The Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, the busiest in all of the Cascadia Region, saw thousands of travellers come and go everyday, each one with their own stories and lifestyles. And yet, one could also confidently say that today it would see its three most unique pilgrims in a while.
Set to board the first Seattle-Boston flight of the day, which left at 9 in the morning (They’d had to wake up at 5 to make it to the airport), our brave questers were the very image of a heroic party: Eyes puffy and half-lidded, yawning and being nagged by a girl not even old enough to drink.
"You still got the provision of funds,right?You didn’t lose it?"
"Still got it."
"Got your Glamour amulets for your weapons? They won’t let you board if they can see them!"
"Got them here."
"Got enough spare socks?"
Conrad muttered something which seemed to contain the words ‘socks’ and ‘strangle‘.
Inspiring.
"Okay Blair, that’s enough. They’re going to be late." Said Mr. Anderson while placing a hand on Blair's shoulder.
"Okay..."; She said."You guys be careful. Good luck."
"Don‘t worry Blair!" Chirped Mila."We’re gonna be just fine."
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"We have to get down this plane!" Mila squeaked. She was sitting rigidly on her seat, hugging herself tightly.
"Now?!" Asked Conrad. "We took of ten minutes ago! We’re 35,000 feet above sea level! Look!" He said, pointing at the the porthole.
"You shut up!" Snapped Kurt. He turned to the girl, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Mila, what’s wrong? Are you scared of flying?"
"Not…not that." She said. "I’ve never been…this far from it."
" ‘It’?" Questioned Conrad.
"Nature." She answered. "Plants, animals, fungi… heck, bacteria! Even in a city there are tons of life around, but here is just… nothing, no life but the passengers. It’s unnatural."
"I see…" Said Kurt. "I’m sorry but… we’re already up here so please bear with it for a little while, okay? Just ‘til we land."
Above their heads the intercom buzzed to life. "Ladies and gentlemen,good morning. This is Captain Williams welcoming you to Flight 573 with destination Boston. Our flight time is of 5 hours, and we anticipate an arrival time of 14:00."
A squeaky sound came from Mila’s throat, and she hugged Kurt like he was a teddy bear.
That hug lasted, save for two bathroom breaks, for the entirety of the flight. And almost all the way out the terminal until they reached a cab.
"To Franklin Park, please." Requested Conrad to the cab driver, who started the engine and began driving.
"How are you feeling now, Mila?" Asked Kurt.
"Better now." She answered. "Still a little under the weather."
"Don’t worry; we’re going to the park now." he said.
The plan was simple. Start the quest in Franklin Park—the largest mass of nature in the city—where Mila was to ask the local spirits about the Aura of Red and, based on their directions, try and follow the trail left behind by the warlocks, with as many spirit inquiries as necessary until Conrad could feel the pull of the artifact and direct them towards its exact location.
"It’s just," said Mila. "There’s something that feels ... wrong with the plants."
"They look sick, right?" Interjected the cab driver. "Some plague or something has been ravaging the city lately. All plants are either sick or dying, and no one knows why."
"Oh no," gasped Mila. "That’s terrible. No wonder they feel so weak...
"Hm, ‘feel’?" said the man, before shrugging. "Well, whatever. I'm sorry you boys are stuck seeing the city when it’s like this. Can only hope things start getting better before it’s too late for them."
The rest of the travel was spent in silence, and, after a short while, the cab dropped them at one of the park's entrances. Conrad paid the driver, and the three of them entered the premises.
Just as the cab driver had said, the plants weren’t looking their best. Sick and gangly, with yellowing leaves and dark spots all around the bark in the trees. The grass was colored a bright yellow, and so dry it crunched when they stepped on it. Mila's powers worked best the deeper into nature she was, and so they traversed to the most secluded spot in the park they could find, right under the shadow of a great oak.
Mila stepped ahead and placed both hands on the oak's trunk, as if to support herself.
"Have you ever seen her do this communion thing?" Asked Conrad. Both he and Kurt were standing aside while Mila began her ritual.
"A couple of times." said the other boy. "Not that it’s particularly impressive. A shiny-looking mist will come out of the tree; she’ll ‘talk’ to it and get the information we want. Even if the tree’s sick, the spirits should be fine. Maybe a bit lethargic, but nothing important." said the other boy.
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Just as he said, a mist shining a sickly yellow poured out of the tree. For a moment everything seemed fine, and Mila tried to communicate with the spirits within it. Then, all hell broke loose.
The cloud remained still for a moment, but after a few seconds it began to contract with a sound like the churning of minced meat. Then it blasted outwards, too fast for them to react to, throwing Mila back a few feet. The oak bloated, sections of its bark rotting and liquifying in an instant.
