Explorer of Edregon

Five people sat silently around a round table in the heart of Terra, lost in thought as they contemplated what exactly the future held for them. The two who had only just been informed of the startling discovery made a few hours prior were having a harder time processing the news, but that was to be expected. Vin, Spur, and Alice had all had a quiet walk home to think about what this meant, but Phil and Witherson were experiencing that right now in real time.

“When you say they were ‘taken,’” Witherson said, frowning as she looked between the three of them. “What do you mean?” The Architect and leader of the crafter classes usually came off as a bit standoffish and cold, but currently she just looked confused more than anything.

“Exactly that,” Vin said, shaking his head as he tried to figure out how to put what he’d seen into words. The Beyond the Veil class ability he had from his Adventurer of the Arcane class was complicated enough that trying to describe the ways mana moved and acted behind the scenes was pretty much pointless. Instead, he went with his usual metaphor. “I know I told you all before to imagine the Gods’ ritual they use to bring people from Earth over to Edregon as a giant pipe, right?”

“Yeah. You said it was beginning to ‘leak,’ and that was why we’ve been losing more and more Earthers with each wave,” Phil said, sitting back with his arms crossed as he nodded for him to continue. It was obvious that the Challenger wanted to be out taking stock of the losses of his combat classes after the battle for wave seven they’d all gone through earlier that day, but Spur had demanded an emergency council meeting.

“Right. But this wasn’t some leak. The pipe… the ritual… was grabbed by something. I don’t know what, and I don’t know how, but the end point was basically dragged somewhere else for a few seconds. Just long enough to collect the members of the seventh wave before snapping back into its original location. And if that’s not bad enough, whatever or whoever did this damaged the ritual even further. It clearly wasn’t designed to be dragged about like that. You’d need Golrim to give a proper estimate, but if wave six only brought over roughly seven hundred of the thousand people it was supposed to… I’d guess maybe only five hundred Earthers probably made it to wherever the new end-point of the ritual was shifted to.”

Silence stretched across the table once more as everyone took that in. It was bad enough that a quarter of new Earthers were getting lost in transit, potentially being dropped out of the ritual around Venus or something for all they knew. But half of them?

Seeing as they were all technically still a part of Project Ark, losing so many of the people fleeing Earth in a desperate attempt to keep a small part of their world alive hit rather hard.

“I guess the obvious question then is where did they end up?” Alice asked. The Trapper was the highest-leveled support classer after himself, and her usual air of nonchalance was nowhere to be found as she stared at him. “Could you at least tell that much?”

“No… I hate to admit it, but it all happened so fast. One second the ritual was formed and looking like normal, the next, it was twisted and yanked off into the distance before snapping right back to us. I have a general direction, but nothing more than that.”

“And that means nothing, seeing as whoever or whatever did this could be anywhere from five to five hundred fragments in that direction,” Spur sighed, placing his face in his hands as he let out a deep, rumbling groan. The poor Commander had been riding the high of their recent battle being arguably the best one they’d ever experienced with the least casualties to date, only to get slapped down from his high as the influx of new faces failed to arrive as expected. “What do we even do? We can’t keep this a secret. I don’t even want to think about how people are going to react to learning that we lost the entire seventh wave.”

“Obviously this constitutes a problem on many fronts, but is public opinion really one of them?” Witherson asked. “We only have two more waves after this before they were supposed to stop all on their own anyway. Every Earther within Terra’s walls knew from the start that we’d stop getting new recruits from Earth eventually.”

“Edregon is filled with so many unknowns and mysteries that I don’t like the idea of taking one of the few things we thought we knew, and telling everyone we were wrong about it,” Spur admitted, drumming his fingers along the table as he thought. “Not knowing what actually happened certainly doesn’t help. Vin, you seriously don’t have any ideas?”

“I’ve got loads of ‘ideas’,” Vin snorted, ticking them off his fingers. “The Gods decided to drop the Earthers off somewhere else for whatever reason. A powerful group of Ritualists like the neilans living within their bubble decided to interfere. Maybe there’s a new person with a divine boon out there capable of adjusting such a powerful working of mana. I can at least check in with the Gods, but as for the other potentials, a guess is as good as I’ve got.”

Months back, Vin had been informed by the Goddess of Benevolence that there was something special about humans from Earth. He didn’t know the what or the why, but she’d managed to explain that the presence of Earthers was critical to the stability of Edregon before the God of Contracts appeared and silenced her. Vin had then been forced to sign an agreement with Contracts to not reveal anything he’d learned with anyone else. It was that reason he thought his guess about the Gods stealing the seventh wave might not be that far off, but he would have to commune with them to be sure.

