Char sighed and rubbed her face. “Yeah. I was just telling myself I need to be more careful about jumping into risks. I might be turning into my cousin. That crazy bastard thinks it’s fun to jump out of perfectly good airplanes.” She exhaled, serious again. “I can see arguments for and against. On the ‘pro’ side, we’ve already finished three-quarters of the Zone, there’s supposed to be a big reward, and you need a Domain Affinity Core. So far, the only ones I’ve gotten have come from bosses and quests. Getting you stronger helps both of us, and it helps keep the others alive when we go back. Cons: we could die.” She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Nope, that pretty much sums up the arguments against, but I’ll admit, it’s a pretty compelling one for walking away. My gut says go for it, but I’ll trust your read on this one. What do you think we should do?”
Declan chewed on his lip while he considered the question. He pushed himself up to lean against the tree that had nearly killed him. All of his wounds were closed thanks to Char’s healing spell, but he moved like he was still bruised and sore. After a few moments, he answered, “I think it’s worth taking a look. If not for the Wendigo, the orbs wouldn’t have been too hard. An annoying slog, but without the ice, I don’t think it would have been too much for us. Heck, we beat it even with the Wendigo. Let’s see what we’d be facing before we decide… but, maybe we could wait for morning?” He said the last few words through a jaw-popping yawn. “I think three shadow hordes and a mythical bogyman are my limit for one day.”
Char glanced to the sky and realized for the first time that the shadowy haze was gone. The sun was dipping low, and the natural shadows were stretching long. Artificial night had been banished just in time for the real thing to move in. “Yeah,” she said, fighting to keep from echoing his yawn. “Let’s find a better place to camp, though.”
Stretching, she stood and went to the Wendigo’s corpse. She looted it and got only gold credits. The corpse didn’t crumble to dust. It seemed like only altered animals and monsters did that, but despite how his body had been changed, Royce still counted as human. One more oddity to file away. There was nothing else left in the clearing other than the damaged stone plinth that had held the orb. The blast had torn away a chunk of the stone, and there was nothing special about it when Char checked it over.
By the time she was through, Declan was on his feet. They hiked upriver a little way, not wanting to move closer to the end of the Zone and whatever boss monster might be lurking there. Lulu ranged wide as they walked, alert for any lingering threats, but she found none. The quiet walk should have been relaxing, but Char was still on edge after the fight and kept expecting trouble to pop out and take a swipe at them.
Lulu found a stone outcropping that made an easily defensible spot for their camp. The stone jutted at an angle from the side of a hill, forming an overhang that made a natural shelter. It made Char feel a little better about camping in the woods to know there was solid stone at their back if they were attacked.
They had a proper campfire, and Char heated canned beef stew for them. As they ate in companionable silence, Char heard the sound of an owl hooting somewhere off in the woods. She tensed for a moment, but made herself relax. It sounded like a perfectly normal owl, and she realized that it was the first animal noise she’d heard since the crickets went silent.
Declan must have been just as on edge, because his daggers appeared in his hands at the sound. The owl hooted again, but when it didn’t seem to be getting closer, and nothing crashed out of the trees to attack them, he put the daggers away. “Do you think there are any normal animals left, or are they all changed?” he asked.
“I’m hopeful there are still normal creatures out there. I’d hate to think that all the cows and chickens are now mutated monsters and we’ll have to risk life and limb for steak and eggs.” She ran a hand over Lulu’s head and scratched behind her ears. “Lulu didn’t change. Not at first, anyway. When I Assessed her, it always just came back as ‘Dog’ with ‘pet’ in parentheses. No level. I think she got a little stronger and smarter as I leveled, but other than her health bar, I didn’t have access to her stats or anything. Now, she’s her own… entity, I guess. When I Assess her now, it shows ‘Hound of the Inferno’ and she’s level 23. If dogs didn’t change… well. Maybe.”
