After breakfast, Nora led Dan to the town’s marketplace. There, he quickly found that although five sovereigns was a decent amount of money, being an adventurer was very expensive. Traveling out after dark meant that he, as the party leader, had to buy a set of sanctuary runes. That set him back almost three sovereigns immediately and probably had a lot to do with why he was the party leader, even if Nora was doing most of the party leading. Then, he found out that preserved food was expensive. Not break-the-bank expensive, but a day’s worth of food that might usually cost 10-15 bits ran him a whole silver sheaf if he wanted something that could last for a couple days.
Next time, he vowed to himself, he would come back with a backpack full of power bars and avoid the price gougers that preyed upon adventurers. Two weeks of food later, he barely had anything left for equipment.
Finally, he settled on a set of bracers with ‘power’ runes on them. They cost him his final sovereign, leaving him with some pocket change and the hope that he would earn enough money to pay the Cragson sisters, but he couldn’t argue with their effectiveness. The bracers hogged mana, and they only really improved Dan’s arm strength, but they added a noticeable amount of extra force to his blows. He wasn’t going to be competing with Ishlar anytime soon, but he actually hit like an athlete now, rather than just a guy who was in pretty good shape.
Nora wanted to leave immediately after they were done shopping, but Dan was able to convince her to let him get used to the bracers. Of the Cragson sisters, only Emily was willing to spar with him, but even then, she was a bit hesitant. Apparently, they had both noticed his lack of restraint at the end of the battle in the arena. It was a bit hard to focus on the fight with Andrea trying to burn a hole in his back while he fought her sister, but he quickly grew to appreciate Emily’s strength and flexibility.
She didn’t have the same overwhelming physical strength that Ishlar did, but she stood almost six and a half feet tall, and even with the bracers, she overpowered Dan on most blows. Dan, on the other hand, had a slight edge on her in agility and sword skill. Quickly, the match devolved into a game of cat and mouse where he would circle her just outside of her superior range before darting in and trying to score a hit without getting walloped by her greatsword.
After a half hour of Nora grumbling about them wasting daylight and Andrea staring daggers at the fight, Emily and Dan called a break. Emily still wasn’t exactly thrilled to have been tricked into doing a run on the silver mine, but she didn’t seem quite as stiff around Dan anymore. He wasn’t sure he could blame her as he had also been tricked into the silver mine mission, but Nora was quite insistent that it had been his plan. She had signed off on it as his registered agent, after all.
The hike itself to the mine was fairly unremarkable. The land around Morganville was mostly plains with occasional irrigation ditches feeding orchards and grain fields. Periodically, they saw small herds of large, shaggy, bison-like mammals that Nora informed him were called ‘aurochs.’ Apparently, they filled the role of sheep and cows, providing Morganville with wool, pack animals, meat, and dairy products. Although docile, Nora warned him to stay away from them during the breeding season. According to her, the bulls got very territorial and had a tendency to attack any traveler that crossed their path.
Five hours into the hike, the plains began to transition into hills, and Dan got to see his first daylight. Specifically, Alpha Centauri A appeared around the curve of Tanloff and they got a couple hours of full light before it dipped behind the horizon. According to Nora, the day-night cycle was two hours of daylight, roughly twenty-five hours of twilight, another two hours of daylight, four hours of twilight, two hours of night, and another four hours of twilight before things began again. Internally, Dan couldn’t help but wonder what the planet’s suicide rate was. Four hours of daylight, thirty-four hours of gloom, and then two hours of night? He was already a little worried about his mental health from the arena. He really didn’t need to add mega seasonal depression to his list of concerns.
Finally, just as the star slipped below the horizon restoring the planet’s customary murkiness, they arrived at the Mashress Silver Mine. A small, walled compound sat around the mouth of the mine. Worryingly, its defenses faced in all directions, including the mine itself. The compound consisted of an inn, a small general store, a barracks for the local guard, and an administrative office for the mine itself.
Nora quickly went into the compound to alert the administrator that they were ready to enter the mine, and to get the soldiers to open the reinforced gate that kept the mineshaft shut. Belatedly, Dan realized that he probably should have gone in with her. She’d already volunteered him once, and he’d prefer to avoid that becoming a habit.
