A New Star Chapter 79 (Patreon)

Anastasia

The group immediately moved into position, hours and hours of training at the academy kicking in as we prepared to confront whatever the dungeon had to throw at us. After a few seconds, just when several of us started to stir and become restless, a massive beast rounded the corner, looking like a cross between a bear and an armadillo. These kinds of beasts were rare in the Settled Lands, at least outside of dungeons they were never seen, and they were a big problem to deal with. They were slow, but their armor made them tough for anyone at or below their rank to contend with, and their immense strength made them difficult to corner. It wasn’t unheard of for rhok, the type of beast we were facing, to plow through a group, knocking them down and scattering them before mauling the members one-by-one. It was the kind of thing a lot of parties feared and the kind of thing they were going to have to look out for if they didn’t want to go down as one of the shortest dungeon delves in history.

Jhan, of course, stopped giving orders as soon as the bear had appeared, and the ranged fighters, including the mages, were left to fend for themselves. Luckily, we were all trained well enough that we knew to wait for a proper opportunity to launch our first attacks. The best would be to take an enemy unaware, but that ship had long sailed, so the next best thing was to hit it at an opportune moment, something that would disrupt its rhythm and let the rest of the team take it apart. One of the others, clearly eager to prove themselves, and with no instruction coming down from the top, shot an arrow right when the beast started to bellow. It would have been a good tactic, but their aim was just a bit off, and the arrow glanced off the rhok’s left cheek, the face of the bear just as armored as the rest of it.

The one thing the rhok didn’t have was speed, and it proved that with its charge, giving our team plenty of time to adjust and even to launch attacks, while it approached. The dungeon itself wasn’t much different than most caves, though there would be sections where the floors were smoother, or the walls were smooth and had etchings in them. This part, however, was just the same as any random cave in the wild, and the terrain provided no advantages to the beast as it charged. Thankfully, it wasn’t something that had awoken its element yet, or, if it had, it wasn’t deigning to use it in this fight. The worst case in these situations was having a beast that used the earth element, while right up there with it were things like stone, metal, mud, and even sand. Fighting a beast like that in a cave was absolutely not fun, something we had been trained in using a very specific scenario at the academy to understand just how big an elemental advantage could be in certain scenarios.

The bear’s charge was interrupted, briefly, by the fighters up front, Gorge making a monumental effort to stop the beast all on his own, taking the full brunt of its strength on his tower shield. He had some kind of metal affinity, I think for a specific metal, and it helped to reinforce his equipment as well as his own body, one of the results being increased weight. If there were more time, or better coordination, we could have done some serious damage in the few seconds that the beast had been stopped, though it wasn’t stunned for long. I did my best to maximize that moment, blasting the beast with ice and wind, using my wind affinity to hurl the ice faster and adjust its movement in flight, causing it to hit harder and in different locations than the initial cast might lead one to predict. Much of what I was doing bounced off, though a lucky combination with one of the others cause a light injury in the beast’s side.

That was the precise moment everything went, for lack of a more decorous euphemism, to hell in a hand basket, as the bear started another charge, one Gorge simply didn’t have the muscle or experience to stop. He was knocked flying, lifted off the ground and smashing into Jhan, who had been working from around Gorge’s shield side to strike at the bear’s face. The beast then plowed through the rest of us, not even actively attacking, but content to let its massive size, weight, and strength do all the damage for it. I managed to get out of the way in time, or nearly so, an elbow (or a knee…?) catching me in the side and setting me on my rear. I knew we were in a lot of trouble at this point, and I leapt back to my feet, trying to never let the bear out of my line of sight for even a moment.

Just then, there was a thunderous report, and the bear stopped dead in its tracks, which was a funny way to put it, as the beast keeled over a second later, truly dead. I just stared at what I was seeing, not being able to comprehend what had happened, before walking back around the bear, still giving the beast a wide berth. I saw Alex standing there, arms crossed over her chest, a pose she had assumed as the fight started, staring down at the corpse of the beast in some mildly annoyance. Never had I seen such a facial expression on someone that had just confronted such a powerful threat, and that feeling was only reinforced when she turned her glare towards me.

“Really?” was all she asked, but the word was dripping with so much scorn that it felt like a slap.

“R-rhok are dangerous beasts. We’re not well versed in fighting such physically strong opponents…” I stammered out, trailing off at the end as her glare didn’t soften even a single iota.

“I should hope you’re not trained,” she replied, which brought me up short for a moment. She clarified a moment later, however, and I got the feeling it was going to be a very long dungeon delve when she said, “If you had been trained and…that, whatever the hell it was I just witnessed, was the result, I should like to find your trainer and beat them to death with a wet mop. That was one of the most pathetic displays I’ve ever seen a squad perform, and I’ve watched my parents recruits train.”

I was a bit confused by the last part, but I decided that discretion was the better part of valor when taking into consideration someone that was roughly six years younger than myself and had just killed a beast giving our whole squad trouble with what, I thought, was just a single punch, performed so fast nobody could tell she had even moved. It would be a passe to point out that new recruits were, well, new, and one expected a certain level of incompetence until they had been trained. That clearly seemed like one of the wrong things to say, and I was content to take the verbal lecture and improve, but we had a Jhan on our team, so, of course, the comment wasn’t going to go without challenge.