“I wonder if it’s because she was a domesticated animal? Maybe it was just the wild stuff that changed. Or maybe there are pockets of normal animals. We’ll starve to death if we can’t farm, and that requires pollinators as well as livestock and draft animals. Magic might help with some of it. I mean, you said there was a Plant domain on that list you saw, right?” When Char nodded, he went on, “So, someone with Plant, Earth, and Water affinities would make a pretty good farmer, I’d think. But if the livestock are all trying to kill us…” He sighed. “I really don’t want to have to become a vegan.”
“Nah, that’s not a danger. That boar meat was pretty tasty. We can re-domesticate some animals if we have to, I think. Assuming our new alien overlords give us the time.” Her lip curled with disgust at the mention of the Aldevari. She suppressed the rant that tried to bubble up. This was too nice a break from the constant fear and rage, and she wanted to enjoy it.
She stared into the campfire, watching the flames dance and crackle. Lulu was a hot, comforting presence pressed against her leg. Her chin rested on Char’s knee, and her eyes were locked on the stew bowl. Char had mercy on her and set the bowl down with a few spoonfuls of stew left in it. Lulu’s tail whirred like a fan blade and flickered with little flames as she licked the bowl clean.
She watched the happy hellhound for a long moment, then broached a subject she’d been putting off, “How are you doing? I mean, after Ravenmoor? That was pretty rough.”
“I’m…” He trailed off with a loud exhale. “I won’t lie. I’m not really OK, but I think I’m coping. I put some points into Resilience, and I think that’s helping. It keeps sneaking up on me, though. I’ll be just going about my day and something will remind me of… that place, and I suddenly remember that I killed people.” He looked at his hands as he spoke, turning them over as if they were strange appendages that he’d never seen before. “It’s not like flashbacks; I’m not back there reliving it, or anything. It’s more like… after my Dad died. I’d be living my life and think 'Hey, I should tell Dad about that,' and then remember that he’s gone and it would hurt again. With this, it’s the sudden realization that I’ve killed other people, and that hurts in its own way.”
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He trailed off, and Char let the silence stretch. She didn’t know the right thing to say, so she stayed quiet, but attentive. She knew the jolts of sudden hurt; she’d felt them after her mom had passed, and still felt them three years after Ty’s death. She also understood why he was looking at his hands. There were moments when she looked at hers and expected there to be bloodstains on them. She remembered seeing her dad doing the same thing once or twice.
After a minute, Declan started talking again. The words poured out like a boil had been lanced. “I know we didn’t have a choice. I mean, if we’d walked away from that, they would have killed Jabat and Lina and the others. Even when we didn’t know there were survivors, we knew they’d been going out and abducting people. And it’s not like they stopped to talk to us. You can’t exactly have a conversation with someone who’s trying to shove a kitchen knife into you. And finding out that they were essentially mind-controlled doesn’t make it any better. They were victims in their own way.”
Char considered her words, then said, “There’s a concept I came across in a book several years ago. I didn’t really agree with it at the time, but it stuck with me, and I can kind of see what the author was getting at now. He said something along the lines of mercy being a luxury of the strong. The way it played out in the book, they didn’t have any way to deal with… I think it was bandits, maybe? Anyway, they didn’t have any way to keep them as prisoners, and they couldn’t let them go to prey on other people. They didn’t have the resources to be merciful. They had to be practical, and that answer was the brutal one.” She paused and poked at the fire with a stick, letting Declan think. When she’d read that book, that sentiment had seemed like an excuse for the protagonist to be a bloodthirsty bastard, but she was starting to see the harsh truth in it, even if she didn’t like it.
Declan leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and propping his chin on his hands. The posture made him look younger than his years. “Yeah, I can see that. It’s counter to what we’ve been taught about how crime and justice should work, but what else can you do if you don’t have a working justice system with judges and lawyers and prisons? Still, I don’t want us to go back to the days when everything was a hanging offense.”
“No. Me neither. Finding the middle ground won’t be easy, though. I get the feeling we’ll have to keep living with blood on our hands for a while.”
“Yeah. Maybe. I guess we’ll just have to get strong enough.” Declan stood up and paced. “I’m too wired to sleep. You go ahead. I’ll take the first watch.”
