Soulforge Legacy Series

I don’t know what I expected but more training was not it. Barti and the two girls had apparently decided that I didn’t need to rest before we left. I could sleep in the truck after all.

They pushed me. So much so that I was forced to use every skill in my arsenal to keep them back. And even that wasn’t enough. Fuck, even pushing my body to the breaking point didn’t give me the speed needed to deal with their strikes.

The worst part was that neither Barti or Tindi used any skills during the entire fight. And no, they were not that fast. With my new stats and my normal Body Enhancement I could run circles around their unboosted selves.

My issue came from their skill. Their training and practice. None of their moves were wasted. A tiny stance change changed how and where my strike would land.

Now, there was one major change from my first training with them. Barti didn’t just allow me to use healing abilities, he insisted on it. In his words I had all the speed I needed for a while. I now needed to focus entirely on everything else. To build upon the foundation we had laid down.

At one point he actually admitted that my training had been a bit lopsided. Mostly as a way to make sure that I was ready in time. I suspected there was a bit more to that. Likely something to do with making it easy to take me down if the situation called for it.

Every time I ran out of mana, the two of them would leave me in the hands of Mindi. She may look sweet and act shy, but her mind was both sharp and devious.

Not in the way of tricking someone. She handed me little puzzles for me to solve. A few of them rejected mana while others could only be solved with mana. And I didn’t manage to solve a single one.

While that may not sound all that devious, I might have forgotten to mention that the mana one grabbed a piece of my mana and stored it inside the cube with every failure. Any bit taken vanished. It didn’t regenerate. It was just gone.

The other one stole one of the other stats at random. Just yanked out a point while handing me a permanent debuff. One that continued to grow with every failure. By the end of the night I had two such debuffs. Statis Cube XXI and Mana Cube XXXIV.

Yeah, I might have freaked out about losing my mana. That freak out ended up doing more harm than good.

All of this came to an end as the orange rays of the sun forced themselves through the glass wall. Through the dawn light, I was finally able to make out the massive training space.

Weed riddled sandy dirt covered the ground. Parts were separated by what might have been painted lines or river rocks. The rest was a massive jungle gym.

Before I could get out there and check it out, a sharp cracking noise of wood hitting flesh filled the air. The pain of which forced me out of my slight fugue a moment later.

“Let’s go.” Barti called as he started for the door. “We got places to see, people to be, and no time to do any of it.”

He had to be tired as I think he said those two things backward. Surely he meant places to be and people to see. But what did I know.

Mud and dust coated my shoes as my feet dragged me along behind the group. Before I knew it, we were simply waiting for Xander to pull the truck back out and hook it up. A process that seemed to take quite a bit longer than tearing it down.

I took the chance to sit against the wall. I didn’t fall asleep, my eyes only needed to take a long blink.

The next thing I knew, someone’s hand forced mine open. Which was weird for a few reasons. The first being that there was nothing in my hand to steal. The second, even odder issue was the fact that they were forcing something into my hand.

No matter what I did, my eyes were slow to open. Almost like they didn’t want to. When they finally did, I found myself looking into the eyes of someone I knew. Someone I had wished I would never see again.

Warm chocolate eyes looked into my eyes. It felt like he was looking past the surface and into my very soul. Yeah, I wasn’t going to deal with that.

With a heavy shove, I forced the wolf back. Whatever he had placed in my hand dropped to the ground. It fell with enough force that the soft dirt and grass nearly covered it. What little I could see showed me a creature with blue fur.

Unwilling to even give it a second, closer look, I instead moved toward Xander. “How much longer until we can get on the road?”

“Maybe twenty minutes?” It sounded more like a question than an answer. Like he was guessing at the timeline. All while his finger traced something in the air in front of him. Probably a screen with information. Or maybe even a manual on this thing.

“Mind if I just get in and pass out?”

“Go ahead.” He gestured at the back. “There should be some soft padding in the back.” Really? Why?

