06 – Guild mission

The sun was shining through the vegetation, making so that the little wisps of mist rising from the mossy forest floor looked like little spirits of nature. There was a small patch of old oaks where the manor used to be, their bark covered in green. Spinning around, Martin took the view in and savored the fresh taste of the oxygenated air.

What a night.

He didn’t know where the path was but, despite his hunger, he decided to make finding it his priority. He had a waypoint function built into his system now, and he wanted to at least plop a waypoint on the path before wandering off in search of food.

It took him a while, mostly spent wandering in circles around the clearing, but eventually he came across a patch of trees that looked familiar. There was a large stone on the ground that had been split in two by the slow but incessant growth of a tree. Its trunk bent when it was a few feet above the stone at a steep angle of almost ninety degrees, was too odd to forget. Standing next to the moss covered rock, it was easy to find the way he came, and before long he was back on the path.

He set the waypoint down, and decided to enter the forest again in search of food. There weren’t many people on the path this early, in fact other than a single person the path was completely deserted despite the sun being well above the horizon. Thinking back, there had been a few people on the road close to Topguard, but barely any by the time the road had forked enough to only be a small mountain path. There had been no buildings either, just forest on this side of the city walls.

Shrugging, he set off.

The forest was silent. The more time he spent inside it, and the more the silence got to him. Compared to the many sounds he heard before, now it felt like he was somewhere completely different, devoid of all animal life. The trees too, upon closer look, revealed some details that didn’t quite make sense. They were at times torn and broken, bent branches supporting the weight of withered leaves, and snapped trees were not as uncommon as Martin expected them to be. There were scratch marks on some trunks. He came upon a hole in the ground that appeared to have been dug by a large explosion, and a recent one at that, he felt. There were still traces of burning, and the soil was soft where it had been moved about by the force of the explosion. There was no grass, nor moss. The closest tree was snapped, trunk and leaves laying on the ground still green.

Something had happened. It wasn’t like this yesterday, was it? His mind told him that no, it wasn’t. He would have noticed. He stared at the hole a little while longer, but eventually a sound coming from his still empty stomach reminded him of the task at hand.

But there was nothing he could eat. He was counting on seeing an animal and smiting it with fire before it could run away but… the forest was empty. Almost empty. There was a place where he knew he could find something, assuming that a dezelle was an animal and one he could eat. There was only one way to find out.

***

He crouched behind a bush at the edge of the clearing. From the vantage point he was hiding in, higher than the clearing at the edge of a small stone outcropping covered in vegetation, he could see the herd grazing at the tall grass below. He could also see Topguard, where he had stopped to place the waypoint before venturing back in the wilderness to complete his mission. He had needed to, or it would have been impossible to find the herd from the guild mission instructions alone, without using his system issued compass. The walls of the city seen from here were not very tall, rather they were very thick. Just what do they defend the city against? Is it connected with whatever happened last night that left those holes in the forest?

The low walls meant that they only obstructed most of the outermost buildings of the city from view. Martin took a mental note of the layout of the streets, completing the mental map he had already. Topguard was small but compact, with tightly packed buildings one on top of the other in concentric circles around the central plaza. Then, very visible at the center of a small forest amidst the stone buildings was the guild, hugging the walls immersed in a sea of trees the hid it from view.

An outpost town, nothing more. A place where anything barely happened but, when it did, it was not pretty. Perhaps at the edge of a kingdom to defend their borders. Perhaps just long forgotten, kept usable by a few nostalgic people and one or two retired adventurers. Although, there were quite a few low ranked adventurers at the guild, so maybe this was the place they were sent to train and could safely climb the ladder and gain experience. He didn’t know.

A gust of wind made the leaves rustle. The herd of dezelles, he could count at least 12 of them, was hiding in the tall grass, and when the wind blew just right he could see small floating antlers that rose when the animals looked up from grazing. Martin thought about how to approach the problem. He needed to eliminate the animals with the tools he had, but if he scared them away then it would be almost impossible to chase them all as they entered the thick of the forest.

Thinking was never his forte. Or rather, patience never was. He could think without problems, but focusing on something for too long always made him act rashly after a while, just as boredom or impatience or the slight hint of powerlessness began to creep into his mind. That’s why he soon decided to act. He approached the herd, descending into the clearing and using the swaying grass as cover, until he was close to one of the animals. It was the most isolated one, a good test case to see if it could spot Martin as he tried to sneak close. Martin kept walking forward, keeping his body as low as possible and his footsteps quiet, stopping every time the animal moved in a strange way in fear of having been spotted. He could only see the antlers, but soon he took it as a good rule that when he saw them high above the grass, he needed to wait. The animal looked down to graze. Martin was only a few meters away. Deciding it was finally time, he sprinted towards it and he saw it stare at him like a deer caught in the headlights on a highway.

He crossed the distance and lunged, right hand forward. A small sword began to materialize in his hand, starting from the hilt, then the blade. It took a bit more than a second to fully appear, the last bit of steel appearing right inside the creature’s skull. Martin dismissed the skill as soon as he felt the impact with the animal, and the sword vanished leaving behind a small hole in the dezelle’s head. Then the animal quietly fell over to one side, swaying once before it toppled.

“Interesting,” he muttered, then stood over the dead animal to examine it. It was brown, covered in fur, but its antlers were of a strange translucent material, like green tinted glass. They were hard, twisted in complex shapes that bent the light and made little rainbows appear where the photons were bent just the right way.

He briefly wondered if they were valuable, but without a way to store them he left them there.

Martin’s stomach grumbled again. He quickly considered whether to just ignore the quest and fireball this carcass and eat it, or do the quest first. He decided to do the latter thing. If the dezelles ran away… he didn’t want his first mission to be a failure. He had no idea what would happen if he failed a quest. He actually didn’t know why he was doing the missions for the guild, to what end he was trying to grind through ranks instead of doing… doing what? What was his purpose?

He thought about money. And power, assuming the system gave him more quests… which was more probable if he did good in the guild. Money bought nice food, without needed to eat dead dezelles.

Leveling up. The thought came to his mind like lightning tearing through the clear sky, and a storm followed, lighting his brain synapses like a Christmas tree. He suddenly felt hungry, but the kind of hunger that no food could ever satiate. The kind of desire that was beyond carnal. The need.

He wanted to level up.

“Alright.”