Cal flicked the blood off Bael'zhar before sliding it home, then reached over his shoulder for Nen'tae.
Around the clearing, the bandits were finding themselves again. A wiry man in a leather vest blinked hard, pawing at his ears as if he could scoop out the ringing. Another spat into the dirt and snapped his head back and forth jerkily, eyes watering against the lingering spots from the [Flashbang]. A third was already turning, his shortsword unsteady as he sought purchase on the world that had been ripped from him moments ago.
A bearded bandit at the front of the loose encirclement saw what remained of their leader and froze, his mouth falling open. His weapon dropped to hang slack at his side as he stared at the two cooling halves of his leader in the dirt, blood pooling black under the red dusk and firelight.
"Gasto..."
Cal took his time nocking an arrow.
A second bandit looked from the corpse to Cal and stared at the bow in his hands. His eyes widened enough to show white all the way around.
"Oh, fek, it's him! The archer from the caravan!"
The words had an immediate effect on the front line, with heads turning and feet shifting, recognition jumping from face-to-face. The man with the unsteady shortsword swallowed hard. Another took an unconscious half-step backward, his heel catching on a tent stake.
"Run! Run, ya fools! RUN!"
Whatever cohesion the line had possessed crumbled. Seven bandits broke at once, scrambling over each other in their haste to put trees between themselves and the masked figure standing calm in the middle of their dying camp. They abandoned weapons and each other. One man tripped over his own feet and clambered back to his hands and knees before sprinting after the others.
[Crimson Overdrive]
[Liminal Breath]
The world dropped into a syrupy crawl as Cal drew the string back to his cheek. A scarlet aura flared around him. The pinpoint sensation behind his eyes marked the activation of the mysterious nerve cluster as colors washed out to muted grays, and ambient sound stretched.
Everything snapped into focus, and the fleeing bandits became a series of slow-motion targets.
[Rapid Fire]
The first arrow hissed free of the string. He watched it cross the camp in a leisurely glide, the fletching rotating, the shaft slightly vibrating from the release before it struck the lead runner just to the left of his spine, between the shoulder blades. A stain of red unfurled across his back, the fabric darkening as it spread outward from the entry point, and Cal had already nocked and drawn the next arrow before the body began its slow tumble to the ground.
He fired in an effortless stream of motion: quiver, string, draw, aim, release. Each movement bled into the next through unbroken repetition, the bow seeming to almost anticipate him.
The second arrow flew. The target, a man in a torn brown tunic, chose that exact moment to stumble over something. His upper body pitched forward as the arrow passed over his bowed back, lost to the night. Cal adjusted his aim while he calmly kept firing. His third arrow caught the stumbling man square in the back as he scrambled to his feet, and he folded forward without another sound.
Another runner had veered left. Cal's bow swung to track him, the adjustment tracking before he thought to make it, and the arrow took him through the side of the neck. The man's momentum carried him three more steps before he crumpled.
The next bandit had nearly reached the treeline when Cal shot. The shaft punched through the back of his skull and the man ran two more strides on dead legs before crashing face-first into the trunk of a young hemlock.
One target broke right, deeper into the trees, his red cloak flashing through the trunks before disappearing behind a tangle of ferns. The angle was wrong. The trees were too thick. Cal committed the man's flight to memory and turned his attention back to the rest.
He had been tracking the rearguard with his [Spiritual Perception] the entire time. Eight auras rushed from behind, including two E-tiers who were leading the charge. They were thirty yards out. Twenty. Fifteen.
He fired another arrow at a man limping through the trees and watched the shaft punch through his lower back, severing his spine. The body folded down on itself.
Ten yards.
Cal nocked another arrow.
Eight.
He drew, released, and watched the seventh runner collapse with a shaft through the lungs.
Five.
In his mind's eye, Cal watched the nearest attacker's form twist, heaving a battle axe overhead for a heavy downward chop.
Now.
Cal dropped the bow and spun, already calling his Mana and reaching across his body for Bael'zhar's hilt while whipping his left hand up, fingers flying through the six runes of [Immolation]. He dumped a torrent of Mana into the arcane construct right as it completed.
The Spell bucked against his Intent. He'd pushed too much, too fast. The runes shivered at the edges, the [Ignis] pair straining against their connection to the [Ventus] runes' airflow. For a heartbeat, he felt the entire construct on the verge of fragmentation, the energy ready to detonate in his hand and take half his arm with it.
Crumb, hold it! HOLD IT!
