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Duskbound 2- Chapter 16
🕑 Added 2025-01-27 13:57:16 +0000 UTCThe bed was lumpy and it stank, which was actually kind of amazing when Aria thought about it. The whole damn village reeked with that particular rotting odor unique to swamps. Despite that, they’d somehow scrounged up the audacity to provide paying customers with a mattress that smelled so distinctively foul from the air she was forced to breathe in that she hesitated to even sit on it.
Please let that boy find that hydra right away, she silently prayed, casting that thought off to whatever god was listening.
Torwin had assured her that the new recruit was strong enough to be a gold-ranked monster hunter, and they’d both predicted that the guild would find some way to try to use that to her advantage. She hadn’t expected to be handling this all on her own, but Torwin had been sent off within a week of arriving, and the assignment they’d stuck him with was every bit as tedious as he’d expected it to be. It was the kind of work a good team of silvers could have handled, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was being punished for his apprentice not gaining the right class.
Twenty years ago, when she’d been a fresh-faced teenager just beginning to explore the power her own [Star Fated Conjurer] class had granted her, the guild hadn’t been like this. It had stood for something back then, back before the reforms started flowing out from the main headquarters in Ashala. The senior members of the guild had been given two choices: get on board or get out of the way. Those that had tried to fight had found themselves isolated, unsupported, and given the most dangerous missions.
It broke her heart to see how the guild behaved today, to know that they were going out of their way to drive off fresh talent with no care for what it would cost the people of Ghestal, all so that they could play their stupid games. And it was absolutely infuriating that she was stuck playing those games, too.
All that having been said, Torwin had better have been right about how good a hunter Velik was, because Aria was not planning to linger in Eldmyrk a single second longer than she had to. She’d agreed to get herself placed on the list of examiners to protect Velik from the guild’s machinations when they forced the gold-ranked examination on him, but she hadn’t expected to be sent out to the Harclovi Swamps as part of the deal.
With one more distasteful glance at the bed—was that a bug that just crawled out of the sheet?—she settled into a cross-legged position and began channeling the power of [Horizon Seer]. The skill was an amalgamation of various scrying magics, limited primarily by how much mana it took to maintain it. As Aria was completely fresh from napping through the long carriage ride, she was more than capable of spying on her charge for a few hours.
It was the work of minutes to find him, roughly twenty miles deep into the swamp already. Considering it had been less than two hours since he’d set out, she was mildly impressed. The number of dead monsters he’d left in his wake, however, was downright disturbing. Apparently, the locals weren’t concerned with thinning out the local monster populations. Maybe that’s how a hydra managed to grow to be such a problem in the first place.
She watched him get ambushed by an absolutely massive reptile and briefly wondered if she’d be forced to intervene, but Velik surfaced a few seconds later and murdered the monster with extreme prejudice. There was a line of puncture marks from its teeth across his stomach, but it didn’t seem to slow him down. He eyed up the gator for a moment after it died, then shrugged and kept walking.
He’s confident in himself. I know that thing caught him by surprise, but he’s showing no hesitation wading back into the water. Not worried about infections, either. He didn’t even bother to clean up the bite mark. I bet his physical is over 100 already.
Over the next hour, Velik pushed deeper and deeper into the swamp. He kept to dry land when he could, but didn’t shy away from going swimming when he didn’t have any other way forward. All manner of swamp critters were stupid enough to attack him, and he was merciless in dealing with them. Nothing was strong enough to offer him a challenge, but then, the main danger of the swamps had always been in navigating it.
She’d thought him stupid to set off with over half the day’s light already wasted, but hadn’t bothered to try to talk him out of it. As afternoon turned into evening, he showed no signs of slowing down, making her wonder what exactly his skill set was that he was so comfortable working alone after dark. Nobody was required to reveal their status or build to the guild, thankfully. That was one change at least that everybody had rejected.
Still, it left her curious enough that as her mana started to dry up, she shifted into a cycle of [Cosmic Meditation] and [Horizon Seer] to keep spying on him. Eventually, the sun vanished and her charge was left with nothing but the faint light of a quarter-moon to see by. Far from her expectations, he didn’t slow down. If anything, he started moving even faster.
His course took him to the heart of the swamps, a decent place to start his search, and then he started moving outward in a spiral pattern until he finally came across what he was looking for: hydra tracks. Hydras were amphibious, with short, powerful legs ending in webbed feet, which meant that their bellies tended to drag across the ground when they were on land. The rut this one had carved through the mud was so obvious, a blind man could have followed it.
Good. Perfect. Find this thing and kill it. We’ll be back home without me ever having to touch that disgusting mattress, she thought to herself as she watched.
It wasn’t that easy, unfortunately. So far from the edges, the swamp was more disgusting, fetid lakes of brackish black water than it was dry land. Velik was persistent, however, and more than capable of scaling a few trees growing around the edges of the water. He followed the hydra’s trail as it went in one lake and out the other, circling around each one until he’d picked it back up again.
Finally, he came to a stretch of water a quarter mile wide. The trail went cold there, despite circling the whole lake multiple times. Aria watched through her magic as Velik stood at the edge of the water and stared into it. It was easy to picture what he was thinking. The reason he couldn’t find the hydra’s trail was that he’d come to the end of it. It was likely submerged in the middle of the lake somewhere, perhaps sleeping. Or maybe it was watching him, waiting for him to step into the water where it would have the advantage when it attacked.
Don’t be that stupid. I know I said I wanted this over as quickly as possible, but do not chase a gods-cursed hydra underwater and fight it there. Just be patient. It’ll come out eventually to scrounge for food.
Of course, however talented Velik might have been, he was still a relatively inexperienced hunter. After pulling some trinket out of his pocket and staring at it for a few minutes while he paced back and forth around the edge of the water, he sighed, summoned that curious spear of his off his arm, and waded in.
Damn it. Now I have to go save his dumb ass.
*
Velik was… annoyed. He’d kind of been expecting it to come to this, but he’d been really hoping to catch the hydra out on the hunt. Instead, he’d found its lair. It had only been dark for a few hours, but given the famous regenerative powers of the monster he was hunting, he wanted as much time as possible to slowly wear it down. If it decided to just wait him out, he might be stuck facing it without the benefits of [Duskbound] to help.
He had two possible ideas for baiting the hydra out. The first was to draw its attention with a lot of noise and maybe some monster corpses to play to its appetite. The problem there was that hydras didn’t actually eat all that much for creatures their size and they were prone to hibernating at odd times. He didn’t think this one was going to be down for a long time, not with how fresh its tracks were, but it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days of waiting for it to show itself.
Or he could swim down there and jab it with his spear. That’d piss it off, but that strategy came with the downside of having to find a way to get back out of the water. Well, with [Burden of the Beast] helping him to slow the hydra down, he was sure he could manage something.
This thing is definitely going to bite me at least once or twice, though. Stupid hydra. Stupid monster hunters guild. Stupid Aria.
With a sigh, he willed his spear to slide down his arm and extend to its full length, then he waded into the water. Somewhere just off center of the middle of the lake, a sleeping monster was waiting for him.
Comments
musashi
Sounds like the guild needs a decap strike.
Tom C
Hahaha Aria is gonna arrive to him sitting on a dead hydra and she won’t have any idea how it happened… Or she’ll arrive in time to see him wreck it. Or he gets his ass whooped and she saves him. But I’m confident our boy has the skills to ruin that Hydra’s day! TFTC
Maurice Jenter
Great chapter! I am hyped for the next one
