A New Star Chapter 98 (Patreon)

This was a good opportunity as well, and I waited for the two to spend a little further time settling their differences as the other beasts fled deeper into the forest. When the time was right, or I judged it was as good as I was going to get, I reemerged from The Dark, falling from above the battling beasts with Gungnir extended and already pulsing with lightning. The beasts were strong and had keen senses, but they had also been brawling for minutes now, and they had been distracted and put in a poor frame of mind from the fight and losing the herb. They both reacted far too late, though I had to hand it to the gorilla creature, as it managed to dodge the first strike, though only partially. Unfortunately for it, I was no green-behind-the-ears novice that had never battled frightening beasts or slippery foes before. It was easy to land lightly and slash around me, lightly wounding both beasts and driving them a step back.

From there, it was no contest, really, though both beasts were tough, being of an equal, if not greater rank, than I currently was. Hammering them enough times to get them to stay down took time and effort, and I exerted my all to make sure they died quickly and with as little movement around the area as possible. Just because the other beasts had scrammed didn’t mean they couldn’t come back in just a few moments. Beyond that, there were…things out in the Shiverwood, things that it was much better not to disturb. I didn’t know if there were any beasts or monsters of X- or Y-rank or such so close to the Settled Lands, but not everything was a mindless horror that threw itself at anything nearby intent on slaughter. It would be even worse to meet something clever of that rank with my current strength, though I did still possess a few contingencies of my own.

None of that was necessary now, however, as I was able to kill both beasts with some alacrity. Harvesting them was a different matter, but that didn’t need to be done right this second; I was strong enough and swift enough I could grab even two large corpses and slip away with them, making my way back to the southern mountains, or the northern mountains, as they were referred to in the Settled Lands. I didn’t know if the range had a formal name, but I would have to start using it to keep everything straight in my own damn head. Anyway, I took the two corpses south ten miles until I was back at the edge of the mountains and skirted them for thirty minutes before reaching a place I had set up a little cavern to use as a temporary base. I did the usual scans to make sure there wasn’t anyone already there nor following me before heading into the cavern. I dropped the body right outside and carefully secured the couple smaller finds I had grabbed before locating the highly valuable herb.

The corpses I dealt with outside; I had set up most of my little shelters by some kind of water, preferably flowing water if I could, and that was the case here. There was a small stream near the little cavern that I used to dismantle the corpses, keeping everything from both of them, though in a more compact form. Luckily, alchemy offered me a few magical solutions to preserving things in the short term, though I was actually fully treating anything. I wasn’t a leather worker or forger to treat the hide or bones, not that the bones needed much help, nor was I a cook or chef to treat the meat. I could preserve the blood fairly well, and the core didn’t need treatment, but gathering materials always put a certain time limit on my expeditions. Without anybody else at all helping, even just gophers to transport things back to the estate and town, I had to return within a certain time limit.

The preservatives I had could extend that, and I crated up the meat in a couple special barrels meant to preserve it lightly, though the barrels only had basic formations on them. I didn’t use salts on the meat, not at first, as that was also considered as…not exactly ruining the meat, but it was a much less pleasant thing to work with, and even to eat. It would preserve it nicely, of course, but it would make a less desired product overall, especially with a bit more widespread use of cooling and preserving enchantments. The blood I stored in vials and glass I had that had better preservation runes built into them, some of the things I had acquired over the last few years as I pushed my alchemy. The blood didn’t have any crazy properties so it would be fine for up to a few months in those containers without changing state at all. The hides were the toughest, as I could do a basic scraping of them and give them a light coating with a powder that acted as a preservative, much better than using salt or even a uric acid solution for short-term preservation, but they would still need to get to a skilled leather worker within two weeks to not be ruined.

Moving about the mountains was easy for me, and after the stop at that shelter, I slipped into an easy pattern, always wary of any pursuers, bouncing between a few more shelters before arriving at the mage’s tower. It was a better environment to store the hides and the meat, and I wasn’t going to leave the precious herb anywhere but a very secure location. The old mage tower was the only location in the mountains north of the estate that I considered genuinely secure at present, so I left the most valuable things there, though some things, like the hide, would just do better in the air in the mage’s tower. There were climate control runes that kept the place cool and dry and made it a better temporary solution than a cave next to a creek for anything sensitive to moisture and heat.

After putting the precious herb in a small box that would also go a long way to preserving it, I slipped back out and into the Shiverwood, finding my way back to the site of the Great Herb Battle in a matter of twenty minutes, thanks in no small part to The Dark. There was a large snooping around, and it gave me a decided queasy feeling to examine it even from this other dimensional space, so I decided to leave well enough alone. I wasn’t really trying to harvest obscene quantities of goods right now and I didn’t need to tangle with some tricky that was, at a minimum, a rank above me, if not two or three, based on what I could see and what my instincts told me. I had never been one for video games much, but I do remember playing with my children a bit, and I pined for the easy days where I could look at a beast in those virtual spaces and have a panel pop up that conveniently listed out all its information.