"Mila!" Screamed Kurt, darting towards the girl before helping her sit up."Are you okay?What happened?"
"I’m fine," she said, voice hoarse. "The spirits... something was mixed with them. Something deeply evil."
"We’ve got bigger problems." said Conrad, hand drawn to his sword. The sound of creaking wood could be heard all around them."I think those spirits have already found some new bodies to inhabit."
The creatures came from all angles around the oak, numbering a total of ten. Their outlines, humanoid and gangly, were encased in petrified wood, and rotten, black pulp formed their flesh, oozing from the cracks in their stony hides.
Rotten Dryad
LV: 9
Conrad unsheathed his sword, a light saber with a blade of clean white metal. Kurt followed his example, drawing out his own blade, which shimmered with the same white.
Silver Demon
Quality: Rare
A longsword cast from mithril, crafted by its own wielder, Kurt Celik. While the quality of the work is unremarkable, if definitely functional, it is still sharper and stronger than any steel blade while also being quite light for a sword its size. Deals extra damage to demons, undead and similar creatures thanks to the cleansing properties of mithril.
The sword had the length and shape of a longsword, but its blade was somewhat thinner than usual for a sword of its type, with a t-shaped guard. The materials to make it he had gotten just a year prior from a very successful wight extermination he had spearheaded, and he had forged them himself into a sword.
With Od flaring across his body, he stabbed this precious sword into the gut of the closest enemy. Its ‘flesh’ sizzled in contact with the blade, but the thing refused to die, its arms still flailing towards him. The boy tried to retrieve his sword from the monster's gut, but he only succeeded in bringing the creature closer. Its insides were too sticky, its body too light. It was like stabbing a piece of chewed gum.
Two dryads dashed towards him from opposite directions, perhaps thinking him vulnerable, pincer hands raised in a zombie-like fashion. Undeterred, the young warrior raised his sword, alongside the thrall still impaled on it, and brought them down on the thrall to his left like a warhammer. Both dryads collided against one another with the force of a car crash, exploding in a rain of black ooze and wooden shrapnel. Now unweighted, the boy planted both feet firmly and twisted his hips and torso to his right, elbow thrown like a ram towards the third one's head, ripping it clean off its body, which collapsed in a lifeless pile of twigs and slime.
You have leveled up *1* time. HP, SP, and STM restored to 100%!
LV: 3 --> 4
All stats up by *1* point.
STR: 16
VIT:19
DEX: 25
MND: 20
SPT: 11
On the other front of the battle, Conrad faced two creatures. Perhaps having seen how impractical blades were against them, the blond warrior sheathed his sword back, deciding to face the threat with his bare hands. Blue lightning covered his fists, which shot forward in two quick jabs, one for each dryad. Their heads shot back, and the wood covering them cracked at multiple places, but they remained both whole and attached to their bodies. Conrad did not like this.
Letting his aura envelop the whole of his body, the warrior pivoted on his right leg, throwing his left in a roundhouse kick at the dryads. It went cleanly through the head of the first one, but it stopped at the second's, his foot embedded in the thing's skull. For a moment the creature seemed to struggle, twitching and weakly flailing its arms, but it finally collapsed.
The last five creatures darted away from both swordsmen, poised for Mila. Neither tried to stop them. It wasn’t necessary.
The girl in question stood still, face screwed in concentration. The monsters approached. Her eyes opened, green energy leaking from them. A massive root emerged from the ground, enveloped in that same energy, and swatted away all five monsters like a massive flail, breaking and cleansing their form at once, before burrowing back into the earth.
"What the hell has gotten in these trees?!" Exclaimed Kurt.
"I—I don’t know." Mumbled Mila, looking exhausted."It’s my first time experiencing anything like this."
"Whatever it may be, we shouldn’t try and face it in unknown terrain." Reasoned Conrad."Let’s get out of ..."
A booming sound, both cracking and wet like the snapping of a bone, hit the group from behind. They turned their heads.
...
"Good God." Gasped Kurt.
Putrid Demon Oak
LV:31
The oak that Mila had tried to commune with was, for a certain definition of it, still very alive.
Its rotten, liquified bark now pulsated with unholy life, bright yellow veins scattering through its body. Three deep gashes had opened near the top of its trunk, with flaming yellow orbs flaring from within them in the resemblance of eyes, glaring at them. Its roots had blasted from the ground-that having been the sound that alerted the group to its presence in the first place- and were now crawling through the ground like tentacles, slowly but surely dragging the oak forward. And finally, its branches had all merged together into two lean arms that ended in equally thin, human-like hands.
