Chapter 6: Hunter (Patreon)

“What?” Elliot said, still breathing heavily, feeling wrung out and listless. “Sorry, say that again. I feel woozy.”

“Are you daft?” The hunter said, still glaring. “Bad enough for a low-circle merchant to be strolling through the Gerrwood, but after I risk considerable exposure to draw the beast away, you follow and throw yourself back into peril. I should have let the thune feast.”

“Oh,” Elliot replied, head spinning. “Sorry. I thought you were in trouble, and I wanted to help.” There was a ringing in his ears, and his head had started to ache. A thune?

“Help? You wanted to help?” The man’s eyes widened. “And what, pray, did you think to do as a merchant of the second circle? Die distractingly?”

“Sorry,” Elliot repeated, closing his eyes with a wince. “Just give me a sec.”

“You—” The hunter stopped, clearly forcing himself to pause and take a breath. “You seem overwrought.” He unclipped a steel canteen from his belt and thrust it in Elliot’s direction.

Elliot stared at the container for a moment before reaching out to grab it. He took a sip and suddenly realized he was parched, throwing the rest of the water back in one pull. “Thanks.”

“Sit for a moment,” the man said, still scowling. “We will discuss this after the shock of combat has passed.”

Closing his eyes once again, Elliot let his head fall gently back to the ground, not as soft as the moss and loam of the forest proper.

He still felt lightheaded. While he tried to regain some semblance of normalcy, he let his attention drift inwards. It was like a whole new world.

The orange sphere spun at his center, connected to his body by a web of lines. A clear shard jutted out from its surface like a piece of glass. Around the whole system was a gray fog of nothing, and incredibly far off he could sense the Beacon.

Examining the shard, he realized there was a choice available.

The options had colors: three white, one brown, and one gold. Fixing his attention on the first of the white options, understanding arrived.

These were new abilities, like his inspection skill. The one he’d chosen to examine was a passive effect, making him slightly more trustworthy to anyone he interacted with.

He shivered. That was absolutely not going to happen. There was something else attached to the skill…causation? Oh, requirements. It was vague, basically the sense of having a merchant core and a history of work in sales. Must have counted the antique store. I wonder how it was able to tell I did that. Can it read my mind?

The other two white skills were similar in concept, the color seeming to represent general and low level merchant skills. One was another passive that improved his ability to mentally keep inventory, something he actually found fascinating, and the other an active ability that let him temporarily get a sense of another’s interest in his merchandise.

The brown skill was different. It was a navigational ability, assisting with orientation and sense of distance, direction, and location. He had to stop himself from choosing it immediately, without even moving on to the last option. That was exactly what he wanted right now.

Checking the last ability, Elliot could tell it was somehow in a class of its own. The mechanics were more complicated, to the point where he didn’t immediately get a thorough sense of what it could do. The requirements though, those were clear. He’d earned this option by travelling across multiple dimensional boundaries before awakening his core—he stored the term ‘multiple’ away for later consideration—and by successfully striking a bargain with an extradimensional power.

Extradimensional power makes that piece of shit sound a lot more impressive than he seemed in person.

Refocusing on the meat of the ability, he stayed locked in for several seconds until it clarified. It was a spatial skill.

[Esoteric Storage]—the ability to add a roughly five inch square pocket of extradimensional space to an already existing container. It wasn’t private, anyone reaching in could access the extra space, and it wasn’t deformable, staying as a simple square at the bottom of whatever it was attached to. It could be transitioned between items, although there was some time and energy commitment required.

That was disappointing. The requirements were dramatic, and the gold color was eye-catching, but this seemed like a fairly useless ability. It tickled his imagination, bringing to mind scenes of reaching into a pocket and drawing out something clearly too large to fit in front of a shocked audience, but the space was less than half a foot. What did the colors mean?

“Are you recovered?” The hunter’s words broke through Elliot’s reverie, and he opened his eyes.

The man was crouched next to him, his scowl replaced by a stiff neutrality.

“I feel better,” Elliot replied, realizing it was true. His heart rate had slowed, the water had helped with the lightheadedness, and the puzzle of his new magic had focused his thoughts. Although ‘recovered’ is probably a bit strong.

“I was, perhaps, excessively harsh,” the hunter said. “There is meaning in you risking your life in an attempt to save my own, however misguided your decisions. My name is Hadrian.”

Elliot’s eyebrows rose. “Thanks. My name is Elliot.”

“How did you find yourself here? The Gerrwood is no place for a merchant alone. Where is your caravan?”

