BT - Book 1 - Chapter 87

Micah stepped to the side, bursts of wind mana accelerating his feet until they were almost too fast to see as Jo’s knife whistled past him.

He backpedaled, shoes trampling the ankle high grass near the lake as Jo tried to stab him once again.  At the last second, Micah’s hand flashed out, grabbing her wrist.

“Fuck!” Jo bit the words out as she tried unsuccessfully to wrench her hand from his grip.  Then, without warning she dropped the knife.

He pushed, slamming her hand into Jo’s chest and sending her tumbling to the ground even as she tried to contort her body so as to catch the knife in her other hand.  Micah simply picked it up.

“I win,” he grinned at her, “but you’re certainly getting better.  You were fast enough to almost hit me when you followed up on that Triple Thrust move of yours with a low kick.  That’s a good combination.”

“I thought you liked me,” Jo grumbled, brushing herself off as she stood up.  “If you liked me, the least you could do is let me win every now and then.  This is getting demoralizing.”

“Jo,” Micah shook his head, flipping the knife blade around and offering her the weapon’s hilt, “it’s precisely because I like you that I’m treating this seriously.  You’re gaining levels in the dungeons, but that’s happening too fast.  The only way you’ll be able to get used to your new abilities and attributes is if I push you to your limit.”

“Usually when a guy talks about pushing you to your limit it’s a lot more fun than this,” she complained, sliding the knife into her sheath.

“Forgive me for wanting to keep you alive,” he snorted crossing his arms.  “Look, if you just want to goof off you can always go hunting with Ravi or play tag with Telivern.  Both of them love spending time with you, and if someone doesn’t keep them active they just end up sleeping all day.  I don’t know much about how their bodies work, but that can’t be healthy.”

“Maybe later,” Jo walked past him toward the rough wooden compound that housed their group in the field, “but we should probably get going, Sarah and the others will be finishing up in Basil’s Cove soon and they’ll need you to ferry them back.”

He glanced up at the sky, noting the Sun’s position and turned toward the lake.  Unfortunately, they couldn’t quite survive on their own yet.  Food and necessary ritual reagents still came from Basil’s Cove even if Ravi and Telivern’s exploration missions helped alleviate the party’s needs on both fronts.  Most importantly however, Trevor and Drekt still needed to report back to the Lancers, occasionally taking on missions for the guild and keeping their ears to the ground regarding updates from Baron Hurden’s search parties.

Micah stripped off his shirt and pants, leaving them enough up on the beach to ensure that they’d stay dry before wading into the water.  A couple of splashes later and the sweat and grime from the day were gone.

He stretched, enjoying the Sun on his bare back for a moment, eyes closed and knee deep in the water.  The past month or so had been productive.  He knew… Trevor’s spear art… almost as well as his brother, partially because Micah made a point of actually practicing the martial art’s component skills whenever he got a chance.

Their constant forays into the Caverns of Rust provided a steady stream of experience, and Micah was edging his way toward level thirty.  The levels themselves were coming a little slower as he was no longer fighting monsters grossly above his official experience.  Still, the rest of the team was growing a little faster than him and they were well on course toward making it past level forty in time for his fight with the Khan, even with the anticipated experience bottleneck as they began to outgrow their dungeon.

Shaking his head to dry his hair, Micah cast Gust on himself three times to dry off.  The air was a bit chilly, but Micah could use the invigoration after his brief but languid soak.

A minute or so later, his clothes and armor were back on and Micah was walking back toward the compound.  Ravi and Telivern hadn’t returned from whatever adventure they’d engaged in for the day, but Jo was standing outside the crude palisade they’d built around their residences, waiting for him.

“Ready to go?” She asked cheerfully, leaning against one of the logs.

“I am,” Micah cocked his head carefully to the side, squinting at Jo, “but I don’t understand why you’re here.  You never come on teleportation runs.  They’re exhausting and fairly miserable.  Most of the time you make up some excuse and make yourself scarce.”

“That was then,” Jo shrugged, shooting him a coy smile, “right now, I’m going stir crazy.”

“Suit yourself,” Micah rolled his eyes as he walked past her toward the lean-to where he’d set up the teleportation formation and stored the enchanted quartz formation keys.

He walked over to a crude wooden shelf built into the side of the shack and grabbed three of the fistsized chunks of mineral.  Each of them glowed with its own internal light as Micah quickly sorted through them, placing two of them in the carrying satchel he retrieved from the same counter before slinging it over his shoulder.