“What’s that supposed to mean? And what did you do? How did you kill it so fast? The adults aren’t helping you, are they?” Jhan demanded, having rounded the other side of the bear and started glaring at Alex.

“Wow, that’s a lot of stupid in just a couple sentences,” Alex replied coldly. “Let’s see if we can unpack all that. Firstly, you’re too stupid to recognize an insult when it doesn’t include some type of direct attack on your character. Secondly, I killed the enemy, quickly and efficiently, as you should have been trained to do. Third, I killed it so fast because, unlike you lot, I am both skilled and powerful. Fourth, despite myself and the others treating you like a pathetic child, you are all adults here, legally and societally, so asking if the ‘adults’ are helping or going to help, asking of the only child in the group, I might add, makes you look incompetent. Shape up.”

It was interesting to watch Jhan getting lectured; it had always been interesting to watch him get lectured, even back in our academy days, and this was certainly no different now. He always turned several interesting shades of red, with a vein standing out on his left temple and pulsing visibly. I think, though I was loathe to say it, the only reason he had such control as what he did have was from all the instructors and the adults of his family taking a very firm hand with him when he was still young, all the way up until now. Personally, I thought he just wasn’t cut out for the adventuring life, which was good, as he wasn’t going to be even a small team leader any time soon. No, he would be much better running part of his father’s business, trading in wine and ale, a place where the underlings did much of the hard work and he could make slightly shitty deals while yelling at people for no good reason without causing too much harm.

“Who’s in charge here?! If you think-“ Jhan started, but was easily cut off by Alex. Her voice had a kind of presence to it, a kind of raw, magnetic power that made it even easier for her to override what someone else was saying. The others had gathered around at this point, many of them prioritizing checking the enemy and making sure it wasn’t a threat, while Gorge still watched further down the tunnel to make sure we weren’t surprised.

“Jhan. Nobody cares,” she said coldly, giving the boy, and he was acting like a boy, a look that would have frozen a glacier. It certainly made me shiver, as did her next words, “I was sent in here to ensure that none of you died. I’m not here to play nursemaid to you sorry lot, nor are those so-called ‘adults’ out there going to continue wiping your asses for you forever. If you actually want my help, want me to train you and coordinate your team, you’re going to have to learn to be flexible, which is a bridge too far for at least one of you. As long as you all live through this experience, I currently couldn’t care less; want me to help more than making sure the boss is killed and you’re all still breathing? Show me you’re worth it.”

She hadn’t uncrossed her arms during that time, and she swept the group with her glare, something that made many of us shiver or react, even Jhan. It felt like one of the senior instructors at the academy or one of the older members of our family, those who had passed down most of the operations of the family to younger generations and were out seeking greater strength, had just glared at us in a particularly disapproving way. It was all the more startling every time I remembered Alex’s age, or supposed age, though I had only her performance here to question whether she really was fourteen, or just about to turn fourteen, if memory served. Someone over six years younger than the main part of the group, including Jhan, Gorge, Sasha, and myself, and she was giving us a dressing down like we hadn’t had since we first entered the academy, back when some of us still thought we were quite exceptional. The academy had done much to disabuse us of those notions, and now Alex was firmly rubbing our faces in the dirt of our inadequacy.

“What do we have to do to get you on our side?” I asked, seeing her focus on me for a moment, the slight smirk returning for a second.

“Finally, somebody with some brains. That’s the right question, asked in the right way,” she said. “You can start with a few things. First, show me you know what to do with this body, then we’ll go from there, thought I think my others desires might prove impossible until you’ve had some better training and practice.”

“With the body? What, you want us to do menial labor now?” Jhan was really on one today, and I was tempted to show him he wasn’t speaking for all of us by shutting him up.

“Oh, what, is there some other group of half-decent but poorly trained hacks here that could do the work?” Alex asked, pretending to shade her eyes as she scanned the tunnel. “No? I thought not. Now hop to it. I want to see that you know how to do at least one thing right.”

The next hour was both very long and painful, and yet very educational at the same time. Alex didn’t participate in the butchering herself, which Jhan had plenty of comments about until she demanded Jhan attack her, at which point she casually dodged his attempt and decked him, but she did offer plenty of advice and instructions. It was clear she was an expert, sounding almost more like a lifelong butcher than the noble daughter of two of the highest ranked nobles in the whole of the Settled Lands, but her insight made the process much faster and less tedious.

It was after the bear was dismantled that the real torture began, as Alex ran us through a series of drills to coordinate our teamwork, which Jhan had the brilliance to ask if it wasn’t good enough. Apparently, we were so bad Alex didn’t consider what we were doing even to be teamwork, so that also stung quite a bit. An hour of drilling had us fighting in a more coordinated way, surprisingly enough, and it was at that point that she unleashed us on the dungeon. Well, it wasn’t anything so grand as that, but she instructed us to continue forward and keep exploring while she walked at the back and watched over our progress.

I would have liked to have said there was an immediate, dramatic change, but we still relied on her to kill the next beast we encountered, which was another rhok. We didn’t do terribly, however, if the fact that we didn’t get scolded for our performance was any indication. She had us keep going after the kill, not having us stop to dismantle the corpse; most delves like ours, that being noble ones, would have a team come through behind the delvers to handle cleaning up all the valuables and such after they were done. Well, that only worked on dungeons that weren’t instanced, but this was one such and we were used to that method of operation, so pressing on and fighting more wasn’t a complete puzzled to us.

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