Nothing so easy on this world, or in the real day-to-day of my previous life, but the convenience was a nice dream. There were spells that people had here, I had read a bit on, that allowed one to get a much more accurate gauge of an opponent’s strength, be they man or beast, but I didn’t know any of them. The only one I found good documentation on needed a strong wind and water affinity, and ice wouldn’t substitute for the water, so it was entirely out of my grasp for the moment. Not that it had the same level of detail as the games of my last life, but the spells gave a moderately accurate read of an opponent’s rank and current levels of mana and vitality. It wasn’t exactly like reading their mana and health pools, but the information was enough to figure out the kind of overall toughness and regeneration a thing had alongside how deep its well of power was. Some of the spells, purportedly, could identify all the target’s affinities and even their individual grades, but those claims were debated, so I would leave that to believing it when I saw it.

Without a way to cast the only version of the spell I had managed to find, it was largely a moot point anyway, and I wasn’t in desperate need of such a thing. I had honed my senses and instincts from centuries of battle and warfare, and I had adjusted to this new world I found myself in rather well by this point. I was not so easily fooled by some type of beast or some type of magical power I hadn’t seen or wasn’t familiar with, and attempts at various forms of subterfuge largely fell flat when faced with my keen insight. I was not infallible, rather obviously, but I was very, very good at what I did, and I knew when to push and when to slip away.

Slipping away was the ticket now, as whatever this thing was, it was big, loud, powerful, and was emitting…something around it that I didn’t like. Best not to get tangled in something too sticky at the moment, not when I was set on exploring quite a ways in the next few days. I turned and left to the west, circling towards the more cratered and valley-riddled lands out that way, though I didn’t go nearly that far. I was just making some room from the earlier fracas, and now headed north towards the Ice Peaks, moving through the wood at a rapid clip, still in The Dark. The mountains were a distance away, but my speed was not like it once was, when a trip to Umberton took an hour or two just to get near the walls; I rapidly approached the foothills and made way through them to the mountains themselves.

The Ice Peaks were rather daunting, even to an old warrior like me. These were the kinds of mountains that had a heavy cap of snow even in the absolute height of summer when temperatures were blazing, peaks towering extremely high into the sky. The entire place was tough to navigate; I had the thought that when people from the Settled Lands did try to push this far, it would be hell to try to get through here. Gods’ Blood, it would be hell for a fully equipped expedition with some high-rank adventurers at the Wall or beyond it to push through these mountains, never mind regular guards or, heavens forfend, regular citizens. It was quite difficult for me to navigate, and I was no pushover on top of the fact that I had several key advantages, including use of The Dark to make navigating dangerous areas much safer. Much safer was not safe, one must keep in mind, and I also needed to proceed with a fair degree of caution, come what may.

The mountains themselves were rather jagged, with a lot of steep sides, broken up cliffs, shattered rocky escarpments, and deep valleys that were hard to get into and even harder to escape. Just climbing over the shoulder of the smallest of the mountains was a test of endurance and patience, not to mention survival skill and instinct, and it took me a day to just get to and down the far side. Even that was a chore, as the other side of the mountain was a set of steep cliffs that would have delighted mountain goats and bird but little else, which proved almost prophetic. The only thing I could see, even when I wasn’t charting a path through The Dark, were a few large birds of prey and a couple other, fat birds that I assumed were a bit tamer, though I didn’t test the notion.

It was only the first valley between the mountains, but as I slipped the area in The Dark, I passed at least two beasts that were five or more ranks beyond me, which meant they were O-rank at the minimum, if not P-rank or more. The amount of power they exerted just by sitting somewhere and breathing was palpable even in The Dark, and I left them well alone. I found a few small herbs or plants that were of equivalent rank to me or one rank higher, but it wasn’t anything spectacular. I had a feeling that anything that was worth anything in these valleys would be both guarded heavily by beasts desiring to increase a rank, or fought over by said beasts as the herb neared peak ripeness or maturity. I didn’t want to get involved in any of that, at least not right now, so I left the valley after only a brief stop to eat and freshen up.

Climbing the second mountain proved to be a poor idea, though not a fatal one, thankfully. On the slopes of the mountain, as I was heading up still, navigating a tough section, I was attacked by a flying beast that looked like an eagle mixed with a ram or goat. The thing was certainly weird, including its very dark coloration, though the strangest, and worst, part of the whole thing was that it could somehow see me in The Dark. I tried a few different tricks, including falling deeper into that other plane, so deep that I lost my orientation in respect to the ‘regular’ world, though I was still linked to it, but none of it mattered. The only fortunate thing for me was that the beast was a K-rank, just one above me, and it wasn’t particularly powerful, not able to overwhelm me in a short amount of time. I did have to retreat, and not just a short ways, as the beast hounded me for over two hours before I drove it off with a combination of fire and gravity attacks that more than singed its dark feathers. It was the first time I had encountered anything below Y-rank that could even sense me in The Dark, let alone attack me therein, and it made me triply cautious in just searching the area and moving about.

I couldn’t let that stop me, however, and continued further into the mountains. I was still on a bit of a time crunch, and I spent two days pushing deeper, though not aiming directly at the heart of the range. Really, I wanted to check what the high orcs had told me about the strange city in the western part of the mountains, the one that seemed abandoned but still had powerful defenses running. If I had anything of a treasure sense, an ancient and mysterious city with extremely powerful defenses and no one around felt like a great place to find all kinds of valuable things, though the knowledge was what I really craved. I still had many questions, both about the cycles of boom and bust the Settled Lands went through, as well as just what was up with the world in general. I figured if I could find a decent answer anywhere, an ancient city of mystery and power would do the trick.

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