“Um…” That was a great question, actually. What was he going to say? Would saying he got thrown here from the death spiral of another world get him treated as insane? Or worse, used as a reagent in someone’s spell that called for alien body parts. Or was it normal, and Hadrian would just nod?

As Elliot’s pause stretched, the hunter’s eyes narrowed. “Speak, stranger.”

Keep it simple. “I don’t have a caravan. I’m lost, I’m not from around here, and I would love any information you could give me about where the closest town is.”

Hadrian’s face took on a colder aspect. “You are lost.”

“Yes,” Elliot said, trying to hold the other man’s gaze. “Lost.”

There was a tense silence, and Elliot frantically tried to think of something non-threatening to say. “Ironically I have a potential skill I might choose that’s focused on navigation. But it’s brown, and there’s also a gold option that’s a spatial skill, so I don’t know if it would be stupid to take the brown one. But I don’t really get the colors—” Shit, wait that’s gotta be suspicious.

“A gold spatial ability,” Hadrian said slowly, his expression blank.

“Yeah,” Elliot hurried on, hoping the man hadn’t noticed his slip about not understanding what had to be a fundamental concept in this world. “It’s called [Esoteric Storage], and I—”

He froze, because the hunter had pulled a knife from his belt and pressed it to Elliot’s neck so fast that the movement had been barely perceptible.

“I will ask you this once, and once only,” Hadrian said softly. “Do not think to lie. Did my mother send you?”

“What?” Elliot choked out, heart once again starting to pound. “Your mother? Why would your mother send me?”

“What did you mean you do not understand the colors?”

Damn it. “Okay, calm down. I have nothing to do with your mother.” He had to contain the mad urge to laugh. “I don’t get the colors…because I’m not from around here.”

“What does that mean?” Hadrian asked, leaning forward. “What bearing does your point of origin have on your comprehension of the fundamental nature of the Beacon’s system?”

“I—” Elliot gritted his teeth. “I’m from somewhere so far away it doesn’t have access to the Beacon the way you do here.”

Hadrian scowled again, increasing the knife’s pressure on Elliot’s skin by a fraction. “Do not concoct wild tales. Tell me the truth.”

“I told you!” Elliot yelped, eyes fixed on the steel blade. “I’m not from around here, I don’t know what the hell is going on, and I have no idea what the colors mean. I’m sorry if that pisses you off, but that’s the truth. And I have absolutely fuck all to do with your mother!”

Another tense silence stretched, then Hadrian slowly withdrew the knife. “What step do you hold in the second circle?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Elliot said hesitantly, still eyeing the knife. “I have an orange sphere inside of me with one black band around it and a clear shard sticking out from the top.”

The hunter’s knuckles went white on the hilt of the knife, and Elliot took a swift step backwards. Not that it would make any difference where I stand.

“I will summarize,” Hadrian said through gritted teeth. “You claim to be a merchant of the first circle, at the first step of the first circle no less, who is from somewhere far enough away to not understand the simplest principles of the Beacon, and you also claim that at the first step of the first circle you were offered a gold ability within the domain of spatial magic.”

“Maybe,” Elliot replied, “I don’t know what a lot of that means, but it sounds sort of right.”

Hadrian sheathed his knife with what was practically a slam. “Everything I have ever been taught tells me you are a liar, and I would be a fool to trust you. But I have known many liars, and either you are the best of them, or you are telling the truth.”

Elliot took a slow, shaky breath. “I’m not lying.”

“I will bring you to meet my master,” Hadrian continued, “who will assess the veracity of your claims. If you truly seek shelter, this will benefit you as well. Bastogne is the only town within reach by tonight.”

“I don’t generally like to travel with people who threaten me with knives,” Elliot replied without thinking, before wincing and averting his eyes.

“You will come with me. If you are telling the truth, you will find aid. If you are lying, I will have many more questions for you to answer. Also—” Hadrian’s expression softened microscopically. “If you are telling the truth, do not refuse the gold skill.” He turned and walked away, without even a glance back. 

Elliot hesitated. Did he really want to throw in with the first stranger he met in the middle of the woods, especially one that quick with a knife? But what choice did he have? It’s not like the man would take ‘no’ for an answer. This would at least spare him a lot of the risk of travel. And the man saved his life. He followed.

As they walked off Elliot used [Detailed Appraisal] for the first time, focused on the corpse of the beast. Information arrived like before, as if he’d always known it.

It was indeed called a thune. Common in this stretch of wilds—his jaw tightened—and possessing claws and teeth that carried minor value if sold.