"Mila." said Kurt, tone serious beyond measure."Get behind us and prepare another attack like the last one. As big as you can make it."
Wordlessly obeying, the girl skittered behind both swordsmen, who kept their position, swords now unsheathed and raised at the monster. Huge and resistant, its actual strength mattered little simply because neither of them had the firepower to bring it down. Their best bet would be Mila's purification and chloromancy. If that failed…
We have to kill this thing, thought Kurt, steeling himself. We must distract it until Mila can launch her attack. If this thing gets on the loose because of us…
"WATCH OUT!!!" screamed someone. And then, before they could turn, a spear of fire taller than a man flew over their heads and stabbed into the oak's central eye before exploding. A wall of heat and force hit them even at the distance they were from the tree, which was now covered in crimson flames. And yet…
That thing was still alive. The three gashes on its head had been blown away, leaving a great, singular gash from which a yellow flame pulsated, but its thin arms and tentacle-like roots were still flailing towards them, as if their master wasn’t on fire.
Reacting faster than anyone else, Kurt held his sword like a javelin and threw it at the demon tree's remaining ‘eye’ with all of his Pneuma-boosted might. The blade drew an arc through the air before hitting the yellow flame.
For a second, sword and flame seemed to push against one another. Only a second, though, because that was as long as it took for the flame to sputter away, finally purged by the might of the mithril blade, which fell to the floor unharmed. Finally freed from the unholy presence, the oak collapsed in a pile of white ashes. A clean green mist emanated from the pile, before dissolving silently into the air.
You have leveled up *5* times. HP, SP, and STM restored to 100%!
LV: 4 --> 9
All stats up by *5* points.
STR: 21
VIT: 24
DEX: 30
MND: 25
SPT:16
Oh, did that one count? Even if he had been the one to deliver the final blow...
"Hey!" Called a voice. The same one from before."Are you kids alright? What the hell were you doing in the middle of ...?". The man took a look at them. It was all it took for him to realize they were not civilians. Swords and magic auras usually did a good job at that.
But they also looked at him, and also recognized him for what he was.
He was a tall and fairly broad-shouldered man. His eyebrows were rather thick, and his dark hair was styled in a buzzcut. But what the three of them truly centered their gazes on was the wooden staff the man was carrying, whose top was smoking like the barrel of a freshly fired gun, and the symbol engraved on it.
A hexagram formed by two overlapping triangles, delimited by a circle. And between the edges of each triangle, a singular point, six of them in total. A Star of Solomon.
Kurt looked at the screen above the man's head.
Sorcerer of the Solomonic Order
Edward Galton
LV:47
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The Solomonic Order of the Seven Seals, or just the Solomonic Order for short, was the world’s largest sorcerous order, with a presence all around the globe. Despite being one of the world's most important and prestigious orders of protectors, the organization was rather infamously undermaned. Just a natural consequence of its vast reach and the relative scarcity of sorcerers who, even though capable of producing offspring as any other human, didn’t pass their gift all the time they did.
It is because of this that the order only deployed their agents for the biggest, most pressing threats, leaving anything below their scope to the smaller, more local orders, such as The Order of Myra.
"Order of Myra, you say?" asked Edward while stroking his chin. "Can’t say I've ever heard of them, sorry."
"Of course you wouldn't." said Conrad, glowering at the new arrival. "Not important enough for…"
"Don’t worry," said Kurt while cleaning off the rotten wood and cinder from his sword. "We are a rather small order."
The four of them were sitting in a circle, on roots Mila had raised for that purpose, still surrounded by the broken bodies of the thralls.
"We are on a quest to retrieve a certain artifact charged with nature-aligned magic, but when our tracker," said Kurt, pointing at Mila. "tried asking the local spirits about it… well, you know."
They all looked at the pile of ashes that the oak had been. Mila lowered her gaze, face twisted by the guilt.
"It’s my fault." She muttered. "If I hadn't tried to call forth the spirits in that oak…"
"Mila," interrupted Kurt. "You had no way of knowing this would happen. This whole situation was beyond our hands."
"I shouldn’t have risked it! Those poor spirits… going through that pain and horror…"
"Little miss," interjected the sorcerer. "Let me tell you that what just happened, on top of not being your fault, was bound to happen sooner or later. In fact, that’s why I am here."
"And why are you here?" Asked Kurt. "Exactly what is causing all this?"
Galton looked at the boy for a long moment, pondering. Finally, after a tense silence, he uttered just three words.
"Come with me. I'll show you."
