Explorer of Edregon

Vin merely stood there, blinking dumbly as the massive dragon collapsed in a ground-shaking heap directly before him. He knew Mai had promised him they’d finish it off if he could just get it down onto the ground, but in the heat of battle and zipping around through the sky for so long, he’d completely forgotten about said promise. Slowly, he lowered his arms, his glowing staff and pulsing sword no longer needed.

It was only then Vin noticed the cheering. Hundreds… Thousands of people were clanging their weapons together, tossing them down in order to hug one another or throwing shields up into the air in wild celebration. Vin had been so busy dealing with the dragon that he hadn’t realized the rest of the monsters had been finished off while he’d been performing his aerial acrobatics. A slow look around the battlefield revealed monster corpses as far as the eye could see. They were hacked to pieces, blown apart, riddled with arrows and Stone Shards and all other random methods of projectile.

And far more importantly, he barely spotted any Terran corpses.

A flash of purple was all the warning he received before Lumel tackled him in the midsection, causing him to grunt and stumble backwards as he nearly lost his footing.

“Woah, careful!” Vin laughed, smiling down at her as she hugged him. “There might still be monsters that need to be finished off. Don’t—”

His concerns were silenced by a pair of soft, gel-like lips, and Vin decided he’d probably gotten his point across. With twin casts of Dimensional Sheath, he tucked his staff and sword away, wrapping his arms around her and enjoying the moment as all of Terra cheered their victory.

Eventually, Lumel seemed to realize that they were not only in public, but largely the center of everyone’s focus seeing as they were still standing at the foot of the monstrous dragon, and she recoiled back, her face turning a deep reddish-purple as she glanced around at all the people cheering them on. Even so, she didn’t let go of her arms around him, squeezing him tight as if afraid some other epic monster was going to spawn and go after him next.

“...I think you might be getting more of a standing ovation than the actual King and Queen on my world,” she admitted after a moment. “Then again, those two never took down a dragon, so that seems fitting.”

“To be fair, whoever the crack-shot is manning the central cannon is the one that dealt the finishing blow. I just brought the monster into the crosshairs.”

“Mhm,” Lumel hummed, raising an eyebrow as she looked up at him. “And taking a geyser of fire powerful enough to melt Terra’s walls to the face for five seconds without so much as a scratch?”

“What can I say? I’m somewhat hard to kill,” Vin shrugged, knowing Lumel had a good point.

He was going to have to be more proactive this time around with the new members of wave seven if he didn’t want that crazy cult revitalized after everything he’d done.

By this point, the cheering was slowly beginning to die down, but Vin had a feeling it was still going to go on for at least another few minutes, and he couldn’t really blame everyone. The closest Terrans looked as though they were debating running over to him and trying to lift him up like one would a team captain after a sports match, but from their faces, it looked as though they were weighing the pros and cons of him potentially exploding if they were to try such a thing. Chuckling to himself, he turned back to Lumel.

“Any chance you can warp us over to the hospital? If the battle is really over, that means it’s time to help Frank with the healing.”

“You know he’s got other Healers working under him now,” Lumel reminded him. “You sure you don’t want a break? You literally just took down a dragon. In the sky!”

“Technically it took me down,” Vin laughed, rolling out his shoulder and wincing at the bruises he could already start to feel forming. His divine boon might save his life from lethal blows, but it always seemed to leave him in pretty rough shape afterwards, as if the Goddess of Benevolence was warning him not to do whatever it was that had just killed him again. “Oh, before that though… Any chance I could ask you for a quick ride over there?”

Shaking her head, Lumel tightened her grip around him, and the two of them warped over to the other end of the battlefield. Peering up at the floating cloud he’d created, Vin cleared his throat and called up at them.

“I’m going to cast Slow Fall, don’t freak out!”

“Why would we freak ou—Gods below!”

Vin grinned at Scule’s frantic outburst as the cloud he and the other snipers had been sitting on vanished beneath their feet. Though rather than plummet to the ground, everyone drifted down at a leisurely enough pace, easily landing without injury. Scule and Reginald landed in the midst of everyone, the petian shaking his fist all the while.

“Sleep with one eye open, Vin, I’ll get you for this!”

“Remind me to set up some sort of glue trap by our door the next time we go to sleep,” Vin muttered, earning a giggle from Lumel as she warped them again. This time, the battlefield vanished entirely as she brought them straight to the front of the hospital. Vin knew he’d need to run off and help Spur and the others with the new Earthers coming from wave seven soon enough, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t time for him to help with the wounded.

To his pleasant surprise, the number of gravely wounded warriors was far lower than any of the previous waves. In fact, it was so low that Frank dismissed him almost immediately, shouting that he and his team could handle it and demanding he keep an eye on Spur to ‘keep that idiot out of any more trouble.’ For the first time he could remember, Vin actually caught up with the team heading out of Terra to meet up with wave seven as they were leaving town. Lumel went off to help hunt for potential survivors lost among the carnage with Shia, so he was happy to have some company during the run over.

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“Vin?” Spur blinked, smiling at him as he jogged up to their large party. The group on its way to meet with the approaching Earthers consisted of Spur, Golrim, Alice, and roughly three dozen combat classes armed to the teeth. Vin thought it felt smaller than usual, but they weren’t exactly expecting any sort of resistance. “Well, this is a pleasant surprise! Frank kicked you out already?”

“He did,” Vin laughed, shaking his head as he answered Alice’s high five that had been waiting for him since she first saw him coming their way.