She came back out, chatting casually with a soldier who promptly began cranking the winch to open the mine’s gate. Five minutes later, the gate was open far enough to go in. Nora led the way inside and promptly pointed out the brazier where they would have to burn the small chunk of rhys wood that she had been given to alert the guards when they wanted to leave the mine. The rhys wood wasn’t native to the region, and would emit a dark purple smoke which would rise through a cleverly-designed flue and disperse outside the mine. Frankly, Dan was more than a little unsettled with the significant amount of effort that seemed to go into keeping whatever was in the mine from leaving. The doors were bad enough, but the security measures regarding the rhys wood spoke of worryingly-intelligent foes. In his experience, that usually wasn’t a good combination. Behind him, Andrea gripped her maul, and Emily drew her sword.
Nora ranged ahead without a care in the world, occasionally checking a map when they came to twists and turns in the mine. The further they went, the more Dan realized how truly lost they were without Nora. Perhaps unconsciously, Andrea stayed closer to the rest of the party while holding the torch. Outside of its light, the mine took on a menacing tone. Dan strained his ears, certain that he heard occasional whispers and skittering.
Suddenly, Nora came to a stop with everyone halting abruptly behind her in an uncomfortable series of bumps and jangling metal. The party clustered around the opening to another tunnel as she looked at the map once more. Dan glanced around the tunnel and frowned. The stone walls around them were rough, unhewn, and covered in condensation. At some point, they had left tunnels worked by humans and strayed into a cave complex of some sort. Once again, he hoped that Nora was half of the scout and pathfinder she claimed to be. If not, and they got lost in these caverns, the fourteen days worth of food in his backpack might not be nearly enough.
“Good news, everyone!” Nora announced as she rolled the map up. “We’ve reached a side branch that hasn’t been explored by a previous expedition. That means that we have no idea what the danger level is, but that there will probably be fresh treasure down there for us to loot.”
“What do you mean, we won’t know the danger level?” Andrea asked darkly, glancing into the rather ominous opening.
“Well I would imagine we’ll be fighting mostly second-rank monsters.” Nora shrugged. “But no one has gone down this tunnel and reported back. That might mean this tunnel has opened recently, or it might mean that anyone who has gone down it has died terribly. Either way, it’s our best chance to do anything other than pick over the refuse from previous parties.”
“But we’re all rank one,” Andrea stated. It wasn’t a question. “We might be able to take down a rank two monster, but if that’s all we’re fighting, this is probably going to be over fairly quickly.”
Nora smiled. “Not true! Plus, I have complete faith in you.” Without warning, she ran past Dan, grinning like a madwoman. He stared at her, bemused, only for the hair on the back of his neck to stick up as a low growl echoed from the tunnel.
He turned back to the cave entrance, drawing his sword and straining his eyes. A faint, hulking shape filled the entrance. The thing shifted slightly, growling again. Behind Dan, the sisters shifted slightly and metal scraped. He cursed to himself as whatever it was sized them up, and wished that he could do the same, but it was just outside the circle of light cast by Andrea’s torch.
That changed as it charged forward without warning, swinging a stone club at Dan’s head. Whatever the thing was, it was almost eight feet tall and dark as pitch. It had four limbs, but Dan couldn’t quite tell if they were legs or arms. As it swung the club, it supported its large, furry bulk on three of them while the fourth gripped the weapon. Its face was dominated by large, ivory tusks that almost hid its beady eyes.
Dan ducked under the club, not even bothering to use Spatial Shield. A single blow from that club would probably be fatal, but the opening swing had been haphazard and poorly aimed. He darted forward and stabbed his blade into its flank, drawing a small drop of blood. The beast didn’t even seem to notice, instead charging past him toward Andrea. His eyes widened in the dark.
“Andrea drop the torch!” he shouted. “It’s homing in on the torch!”
She threw the offending stick of wood and burning tar, and the monster’s gaze tracked it. While it was distracted, an arrow from Nora erupted into the shoulder of its club arm. Emily stepped in, swinging her greatsword in a horizontal sweep at chest level. The blade struck the corded muscle of its forward leg arms and cut into it. This time, the creature noticed the wounds.
