushed everything he had into it. The Wall held for one second. The heat came through the gap and the left side of his face felt wrong for the next several steps as he hit the ground and came back up.
He checked his reserves.
Crushing Gravity draining. Remis still draining. The Wind Wall had spent everything in the comfortable range.
One significant cast left. Maybe.
The daemon reached into the space beside it and produced a bone instrument, black, carved with markings that had no equivalent in any notation he had encountered in the Keeper’s volumes. He had seen it once in the novel.
The character who witnessed it described the sound as arriving before the instrument was played.
He had no mana for what was about to come through the trees.
He raised his hand for Hell’s Fire anyway.
Comments