Chapter 10: Factions
The outcrop wasn’t built for four people to sit comfortably, so they didn’t.
Callum was flat on his back with an arm thrown over his eyes, Bertram propped against the rock face nursing his ruined arm, Iris cross-legged near the edge with her bow across her knees restringing it out of habit.
Lucas sat a little apart from all of them, watching the flood churn below. It’s waved hitting the base of the outcrop with calmness so misleading, one would easily forget the terrors that lay within it.
It didn’t take long before Iris moved.
She settled down beside him, close enough that it clearly wasn’t accidental.
She didn’t say anything for a moment... she ust watched him the way she’d been watching him since the fire that first night.
"Can I ask you something," she said finally.
"You’re going to whether I say yes or not."
The corner of her mouth twitched in a small smile. Then her face went serious again.
"How have you not lost. Not once....Not to the Avallion, not the Makaras back there, not whatever you dealt with before we even met you."
"Luck," Lucas said. Then he flinched. His reply came fast. Too fast, and he immediately regretted how thin it sounded even to him.
"Bedsides, what makes you think I hadn’t lost a fight before we met?" He asked. "I’ve just been lucky..."
"You keep saying that word like it means something." Iris leaned forward slightly, her voice dropping. "Bertram doesn’t lose fights and walk away without a scratch on his plating. Callum panics like a normal person. I miss shots sometimes, plenty of them, you saw that back there." A pause. "You don’t panic. You don’t miss. You knew exactly where the Avallion was weak before it even showed itself. You knew the Maraka’s blind side. You knew things nobody could know unless—"
"Unless what?"
She sighed, not able to get a word out. "That’s what I’m asking you."
Lucas held her gaze for a long moment, the old, familiar pull to just say it basically pulling at his throat.
[Player is not allowed to reveal Regression ability. Violation means death.]
The system stuttered in his sight.
Lucas glanced at it. ’I’ve died twice, I remember things you didn’t and probably never would. Ask me anything and I’ll actually answer’ he thought desperately to himself.
He glanced at the system message again.
He’d believed it enough to keep lying for three rounds now. After all the system constantly warning him about his death seemed to be one of the few things that were actually accurate. And he wasn’t about to test whether the system had a sense of humor about the topic.
"I told you back at the camp" he said instead, keeping his voice even. "Ignition throws off impressions sometimes. Heat signatures, patterns, I don’t fully get it myself. Maybe it’s some kind of prediction thing baked into the skill. I’m not hiding some big secret, Iris. I just don’t have a better answer than that."
"That’s a very practiced non-answer."
He shrugged, a half grin forming on his face"I’ve had a lot of time to practice."
Something in her expression shifted at that, then she let it go. "Fine," she said. "Keep your secrets. Just...for what it’s worth, whatever it is, I’m glad it’s on our side."
"You’re welcome." Lucas said quietly allowing him to fall to the ground propping his head up with his hands.
The silence that followed sat between them in what seemed like a comfortable atmosphere.
[Ding!]
The window that opened this time without the usual stuttering mess he was used to.
Lucas turned his head and read the message.
[A Faction has been formed.]
[Faction members: 32]
[A Faction is an organization formed between players. If a group of players are within proximity after 48 hours, they are given an option to form a Faction.]
All four of them stared at their own copies of the same notification in near-perfect unison.
"...A Faction..." Bertram said slowly, like the word itself might turn into something that made sense if he said it again. "We can just — form those now?"
"Since when?" Callum sat up. "Nobody told us that was a thing."
"Nobody told us any of this was a thing," Lucas muttered, studying the notification.
As far as he could tell, there was no explanation of what a Faction actually did — no bonus stats, no shared inventory prompt, nothing but the bare declarative fact of it, sitting there smug and unhelpful.
He turned. "Can anyone else see anything?" Asking just to be sure his system didn’t do what it did best.
When they shook their heads, he muttered. "Hmmm. No glitches then."
"Do we get anything out of it?" Iris asked, frowning at her own window. "Buffs? Shared vision? Anything?"
"If we do, the system’s not telling us." Lucas closed the window, "Guess we find out the hard way. Same as everything else."
"Story of our lives," Bertram said, in a tired voice. "Whoever formed that Factions must be someone smart enough to understand how this shit works."
Then he exhaled. "I wonder... if we happen to get our own Faction, what should we name it—if there’s an option for naming, that is."
"The Four Idiots Who Nearly Drowned," Callum offered in a flat tone.
"Four? You’re on your own there, mate." Bertram said with a chuckle.
"The Nearly Dead," Iris said. The ghost of a smile on her face this time. "Has a ring to it."
"That sounds depressing." Lucas stared at her.
"Besides, I only need to get to my friends. I’ll be joining their Faction if they have one."
The place was silent. A silence that Lucas didn’t quite notice.
"Thats...understandable." Iris said in a low tone causing Lucas to glance at her seemingly oblivious to the sudden drop in atmosphere.
***
They began hunting once the sun dropped low enough behind the mountains to paint the drying valley floor in long orange shade.
Hunger had finally overcome exhaustion. The receding flood had left the basin littered with smaller game flushed out by the rising water.
They were juvenile Makara, barely the size of large dogs, disoriented sluggish compared to the horned monsters that had nearly drowned them hours earlier.
Bertram couldn’t swing his machete with his ruined arm—Callum had managed to heal him but revealed that he could not heal injuries that were too serious. So he served as bait instead, limping in a way that wasn’t entirely faked, luring two of the creatures into range while Iris put arrows through both before they got too close.
"See," he said, dragging the second carcass back toward their small fire, "still useful. Just differently useful."
"You’re useful as a decoy," Callum said. "That’s not a flex."
"It’s a flex if it works."
Lucas handled the fire, [Ignition] making short work of what would’ve otherwise taken hours of frustrating flint-striking.
For a while the four of them sat around roasting meat that tasted, against all odds, actually decent — chewy and rich. Their worries that wilderness meat would taste bad all in vain.
"So," Iris said eventually. By this time, the valley had completely gone dark — the moonless sky riddled with stars above them. "Plan for tomorrow?"
"Gateway’s still multiple days walk from here, best guess," Lucas said. "We move the moment the sun sets. "No more shortcuts through anything that looks suspiciously peaceful."
"Agreed," Bertram said nodding.
"We should split watch tonight," Iris added. "Two on, two off. No repeats of anyone dozing off alone."
"Alright." Lucas said. "Who’s going to take the first watch?"
"Bertram and Callum. 4 hours..." she turned to them. "You both can handle that, right?"
They both nodded. Iris glanced at Lucas. "Then we should get some sleep," she said again before walking farther into
the outcrop.
"If anything looks fishy, let us know." Saying that, she lay down, the sleep slowly catching up to her.
"Goodnight."
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