He poured his Willpower into the spellwork, clamping down on the Mana in the runes that were attempting to run wild. His mind flashed to thoughts of the catatonic woman and his helper's whispered "make them pay." The rage that had driven him into this camp soared through his Intent and into the construct and his grip on the Spell solidified. The framework stabilized.
[Your proficiency with Immolation (E) has increased to Practiced]
A flood of raging yellow-orange flame erupted from his left palm.
Three feet away and committed to his swing, the lead E-tier barely had time to register the cone of fire hurtling toward him before it engulfed him entirely. His own forward momentum carried his flaming body past a side-stepping Cal, the heat of the bandit's burning clothing washing across Cal's right side as the man hit the ground six feet behind him in a thrashing, smoking pile.
Cal pivoted, sweeping the cone of flame in a wide arc in front of him. The six F-tiers behind the E-tiers had been a few yards behind. Three of them caught the sweeping inferno full in the face. They went down screaming, their cries reaching Cal as muffled wails through the auditory dampening of his Legacy. The other three were on the outer edge of the cone. One had time to throw an arm up before the fire took him. The other two tried to peel away, and the trailing edge of the flame caught them across the back as they turned, igniting their clothing in sheets of orange, yellow, and red.
During his pivot, Cal strafed with the cone of fire as the second E-tier came in hard from his right with a notched longsword raised overhead.
Bael'zhar flashed up in a rising parry, Stamina flooding the blade until the red vein down its center burned brightly in the dark. The longsword met the shortsword and rebounded with a clang that registered as a weak chime in Cal's slowed senses, and the E-tier's eyes widened with the realization his weapon hadn't bitten through. Cal counterattacked before the man had a chance to recover, driving Bael'zhar up under his sternum. The heart-iron blade slid through leather and flesh and lung easily, and the man's mouth opened in a silent "O" as Cal twisted the hilt and pulled the blade free.
The two F-tiers on the edges of the cone were still alive, one rolling in the dirt to smother his burning cloak, the other on his knees beating uselessly at his flaming chest. Cal stepped past the dying E-tier and drove the cone of flame across both of them in a final pass until they stopped moving. He cut the Mana flow. The torrent of fire collapsed inward and snuffed out, leaving only the secondary fires guttering on the corpses.
Cal let [Liminal Breath] release and normal perception snapped back. Sound sped up and became recognizable: the hiss of burning fat, the crackle of ignited cloth on tents and bodies, and the soft pop of a knee joint somewhere in the smoldering mess. He sheathed Bael'zhar and walked back to where Nen'tae lay in the dirt. Bending, he scooped up the bow and ran his thumb along the cord-wrapped grip out of habit.
There was one left. The red-cloaked man who had broken right. Cal extended his [Spiritual Perception] through the trees, tracking the fleeing aura. The man was running flat out, panicked, dodging between trunks roughly fifty yards away and increasing the distance with every stride.
Cal nocked an arrow and began channeling Stamina into Nen'tae. The wood heated in his hand as the spiritual energy soaked into the laminated grain, the bow's draw weight increasing with every breath. He set himself, finding angles through the trees. There. A narrow corridor between two trunks, a gap of perhaps eighteen inches, opening onto a clearer stretch of forest floor where the bandit's path would cross in two more strides.
Drawing the arrow to his ear, Cal sighted down the length while the energized bow stood on the precipice, ready to unleash destruction.
[Power Shot]
The arrow ripped from Nen'tae with a sound like a cracked whip, the shaft glowing faintly scarlet as it tore through the gap between the trunks. It crossed the fifty yards in a blur and the bandit's head disappeared in a red mist. The body ran one more half-step on the inertia of its own panic before crumpling.
Cal lowered Amina's inheritance and let [Crimson Overdrive] slowly fade. The constant systemic flow of Stamina circulating through his channels cut out, and the adrenaline that had been holding everything together drained away with it. His left side still ached where the healing potion had knit the axe wound, the new skin pulling tight as he settled back within his normal limits.
That's when the smells registered.
Burning meat and rendering fat. The sweet, sickening flavor of cooked human flesh.
For a vertiginous second, his two lifetimes collided. He was standing on the back patio on the Fourth of July, the late afternoon sun slanting through a maple. Pork chops hissed on the grill. His daughter ran through the sprinkler in a yellow swimsuit, shrieking with laughter every time the cold water hit her. Evelynn was at the picnic table slicing watermelon, smiling at him over the rim of her sunglasses.
It smelled… so horribly similar.