Jo followed him in, a flash of discomfort on her face as she crowded next to Micah in the dark and stale room.  He squinted his eyes in the dim light, making sure that both of them were standing fully on the wood plate that he’d carved the teleportation formation onto.  Nodding, he looked up at Jo.

“Are you ready?” He asked, grasping the teleportation key in both hands once the woman nodded at him.  “Then stay close and make sure that we have skin to skin contact.  If you lose hold of me you might end up getting lost, and considering what occupies the space between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ I would not suggest it.”

“I know the drill by now Micah,” she rolled her eyes.  “Plus, anything that feels like the Luoca is nothing I want to mess with.  I’d prefer to not be dropped into some abyss, thank you very much.”

“Like the Luoca?”  Micah stopped, chunk of quartz in his hand.  “Can you actually feel Elsewhere when we travel through it?  That isn’t supposed to happen.”

“Elsewhere?”  Jo shrugged.  “Is that where everything feels wrong on a fundamental level?  Like the air is just filled with some sort of residue that coats your lungs and tears at everything that makes you ‘you?”

“I guess,” Micah scratched the back of his neck.  “Gods, it really sounds bad when you put it like that.  I suppose I just got used to it after a certain point.”

“You just got used to feeling corrosive energy slowly melting your soul from the inside out?” She snorted at him.  “Maybe Drekt is right about the daemon.  I’m not nearly as doom and gloom as he is, but if you can get used to that monster, maybe that isn’t a good thing?”

“Maybe,” Micah shrugged noncommittally.   “We can talk about that later though.  I don’t want to leave Trevor, Drekt and Sarah waiting too long.”

“Almost as smooth of a sidestep as when we were sparring,” Jo winked at him before wrapping her hand around Micah’s forearm.

He didn’t respond, in part because he wasn’t sure that she was wrong.  This time, he didn’t feel the chains of fire tugging on his personality and influencing his opinions, but that didn’t mean he was safe.  For all Micah knew, the exact same thing would happen again, just slower.

Closing his eyes, Micah mentally reached into the ball of quartz in his hand.  A hazy white path appeared in the darkness, disappearing into the distance.  In his mind’s eye, Micah put his foot upon the trail and took a step forward.

The world blurred and spun around him as the magic from the formation tossed him like a stone into the ocean of Elsewhere.  Around him, the howling nothingness crowded in.  Micah could feel the perception of entities that had never needed eyes fixing themselves upon him.  Great formless shapes shambled toward him from just outside the path, its thin white light the only thing protecting him from forces older than Karell itself.

Micah stumbled forward, falling onto his hands and knees in the grove.  The two remaining giant trees towered over him as the world spun.  Nearby, Jo fell to the ground, clutching her head and mumbling to herself.

As useful as the teleportation network Micah had made back to Basil’s Cove was, each jump covering almost a day’s walk on foot, actually using it took a toll.  Each additional person required more mana and strained the ritual.  There were other factors such as distance and the skill of the crafter, but there was a reason why nations didn’t simply shift armies around via teleportation.  Even bringing the rest of the party back from Basil’s Cove was likely to push him to his limit.

After a minute, the grove stopped spinning and Mich pulled himself to his feet with a groan.  Jo was still curled into the fetal position in the grass, but at least she’d stopped mumbling things to herself.

He walked over and touched her shoulder gently, drawing a bleary and unhappy look from the huddled woman.

“Gods,” she mumbled.  “I forgot how awful that is.”

“It’s not great,” Micah agreed, “but it’s effective. You and I need to stay far from the City if we want to avoid unwanted attention from a certain mercenary, and we don’t have weeks to waste on supply runs.”

“Ugh,” she replied, standing up and wiping her face with a forearm as she walked to the carved wood panel that Micah was already standing on.  “Just remind me next time that coming with you is a stupid idea.”

“I did,” Micah chuckled as he grabbed her wrist with his left hand while his right held a different sphere of quartz.

The world faded into darkness once again as reality blurred, flinging them down a narrow pathway of light.  Tendrils of… something reached for the two of them, recoiling as they touched the tunnel of white energy.  Micah felt a dagger of ice jam into his stomach as the ritual ripped enough mana from him to sustain the crystalline magical structure that was all that protected him from the corrosive formlessness of Elsewhere.

