Dungeon Noble - Squire

The easygoing pace of their journey was broken up a few hours into the second day when Ari abruptly tossed his pack to Karl with orders to keep walking and dashed off into the woods to the side of the road.

They exchanged concerned looks but did as they were told, grouping up a little tighter as they heard a distant roar of anger, one that was followed swiftly by a howl of pain.

Several more roars came from the vague direction that Ari had gone before everything fell silent.

To Jake’s shock, Ari emerged only a few minutes after he’d left, dragging along a boar that would have reached his shoulders when standing. Not that the creature would be doing anything of the like again, as a good portion of its head was simply missing.

“Right, quick lesson time,” Ari said as he waved them over and stopped dragging the corpse. “This beast behind me was a fairly highly ranked Enhanced monster, which is the minimum tier of monster for earning Wyrdgeld outside a Dungeon. Hands up if you know the Skriva?”

Jake shook his head as everyone else nodded, and he flushed, his cheeks colouring as they all looked at him in surprise.

“No worries, you’ll learn more as you go, but I’ll tell you the basics. There are six tiers of monsters. Beast, Enhanced, Awakened, Arcanous, Ancient, Celestial. There may be something beyond Celestial, but pray that you never encounter it.”

“What do the groups mean?” Jake asked, a chill running through him as Ari spoke. Jake had heard some of these terms before, but they had never been laid out quite like this.

The education for the orphans had been what they could seize for themselves, and there were few opportunities to find.

“Each group is a new scale of difficulty, a new threshold for the creatures you fight. A Beast is little more than a stronger, improved version of an animal. Enhanced is more of the same, but to a greater degree, and they gain the ability to damage your soul directly. Awakened are sapient and intelligent. Arcanous brings magic into the mix, and Ancient deepens it, and everything else for that matter. Above them all stands Celestial, the first step to divinity itself.”

“That thing was only at the second tier,” Jake muttered, looking at the huge boar and wondering just how terrifying something of the Celestial tier would be.

“Yep, but that’s enough of that. All of you, come here. Time to learn some practical magic.”

The four of them clustered around the dead Enhanced boar under Ari’s direction, their hands resting on its oddly warm flesh.

“You should feel something within it, something within grasping range. Don’t touch it yet. I want all of you to feel it first.” Ari instructed as he cleaned his sword behind them.

Jake held his hand on the dead beast and stretched out his mind as best he could. At first, he felt nothing, but he began to feel it after a few moments. It was right at the edge of his senses, lurking deep within the creature.

“Wyrdgeld can be stored inside of you until you need it, like so,” Ari said, grey light pooling in his hand to form a blood-red coin that gave off the same fresh smell with an odd iron undertone that Jake remembered.

“Rhew, go ahead and draw out the Wyrdgeld, then show us how much it had,” Ari said, nodding as wisps of grey gathered off the boar and were drawn into Rhew’s outstretched hand.

“How do I….” Rhew muttered, staring at her hand momentarily before a slight smile crept across her features. “Got it, like this.” She turned her hand, a grey glow manifesting as seven red coins formed in her hand.

“Excellent work. Here, take this and add it to the others so you all have two each. An Enhanced beast like this would have up to ten Wyrdgeld if it were at the peak of its power. Let that guide you on what you’ll be fighting to earn the real money.” Ari passed over the coin he’d conjured for an example, letting Rhew pass out the spoils between them all.

“What do we do with the beast now?” Jake asked, instinctively sizing up the boar and wondering how much meat he could get off of it.

“Blaze boar is edible, but I don’t want to spend the time you’d need to butcher it here. The local wildlife will take care of it. The meat would earn you a fair few Wyrdgeld if you could get it to the right person, but we’ve no way to transport it.”

Jake warred with his natural urge to get the most money out of the situation before eventually giving in and leaving the blaze boar corpse to be eaten by scavengers.

As they started off once more, Jake studied the coins in his hand. When he focused on them, he felt the impulse to draw them into him or, failing that, to consume them.

Jake remembered their training and how the instructor had eaten his coin. Apparently, it would replenish his Wyrd and give some general healing effects, but Jake needed neither right now.

Calling up his status, Jake checked his requirements to rank up and sighed in mute despair. It would cost forty Wyrdgeld to get to the next rank, and he had barely a twentieth.

Thinking of the power of that boar, Jake couldn’t even imagine how he would get that much Wyrdgeld. The four of them together could maybe take one of those creatures, but it would be dangerous for sure.

Still, he had a portion of what he needed for the Triarchy. So that was something.

A flicker of reignited hope burnt in Jake’s chest as he shouldered his pack and picked up his pace. If they could get this much money from just killing something, he could scarcely imagine what the Dungeon would give them.

Sure, Ari had done the actual killing, but the principle was sound.

“I can do this. I can make it work,” Jake whispered as he clutched the Wyrdgeld tight and absorbed them back into himself.

