TVisTV Book 4: Chapter 5 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 5 - The Great Migration

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality, nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit.”

- Christopher McCandless

That morning may have been something of a wash, but Seraphina still had the afternoon. Her grandmother, Lady Adelaide, had assigned several household knights to serve as her bodyguard. They all looked as though they had been cast from much the same mold as Sir Bloodaxe, if in slightly less terrifying form. Even so, they loomed over her like a walking grove of armored trees.

Sir Frest, it turned out, was occupied at the barracks making friends. Somehow, he had acquired a fine new heavy crossbow and a quiver of bolts. Seraphina suspected the former bandit had likely won them off some unsuspecting man-at-arms. He wore half-plate now, the cuirass still of fine quality, though much of the rest of his Royal Guard harness had been abandoned back in her father’s camp. She had sent him to the local Lehman branch in Carcaronne to see whether any messages awaited her. She needed, after all, to be kept abreast of the kingdom’s affairs.

She decided upon a trip to the northern forests bordering Carcaronne, taking her escort with her. The northern Knights strongly advised against relying on nothing more than a sling, pointing out that unless she intended to hunt only smaller game, she would need at least a proper hunting bow. She declined, insisting that a slightly modified and enlarged cradle would make the weapon more than sufficient for the task. Once again, they voiced their concerns, no doubt thinking the entire venture a waste of time and the sling little more than a peasant’s weapon.

Desdemona was predictably ambivalent about the whole affair. She said she would much prefer to remain indoors rather than brave the crisp weather of early winter, and that she would far rather spend her time in the keep’s library or at her embroidery.

Protesting, but ultimately deciding to humor her, the Knights of her escort, led by a certain young Knight, Sir Ironhide. Tall and barrel-chested with black hair and serious grey eyes, he was, she decided, passably handsome in a sort of rough, rugged way. The Knight brought Seraphina not to the forest, but to the place where the first Cronir herds had begun to cross the plains of Atavasta.

The plains of Atavasta were a marvel of endless white. Snow lay unbroken across the rolling land, save where the vast horned herds had churned it into grey slush beneath their many hooves. The Cronir moved in great, slow rivers of muscle and white fur. Six-legged, broad-shouldered, and crowned with branching horns, they looked to Seraphina like some monstrous Terran caribou, if caribou had been designed by a particularly vindictive god.

Then she remembered that she had entirely forgotten to bring stones for her sling.

Her escort, naturally, had come equipped with a respectable variety of spears, bows, crossbows, and javelins for the hunt. Asking to borrow one at this juncture, however, would have been a considerable loss of face. And that, plainly, would not do.

Still, Seraphina refused to be denied. Dismounting from her palfrey some hundred paces from the herd, she crouched and scooped up snow in her gloved hands. With her unnatural Strength, she compressed it until it hardened into a dense ball of solid ice. She repeated the process again and again, packing the snow tighter each time, until a small mound of crude white missiles sat at her feet.

The Knights around her struggled valiantly not to laugh. A few looked away. One coughed into his fist. Another appeared to be praying for patience. Seraphina pointedly ignored them.

A simple sling, however, might not suffice. The Cronir were rather larger than she had expected.

“You there,” she demanded, pointing at one of the Knights carrying a spear. She gestured imperiously for him to hand it over.

The knight pointed at himself, then shrugged and surrendered the weapon. “Of course, milady.”

She smiled sweetly at him, then tied her sling to the butt end of the spear, creating a sort of sling staff. The professional warriors stared at her in open confusion. They would understand soon enough this most sublime application of basic physics.

Seraphina loaded one of the ice balls into the sling, braced herself, and hurled it with all the force her Strength could provide, activating Power Throw as she did so. The universal constants would do the rest. Unfortunately, the missile missed her intended target—an unsuspecting young bull—and instead struck his companion to the left squarely in the head.

The Cronir went down as if poleaxed.

The young bull and several of his compatriots turned their dark, bovine eyes toward Seraphina’s hunting party. Her Escort prepared their weapons, intent on defending their charge.

