Chapter 466: Town
The town in the distance was smoking like it had been set on fire, and giant glowing eagle-like monsters were constantly dive-bombing the town. I resisted the urge to blink in confusion as I observed the monstrous catastrophe in the distance.
The first thing that surprised me was that we could see a proper, settled, sedentary town in the distance, complete with agriculture and some evidence of other iron-age industries. For most of our time in this world, the only civilizations I had seen were herds of village-bearing beasts. Immobile settlements were basically only spoken of in rumors, and according to everything I had heard, most real settlements were much further north.
The distant town had a wooden palisade surrounding it, not that it was helping the current inhabitants much against the giant eagle monsters in the skies. I could also see a massive ember in the center of the town. It was at least five times larger than our ember, and the soul inside of it was far more active than our ember’s soul. I was fairly certain that meant that it was far more intelligent than our ember, or at least it was awake more often.
The town was also far larger than what I was used to. Our clan of wandering towns was somewhere between five thousand and seven thousand people, if one combined the population of every village-bearing beast. The one in the town had to have at least fifty thousand people in it.
Far more worrying was our ember. The town of fifty thousand people in the distance was clearly struggling to survive - at least a quarter of the town was already wiped out, and while I could see the corpses of fallen eagle-monsters in the distance, the town was clearly losing. A reasonable action to take upon encountering a battlefield where ravenous monsters were dominating the humans would be to flee at all costs.
Despite that fact, our ember was charging forward like it had spotted an all it could eat buffet. That was a real problem, because a much larger and presumably more powerful town was losing, and if our ember was hoping to eat that town’s ember, I didn’t think we could beat the monsters to the meal. Not to mention, the idea of attacking a town we had no quarrel with left a bad taste in my mouth.
Even more worrying were the eagle monsters. They had massive amounts of life force inside of their bodies. I was fairly certain they had Fortitude in the low twenties, if I went by the Market’s Grade system. That wasn’t anywhere near the top of the power ladder in this world, but it was certainly enough to be a huge pain in the neck, especially since in this world, people’s stats scaled a lot more linearly than they did in the Market. Based on my very rough guesstimation, their Vitality stat, in this world’s System, should be somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 or so. Ten of our Mages could empty their mana reserves and still not quite manage to kill one of the eagle monsters - and there were hundreds of them in the skies blasting the town to oblivion with lightning bolts that they were shooting out of their mouths.
Even more worrying was the appearance of the monsters. The eagle monsters in the sky were not made entirely of flesh and blood. Their wings were made of a substance that looked like paper, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that when I gazed at them, they were looking back at me, despite having no eyeballs or other organs attached to them. Other parts of the eagles were covered in unusual vine growths and bits of roots. Something about the look of them gave me an uneasy feeling, although I had a hard time pinpointing what it was.
<Do you guys see this?> I asked, as I gazed at the town in the distance. I ignored the scout that our trainers had pulled aside, and instead opened my communication bracelet and shared my soul sight with my friends. I specifically focused on the vines.
As I shared my vision with my friends, I noticed that the vines growing out of the giant eagle-like monsters also had souls of their own.
<Those vines creep me out,> said Sallia. <Something about them feels off. It’s even more obvious through your soul sight - something is deeply wrong with those things.>
<They don’t have much life force, but they’re unnerving regardless,> said Felix. <Also, do you notice the way the eagle monsters are focusing on wiping out the survivors of the town, instead of eating the ember and then leaving? Their attacks feel a bit too strange. Monsters usually attack towns in order to eat an ember and then run away, based on everything we’ve seen and heard from the warriors of the village. The humans in a town or village are basically an obstacle to their real goal. However, this town and its defenders are already nearly wiped out, and yet the monsters are focusing on the survivors instead of claiming their prize.>
Now that Felix pointed that out, I became even more convinced that something was wrong here. A moment later, my mind flashed back to the other odd occurrence we had seen since coming to this world - the monster and the interdimensional traveller that we had seen fighting in the skies several months ago.
I might be making a huge leap, but I couldn’t help but suspect the two were related. According to the history of the village, we had gone literal decades without seeing anything obviously extraplanar in origin. Then, we had run into a monster way too powerful to exist in this world. Now these monsters were also behaving way outside of the norm, and had weird, living vines drilling into and out of their bodies.
I hoped I was overthinking things.
I shook my head. Regardless, due to the fact that we were barreling towards the fight as fast as our ember could manage, we needed to fight. I could puzzle out what the monsters and their presence meant later. I looked at the trainers, who were now locked deep into discussion with the scout. Finally, the eyes of a few of the trainers darkened.
“Hero trainees! Come with me! We’re heading to the [Priest] - and we might be in for a fight afterwards. Bring your weapons!” he snapped, before he darted towards the temple. The rest of us followed suit. As we moved, I heard a few of the trainers whispering to each other in the back.
“We could potentially grow much stronger if we fight the monsters there and manage to seize the ember though,” observed one of the trainers, in such a low voice that I could barely hear her. “The town already looks nearly finished. I doubt they would even mind at this point - they might welcome the chance to join our town if we fend the monsters off and invite them into the village. One of the village-bearing beasts is pregnant, and it will probably only be a few months before it gives birth. We can start building a new town on its back after it’s six months old - it should be able to handle the weight of a small village by then. If our ember manages to get such a huge meal, it’ll take ages for it to finish digesting its food anyway.”
“If we can somehow snatch the damned ember from the claws of those beasts!” Hissed one of the other trainers. “I can see plenty of corpses from those eagle monsters laying around, but the fact that they brought a town to this state still meanest they’re dangerous. Who knows if we can win even if we do intrude on the fight.”
“It’s not like we have much of a choice either way,” said the first trainer. “All we can do is ask the [Priest] whether we’re about to change directions. It sure doesn’t look like it, though.”
I grimaced. I didn’t think that intervening in this mess was a good idea. I was especially worried about dealing with aerial targets. Our ember offered an unusually high variety of magic-based sparks, so we had a fair number of mages - but we had zero direct archery-related sparks. Our melee warriors would seriously struggle to fight flying enemies, so I didn’t think this was a good fight to take.
When we were two thirds of the way to the temple, I saw the trainer in front freeze, followed by the other trainers. One of them cursed, before hurling an icicle towards the skies. I looked upwards, and realized that it was too late. One of the giant eagle monsters had spotted us, and it was already flying towards us.
The icicle flew wide of its agile wings, before the creature opened its mouth. A blast of lightning tore out of its throat and zipped towards us at speeds I could barely track, before it crashed into a wall of ice. One of the trainers had erected it in midair faster than I could blink.
It was too late. The enemy was upon us.