“Konrád, tell my listeners what life is like at the top!”
“Well, that’s very fucking noble, Mr. Kalmár! Surely there’s more to it than that! I mean, don’t tell anyone, but I snuck into your parties before! Shit is going when you’re having a good time!”
(prolonged silence)
“Secret DJ Skillz, baby! You can’t expect to get rid of just by throwing me out once or twice! Now, next question…”
- DJ Demophon Kerner, with guest Konrád Kalmár on K-RAD LA, April 5th, System Year 453
The landscape we were passing through wasn’t that different from the area closer to Sunland. Rocky, hard dirt in places, with some sandier areas. We were still bracketed by the huge Angel’s Spine mountains further to the north, and the smaller but closer Shadow Hills to the south. Though it seemed the Shadow Hills were getting less imposing the further east we went. There were occasional shrub brushes, and many varieties of cactus.
Traces of the ancient cities still littered the area, mounds scattered here and there. Some of them had bits and pieces of obviously man-made objects sticking out – sharp corners of stone, usually. Others just looked like piles of dirt, though I was sure if I went digging through them I’d find more debris. I tried to ignore them, because thinking too much about what things had been like before the Wasted War was fucking depressing.
At one point, Hassan dropped by to guide the four of us a hundred yards or so to the north of the road, where he stopped and pointed out one particularly lush, green cactus about the size of a small barrel. It had thick, broad leaves with only a few dull-looking spines, spread out over an area maybe six feet across.
“Identify this plant,” he instructed us, and we all complied.
Plant: Succulent Cactus
Level: 9Stolen from RoyalRoad. Support AzureInk by reading the original.
“It sounds quite innocent, perhaps even tasty, doesn’t it? Certainly looks lush and full of water. Does the name appear as Succulent Cactus to all of you?” We each nodded in turn, and he continued. “Its real name is Fool’s Rest. It’s actually a monster with a deceptive status – your Identify Skills are too low Level to detect the lie yet. Animals and small monsters think it's a good source of water and try to eat it.”
He reached out and lifted up the leaves with the training sword I used when sparring. Under the shade of the leaves there was a dried out corpse, some kind of small animal from the looks of it. It was mostly bone, and thin dark roots had grown up through the remains.
“It does, in fact, have quite a bit of water in it. But its sap is actually a potent stamina poison, which can knock out even something as large as a person quite easily at your Levels. Once the creature has nibbled on it and passes out, the roots come up and pierce into the unconscious victim. It sucks the blood right out, killing it, and eventually digests the flesh and even the bones as well. This particular one is medium-sized, they can grow quite a lot larger.”
I stared at the plant monster in fascination, wondering how such a thing was possible. A plant that had deceptive abilities? Was that the same thing as lying on your public profile?
Elin interrupted my train of thought by asking eagerly, “Should we kill it?”
“It’s a waste of time, they’re quite hard to kill. Plants are like that, you sometimes have to rip up the roots completely, burn them out, or poison them – and after you go through all the work, the Essence is usually pretty shit.”
I frowned. “The treants weren’t hard to kill, and they gave us a good amount of Essence.”
“Treants are monsters pretending to be plants. This is a plant that just happens to eat meat. Regardless, I brought you out here to help make sure you understand why it’s dangerous to try and live off the land, and show you first-hand that you can’t rely on Identify to tell you if something is safe to approach or eat. Unless you’ve got a knowledgeable guide, pack your food and water with you. You can supplement with meat from kills of monsters you’re familiar with and that you know are safe to eat – at least, around here, in the wilds.”
“The wilds?” Raylan asked for the rest of us.
“When you visit Lost Angels, you’ll find plenty of people there that have never been outside the city walls, or if they have, not more than a few miles or so. Lots of them like to call everything outside the immediate area the Wastes.” He snorted derisively.
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“Never fall for that line of bullshit. The Wastes – out past Fort Delta – it’s like comparing your sparring bouts to what Mason showed us last night. You can hardly find anything dangerous than a Fool’s Rest out there. A plant monster in the Waste would never survive letting a predator get that close to it. They’ll poison you a hundred feet away with the sweet scent of their flowers, shoot out spikes to impale you from twice that far, or send their roots out questing underground, ready to strangle you when you sleep. Or all three.”
I shivered at the grim description. I wasn’t sure if it was 90% fear and 10% excitement, or maybe… 80% fear and 20% excitement?
Hassan led us back to the group, switching to Comms to continue his spur-of-the-moment lecture.
Mason somehow managed to sigh over the Comms, which I hadn’t even realized was possible.
As we rejoined the small column, I considered what Hassan had said. It might not have been a planned speech, but what he had said resonated with me in a way that took me a while to figure out. He’d called the Army and contrasted that with the Delvers.
I smiled to myself at the made-up word, but there was clearly a connection to my Aspect that seemed to with me, somehow. I wondered if there was a link to the fact that, as far as I could remember, I’d never settled on just what Class I’d really wanted the most. I’d spent the most time training with a sword, for sure. But a big part of that was just that it was a common weapon and better-suited to my thinner build and relative lack of muscle than something heavier.
If I’d been stronger, I’m quite sure I would have varied it up more, with battle-axes and warhammers also having always appealed to me. Who didn’t want to occasionally just smash the shit out of something – or someone – that annoyed you? I’d also practiced my Cantrips a ton, and could cast them faster than many of the other kids. Even if they were fairly boring they were still , and magic was awesome.
I’d even liked shooting bows and crossbows, though you couldn’t really spar with them. To me that took a lot of the fun out of it. The same was true of the pistol I’d had, though in that case my skepticism had clearly been influenced by the idea that it was a weapon for , not real fighters. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder what someone with a pistol-related Class could do with one.
Either way, I’d somehow ended up with a weapon that I’d never even heard of before the Tutorial. And I had to admit that I loved it now, my attitude towards guns having completely flipped in the course of just a few days. Totally insane days full of near-death experiences, but still.
My musings were interrupted as we started to climb a steeper hill than most we’d passed so far. The sun was behind us now, and we were approaching mid-afternoon. I was sweltering in my armor and wishing I had a better thermal regulation mod to take the edge off of the heat. As we crested the rise, I saw the land spreading out before me and slowed to take in the view.
Ahead of us a canyon sliced across the land like a scar. It ran all the way from the Angel’s Spine in the north, through the valley, and continued on south past what I realized had to be the east end of the Shadow Hills. It was wide and deep, deep enough that from where we were I couldn’t see the bottom. The only way I could see to cross it was a massive bridge at the end of the path ahead.
The bridge was much lighter in color than the patch of remnant road we’d passed outside Sunland, much closer to white than black, but everything about it looked flawless. It was huge, to start with, wide enough for many wagons to cross at the same time. It stretched on for what looked to me like a good part of a mile, standing on thick columns of light-colored stone. The white and yellow lines on the top shimmered slightly from the heat radiating off of it in the intense afternoon sun. It was obviously a remnant.
On the far side of the bridge, I saw the walls of what had to be East Bank. They completely blocked off the east side of the bridge, then extended several times the width of the bridge to both the north and the south. If I was judging the distance correctly, the walls were significantly higher than Sunland’s.
have read all of and heartily recommend it, so I'm sure The Undermines is going to be excellent as well. It's fun to be able to exchange shouts with an author whose books I read well before I even had the idea that became Azure: Gunner!