“That was awesome!” she exclaimed, grinning as she threw her hands out. “You took down a dragon, dude! How did it feel getting blasted into the earth hard enough to form a crater?”

“Painful,” he admitted, deciding to start sweeping a Renewal spell over his back as they traveled. “Your traps looked like they did some serious damage.”

“You have no idea. For whatever reason, this wave seemed more monster-dense than the previous ones. Probably still the same rough number of monsters, just more of them spawning back-to-back instead of having it dragged out into a prolonged battle. Thanks to that though my traps were even more effective than usual. I got a level and a half from all the monster kills,” Alice admitted. “I’m still pretty early into my second prestige, but it’s one step closer to catching up to you!”

“I got almost two levels myself,” Spur admitted, positively beaming as they jogged. “What about you, Vin, anything of note?”

“In fact…” Vin peered at his own interface, finally taking the time to look through the ridiculous number of new monster notifications he’d received. He’d gone from only just hitting level 53, to being only a few thousand experience shy of level 54. Having missed the battle for wave six, he’d almost forgotten just how much of a boost he got simply from ‘discovering’ the vast number of new monsters that spawned with each wave, and he shook his head as he dismissed them all. “...No level up, but close to the next one.”

Hell, if this keeps up, I might manage to hit my third prestige class before the battle for wave eight.

The rest of the trek was filled with them debriefing one another about the battle, going over aspects they may have personally missed while busy dealing with putting out other fires. For example, Vin hadn’t noticed how Golrim had taken it upon himself to run over and join up with the Terran manning the central cannon after the dragon had formed.

The Expert of Numbers had used his computer-like brain to help the cannon narrow in on its second shot, ensuring that they would hit the dragon dead in the head and finish it rather than just deal it another blow. Similarly, Myers had revealed a new prototype weapon on the far side of the wall that was still in the testing stage. According to Alice, she’d somehow managed to recreate what was functionally a belt-fed automatic crossbow launching her famous explosive bolts, and had taken quite a lot of pressure off Phil’s struggling sides before it jammed and ended up blowing her off the wall.

The good news was that with Regeneration, Shia could regrow those missing fingers easily enough. The eyebrows would come back all on their own.

It wasn’t long before the group reached the usual rendezvous point, and Vin was surprised to find that some of the crafters had been through since his last visit. A small but obvious fence had been set up surrounding the area to prevent anyone from wandering off, be it accidentally or on purpose. Spur must have noticed his gaze, because the Commander chuckled.

“We really debated putting in that road or not, but seeing as we’re only supposed to have two more waves after this one, we thought it would be a bit of a waste. A fence was simple enough however. We thought the Earthers might feel better immediately seeing that we have a handle on what’s going on rather than having them just popping into Edregon in the center of a large meadow.”

“Makes sense,” Vin said, preparing himself for the inevitable wait. He normally only met up with this group an hour or so after the battle, which meant they had plenty of time to kill.

As the others chatted and discussed improvements that could be made before the battle for wave eight that would be hitting them in roughly two months’ time, Vin’s mind wandered toward some of the items on his to-do list he’d have to tackle once they were done here.

Shuvo and his students were almost certainly ready for their next tier of magic and should be hitting their prestige classes before too long. The five fragments that the Rebel Queen and her trogum tide struck were still largely blank on his map, and he wanted to at least swing by and see if he couldn’t find any survivors. He had plenty of spell ideas he wanted to put to the test, doubly so now that he’d managed to get his tier-3 spell-creation time down to only four intense days and nights of work. Not to mention he’d have to help find the new missing Earthers that ended up being scattered around Edregon from the Gods’ actively decaying ritual.

“So many fragments, so little time,” Vin muttered. He glanced up as Beyond the Veil allowed him to spot the Gods’ ritual rapidly beginning to form mana into the shape of a massive tunnel stretching off into another dimension, somehow managing to connect Edregon to Earth from an entire universe away. Just like the last few times, he noted how parts of the tunnel were fraying and almost actively dissolving, and he winced as he wondered just how many people were going to go missing this time around. His eyes followed the large pulse of mana as it rocketed down the tunnel, bleeding tiny flashes here and there as it traveled. But before the main body could reach them and transform into a thousand fresh-faced and confused Earthers, something new happened.

The mana making up the tunnel shuddered and shook, looking like it was twisting in upon itself and bending almost. As the fraying portions grew larger and more individual mana signatures were split from the main body and scattered to the winds, Vin watched with wide eyes as the entire tunnel connecting their current location back to Earth shifted, moving as if it were being dragged across the sky and dimension alike by an invisible hand. The dense pulse of mana containing their reinforcements and new allies continued down the tunnel, now rocketing away from them before vanishing off into the distance. As if it had been under extreme strain, the mana making up the ritual then bounced back to their location a few seconds later, but by then it was too late.

During those few seconds that the ritual had been commandeered, the dense pulse of mana containing hundreds of people from Earth had traveled through it.

Like it always did, the God-scale ritual ended moments later, the mana forming its fraying structure dissipating and returning to normal as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

“Uh… You good there, Vin?” Spur asked, looking concerned as he waved a hand in front of his face. “You’re just sort of staring up at the sky with your mouth open. Something we should know? The next wave should be arriving any second. Probably shouldn’t scare the seventh wavers before they get used to Edregon.”

“That’s not going to be a problem,” Vin said slowly, his mind whirling as he turned to face a few of the other leaders of Terra. “Something… or maybe someone… took them. The seventh wavers are gone.”