Char rolled out her bedroll between the rock and the campfire, but even as tired as she was, she wasn’t quite ready for sleep. The last few days had been an emotional roller coaster. There had been a lot of ups and downs, and some pretty steep drops. She recalled the advice that she’d given Declan after the fight with the Burrowjaw. No one could live in constant angst and fear; it would wear your soul down to a nub. The Zone Boss should be just a monster fight, though. Just a good, straightforward challenge. She was actually looking forward to it.
She pulled up her status sheet and looked it over. She had fifteen points to spend from her level-ups. Thinking back over her last few fights, she considered what she’d been most in need of. Recovery would help her get mana back faster… more Speed was always good… but Dexterity and Intelligence were falling behind her other stats, maybe she should shore them up? She needed those for faster spellcasting. She could see good reasons for increasing them all.
Staring at the numbers didn’t give her any inspiration. In the end, she added five points to her Speed, because that was what she relied on in a fight, five to her Willpower to help her shake off mental attacks, and she was going to add the last five to Recovery, but something stopped her. A subtle impulse from her hind-brain pushed her toward another choice. Maybe it was instinct, or maybe it was foresight; she couldn’t be sure. She decided to listen to it, though, and put the last five points in Spirit. She still wasn’t sure what Spirit did, other than making her mana pool larger, but it felt right.
Lulu turned in circles a couple of times before plopping down next to her with a doggy sigh and a wave of contentment. Char smiled and rubbed her head. “Don’t set my sleeping bag on fire. I like this sleeping bag.”
Lulu huffed like an insulted matron and sent Char a feeling of slightly affronted reassurance. Of course, she wasn’t going to set anything on fire. Not unless she intended to.
She didn’t lie there awake as long as she feared she would. The crackle of the campfire and Lulu’s warm presence lulled her to sleep. Her dreams were troubled, and her tossing and turning must have disturbed Lulu, because when Declan woke her for her turn at watch, Lulu had moved to curl up on top of the hot embers of the campfire.
————————————————————————
The next morning, they made their way down the river toward the far end of the Challenge Zone. Without the artificial night to hide things, Char found the woods to be quite charming. There was very little underbrush, and what there was tended to be spread out, making travel relatively easy. It made her think of what she’d read about old, tended European woodlands.
She used Identify Plants as they went, and was surprised to find a number of berry bushes and nut trees. They spotted a few birds, all Earth-native, unaltered songbirds with levels from 1 to 5, but nothing larger. For the length of the walk, Char could almost pretend that nothing had changed.
What they found when the woods ended drove any illusions from her. When they stepped out of the tree line, it was to face a massive black half-dome. It covered the entire width of the valley. The dome was made of congealed shadow. It was almost opaque, but a little light made it through—like a dark tint on a car window. Details were obscured, but silhouettes could still be seen within it. They could just make out the shape of a humongous tree in the center of the dome. The tree had to be at least three hundred feet high, and as large around as a city block at the base.
“What the fu…” Char cut off as a new notification popped up, bypassing her settings to appear before her.
Special Challenge Zone:
Enter the arena to face the Zone Boss.
You may retreat from the arena at any time.
You may only challenge the Zone Boss once.
If the Zone Boss is challenged but not defeated,
the Challenge Zone will reset in 24 hours.
Rewards: Sanctuary Access, Random Domain Affinity Core, Title, Experience
“You don’t think the tree is the Zone Boss, do you?” Declan asked, his neck craned back to look up at the massive leafy crown.
“No. I can’t make out what it is, but there’s something else moving in there,” Char said, stepping to the side in an attempt to get a better look. It was no use. The shadows were too dark, and she could only catch the occasional flicker of movement. She couldn’t tell if what she was seeing was close to the barrier or back near the tree, but she hoped it was close to the barrier—because if it was as far away as the tree, it was massive.
Her modern, civilized brain was telling her to turn away and not look back, but the part of her that was coming to love the challenge of a fight was ready to plunge in and test herself against a new monster.