Mind full of possibilities and half-baked dreams, Jake barely noticed as the minutes swept by, only perking up when he felt an indistinct tugging sensation pulling him forward. It was an odd feeling, insubstantial and faint enough to feel like he imagined it, but there it was.

Jake perked up and looked around them at where they were, noting that the woods on either side of the path they were following had become much deeper and thicker.

“Okay, everyone, we’re here,” Ari called out as they turned a corner and came into sight of the camp.

What lay before them was a cross between a small village and a trading outpost. There were barely a few dozen buildings of various sizes, and they were all arrayed around a single large stone entrance.

The entrance was set into a small mound and must have stood fifteen to twenty feet high and just short of the same across. Even from this distance, it was an imposing structure. It also seemed to be the origin of that strange tugging sensation that Jake could feel within him.

Intricately carved stone doors blocked the entrance, their surface covered with carved patterns and shapes that flowed into and through each other in a disconcerting way.

It was almost as though the individual shapes didn’t quite match the overall pattern and were different when he focused on one specific area instead of the whole thing.

Shivering a little, Jake’s gaze drifted to the top of the doors, where a series of runes were carved into the stone. He sensed a meaning behind them, but he couldn’t quite understand what it was.

Pulling his mind away from the Dungeon, for what else could it be, Jake’s gaze gravitated to the building that was closest to the entrance. It was a small structure made of what looked like black metal and glass that had been interwoven to create a form of architecture that was as foreign to Jake as the designs on the Dungeon doors.

“Right, come on, it’s still early, so you can get your first run at the Dungeon done today. I’ll get us rooms at a tavern, but we need to head to Ivaldi’s first.” Ari said, waiting impatiently for them to stop gawking.

“Ivaldi’s?” Alan questioned, cocking his head to one side as he looked to Ari for an explanation.

“It’s a store mixed with a bank. You’ll understand when we go in. There’s one at every Dungeon, and they’re key to making it in the business, so don’t piss off Ivaldi whatever you do, understood?” Ari gave them each a severe look that was unusual to see on the easygoing Classer’s face.

“Understood, but you don’t mean every Dungeon, just the ones in Strovia, right?” Alan asked, his brow furrowing as Ari simply shook his head with a chuckle.

Jake listened in, but his attention was caught on several dozen Classers who were wandering around the impromptu Dungeon row.

The gear on display varied enormously between them, and Jake saw everything from suits of heavy armour to magical staves that seemed to glow in their owner’s hands.

“Busy this year, but I suppose that’s to be expected this close to Port Emerald,” Ari remarked absently as he led them toward the building of metal and glass that Jake had seen earlier.

Ari’s comment made Jake look at the groups of Classers afresh. Years of watching the flow of people in the city helped Jake pick out those who knew where they were going and those who were following, much like they followed Ari.

Looking again, Jake realised there weren’t that many people moving with purpose, and each had a sense of solidity and strength to them, much like Ari did. Channelling his Wyrd to his eyes, Jake saw that he was right. The majority of the Classers were freshly Ascended.

Bright and shining souls with power similar to Ari were scattered here and there, but they were thin on the ground.

Jake sighed silently as he compared what he had to what was displayed around him. Even in this new world of Classers and Dungeons, he was at a disadvantage, but he wouldn’t let that stop him.

Since the day he’d first managed to slip out of the orphanage and explore the city, Jake had learnt that he had to work hard for what he wanted. This would be no different.

One look at the plump and well-fed faces of many of the Classers around him told Jake that they hadn’t known much hardship.

Of course, that wasn’t true for all of them. Jake grudgingly admitted that some of them looked tough, even by his standards.

“Right, here we are, in you all go,” Ari said as they approached the strange building. Ari seemed oddly tense as they came closer, making Jake wonder who or what this Ivaldi was.

Up close, the odd architecture was even more striking to Jake. He’d seen his fair share of old or odd buildings and had to judge them quickly to know what was sturdy and what wasn’t, but this was unlike any he’d seen.

As far as Jake could tell, the whole building’s structure was made of metal, forming something like the outline of an ordinary townhouse. The expense alone would be ruinous unless the builder had a Class that allowed them to work with metal.

Dark-tinted glass flowed organically back and forth between the solid pillars of the metal framework, moving in a sinuous curve around the framework. The whole thing was a strange design with a lesser version of the odd visual effect on the Dungeon entrance.

The front door to the building was a single plane of glass with metallic fixings and a shaped depression where a metal handle sat. The metal flowed into and bonded with the glass seamlessly.

Something about the odd design made Jake pause and look uncertainly back at the others, but Ari carried on past him and grabbed the metal handle, pushing the door open and stepping inside without hesitation. Karl, Rhew and Alan filed in after their instructor, each staring at the unusual building as they went inside.