Raccoon was a new and interesting presence in our lives. I was less than impressed with her desire to learn ALL THE VIOLENCE from Iona and her reluctance to do the hard, needed farm work, but Iona managed to get her round.
Weeks passed, and carrots died. The hardiest ones were growing into small and scraggly little things, but by the gods, they were alive. Growing, promising more food, promising to extend our stores.
Raccoon approached me one morning as I was recharging the enchantments, praying for the day she leveled up enough to do the chore herself. What else were minions for? I raised an eyebrow at what she was carrying, and stood up straight as she nervously approached me. Her language skills had improved in leaps and bounds, and I was pretty sure she had a general skill dedicated to learning.
“Elaine. Uhhh. I got for you?” She shyly offered me up a dead opossum.
“Thank you?” I gingerly took the offering, trying to figure out what I was going to do with a dead marsupial. It hadn’t even been washed or anything, the blood was still congealing on its fur.
Her offering reluctantly accepted, Raccoon beamed at me.
“Is good eating! You teach me magic food skill?”
It took me a moment to understand what she was asking. Maybe.
“Do you mean my [Tower] skill I get food from?”
Raccoon nodded furiously.“Yes! Lots of good eating. Raccoon and tribe no starve.”
I debated trying to explain the power complexities of Spatial magic, along with the power and control requirements, before getting into the need to plan and store everything.
“Raccoon, how high can you count?” I asked, hoping she’d make it higher. As her teacher, I had standards.
“One, two, three, four, five… six! Seven, eight… ten, thirteen, thirty six!”
Raccoon nodded to herself like she was an accomplished genius, able to rattle off huge numbers.
“You teach me magic food skill now?”
I sighed.
“Raccoon, you’re great, but nine comes before ten, and…”
I debated saying ‘no’, but I doubted that’d get through to her. I drew myself up - fuck how short I was, I was still almost eye level with the goblin - and did my best ‘evil mysterious witch’ look.
“Elaine powerful Immortal mage. Puny goblin hasn’t lived long enough to learn valuable secrets. Many years of learning needed first. Then, I teach powerful secret-hush magics.”
I felt a little greasy after saying that. Raccoon was nodding along like it made total sense to her.
“Alright! Raccoon picks carrots now, Elaine cooks?” Her eyes locked on the carcass I was still holding and she licked her lips. There was absolutely no temptation to have Raccoon do the cooking herself, not after the first time. We’d all seen what she considered ‘good eating’, and since it had been her first week and she was still a nervous wreck, we’d politely choked it down, then made a private pact to never let her cook again.
With quite a lot of high-speed mental effort, and a dramatic flick of my wrist, I lit up a dozen carrots I’d mentally marked as being ready for harvest. Had to keep my dramatic ‘all powerful witch’ image up after all. It was the only way I could get her to practice her letters!
She was one of the most eager students I’d ever had. Once she figured out that I was teaching her ‘runes of power’, there was no stopping her thirst for knowledge. Part of me wondered if she’d be disappointed down the line, but… nah that was impossible. Everyone loved reading.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [Sage of Tomes] has leveled up!]
Oh, I wondered what Auri was up to? Also, speaking of, it’d been a while since we’d seen Fenrir. He left to hunt and hadn’t been back since. Iona still had the companion skill, so he was obviously still alive. Just… concerning.
Carrot - oppossum soup. Yay apocalypse.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1350->1352 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]
I woke up in the middle of the night to a pair of levels, swearing.
“Love! Auri! Up!” I yelled, teleporting Iona’s armor onto her body as she sat up. She threw off the covers and we both jumped out, and I finished gearing her up.
“Brrrpt?”
“Unknown, two levels.” It was a little biased, but my mind instantly jumped to the goblins, wondering if they’d betrayed us.
“Goblins?” Iona asked, on the same wavelength.
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[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1352->1353 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]
My mind was split a dozen ways, each investigating in a different manner. Iona quivered beside me, ready to spring into violent action the moment I located the source of the trouble.
The sharpest blade in the world was useless if it didn’t strike true. The third level already suggested this wasn’t goblins. No offense to them, but an entire tribe of goblins trying to knife three dozen farmers in the middle of the night simply didn’t have the weight or scope for me to be leveling multiple times. A tenth of a level, at best, before it was split with Auri.
I stretched my senses, trying to understand everything going on around me. The range of [The World Around Me] had steadily increased over the years and levels, but they weren’t quite in range. However, I could hear and sense far more than the range, and I was getting a big old nothing.
‘Nothing’ was something of an exaggeration, but not that much of one. Sure, there was the sound of the wind going through leaves, and the thousand nocturnal creatures -
Wait.
No, there wasn’t. I didn’t hear scurrying mice, there was no soft swish of an owl’s wings, foxes didn’t rustle bushes and cats weren’t lazily prowling for dinner.
Then, like the scythe of the grim reaper himself had passed overhead, like Black Crow got into farming, our carrots, the vegetables of our hard labor, died. En masse, the entire field, no survivors. They simply withered and died, pretty much all at once. Blackened and withered, small and hard.
I breathed in deeply through my nose, trying to filter the thousand subtle scents to see if I could pick up any trace of what was going on.
“Elaine?” Iona prompted me, and I frowned. I absent-mindedly left the cottage, to see if my eyes could help me out. I didn’t see anything obvious.