The entire tunnel shook as it bellowed. One of its rear leg arms grasped blindly for Dan as he circled behind it. It was moving forward again, seemingly lunging for Emily. He activated the runescript in his bracers, his mana pool draining noticeably as he sidestepped the hand and stabbed his sword deep into the other leg of the creature. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the other arm reaching for him. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his blade. Feeling his weakened mana pool, he grimaced and activated Spatial Shield as he abandoned his sword to jump back. The hand missed, bouncing off the outside of the shield as he backpedaled frantically.
On the other side of the monster, an impact thudded, and Emily grunted. All he could do was pray she was all right and draw his dagger. He glanced down at the pitiful weapon. If a stainless steel longsword wasn’t enough to stop this thing, what hope did he have with only eight inches of metal? Helplessly, he took a couple steps back before breaking into a sprint and jumping onto the creature’s back. The dagger went in and out like a sewing needle, barely drawing blood. He was hurting it, but the creature didn’t seem to care, instead focusing on the larger weapons of the sisters and the angry whir of Nora’s bow.
Frustrated, Dan clung on as the creature bucked like an angry bull, one hand full of its dark, wiry fur, the other gripping the blood-slicked hilt of his dagger. The monster was likely too big to harm with Shocking Grasp; he would just generate a localized muscle spasm with the level of shock he was capable of. Spark Field would be worse than a joke against this thing, and without his sword, his physical attacks were basically useless. Hell, with his sword, he had only managed to do real damage to it once. His gaze flitted to the torch. It really hadn’t liked fire. Maybe that was something he could work with. Either that, or he had gone completely crazy.
Ignoring the consequences, he thought back to his experiments with the fire affinity stone. He hadn’t earned any spells yet, but he could still access the most basic effects. Converting raw mana into elemental mana. Not terribly useful for most affinities, but even undirected fire was still fire. Ignoring the part of his mind that screamed that he was making a mistake, Dan channeled mana into the fire affinity stone buried in his arm. For a second nothing happened as the creature hit Andrea with an open palm, throwing her across the chamber. Then, fire poured out of his free hand and blasted into the creature’s back.
For one glorious second, everything went perfectly, and Dan grinned like an absolute idiot as the flames poured into its exposed back. Then, the oily fur burst into flame, and the creature went mad.
Flames licked at him from every direction, charring his skin and stealing the air from his lungs. Frantically, he released his grip on the creature’s back and pushed off, dropping ever so slowly to the ground to avoid the billowing inferno.
The fall stunned him. Maybe he misjudged the height, or maybe he fell at a funny angle. Regardless, his legs didn’t catch him, and Dan tumbled to the cavern floor, cracking his head on the hard stone. His face slammed forward in the helmet from the impact. A distant part of his mind wondered if he had landed hard enough to dent the back of the metal armor.
With a flash of pain, his forehead bounced off the nose guard of the helmet. A blooming, sticky dampness on his face warned Dan that the guard had slashed open the skin of his face. His vision blurred, and everything took on a dreamlike quality as the flaming behemoth rampaged around the tunnel. Luckily, one of its first casualties had been its eyes, or the enraged monster would have almost certainly killed a party member or two.
Dan blinked, and for some reason the creature was on the other end of the tunnel, still burning, chasing Emily. He blinked and the burning monster was much closer, but someone was dragging him from the fight by the collar of his armor while swearing inventively. He blinked again and the monster was right on top of him, only to be distracted by an arrow erupting from its neck. Dan tried to sit himself up woozily, only to feel an intense wave of nausea flow through him. He leaned back and blinked again.
This time, the warmth of mana flowed into him, but it just kept going. If the nightgliders were a candle, and the blood bear was a torch, this was a raging bonfire. The warmth coursed up and down his body, causing pleasant tingling to erupt in its wake. Dan smiled as he basked in the afterglow of the mana.
Mana influx detected. Recalculating Spirit.
Spirit is now 4.
WARNING: <USER> has gained 2 points of Spirit at once. Irregularities detected. Please exercise caution in the future.
WARNING: <USER> is concussed. Please consume protein and liquids as soon as possible, so that System may effectuate repairs.
