On the high cliffs, the wind howled. It was a caustic gale that offered no respite from the chemical stench permeating the wastes, whipping sand across the exposed rock with enough force to scour paint from steel.
Yet the elements were little more than an annoyance to Team Obsidian. Crossing the threshold into the third tier of power granted them a physicality that defied normal human limits.
Erethemor was completely indifferent to the chill thanks to his scales, and even without them, he was a natural draconic furnace. Esmeralda moved with her usual liquid grace, her vampiric physiology rendering her immune to the plummeting temperatures.
For Orion, whose Body stat was climbing but still lagging behind the others, a simple loop woven around his coat trapped a layer of warm air against his skin, negating the frost that would otherwise have built up.
No, the true toll of the march was not the cold or the wind; it was the pace.
Garrick led them at a punishing pace, barely pausing to determine the safe path before urging them to follow.
To match the veteran’s stride, Orion maintained a steady application of [Gravity Step]. He micro-adjusted his spatial coordinates with each footfall, altering the gravitational potential energy around his boots to glide over the limestone rather than climb it.
The spell was highly efficient, but sustaining it for hours required focus, and even with his new rank, the Silence made any spell costlier. A dull ache bloomed behind his eyes before long, though compared to the condition he’d been in the day before, it was almost pleasant.
During the brief openings in the fog, Orion continued collecting data from their surroundings.
The Iron State swarm ground its way south. From this height, the constructs looked like a segmented worm, a sprawling column of dull metal punctuated by the glowing red coals of their optical sensors. The machines made relentless progress, crushing everything from petrified timber to loose shale and the occasional bone beneath thousands of treads. They marched without need for rest, food, or morale.
By the time the last light bled from the sky, plunging the wastes into absolute darkness, Garrick finally raised a fist.
“Let's camp," the adventurer rasped, his voice roughened by dust.
They found a shallow limestone overhang that offered a windbreak and a gouge in the rock barely deep enough to conceal the five of them, and they quickly settled in.
Given their conditions, there was no fire. Striking a spark would be a beacon in the dark, drawing the optical arrays of the machines that even now moved below.
They passed around a skin of water and chewed on strips of salted meat in the pitch darkness, or, in Esmeralda’s case, drank from her own bottle, which sloshed with crimson liquid.
Nobody was really in the mood to talk, having already said all they needed to before departing the grove, and with their rest so short, they needed all the energy they could spare.
Garrick set the watch to cover the next two hours.
Esmeralda took the outer perimeter, given that her eyes were perfectly adapted to the gloom. Erethemor curled into a scaled mound near the entrance and fell asleep within seconds, while Garrick leaned his broad back against the wall, his greatsword resting across his knees, and closed his eyes.
Orion sat near the back of the overhang. He crossed his legs, letting his head rest against the cold rock, intending to take a moment to take stock of his condition.
He might have healed the damage he’d inflicted on himself during his attempted healing with the second potion, but that didn’t mean it could take care of everything, and he’d rather know than be surprised.
His scans came up surprisingly clean, with only some inflammation remaining in the punctured area and in his muscles. But that was to be expected, given the pace they were moving at.
A few feet away, the faint scrape of metal on stone broke his concentration. Jordan sat with his knees pulled up, having removed his armor for once. He stared blankly into the dark, holding a cloth meant to clean and oil the metal, but he kept polishing the breastplate. It was a nervous, repetitive motion.
Sighing lightly, Orion reached into the Field and performed a simple manipulation of acoustics, drawing in the sound waves within a ten-foot radius and inverting their frequencies, creating a bubble of silence that enclosed just the two of them.
“Something on your mind?” he asked quietly. He’d known this talk was coming, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.
Jordan stopped his hands and looked up, his face a pale shadow in the gloom. The energy that usually radiated from him seemed dim, suppressed by exhaustion.
"I can still feel his blood on my hands," he finally whispered. "When I pressed my hands to his stomach, the flesh was just... giving way. The damage was too extensive. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough. And he kept chanting, even after I told him he was killing himself. He kept going.”
"He made a deliberate choice to use magic even as his body was torn open," Orion replied, trying to keep his tone from turning clinical. "The magic accelerated his heart rate and pushed the blood out faster than your spells could coagulate it, and he knew it. You couldn’t have done anything more. Frankly, it’s a miracle he lasted long enough to see the grove.”
"I am a Paladin," Jordan countered, pressing the breastplate to his chest. "My Light is meant to smite the wicked and shield the righteous. It is a weapon, Orion. It heals by restoring raw vitality, but it lacks precision. If we had a true healer with us, Daus would still be alive. I had to watch him die because I am a blunt instrument. It happened again.”
Rather than offering more platitudes, Orion took a moment to consider his next words. Jordan was the moral anchor of their team, a man whose faith in his cause had always seemed unshakable. Seeing him fracture under the weight of his perceived inadequacy struck a chord.
“I don’t believe he would be sad about his end,” he finally said. “Being able to see the grove and connect with the tree… That’s the extent of what we control. Ultimately, no one is all-powerful, and though it may be difficult to accept, it is what it is.”