“I’m pretty sure we’re being gassed.” I explained. “A Miasma Classer, or a Poison one. They’re releasing something on the wind to try and kill us all.” I petulantly kicked one of the plants, bemoaning my desire to let them grow a little more instead of just harvesting them all. Then again, whatever herbicide was fucking with us would -
“Fuck. The granary!” I yelled and pulled out one of my spellbooks. I grabbed a bunch of pages in the middle, and bemoaning that I was going to waste three of the seven pages, I ripped them out. “Iona, go, I have to stay here. Activate these ones, in this order.” I reshuffled the pages and thrust them at my wife, who grabbed them and shot off towards the bunker like a… well, she was a charging knight.
I was a little stuck. Everyone was inside my multi-mile healing radius, but that wouldn’t be the case if I started to move around. Running to the bunker was the same as killing five families, and I wouldn’t do it. I’d encountered a number of different traps over the years, but this was a new one - ‘move and civilians die’.
I took no responsibility for the actions of others. Like with the pirates, if they threatened a hostage’s life if I moved, I took no responsibility for their actions if I moved and they acted anyway. It wasn’t on my conscience.
This was a little different. I was actively staving off death right now, moving would kill them from my actions. It was like holding up a falling beam over a child - it was absolutely my responsibility if I dropped it on their head.
I moodily kicked one of the dead carrots as I scanned the skies, looking for a flicker, a trace of a Classer soaring away. They were in the middle of actively trying to kill me, and I had exactly zero problems dealing with assholes who tried to gas people in the middle of the night. We probably weren’t even the only ones! Anyone -
[*ding!* You are in the presence of Erra, the Merciful]
The sky warped above me and a crystalline scorpion-like vorler snapped into existence. Only the shock of the Guardian announcement prevented me from immediately throwing all my spells at the creature with extreme prejudice, instead taking half a moment to think about the situation. My mind continued to work on a dozen tracts. [Identify] the creature and evaluate the situation.
I’d studied the known Guardians, and Erra wasn’t one of them. A newly promoted one… and I hadn’t seen any notifications for any of the old Guardians ascending.
Was the Vorler the Guardian? Was her name Erra? Or was the Guardian something like a Mist or Wind elemental, invisible to the eye, and revealed the source of the plague?
I started conjuring a dozen [Radiant Angel’s Spears of Obliteration], preparing my spears of burning golden Radiance for an overwhelming initial strike on the Vorler. My class quality let my stats be… well, I wasn’t a heavyweight, but I wasn’t a lightweight either. I seriously doubted anyone or anything selected to be a Guardian was anything other than the heaviest of heavyweights, but if the Vorler wasn’t the Guardian, and I hit the right spots with overwhelming power… maybe…
That, and if it wanted to fight, I’d have to stand and fight.
This was all occurring quite quickly.
Another part of me hit upon the actual solution quite quickly, and terminated three different thought processes with the conclusion.
[Guardian Erra, the Merciful]
Well, that simplified things quite a bit.
A moment after it finished appearing, the Vorler split, then split again, turning into a cascading fractal pattern. Its many stingers all struck forward at once in a thousand-million places, a struggling harpy revealed for a brief moment. Colorful feathers and a blowing breeze in her eyes marked her as a Gale user.
[Mage - 768]
Auri flew out of the cottage, starting a beeline straight to the vorler. Didn’t blame her, we’d been hunting the menances for decades, and they were kill on sight.
“Auri! Stop! Friendly!” I yelled as the System dinged at me. Too many things going on too quickly.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1353->1360 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]
I had a moment of indecision, of hesitation. The massively more powerful Vorler’s poison wasn’t killing the harpy because of me. I was single-handedly staving off death with [Persistent Casting], and once I finalized the conclusion that the harpy was responsible and needed to die, I couldn’t say ‘whoops’ and take it back. It went against nearly a century of instincts and of exterminating vorlers. My mana was regenerating faster than I could spend it. It was ‘only’ a single person being executed, and unless the trauma was immediately lethal, I could heal them again and again, as many times as was needed, until I’d made my decision.
Nobody died. That was my conviction, and right now, I could stare a Guardian in its many-faceted eyes and say ‘wait.’
I Wait for me to judge. Wait for me to decide.
Iwas the arbiter here.
Auri fluttered to my shoulder.
“Brrrpt?” She asked.
“Thinking.” I tersely answered.
“Brrpt.” She had full faith in me.
The Vorler, scourge of all life, a species that warring armies would pause to eradicate, an infamous Miasma user, came in on a Guardian notification. The System was cleanly telling me she was a Guardian.
But there was no confirmation, no knowledge, that the harpy was the killer. No Poison or Miasma in her eyes, no Acid or Spore or one of the other elements known for murder writ large. That the Vorler wasn’t going rogue, if it were possible for a Guardian to break its mandate. A Vorler the level I was witnessing was enough of a scourge to be worth summoning a Guardian in and of itself, the skills, levels, and classes enough to take a strong stab at gassing the entire continent of life, of stripping every living soul from its mortal coil.
The level and power were suggestive. If the Vorler, right here, was trying to kill us specifically, I’d possibly be having a harder time keeping everyone alive. My mana would be slowly dropping. At the same time, normal Poison and Miasma were trivially cheap to deflect. It was only when they got supercharged by high level skills that it could possibly start to pose a challenge… and a Vorler at that level should have the high level skills in question.
However, if they were attempting to exterminate a large population all at once, the impact and the effect would be diluted, making it trivially easy once again to deflect and prevent, my mana regeneration alone more than enough to keep up.
Did I have enough knowledge to once again arbitrate life and death? To give the thumb’s up, to allow her soul to be reaped by Black Crow? In the moment I wished for Iona, and her ability to see all stats and skills, to let me know with certainty what the right decision was.
I arbitrated.
I decided.
And a winged body fell.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1360->1361 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]
[*ding!* [Everywoman] leveled up! 502 -> 503]
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