Seraphina simply reloaded, and the next missile struck another beast in the shoulder with a wet crack. The one after that shattered against a horned skull. The charge that had begun to gather among the front ranks faltered beneath the sudden barrage. The Knights’ amusement faded by degrees, replaced first by disbelief, then by a growing and rather uncomfortable respect.

Seraphina was not, strictly speaking, aiming carefully. She did not need to. She merely lobbed compressed balls of ice into the herd with a murderous, almost gleeful enthusiasm. Yet the results were difficult to argue with. Cronir fell. Others stumbled away bleeding, limping, or shrieking into the cold air.

You have slain a Cronir. 16 experience gained.

You have slain a Cronir. 13 experience gained.

You have slain a Cronir. 15 experience gained.

You have slain a Cronir. 11 experience gained.

… 

You have learned Throwing Weapons (lvl.3)

You have learned Polearms (lvl.4)

You have learned Power Throw (lvl.2)

The young noblewoman smirked to herself. The game system truly did reward novelty.

She continued the slaughter. There was an almost industrial quality to the work. With her high Constitution, the cold barely touched her. Scoop, crush, load, throw. Scoop, crush, load, throw. Again and again until her breathing grew heavier and her Stamina had fallen to nearly one-third.

Through the Beast Lore amulet at her throat, she heard them all. Their pain. Their panic. Their shock. The bewildered terror of animals that could not understand how winter itself had been turned against them.

Then Seraphina learned to simply turn the amulet off in her mind, cutting out the incessant bleatings of lesser things.

A gruff Knight approached and offered her a yellow-tinted potion. She inspected it with Identify before accepting. A Stamina potion. Adequate. She quaffed it down, and warmth spread through her limbs, sinking into tired muscle and chilled bone.

Then she resumed.

She continued in that fashion for the better part of another half hour, until the first few of the front-runners of the great herd had been reduced to a grisly sprawl of blood, fur, and broken bodies across the snow. The killing did not cease until at last, Sir Ironhide was forced to step forward.

“Perhaps that is sufficient for a hunt, milady,” he said, wearing a weak smile. He seemed about to place a hand on her shoulder, but one withering glare stopped him in his tracks. “I believe that is enough meat to feed the keep for the rest of winter, and then some. But the Tribes may not take kindly to us slaughtering an entire herd. And, we will also need townsmen to help dress the carcasses and bring them back.”

Another, younger knight blurted out, his face ruddy from the cold, “And with this much blood on the snow, Ice Drakes may come.”

“Ice Drakes, you say?” mused Seraphina. “That may indeed prove a suitable distraction.”

A worried look passed between her escorts.

Sir Ironhide coughed politely. “The Ice Drakes are sacred to the Tribes. Hunting them would be…”

Seraphina’s eyes narrowed.

Everyone, all the time, always had to say something. Some little warning. Some little objection. Some tiny, useless piece of wisdom offered as if she had requested it.

“Who is my grandmother, Sir Ironhide?” she asked, very politely.

“The Lady Duchess Adelaide, of course, but—”

“And tell me, since the Northern Pact with the Tribes, what was one of the concessions the Tribes acceded to?”

The Knight frowned. “Forgive me, milady, but I do not know where you are going with this.”

“And that,” Seraphina said, “is why you are a knight, and I am a lady of this realm. You do not know. Yet you seem to have forgotten your place all the same. One of the concessions was that House Carcaronne was permitted to hunt any and all creatures that cross the ice.”

“But the Ice Drakes are sacred to the Tribes,” Sir Ironhide responded weakly, grey eyes filled with worry. “And your House has never hunted them, as a sign of respect. The spirit of the Northern Pact—”

“There is a first time for everything,” Seraphina said dismissively, and her voice was iron.

And then, as if the stars themselves had aligned—or the universe had bent, ever so slightly, to answer her whims—a great roar split the frigid air. The girl had to admit that the random encounter system needed a bit of tuning.

The roar came again, closer this time, not from the sky or the distant hills, but from beneath the snow itself. The white plain shuddered. Long ridges began to form under the crusted surface, cutting through the drifts with terrible speed, as if something vast were swimming beneath the frozen earth. 

