(101) Twice In A Row

Tara approached the forest, rubbing the stiffness out of her back. She used to be far more durable, yet it seemed a couple of months of warm, soft beds was all it took to shed her thick wilderness skin. 

Her sleep was not helped by the trio of strangers. She could feel their eyes all night, no matter which direction she turned. Perhaps her perception was skewed, but she felt their stares far more than she guessed Jessup or Dany did. Why were they so fixated on her?

The smaller one, Redra, at least had the decency to glance away whenever she rolled over to return the looks. Morwynn and Esmerelda, though? They just stared openly, watching her as if…what? Did they think she was a threat? 

Maybe that was sensible, actually. They had only just been introduced, yet they were immediately forced to camp together. Sleeping was a pretty vulnerable activity, so being extra wary was warranted. 

That said, all the overcaution had done was degrade everyone’s sleep. Or she hoped it did, at least. She would be annoyed to discover she was the only one tired this morning.

“So…y’all got any protection from the spores?” Dany asked, glancing behind him.

In answer, Esmerelda waved her hand, and Tara was surprised to see an obviously Words-assisted spell manifest. She had been surrounded by monsters for so long that she forgot what ‘normal’ magic looked like.

A wave of heat, like a summer breeze, surrounded not just the trio but the entire group. Tara stared at it, watching the mana patterns, attempting to deduce its function. Surprisingly, it took only a few seconds to get the gist. Perhaps this spell was rather simple?

“Not a good idea,” she declared.

“Oh?” Esmerelda said, glancing at her curiously. “How so?”

“It’ll work fine on the outskirts, but if we’re cutting a straight line through the Gloam, we’re going to go pretty deep into its more sensitive areas. It’ll tolerate your spell vaporizing its spores along the rim, but its threat assessment will rise the further we push into the interior. Eventually, it will take issue,” Tara explained.

“Huh, you’re familiar with this spell? That mean you have a better one?” she asked, her brow raised, obviously assessing Tara.

“No, but you can have some of our spare gear, at least until we reach the other side,” Tara replied, withdrawing a ring from her pocket. 

Dany and Jessup mirrored the motion, withdrawing similar rings. These were backups for the rings they currently wore, and Tara was somewhat hesitant to part with them. However…

A shadow flitted across the ground dozens of feet away. It moved quickly and quietly, and were Tara not looking for it, she would not have noticed it, nor the flash of slitted eyes from its depths.

She shook her head, handing the ring over to Redra. Though Hannibal had departed, he had obviously left capable guardians to watch over them. It should not be too big a deal to part with spares temporarily.

Esmerelda took hers without question, donning it and glancing around her at the invisible barrier that now surrounded her, likely inspecting the mana.

“What do these do, exactly?” Wynn asked, staring at the one on her finger with reservation.

“They kinda just…gently nudge spores away from your body. I guess you could think of them like wards specifically tuned to keep only the spores out. The magic does them no harm, so the Gloam does not seem to mind. It will drain a small bit of mana from you to maintain the ward, but it’s a negligible amount, even for non-casters,” Tara explained.

“You Gloamwardens must be quite the organization to have access to such a talented enchanter,” Redra mused, inspecting her own barrier, though with less precision than Esmerelda.

“Ha, it’s just us two. We’re the start of the whole damn thing. It’s Nemesis that’s connected, not us,” Dany snorted.

All attention turned to him, the trio of strangers as well as Tara and Jessup pinning him in place with their stares.

“You, or perhaps, the Gloamwardens, are connected to Nemesis?” Redra asked, her eyes practically glowing.

“Uh…” Dany replied lamely.

“Loudmouthed fool. Let’s get going,” Tara growled, kicking Dany lightly in the back.

He started forward with a grimace, rubbing his backside and muttering to himself under his breath. “Ain’t noboby said it was a secret,” and other such nonsense tickled Tara’s ears, but she was out of range for a follow-up kick. Jessup glanced at Tara with an apologetic shrug and started after him.

She jogged after the two, their pace great enough that even when she caught up, she could barely slow down were she to match them. She was glad for the speed, as it should deter any additional questions—

“So, only two of you are Gloamwardens? Not all three? He said ‘us two’,” Redra observed, her gait noticeably more labored than the rest.

Dany turned his head around with his stupid mouth already open to answer the stupid question, but he caught Tara’s glare just in time. He turned back around to face the front, continuing to lead silently.

“I am not a Gloamwarden. I am here because my master decided training with them would be beneficial,” Tara answered simply.

“How old are you, kid?” Esmerelda asked, clearly cutting Redra off, who already had her mouth open to voice another question.

Tara bristled, spinning around more aggressively than she intended.

“Fourteen. I’m not a kid,” she declared firmly.

She stared at the trio for a couple of seconds to drive the point home, though she could feel her gravitas all but evaporate when she was forced to jog to catch back up with the two Gloamwardens.