His stomach lurched. Bile rose hot and acidic to the back of his throat and he doubled over, one hand braced on his thigh, the other gripping the bow hard enough that the cord-wrap creaked. He shook. He swallowed once, twice, forcing the heave back down and shivering in disgust.
Groaning, Cal thought, that is so not a smell I ever needed to experience. I don't think I'm going to be able to barbeque again.
When he'd managed to finally collect himself, he shouldered Nen'tae across his back and started walking. His spear lay in the dirt twenty feet from where Gasto had thrown it, the fel-oak shaft sticking point down. Cal bent and lifted it, letting out a slow breath.
Better. Something about having his primary weapon back in hand calmed him.
He turned and began walking toward Gasto's corpse. The man lay where he had fallen, his upper and lower halves separated by perhaps a foot of dirt, the cut so clean that the cross-section of his torso was unnervingly neat. Cal walked toward him, considering what he had seen.
The tendrils, that was the first thing. Eight ropes of oily black shadow boiling out of a man's back with enough physical strength to rip a buried spear out of meat and bone and fling it away. That… had to be a bloodline, right? The stomp, too. That discharge of hybridized Stamina and Mana had seemed incredibly complex. He'd never heard of any Skill or Ability that worked like that. It had felt fundamentally other. Likely a second bloodline, or some derived art of one.
Cal frowned behind his mask.
The other thing nagging at him was the man's reaction to [Flashbang]. Every other opponent he'd ever used it on had been thoroughly disabled for a critical handful of seconds. Gasto, however, had almost immediately been able to track Cal's aura through the disorientation. The guy had been blinded and half-deafened, but he'd switched to fighting by [Spiritual Perception] in almost the same instant his physical senses failed him. That was either superior training or experience. The reflex of a man who had been blinded in combat before and learned what to do about it.
I think my success on the road led to some overconfidence here, Cal admitted to himself. Two D-tiers in one fight and I walked in thinking I could roll the third.
He'd had to take a wound that would have killed him outright at F-tier. Luckily the rest of the bandits had been sufficiently incapacitated that he was able to down a potion mid-fight.
Shaking his head, he thanked whoever was listening and thought through the implications. It was the lesson with the nobles in the tournament all over again, except now he was realizing it might start applying to every opponent he faced instead of just the upper crust. The next D-tier he met might be a mage. The one after, a grappler. They wouldn't all telegraph their tricks before Cal had a chance to react to them. He needed to plan for variety, and for opponents who specialized in things he hadn't imagined.
He reached Gasto and crouched beside the lower half of the corpse, going through the pockets of the rough trousers to find a small coin pouch and whetstone. He stowed the coin pouch in his belt pouch and glanced over. The man's other half had little else to offer.
The tent, then, Cal decided. Whatever else he was carrying is in there.
He started to stand, and as his line of sight shifted, he caught a patch of skin at the side of Gasto's thick neck, just below the hairline where the man's beard ended.
There was… a tattoo.
A small, dark design, no larger than a copper coin. A potion vial with a snake wound around it, the snake's head reared back as if poised to strike at the cork.
[Perfect Memory] delivered the match before he had even finished registering the shape.
Cillian's amulet and signet ring! It was the same design as the items he'd sold to Jakob in Deadfall when he was preparing for the road. Cal stared at the tattoo morosely.
Well, this feels ominous.
A bandit captain on the eastern road outside Deadfall bearing the symbol Zarven Mault's chief enforcer had in his possession. Carrying exotic bloodlines likely worth more gold than this entire camp's plunder would yield.
What are the odds I would run into this crap out here?
He turned the question over in his head and discarded it almost immediately.
You know what? Who cares what the odds were? Not my problem. Noooope.
It was a problem for future Cal. Or, more accurately, a problem Cal was actively choosing not to have and that future Cal could drop in someone else's lap, like the Legion. They could deal with it. Whatever this symbol meant, whatever web Gasto had been a strand in, the prudent move was to take what he'd earned and walk away. Pulling on threads attached to organizations that could afford to put fancy bloodlines into the hands of forest bandits was an excellent way to discover, very abruptly, the upper limits of his current power.
Cal pressed the discovery down next to the barbequing memory and locked the door.
He looked from the tattoo on Gasto's neck to the huge, brutal-looking battle axe lying in the dirt three feet from the man's outstretched hand. The double-bladed head was streaked with Cal's own dried blood, and the haft was wrapped in dark leather worn smooth by years of use.
A D-tier's possessions. A D-tier's tent, still standing across the clearing, unsearched.
He shook off the unpleasant thoughts and focused on what was important in this moment.
Loot.
Happy Monday and thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter.
Jon