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He really hoped it wasn’t either of his other two ideas. Ritualists were known for being able to cast magic far beyond their level at the cost of intense preparation and valuable magical reagents, which meant there was no telling what other ways they might screw Terra over if they so chose. And Vin didn’t have a fantastic track record of dealing with other people with divine boons beyond his own party members. His own divine boon allowed him to survive being killed or maimed once a day, Shia’s allowed her to find the location of something she needed once a week, and Reginald’s allowed him to offer up his own life in place of Scule’s should the petian ever fall. Lots of utility, but no real stopping power.

The divine warrior they’d taken down ages back had been given a glowing golden sword that allowed him to cut through anything. Bit of an unfair boon there, in Vin’s opinion.

“My people brought over the shrine of rebirth and used it to construct a place of worship for the Bands the other week,” Witherson said. “You should be able to speak with the Gods through that, correct?”

“Yeah, that will work. Let’s hope the Gods have an actual answer for us. Some of them are less than keen on sharing important information with us mere mortals.”

Vin felt a light tug around his chest as golden chains of pure mana flickered into existence for the briefest of moments before vanishing once more. Based on the fact that nobody else reacted, it had to have been Beyond the Veil that allowed him to see them at all.

“Then I guess I’ll deal with breaking the news about the seventh wave to everyone,” Spur said, looking like he wished he could have pawned the task off onto someone else. “Vin, you let us know the moment you learn anything more, be it from the Gods or some other source, understood?”

“That was the plan.”

“Good. In that case, seeing as we’re all here, we might as well go over the end results of the battle for wave seven,” Spur said, trying to put a smile on his face as he looked around the room. “I know this situation just put a real damper on the mood, but we do still have something to celebrate. Despite the fact that we faced off against a few thousand monsters and took down a God damned seven-story-tall dragon, we had our lowest number of casualties out of any of the previous waves. Frank says anyone who’s still kicking at this point is going to make it, which means the numbers are in. We only lost seventy-six people in total, which is beyond incredible.”

“I hate that hearing how seventy-six people died makes me so happy,” Alice admitted, looking far older than her twenty-some years for a moment as she stared hard at the table between them. “Still, that is amazing. Doubly so with the giant dragon and all.”

“It did focus most of its attention on trying to burn Vin and Spur to a crisp,” Phil pointed out. “Speaking of, I know Spur and Mai were rescued by Lumel’s quick reaction. How did you survive, Vin? You just stood there and tanked a geyser of flame larger than a car for a solid five seconds without so much as a sunburn.”

“Thanks to this,” Vin said, casting Dimensional Sheath and causing his new staff to pop into his hands. The staff looked like a miniaturized version of the Tree of Ancients from the Sacred Forest, with hundreds of thin rings of multicolored wood spiraling from top to bottom. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, the rings glowed, the light spiraling along the wood from one end to the other.

“Shia wanted to create a new staff for me, and we decided to make it a bonded artifact. Though we admittedly ended up going a little wild. I accidentally reached out to the mana and convinced it to help, she unintentionally fell back upon her bond with the forest as a Druid of Bonds… The end result is this. A grand artifact with a couple of interesting effects. The most useful one being so long as I plant the staff firmly into place, it and I become pretty much indestructible, at the cost of being unable to move or cast magic.”

“I don’t suppose Shia is looking to make anyone else their own grand artifact anytime soon?” Alice asked, the sight of the powerful staff bringing a bit of her usual smile back to her face.

“In fact she is planning to help create bonded artifacts for other people to help advance her class, but we’re pretty certain this was more of a one-time fluke than anything,” Vin admitted, casting Dimensional Sheath once more and causing the staff to vanish. “But yeah, that was how I survived the dragon’s fire.”

“It’s pretty wild that the news you have your own personal grand artifact doesn’t even faze me at this point,” Spur admitted, clapping his hands together as he got to his feet. “Alright, we’ve all got stuff to do, so no sense sitting around. Vin, you hit up the Gods and shake them down for information like only you can. Witherson, check the structural integrity of the walls and see where we need to start focusing on repairs. Phil, get out of your comfort zone and give those warriors a damn-good speech, they deserve one after how well they all did. Alice, get your support classes started on monster disposal. Even if the dryads’ magic problems are largely solved, no sense in not continuing to buy their favor and get in even gooder with them.”

“You do recall you’re not in charge, right?” Witherson asked, frowning at him. “And ‘gooder’ isn’t a word.”

“As the pioneers of this new world, I think it’s only fair that we all get to make at least one new word of our choosing,” Spur grinned. “I’ll propose an actual vote on the law later if it makes you feel any better. But right now, we’ve got work to do, so get out of here before I go get the broom!”