A silence settled over the group, though not for lack of curiosity on the strangers’ part. They entered the forest proper, denoted not only by the fungal trees themselves, but also by the squishy ground. Every step seemed to crush a mushroom cap or a bulbous fungal sack, releasing a white fog that Tara had been told was as much spore as mist.

Nephthys had speculated that the fog that blanketed the ground throughout much of the Gloam was this very same, released by all the undergrowth whenever a walker, or trespassers like them, stepped on it. She had also speculated that it was one of the reasons that the walkers were so mobile. Not only were they patrolling to defend their territory, but their every step released the fog, a multi-layered defense.

The eerie atmosphere of the Gloam wrapped the group in a blanket of silence, its chilling ambiance haunting even in broad daylight. However, the farther the group progressed without incident, the more accustomed the newcomers grew.

“Well, shit. This is the most peaceful romp through the Glaom I’ve ever had,” Esmerelda declared.

Her voice was not loud, but even a normal speaking volume was startling in the suffocating silence. Dany, in particular, jumped noticeably, though he made some strange heel-click motion, seemingly attempting to play his startle off as a trip. Honestly, Tara was unsure whether tripping over nothing would be more or less embarrassing.

“It is?” Redra asked, aghast. “Were you planning for us to already be attacked, not but ten minutes into the Gloam?”

“I don’t control fate, kid. Gloam’ll do what it’ll do, and all we can do is respond to it,” she replied with a dismissive shrug.

Tara was briefly comforted to hear Esmerelda refer to Redra, who was obviously much older than she, as a kid.

“So, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen,” Redra said, changing the subject and pointing to Tara, Wynn, and herself in order. “Our ages are like a ladder.”

Tara did not respond, and an awkward silence passed through the group like a chill wind. Truthfully, Tara felt no animosity toward these people specifically, but a few things made her dislike the general situation.

First: she had been pulled from her training with Myra for this excursion, and she had only just become accustomed to her new normal of Myra’s training during the day and leveling at night. Now, she was completely discombobulated once again.

Second: she had not slept well last night, and though it was not solely the newcomers’ fault, they were present to accept the blame.

Third: these people, even had Hannibal not stated it plainly, were clearly attempting to pry information about Nemesis from them. On top of that, they were not directly asking what they really wanted to know. They were doing that underhanded stuff that she hated, where they try to make small talk and tease information out through it. She did not like it. It felt manipulative.

Tara sighed, shaking her head. At least the core objective was bearing fruit.

[Name: Tara Nustra

Race: Nuarch

Class: Survivalist

Level: 181]

Thanks to the gear Nephthys had provided, and a certain idiot’s propensity for drawing the Gloam’s ire, she had advanced over twenty levels in a short period of time. Such growth was unprecedented, and it made her strangely conflicted.

Compared to the grueling crawl through the levels that had been her entire life, this pace seemed almost a mockery, as if it were meant to diminish her life’s struggle, to make it meaningless. If nothing else, it firmly cemented a notion that had been bouncing around her head for many years: life was not fair.

Crack!

A hulking walker burst from the trunk of a mushroom-tree beside them with a great groan. It smashed through the bark, splintering it and tossing it like shrapnel as it emerged. It must have been at least eight feet tall, and though it was humanoid, it was so thoroughly covered in fungus that Tara could not even hazard a guess as to what it was prior to infection.

Dany, who was right next to the creature, already had his hand on his ax, drawing it from his belt. He pulled it from its buckle and, in one smooth motion, turned the draw into a strike, aiming to separate its head from its body.

Fwip! Fwip!

Before his strike could connect, Tara’s two whips of water grabbed his wrists and held him, halting his attack. The two struggled briefly, but when Dany’s conscious mind caught up and realized it was Tara’s spell holding him, he relaxed.

Tara slowly retracted the whips, and Dany returned his ax to his belt. The walker stared at…someone. It stared at the group, at least. Its face was covered by shelf fungus that seemed to have eaten into its skull, so she had no idea whether it was seeing with its actual eyes.

It stared, sweeping its head across the area in front of it, but after a few seconds, it lumbered off into the fog, its footsteps a muted thump, like someone stomping in sand. Once the footfalls had faded, the group relaxed, releasing a collective exhale.

“We are not doing this shit again! Pay attention!” Tara barked.

“I get it! I get it! I’m trying, but when I’m in dangerous territory, and something jumps out at me, instinct takes over. It’s gonna take a while to retrain that instinct,” Dany said, ending with a sigh.

“The problem isn’t the instinct. It’s that you’re spacing out. It happens every time. We go a few minutes without incident, and you immediately become complacent, spacing out despite being in the lead. If you maintained focus this whole time, you could have halted your instinct before your ax even left your belt,” Tara chided, shaking her head.

“Yeah, yeah. ‘Just focus’. Great. That’s really actionable advice, thanks,” Dany grumbled, starting forward again.

Tara opened her mouth to say something scathing, no doubt, but Redra spoke first.

“Did you just…how did you cast Water Whip so quickly, twice in a row?!”