Just as they neared the end of the lighted trail, Micah’s senses tingled.  There was something different, a loose net of red and green surrounding the teleportation formation.  Before he could make sense of it, Jo and him were pushed through by the power of the ritual, tumbling out into the stone chamber of the cave where Trevor and he had first killed the dire stoat.

Micah just sat there, heaving for breath on his hands and knees on the stone floor of the cave.  Once again, Jo was whimpering something indeterminate, but he was more concerned with the way the chamber undulated and spun around him.

The vertigo lasted almost twice as long as his previous bout.  Micah wasn’t entirely sure if that was from the entity in Elsewhere, the grid of magic around his cave, or if he was getting tired.  Either way, he had time to kill until the rest of the team signalled that they needed a pick up from Trevor and his parents’ house.

After recovering, Micah walked toward the cave’s exit.  He wasn’t entirely sure what the net of colored energy he’d viewed from Elsewhere was, but the cave was an important link in the teleportation network.  The least he could do was perform an augury ritual and try to scry on whatever forces were disrupting the area.

He walked past the cages, long empty, that he’d used to fuel his first enchantments.  It all seemed like a lifetime ago but he could still smell the damp fur and blood from the various woodland critters he’d used to make Trevor and his starting gear.

Finally, he stood in the entryway, squinting against the afternoon light after the muted shades of the cave.  Nothing outside looked all that different.  The grass was more overgrown than he remembered, but Telivern wasn’t in the area keeping its growth in check.

Still, Micah frowned.  Something seemed wrong.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he squinted his eyes, peering for signs of foul play or an ambush.  After almost five minutes of nothing, he cautiously exited the cave’s dark confines.

The ground beneath his feet exploded, launching Micah into the air even as dozens of thorns, magically hardened until they put steel to shame, punched through his armor and lodged themselves into bone.

Icy cold energy filled Micah’s body as the lengths of wood dissolved, transforming into a corrosive venom that immediately began to liquify the muscle and ligaments surrounding the wound.

A scream of agony died in his throat as Micah’s lungs seized up, a neurotoxin paralyzing him even as his body was eaten alive.

Reality flickered as Temporal Stutter activated.  He was standing in the entryway of the cave once more, cold sweat pouring down his back.

Micah took a faltering step away from the exit, turning back in time to see Jo approaching from behind.  She moved to step past him, intent on getting some fresh air.  Without conscious thought, his hand grabbed her shoulder, stopping her.

“It’s a trap,” he croaked, still struggling to deal with the emotional whiplash of almost dying only to be thrown back a handful of seconds in time.

“What?”  She asked in confusion, double taking once she saw his expression.  “By the Sixteen, Micah, are you all right?”

“After a fashion,” he smiled weakly, “I just experienced the full force of a trap designed to bring down a level forty or fifty blessed by surprise.”

“Then how the fuck are you alive?” Jo asked.  At least she wasn’t trying to get past him anymore.  “Seriously, why didn’t I hear anything?”

“It killed me,” Micah shuddered.  “I just have a spell that lets me undo that.  It’s very mana intensive and I can’t use it that often, but I think today just proved its worth.”

“Honestly?”  She crossed her arms, a playful flicker in her eyes.  “That’s really unfair.  Seriously, how broken are your abilities that you can just ‘get better’ after dying.  That’s some bullshit.”

Micah smiled at her, thankful that Jo was trying to lighten the blow of his brush with death.  Already it wasn’t quite as real, more a terrible memory than a bright and present trauma.

“It has to be Baron Hurden’s ritualist,” he sighed.  “I can’t think of anyone else with the power and ability to put something like that together.”

“Shit,” Jo frowned.  “That means she’s found us.”

“Well,” Micah sighed.  “Not necessarily.  That means she’s found this waypoint.  More importantly, with proper study, a ritualist can trace a teleportation ritual.  That means that the grove is at risk as well.  More importantly-”

“Your family,” Jo spat the words out.  “Shit.  Micah I’m so sorry.”

“We need to get the rest of the team back to the lake,” he winced.  “Hurden’s pet mage might not have unraveled the network yet, but I need to destroy it before she can.  Then?”

He sighed, running a hand through his hair.  Things had been going so smoothly too.

“Then we need to get my family out of Basil’s Cove,” Micah finished grimly.