Jordan let out a bitter sigh. "And what about Verner? Was his betrayal just another thing we have to accept?”
The question hung in the insulated bubble. Orion felt the phantom ache beneath his collarbone, where the enchanted dagger had pierced his lung. He pressed his hand against the fabric of his coat, where the tear remained even now.
"Yes," Orion admitted, his voice hardening. “I don’t like it, especially since I was already suspicious of him and feel I could have uncovered him before it came to this. In the end, though, it’s in the past, and I need to look to the future.”
Jordan looked up at him, surprised by the admission. “You suspected him?”
“There were several things that made no sense," Orion continued, and despite his best efforts, frustration bled into his tone. He stared at his own hands in the dark, trying to focus through it. "When we fought the Amalgam at the first base we hit, he destroyed a valuable component and then lied, saying he had panicked. It made no sense, especially compared with the data I’d gathered. I knew something was wrong, but not what.”
"Why didn't you say anything?" Jordan asked.
“I had no proof, and things happened too quickly to care afterward,” Orion spat, disgusted by his own blindness. “He fought well and helped when needed, and I shelved the data to focus on the immediate threat. If I could go back, I would never let him watch my back, but I can’t.”
In the end, despite his suspicions, he had very little to go on. Verner shouldn’t have had anything to gain, and his status screen showed nothing unusual.
And now he knew even his much-vaunted SDGs could be fooled.
How did that even happen? I’ve seen all kinds of failures, from Silence-based ones that block some information to powerful people like Antares refusing the System’s handshake entirely, but never something like that.
But then again, he’d seen the Treant at the entrance to the wastes rip itself out of the ground, even though he’d assumed it was a mere dead tree before, so clearly, there was much he didn’t know.
"He played all of us," Jordan said softly.
“He did, and we almost paid for it,” Orion grunted. “We survived on pure luck, me most of all. Nothing more.”
They sat in the quiet dark. The confession did not offer a magical reprieve, nor did it fix the broken state of the world. But speaking their failures aloud—dragging the guilt and anger out of their own heads and into the cold air—relieved a fraction of the pressure. The burden was shared.
"We are alive," Jordan finally said, slipping the breastplate back on. He reached for his gauntlets, strapping the silver plates over his hands. "My Light may be blunt, and you may have missed a step, but we are still alive. We can still fight. And when we find Verner again, and I know we will, we will prove we learned from our mistake.”
Orion sighed and nodded. He let the acoustic bubble dissipate, letting the howling wind and the distant grind of the brass swarm filter back into their ears.
"Get some sleep, Jordan," Orion said.
The Paladin leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
Orion returned to his meditation, trying to see whether he could speed the inflammation’s healing with a careful application of light mana.
The next hour slipped by quickly until, deep in the night, the rhythm of the wind changed.
Orion opened his eyes. The dense fog rolling over the ridge muffled most sound and obscured sight, reducing visibility to a few meager yards, yet his senses picked up a faint vibration from below.
Click. Scrape. Click.
It was a sound he knew all too well, the sound of metal points finding purchase on solid rock.
Garrick’s eyes snapped open. He silently uncrossed his arms, his hand sliding down to grip his greatsword. Esmeralda materialized from the fog near the overhang's entrance, her rapier already drawn. She held up three pale fingers.
Orion pushed himself up, staying low. The vibrations grew stronger, waking the others, until finally a machine pulled itself over the lip of the cliff.
It was a modified Crawler, its chassis elongated and its six articulated limbs ending in sharp, barbed pitons designed for vertical scaling. It lacked the bulky acid reservoirs of standard models, trading armor and weaponry for sheer mobility and advanced optical arrays. The brass casing ticked quietly as the construct adjusted its sensors, peering into the fog.
Two more followed, pulling themselves over the edge with spider-like grace. They communicated in a rapid series of ultrasonic clicks, sweeping their glowing red lenses across the limestone shelf, likely detecting their presence, though not their exact coordinates.
The fact was, they could not afford a loud fight.
If Erethemor unleashed his fire or Orion dropped a [Gravity Cannon], the concussive force would echo down the sheer cliff face. The Centurions below would react instantly, directing the swarm upward. No, the kill had to be silent.
Garrick exploded from the overhang, using his immense strength to drive the steel pommel of his weapon into the center of the first crawler's chassis.
The impact crushed the brass plating inward, pinning the machine against the floor before it could emit even a warning ping.
Esmeralda struck the second scout. She flowed around the machine’s barbed limbs and, with surgical precision, severed the hydraulic lines linking the optical array to the main processor.
Caustic, foul-smelling fluid sprayed over the rock, and the machine went blind, its limbs seizing as internal pressure failed.
The third scout scrambled backward, its front limbs raising a small, dish-shaped apparatus toward the sky. The red lens flared brightly, preparing to broadcast a high-frequency distress signal down into the valley.
Orion’s focus narrowed to a single point in space, pinpointing the exact coordinates of the machine’s brain vat. He drew a thread of mana and executed a hyper-compressed spatial shear.
Spacetime folded inward along a plane no thicker than a hair, slicing clean through the scout.