Black soil and pale powder erupted in jagged sprays as the first of the Ice Drakes drove upward just enough for Seraphina to glimpse a plated back, a line of glassy spines, and the flash of a narrow, reptilian eye before it vanished beneath the ground once more. The surviving Cronir felt them before they saw them. Panic rolled through the herd like fire through dry grass. The wounded screamed and thrashed, while the rest broke formation at once, their six legs churning the bloody snow into mist and mud as they stampeded in every direction but toward the moving ridges. The great herd, so vast and steady only moments before, became a single unified thing driven by terror.

“Drake sign!” one of the knights called out in a deep voice, an older man with a scar running across the bridge of his nose.

But the Ice Drakes did not pursue the fleeing Cronir. Why would they? Easier prey lay scattered across the snow already—fresh kills, broken bodies, warm blood steaming in the cold. Seraphina’s kills.

Unfortunately for the drakes, Seraphina had no intention of surrendering them. And, she also had every intention of gaining more experience.

“They burrow beneath the snow and earth, Lady Seraphina,” Sir Ironhide warned, a small quaver in his voice. “They have been known to devour whole companies of men. Forget hunting them. We must retreat at once.”

“Retreat?” Seraphina asked, arching one delicate brow. “That does not sound very manly at all. Still, I am not certain I can protect all of you. You may go.”

She dismissed them with an airy flick of her hand.

“But…” Sir Ironhide began.

Then she saw it: the look in the knight’s eyes. The grim little tightening of his jaw. The expression of a man about to do something stupid, gallant, and deeply inconvenient. Like, perhaps, attempting to carry her away by force.

“Go, Sir Ironhide,” she repeated.

“No, milady,” he said stubbornly. “I must insist.”

Seraphina sighed. “Very well, then. I suggest you cover your ears, at least.”

This only deepened her escort’s confusion.

Then the snow erupted. A serpentine head burst from the white crust near one of Seraphina’s fallen Cronir. It rose on a long, armored neck, scales glistening with meltwater and powdered ice. Jagged plates ran down its skull like a crown of broken glass. Its orange eyes fixed upon the young girl, bright with hunger, malice, and something that looked uncomfortably like intelligence. It roared again in challenge.

The men around Seraphina surged into motion, trying to form a protective ring of steel around her. She pushed them aside as though they were troublesome furniture.

She knew that even with all her Strength, she would not be able to kill the thing with ranged attacks. Not unless she managed to strike it cleanly through the eye, and fortune had never been a thing to rely upon too heavily. Luck often smiled upon Seraphina, yes, but hard experience had taught her that fortune disliked being tested at one’s convenience.

So she crossed her arms and waited. She had nineteen Mana, and that meant she had but one chance.

The Ice Drake seemed confused. Prey usually ran. Lesser creatures always ran. A two-leg standing its ground was not a memory written into its blood. So, when confronted with a weaker and unknown creature, it did the only thing its instincts demanded.

It charged through the earth and snow.

Seraphina waited.

The Ice Drake surged toward her, bursting up perhaps fifty paces away. It weathered the missiles of her escort. Javelins, arrows, and bolts struck its hide and bounced away, clattering harmlessly from its armored scales. For a moment, she thought the Knights might finally turn and run. Yet honor, that most foolish and inconvenient of virtues, held them fast while a young girl—brave, stupid, or both—stood her ground.

She waited until the creature was well within range. Then Seraphina drew a deep breath and unleashed the full power of her voice.

Wail of Judgment erupted from her in a wave of holy force. It struck the Ice Drake like the wrath of a god given sound, smashing through scale and bone, resonating through ice, snow, and frozen earth. The creature was stopped mid-charge, stunned, its baleful eyes widening in animal confusion as if struck by an invisible hammer. Then it crashed to the ground in an explosion of snow, skidding to a halt just before her feet.

Seraphina raised one hand. Imperiously, she called upon her other magic—the magic of logic, structure, and perfect edges.

Crystal answered, and a spear formed from her palm, five feet long and rose-blood pink, its facets catching the winter light like a frozen dawn.

Lazily, she walked up to the stunned creature without haste. Then, with Power Strike, she drove the crystal spear through its eye and into its brain.

The Ice Drake thrashed once. Then it stilled as death claimed it.