Explorer of Edregon

While Alka confirmed the last of the rankers was down for the count, Vin let out a sigh of relief as he turned to check on his companions. “Everyone okay?”

“I was definitely caught off guard, but yeah, I’m fine,” Shia nodded, glancing down at the corpses at their feet. “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone that skilled at sword play before. Other than Alka, obviously.”

“Lumel?” Vin asked, blinking as he finally spotted her. The moment combat had started, Lumel had used her new Adaptive Camouflage passive, turning the same jet black as the darkness of the fragment right beside them. She’d all but vanished from sight, but Vin watched as her form rippled and she returned her skin to the usual soft lavender he was already beginning to think of as her natural state.

They’d actually discussed the plan for her to use her passive to hide in the event of an attack on one of their adventures, as it was better for her to stay close rather than teleport away, but it was still jarring to see her functionally disappear like that.

“I’m alright,” she said, her own eyes fixed on the corpses of the warriors as well. “Were those three the rankers you told us about?”

“Oh yeah, no doubt about that. Humans with distant bloodlines to some of the other races, melee weapons, and a bad attitude? Definitely rankers.”

“They weren’t half bad!” Alka laughed, rejoining them as she sheathed her sword. “Not quite as skilled as I would have liked, but not bad at all.”

“We have no idea where these three fell on their weird, fragment-wide ranking,” Vin shrugged. “For all we know they were in the upper thousands.”

“I’ll be the first to admit, that was a little close for comfort,” Scule said, slowly putting his blowgun away as he stared down at the body of the woman that had nearly run him through with her sword. “For our sakes, let’s hope there aren’t many rankers stronger than them.”

“A powerful warrior is pretty much the bane of any mage’s existence,” Shia added. “You saw those abilities they had. Piercing Lunge. Mirror Slash. Most warriors are awarded finishing blows for their Capstones, or abilities that highlight their combat style. They won’t have many under their belt, but that’s because they tend not to need more than one or two to get the job done.”

“Sometimes they don’t need an ability at all,” Vin muttered, rubbing his stomach as he recalled the ranker king’s blade nearly impaling him as he escaped. Seeing as the rankers didn’t believe in ranged combat, he highly doubted the king had any sort of ability that revolved around throwing his sword long distances.

“So what’s the plan?” Alka asked, getting them back on track. “We’ve got three dead rankers at our feet, and their arrival pretty much proves we’re in either the beastkin fragment or the orc fragment. Now what?”

“For starters, let’s do this.” Vin knelt down, fishing through the lead woman’s possessions before he found what he was looking for. Holding up four scraps of cloth, each with a symbol that translated to the number ‘eighty-six,’ he passed them out. “Looks like she was actually pretty high up the chain of command, though I guess that makes sense. I think Tarnis mentioned only their more-powerful warriors led the patrols on the alliance’s border. Anyway, tie these around your upper arms, the rankers call them ‘seals.’ If any other rankers spot us from afar, they’ll think that we’re connected with this woman and might not bother us.”

As Alka, Shia, and Lumel did just that, Scule grunted up at him. “Oye. What about me?”

“She didn’t have petian-sized seals,” Vin shrugged. “I’d say just stay hidden within my pocket for now.”

“Fine. But I’m not happy about it! We finally found an enemy that my poisons do a damn thing against, don’t expect me to sit back and let you guys handle everything as usual!”

“If we get attacked again, you’ll be the first person I’m relying on,” Vin reassured him, before tying his own seal around his arm. “Does anyone have any ideas on what to do with the bodies? We probably shouldn’t just leave them lying around like this.”

“I mean, there’s the obvious,” Alka snorted. Picking up the first of the bodies, she walked a dozen feet to the side and dumped it past the fragment border, straight into the darkness. Despite the fact that Vin knew the corpse was lying right there, barely a few feet from him, it was effectively gone. Swallowed up whole by the magical darkness.

Following her lead, they tossed the other two rankers into the darkness as well, wiping their hands of the situation. Assuming monsters or animals didn’t eat them first, they would probably start to smell after a while, but they should be long gone by then.

“Decision time,” Shia said, grinning as she turned toward the rest of them. “Do we keep hitting the outer fragments, or do we try to talk to the alliance members here?”

“The orcs and beastkin not working for the rankers of their own volition isn’t anything more than a theory I have,” Vin admitted. “I think it’s a bit too dangerous to just go waltzing into their main settlements when they probably have a bunch of different rankers contained within. They’ll either have rankers acting as overseers to ensure the ‘alliance’ is running smoothly, or they’ll have rankers visiting because they truly are friends. Either way, we want to avoid rankers as much as we can, so I think we stay clear.”

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“I think that’s for the best,” Lumel agreed. “Let’s let Theodore do what Spies do best and gather that information for us.”

“Which means we’re heading straight into another death fragment,” Scule sighed. “Fantastic.”

“Cheer up, maybe the horrifying monsters living in the next fragment don’t like poison either!” Alka said, her eyes flaring as she laughed.