Both were good questions, but honestly I didn’t have the brain power to deal with any more of this. If I didn’t find a place to sleep soon, my body would do it for me. As I laid down on the surprisingly soft padding that something stabbed into my back.

There, stabbed in the seam of the padding, was a little fox charm. Something about the fox reminded me of my other form. Or at least, what I thought my other form would look like now. It wasn’t like I had taken time to look at my current fox self in a mirror recently.

The moment I pulled up the item description, I tossed the blasted thing out the back of the truck. Wolf’s Heart was one of the sappiest system generated things I had ever seen and I wanted nothing to do with it.

With that thing gone, I settled in for a nap. Nearly passing out the moment my head hit the padding.

It was some time later that the truck shook. The motion was hard enough to pull me out of my dream but before I could jump up to find out what was going on, to see who might be attacking us, the truck lurched forward.

Within moments we were on our way. A fact that caused me to relax. Especially as I doubted that Xander, Barti, or the girls would have let Lance join us.

Something soft brushed against my neck. Not hard enough to do much more than shift my hair, but that was enough. Especially as it was warm and just a tad moist.

With a jerk, I tried to move away from whatever was breathing on my neck. An inch, that was as far as I could get before I reached as far as I could go. Some sort of straps held me to the person behind me.

“Go back to sleep.” Oh fuck no. I was not sleeping with the wolf. Not now, not ever.

Still, even with my boost in stats, I found myself unable to get out of his hold. At one point I tried to break his arms but either he had suddenly gained a whole host of levels, or there was something else at play because nothing I did worked on him.

A small piece of metal hung from a hook on the wall. The look on the vixen face as it looked down on me one of contempt. As if it was making fun of me. I didn’t know how, but somehow that thing was the cause for my current predicament.

Each day was similar. The moment we stopped, Barti or Tindi would force me to join them in training. Lance joined us too, but only because he insisted.

When we weren’t training, we were in the truck. Xander was the only one allowed to drive the thing which slowed us down, but not by all that much. Especially as we would have had to stop to deal with food and other essential functions.

And throughout the entire trip, the damned wolf continued to pester me. The worst part was, what he did was nice. Everything he made me tasted amazing. The issue I had was that it was him doing it.

Especially when he looked at me with those eyes. The ones that pleaded with me to give him a chance. That promised he would treat me like a queen. A promise that I didn’t want to hear, verbal or otherwise, from anyone.

I just wanted to train. To grow and find a way to the damned gods. After that, I would have to figure out where I fit in as I doubt anything I built now would survive my demands with a god.

But we continued like that for a good few days. A trip that was much longer than it should have been thanks to the detours we had to take to avoid landslides and bridges that were too weak to handle us.

It was thanks to these issues that we ended up approaching the city from the mountains rather than the river side. With the mountain path came the canyons.

As the craggy walls rose, I was reminded of the last time I had been in the area. Of the spiders and their ability to shrug off my attacks. With those memories pushing against me, I tried to adjust my fireball gatling gun in an effort to make it useful. Mostly by adding another element.

It didn’t work. Fuck, it more than didn’t work. It would be one thing if the orbs were just different sizes or if I had to use less of them. But no. My issue stemmed from the fact that I couldn’t even sustain the spell with any other element other than fire, let alone mixed with fire.

When I tried to use water instead of fire, the liquid condensed out of the air and rained to the ground. Earth caused nearby stones to fling in random directions. One of those stones hit a larger rock high above us.

The truck moved just far enough that it missed us, but the ground wasn’t quite a lucky. It was hit with enough force that the earth cracked. Where it cracked, liquid oozed out. Not the liquid of water or anything mundane like that. This liquid was a weird flat red. As if some artist had painted the liquid with a single color. Not even bothering to add dimension or reflections.

Xander must have seen it as the truck suddenly took off. Going from the slow but safe speed to one that was bound to have us hitting a wall sooner or later.

Grating, bubbling, gurgling, filtered toward us moments before the sound of rushing liquid filled the place. It was so loud that I was forced to grab onto my ears. And whatever it was that was making that noise was getting louder.