Frostbitten Wayfarer

Zoe arrived at Ren’s place and knocked on the door. Ren opened the door, let her in and then returned to his room.

On the floor by the couch she had sat at were all of the pieces that Zoe was charging the previous day, exactly as she left them. Zoe sat down at the couch and continued charging the rest of the limbs. She had done five the previous day and there were four more, plus the black sphere. She wasn’t sure how much mana the sphere would take, but planned to leave it for last.

Chloe came in a few hours after Zoe and said hello. Zoe wondered if she could ever join them in what she was dubbing Ren’s workshop. Get a little more hands on with the work, see what people actually did with enchantments when they knew what they were doing. It was something that she quite enjoyed and wanted to pursue more, but had no real idea of where to start.

The library could teach her a lot if she spent some time there but Zoe suspected the main issue wasn’t with understanding the process better. It was predominantly with acquiring the resources necessary to actually enchant things properly.

Though, perhaps she would spend some time at the library doing some research anyway. Maybe she could learn about more complicated enchantments that utilized multiple skills of hers, if that was even a thing that could happen. The more she thought about it, the more confident she was that it could be done. But she still had no idea exactly what to do.

Was it just the difference of materials that she was enchanting? Or was she missing something more fundamental. She wasn’t sure, but getting some hands on experience with Ren and Chloe would help her a lot, and she asked Chloe if she would ever be able to join them in the workshop.

Chloe just laughed and closed the door to the workshop behind her. Zoe wasn’t sure what that meant. Was a laugh good? Did that mean that Ren was talking about her coming over and helping out in the workshop? Did it mean that the idea of it was so preposterous that she couldn’t help but laugh at it?

Zoe supposed it didn’t really matter, not much anyway. It would be nice if she could get some more experience with it, but she could research on her own too. She was immortal, she had plenty of time to figure out how to make an enchantment that stayed for more than a few days.

She finished charging the rest of the limbs and then moved on to the orb. While she was charging the limbs, she had some sense of how full they were. The mana that she pushed into them compressed and filled the space, and Zoe could feel her progress as she went.

But with the black sphere, as soon as she pushed her mana into it, the mana may as well have disappeared. She couldn’t feel anything inside the sphere, no swirling energies, no pressure that pushed back as she probed around. Just an empty void of nothingness.

Zoe tried to identify it, but that didn’t show anything either. There was no way for her to tell how much progress she had made, or if she was even making any progress at all. She decided to just spend the three and a half hours it would take to pump thirty thousand mana into it and then call it good.

By the end, she thought that the empty void felt a little less empty, but she wasn’t sure if that was her mind playing tricks on her or if what she had done really had any effect. She grabbed the silver coins Ren had left on the table for her again and then made her way back to Joe’s inn.

It was early in the morning when she arrived, and she wasn’t sure if she’d wake up in time for her plans with Emma if she went to sleep. So instead she sat in the lobby and enchanted her coins. One thing she was very interested in but didn’t feel ready for yet was enchanting things with her new skills.

At least not until she had a good understanding of what they did and how they worked. Enchanting with the powerful skills she had without even understanding at least a little better what they were supposed to do felt like a bad idea.

The sun began to rise and approach noon, so Zoe got up and made her way over to Emma’s house.

“Hey! You’re early!” Emma smiled at her when she opened the door.

“Yeah, well I figured you wouldn’t be busy. Chill for a bit until it’s time to go?" Zoe asked.

“Heck yeah! I was just about to make lunch, you want some?” Emma walked inside and headed upstairs.

Zoe followed her up to the kitchen. “Sure.”

Emma had a table and some comfortable wooden chairs with red cushions set up, and Zoe sat down at one of them. Oliver flopped on the floor next to Emma as she cooked.

She had a big bowl of leafy greens that she tossed some croutons into and then juiced an ifosa over it all. She split up the salad into two bowls and gave one to Zoe.

“You like ifosa?” Emma asked.

“Love them!” Zoe said and dug into her salad.

The salad had a slight kick to it from some peppery green that Emma was using. The croutons were crunchy and savoury, toasted with some flavourful fat that Emma must have had. And the ifosa juice gave it all a nice acidic backing that Zoe found quite pleasant. It wasn’t the best salad dressing but it was simple and Zoe couldn’t complain.

“So what’s the plan for today anyway? West gate you said?” Zoe asked as she munched on the salad.

“Mhm. In a few hours, anyway. It’s a bit of a walk so we’ll leave in an hour?” Emma asked between bites.

Zoe nodded her head.

“Okay. We’re going for boars today. Last time we were out we saw a bunch of tracks a few hours away, so we want to get out there just before nightfall and see if we can’t get a nice haul tonight.” Emma said.

“Okay. I can definitely help out with that then, awesome.” Zoe said.

“Yeah, your eyes will be a big help. Claudia has her glasses, but they’re not super great. I don’t even know how she sees with them if I’m being honest.” Emma shook her head.

“Guess you get used to it after a while. They looked weird for me when I tried them too.” Zoe said.

Claudia was one of Emma’s hunting group, and she had thick black glasses that usually hung around her neck. They were supposed to make things brighter, but at least in Zoe’s case they made it almost impossible to see, like she was staring at a blank white paper that might have shadows behind it if she really squinted.

Claudia seemed to thrive with them though, and would point out things that nobody but Zoe would have been able to notice whenever they hunted at night.

“The snow should help too, it won’t be too dark out there at least.” Zoe said.

“Yeah. I just hope we can find this group and get back home so little ollie bollie doesn’t have to stay alone for too long.” Emma reached down and pet Oliver’s belly.

Zoe and Emma sat for another hour as they ate their salad and cleaned up their dishes, and then left to meet the rest of the group at the western gate. Julie was already there, her short, spiked blue hair stood out among the crowd.