Under the exhaustion, grief, and fear, a tiny piece of him shivered with excitement. I just cast a spell.

Their journey through the forest was uninterrupted by further attacks, and soon enough Elliot began to notice the ground sloping upwards. By the time they broke out into another clearing, the change had become marked enough that he was unsurprised to see three mountains squatting up ahead. The verdant greenery of the forest stretched up their sides, while the peaks were bare and snow-capped.

The two travellers were headed up the sloping base of the middle peak. When he glanced up, Elliot thought he saw what might have been a cluster of buildings clinging to the steep, gray surface a ways up, right where the green began to thin.

The climb quickly became brutal. Elliot knew that Hadrian had some kind of physical enhancement, that much had been obvious from the fight, but it was different to pant along behind the man as he strolled up the rocky trail like he was walking on a flat, paved road.

As he hurried along he tried to make a plan. He’d need a story. How much should be made up, and how much real? The goal was to be non-threatening enough to avoid getting locked up, but also to find some way to provide enough value to pay for supplies and directions. And what does ‘assess the veracity of my claims’ mean?

It was hard to focus while having to push so hard to keep up, and after a number of futile attempts to devise a safe and interesting backstory he gave up. Better to keep things simple. Merchant caravans existed, thunes existed, and he could always refuse to answer more basic questions about his history. Anything more than that would depend on what the person interrogating him seemed to already know.

At one point, when cresting a ridge, Elliot looked north and saw trees that seemed tall enough to be mountains themselves, branches arching up through the clouds.

“Whoa,” he breathed out, freezing in the middle of an attempt to hoist himself up a granite outcrop. “Are those real trees? Surely that’s not possible?”

Hadrian looked back. “The edge of the Quelling sea. Selkan lands.” Then he continued on as if that answered the question.

Elliot had to tear his gaze away from the horizon and hurry to avoid being left behind. The behemoth trunks, whorls in their bark visible despite the haze of distance, left a feeling of tightness in his chest. Nothing living should reach that size.

By the end, achieving every step was a feat of heroic effort. The sun dropped below the horizon over an hour before they arrived, their way lit only by a small lantern Hadrian produced from a pack at his waist. The trail curved around the mountain, and when they emerged from a patch of short, twisted trees, the town was right there.

A sequence of tiers had been carved deeply into the rock, like a giant’s staircase. Every building was cut directly from the mountain, without a brick or plank of wood in sight, and the village stretched across enough of the slope to boast hundreds of structures in total.

Night had fully fallen, and the only reason Elliot could make out anything at all was the gentle blue glow emanating from the surface of each building. The sight reminded him of the bioluminescent algae he’d seen once on a trip to California: faint and fluctuating, yet also softly radiant.

It was a fantastical sight, and Elliot itched for his sketchbook and pens. Was the glow natural, or magic? Or, as part of him was beginning to suspect, was the difference not so clear cut. Rowan would have—

He cut the thought off sharply, lips tightening. God, she’s already been here for hours. She’ll be hungry.

Two men were standing where the path faded into the stone walkway of the nearest tier. As Hadrian and Elliot approached, the taller of the two straightened from his slouch and hefted a short cudgel that had been leaning against his leg. “Evening, lads. You’re back late.” He had a wide, well-waxed mustache that twitched as he spoke.

It might have been Elliot’s imagination, but he thought Hadrian stiffened microscopically before relaxing his posture again. “I was not aware of a curfew, guardsman.”

The guard’s eyebrows climbed. “Well, now. No need to be snippy. And I’d venture to say that when I saw you leave this morning, you left alone. Who’s this then?”

Hadrian’s eyes darkened. “Unless you have cause to detain us, I do believe Bastogne remains a freeholt. Come,” he said, the last barked in Elliot’s direction.

A deceptively lazy-looking swing brought the guard’s cudgel up to rest against Hadrian’s sternum before he could take more than a single step.

“Son,” the man said softly, “I know you’re new here. And I’ve given you more grace than the other strangers who’ve descended on us this month, Gods know. You came with Breka, and she’s known to me. But don’t think I’m stupid. Maybe you’re a merchant guard, maybe you’re not. You don’t act like any guard I’ve met, but it takes all kinds. However, and hear me now, you will tell me why you’ve brought a stranger out of the Gerrwood late at night, or you will be sleeping in the wilds, the both of you.”

Hadrian hadn’t moved a muscle since the cudgel touched his chest, his expression frozen. He could have been scared, or remorseful, but to Elliot, he looked just the same as when he’d pressed his knife into Elliot’s own neck only a few hours before, deciding whether or not to cut.