Their plan in place, the team began following the fragment border as they headed northwest. They ended up running into two more small teams of rankers as they traveled, but the warriors took one look at the large ‘eighty-six’ tied to their arms and didn’t stop them, continuing their patrols as if they hadn’t seen anything. Vin didn’t know if that meant these teams were led by rankers who weren’t in a position to challenge the woman they’d killed, or if they just didn’t want the hassle of stopping and talking to them, and he didn’t care. So long as they could finish their mission and make it back to Terra in one piece, that was all that mattered.

It wasn’t long before they spotted the next fragment, and their team as a whole did a double take. The deadly, horrifying fragment that supposedly was keeping the rankers completely trapped within the three fragments of their alliance…

Looked completely normal.

“Huh…” Scule said, peering out from Vin’s pocket as they gradually grew close to the next fragment. “Is it me, or does that fragment look downright pleasant?”

“It’s certainly strange,” Shia nodded, shielding her eyes as she tried to get a better look as well. “Though that just makes me wonder what’s so dangerous about it.”

“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” Vin said. As they approached the border, he took a hard look into the interior. The fragment was mostly a large, flat meadow, filled with little more than short grass barely a few inches tall. The sun was shining and the weather looked standard, and try as he might, Vin couldn’t make out any immediate dangers.

“Hey guys… do you see that clump of something over there?” Scule asked, pointing toward their left.

Sure enough, Vin quickly spotted what he was looking at, and his brow shot up as he immediately realized what Scule had picked out of the short grass.

A pile of bones picked clean, complete with a human skull staring up at the heavens.

“Alright, that’s mildly concerning,” he said, staring at the distant skeleton. “What the hell do you think happened to him?”

“Something devoured every scrap of flesh and blood on him,” Lumel said, following his gaze. “There is a creature on my world that acts similarly. A large slug that secretes a highly dangerous toxin to paralyze its prey while it devours them whole. It’s not even a monster, just an extremely dangerous creature our farmers have to watch out for.”

“We’ve got vultures in my world too, which are birds that clean corpses of anything on them, but I don’t think they do it quite to that degree,” Vin admitted. “Without knowing what happened… I’m a bit worried about heading into that fragment.”

“Well, luckily for us, whoever that poor sap is, they died with their skull intact,” Shia pointed out. “If we retrieve that, you can use False Life on it and just ask them.”

“Want me to head in there and grab it?” Alka asked, already unsheathing her sword. “I don’t have flesh or blood, so I’ll probably be fine.”

“I’d rather not hinge our bets on a ‘probably,’” he said, eyeing up the skull. “Hang back for now, I’ll grab the skull.” Before Alka could complain, he cast Mage Hand, reaching out with his mana and nimbly plucking the skull off the ground with minute fluctuations of gravity magic. As the skull slowly drifted toward them through the air, Scule whistled.

“Not a bad spell at all! One of these days I’d love to get my hands on that one, if you’re still taking requests for artifacts and what-not.”

“It’s a tier 2 spell, so that probably won’t happen for a while,” Vin chuckled, snatching the skull out of the air with his actual hands once it got close enough. “Alright, let’s find out what happened.”

He still wasn’t the biggest fan of using False Life in general, but over time he’d gotten over his initial queasiness from creating copies of dead people just to ask them about the events leading up to their death. Once he came to terms with the fact that the person’s soul wasn’t involved in his spell, it grew a lot easier. Holding the skull in both hands, he cast his spell, even managing not to flinch as the skull gasped despite the lack of lungs and angled its head to stare at him.

“Is there something in that fragment that kills people?” Vin began, limited a bit in his interrogation by having to ask incredibly specific questions. Being nothing more than a magical copy of the corpse kept alive by his mana, they weren’t exactly all that intelligent.

“Yes,” the skull said, its jaw moving as it spoke without issue. Magic obviously took care of the lack of lungs, tongue, and vocal cords, but it was still strange to see.

“What killed you?” Shia tried.

“Bugs,” the skull answered simply.

“Bugs? Bugs did that?” Scule repeated, staring at the bleached skeleton in the distance. “How the hells does that happen?!”

“I think I might know,” Vin said, deciding on his next question. “I’ve heard of giant bug swarms flying through some of the deserts on my world, devouring basically anything edible, be it plant or animal. Maybe this fragment has a similar creature. Was it a swarm of bugs?” he directed at the skull. “Hundreds of them?”

“Yes,” the skull confirmed. “I do not know the exact number.”

“Can you give us a rough guess?” Shia ventured.

“Yes,” the skull said helpfully.

“What would be your rough guess as to their number, you dead idiot?” Scule asked, grumbling under his breath.

“Enough to darken the sun.”

That was enough to give them pause as they all turned to look at the bright sky in the fragment beside them, free from anything even remotely resembling a cloud.

“Huh,” Alka said, crossing her arms and narrowing her glowing eyes as she stared directly at the sun without issue. “You know, that’s a lot of bugs.”