Fred was next to show up. He was a taller fellow with short brown hair and a soft looking face. And then finally Claudia arrived. Thick black glasses hung from a cord around her neck, and her blonde hair was tied up in a messy bun.

“Alright, shall we get going then?” Fred asked the group.

Everybody else nodded, and Fred led them through the gates and down the road. Where they were headed was a few hours journey as Emma had mentioned, so they set up some markers a ways down the main road that would help them get back to where they wanted to be.

Zoe cast haste on the group, and they jogged down the road at quite a brisk pace. When they got to the end of the markers, Fred took a step back and gestured to Zoe.

Zoe checked around them and saw a derth of untouched ground. Everywhere she looked were signs of boars. Footsteps, dug up ground, trees missing most of their bark and almost all of the snow trampled and crushed beneath the boars’ heavy hooves. A whole pack of boars must have stopped by here to feed, for whatever reason.

“I can’t count. Maybe thirty? Forty?” Zoe said.

Fred nodded. “That’s a good number. Lets get as many as we can.”

It took Zoe a while to get used to the hunting practices here. She didn’t spend a lot of time hunting when she was back home, but she remembered there being regulations and rules about which animals could be hunted and how many of them per person.

In Flester, there was none of that. You could just go hunting and bring back as many boars as you wanted. If you found thirty, and killed thirty, then you did an excellent job. It was that simple.

Zoe had asked Emma about it at one point. She laughed and said she’d never even heard of anything like that. If you found a boar, why wouldn’t you hunt it? You got food and there was one less boar to go harass unsuspecting people.

Maybe there just weren’t enough people to drive the animals to extinction? But they had classes that helped them far exceed what normal people could do too so it would even out, Zoe thought. Just today they were going to try and get thirty boars if they could manage it, as a group of five.

The rest of the group nodded their heads, and Zoe started leading the way down the tracks she could see. The tracks split off a few times as some of the boars wandered into the forest, but most of them returned and continued on the main path that Zoe could see. Thankfully, they were already heading upwind so they should have the upper hand.

Zoe continued on until she noticed the smell of the boars drifting past her with each gust of wind. “I smell them.”

“How far?" Emma asked.

“I can’t smell distance. But they’re close enough to be smelled now. Could just mean there’re less trees in the way or maybe they’re pretty close.”

Claudia nodded and put on her glasses to inspect the ground. “Tracks are too messy to date. Some of it looks like yesterday but some of it looks pretty fresh. Not sure, could have been a deer walking by earlier too.”

“Not deer,” Zoe said when she looked at the tracks. Her Vampyric Senses was only telling her boars. Even if the tracks were muddied, she was confident her skill would tell her nothing at all before it told her boars and no deer.

“Okay then a boar was here very recently. Look there.” Claudia pointed at some disrupted dirt that was still darkened with moisture and not covered in snow. “Some boar came through here very recently. Couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes with how wet it still looks.”

Emma nodded and drew her bow. “Be ready then, we could walking into an ambush.”

The rest of the group nodded, and Zoe paused to listen around her. She couldn’t hear any leaves rustling that didn’t match the wind, no branches snapping or snow crunching. There were no snorts or huffing from nearby boars.

“I don’t think they’re still super close. I can’t hear anything, at least.” Zoe said.

“We should at least get off the boar’s path.” Julie suggested.

“No, I don’t think that’s wise. The snow is noisy, the beaten path from the boars is quiet. The snow’s already packed in and we can approach much quieter this way.” Fred said.

Zoe heard a faint rumbling that began to grow louder and louder and her eyes widened as she realized what it was. “They’re charging!” She shouted.

“How many?” Fred asked.

“Too many. Run or climb?” Zoe asked.

“How far away are they?” Julie asked.

“I can hear them now too. Climb.” Claudia said.

Everybody jumped to the first sturdy tree they could find and climbed up off the ground. Minutes passed as the rumbling grew louder and louder. The rest of the group started hearing it too, the rumbling echoed through the forest and even shook the trees they were hiding in.

A few more minutes passed and a stampede of boars blazed past them on the forest floor in a frenzied dash. Zoe’s jaw dropped as she saw how much she underestimated the pack. There weren’t a few dozen boars, there were a few hundred.

The massive mounds of muscle rushed through the forest below them. Some of the smaller trees fell victim to the stampede and toppled over. Even the sturdier trees the group had climbed didn’t come out unscathed. The boars smashed through them and shook the trees. Branches and leaves were broken off and fell. Large clumps of snow that were stuck in the canopy fell to the ground and sent snow flying all around them.

The stampede passed and the chaos below them vanished into the distance. But the rumbling continued to grow louder and louder as something else approached them.

“Can you see anything?” Julie whispered from next to Zoe.

Zoe tried to look into the distance but couldn’t see very far. Darkness enveloped the forest and not even her superior eyes were able to pierce it. She shivered in fear and shook her head.

“It’s too dark. It shouldn’t be too dark. But it is.” Zoe said.

The rumbling grew and the trees they were in began to bend. The tops snapped off and fell to the ground.

“Do we run?" Fred called out from another tree.

“Haste us and we book it. Now.” Emma hissed.

Zoe nodded and hopped down to the ground. The rest of the group jumped down with her and Zoe looked towards where the rumbling was coming from and finally saw the source.

A black goat walked through the forest, following the path of destruction the stampede left in its wake. With each step the goat took, reality itself quivered and shook. The ripples of its power were visible as the air twisted and warped. Trees shattered as the power washed over them. Splinters of wood rained down around them.

Zoe gasped for breath and tried to identify the goat. She stared at it in shock as she saw something that shouldn’t have been possible. Bright green question marks floated above it and burnt into her vision.

[Corrupted Okiu - ??]