The Pinnacle Warrior

It took a while, but eventually Chloe’s sobs became intelligible, and they were a single name: Paulie. Of the four survivors that remained of the other Human parties, Astrid tried to remember names. The only two whose names she could recall were Aaron and Chloe, and once Aaron had finished stabbing Caelum’s corpse, he’d retired to stand at the edge of the canyon without saying a word. The group hadn’t really strayed from where the Wanderers had first fought the rocs and then confronted Caelum and his party, and they stood in a canyon about six meters wide at the bottom where they stood. Astrid considered herself lucky that no monsters had decided to swoop in and attack while she continued comforting Chloe, but with the corpses nearby, it might just be a question of time.

Now that Astrid actually evaluated the other three, she saw something in common among them that answered the question of how the other party had managed to sneak up on them. Aaron was obviously a Rogue or something similar, and he must have been the scout of his party, then there was another Ranger or Archer wearing dark leather armor with his bow in hand. Those two together made for a suspicious pair, though the third didn’t have the same general class as the others. She was a secondary frontliner to work alongside the dead Knight.

“Did the Count just sneak around every floor? Using a couple different Stealth skills paired together to be able to avoid the fights he didn’t want to take?”

“Yeah, he strengthened them too,” Aaron grunted. He didn’t say anything else, but even with a hooded cowl covering much of his face, Astrid could tell that his frustration wasn’t just towards Caelum but also to the way that he’d been dragged through the Trials. Different from Chloe, who was obviously most distraught over her lover’s death, Aaron seemed most unhappy about the potential future that had been stolen from him. The Ranger or Archer nearby was despondent, almost catatonic and totally unresponsive to anything that happened around him while the frontliner kept her head up but hadn’t said a word.

“Can I… talk to you for a second?” Felix’s hesitation brought Astrid out of comforting the young woman held to her chest, and as she looked up, she realized that the Guardian didn’t want to speak with her, but with Chloe. The Healer pulled back and wiped the tears from her eyes, but as her eyes cleared and saw the string of snot that trailed between herself and Astrid’s shirt, she managed to look mortified, even as she mourned so much.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean… I just—”

“People cry. It’s kind of gross, but it’s not a bad thing,” Astrid replied with a gentle smile. 

She felt the beginnings of tears threaten at the corners of her eyes as she was forced to witness the results of hostile subjugation by a noble firsthand. She hated seeing it, but it was good that she did. Not only had it reminded her of the ugliness of the world that some people would indulge in, it also further solidified for her that, though the Guild seemed to be trying their best, they hadn’t warned any of the delvers coming in here that this was a possibility. She refused to believe that, in the past, there hadn’t been any warning about something like this happening, so why hadn’t she been told about it? She’d gotten equipment that would help her stay safe, but just a single warning of “hey, the nobles have enslaved people before, be careful” would have gone a long way.

“I’m sorry,” Chloe repeated as she wiped her face and pulled a handkerchief from her pocket that she dabbed on Astrid’s shirt. The wetness remained, and Astrid waved her back as Chloe grew more flustered. With Astrid’s comforting, the Healer gathered herself and blew her nose before replacing the handkerchief. Then, she took a deep breath and answered Felix. “I’m happy to speak with you, if you’ll give me a moment. I’m going to get my spatial pouch from that one.”

Her voice dripped with disgust as she gestured with her hand towards the Steward’s corpse, and she walked forward. As she did so, that seemed to remind Aaron and the frontliner of the pouches’ existence, and all three walked towards the corpse. Inside of the man’s robes hung a dozen spatial pouches, and Chloe grabbed several before she sighed and looked at the frontliner.

“Gretchen, would you just take them all? I’m sure when we escape we can figure out what will go where.”

The frontliner nodded once and pulled out a backpack which she filled with the pouches under Aaron’s supervision. 

“At least half of those are ours by right of conquest,” Muti spoke, and the other Wanderers looked at her with various different amounts of surprise and displeasure.

“That’s fine,” Chloe said as she looked at the others. Aaron shrugged, as did Gretchen, and Muti nodded. 

“Muti,” Astrid hissed a whisper at the Barbarian, “we don’t need this!”

“No, we do not,” Muti agreed. “But we freed them and killed their slavers. Their lives should belong to us as well, but I am being generous.”

Astrid signed and hung her head. “Take two, and we don’t really want anything inside of them that isn’t food. The extra storage will be worth quite a lot.”

Muti nodded and then, after examining the spatial pouches, found two that she chose. She reached in and deposited a surprising amount of things on the ground before saying, “Take what you wish. This is of no worth to us.”

Aaron turned and began gathering the materials into different pouches as Chloe wiped at her eyes once again and put on a smile that greatly contrasted with her splotchy, tear stained face.

“What can I do for you?”

“Well,” Felix seemed unsure now that he was actually talking to her. Then, he gathered himself and said, “I just wanted to know if you could heal me some more.”

“Does your party not have a Healer?” She recoiled and looked at the five still living people, her face colored by fear. Astrid quickly understood where the fear came from, but she didn’t need to comfort the Healer to remind her that the Wanderers wouldn’t take her prisoner. Then, Chloe shook her head and looked at Benedict. “I forgot, a Bard. Can’t he heal you? I’m happy to help the people who saved me, I’m just confused as to why you need me to.”

“I needed to pull back in that fight because when you healed me from that hit, you partially healed my arm.” As Felix gave the explanation, Chloe didn’t seem to understand at first. Then, she only then seemed to realize how his arm was bound to his body and stepped forward.

“Can you dismiss your armor? I’d like to see the wound.”

Felix obliged, and with a quick thought, he stood in a light pair of shorts and no shirt. He’d taken to not wearing a shirt under his equipment because getting the hurt arm through his sleeves was so painful as to make it not worth the effort. His Fortitude was high enough now that the small discomfort of his armor pinching him or chafing didn’t happen anymore. The skin on his body resisted injury too well. Now that she was actively thinking about it, Astrid wondered how difficult it would be for her at level 5 to hurt herself or Felix, even if they stood still. She doubted that the current her would even need to use Fortitude-aligned mana to keep herself safe. 

With his body exposed, it was obvious Felix’s body was covered in scars, most of them not too deep nor prominent, given how his attributes allowed him to recover from physical damage much more easily than others. Even so, Astrid was familiar with the patterns of scars that covered his body, as she herself sported them as well, remnants of tough fights against dozens of monsters. Chloe leaned over his arm and prodded gently at the one scar that was an exception to saying that his scars were well healed.

The scar tissue all over his shoulder was twisted and angry, a deep red coloring it all, and it protruded nearly a full centimeter from the smooth skin of Felix’s arm. Where his shoulder met his arm was a mass of scars, and though the wound had scabbed over and then become whole again, his arm was largely useless.

“There’s damage to the tendons, the rotator cuff, and the nerves,” Chloe said as she touched the wound probingly. “It feels as if it was hanging on by a thread and then you let it heal back together. I can’t imagine that it’s a particularly comfortable wound, even though it’s been healed.”

“And healing it in the middle of battle,” Felix added, “was very painful.” 

“I would imagine!” Chloe exclaimed. “The sensation for nerves reattaching is, supposedly, one of the most painful things a person can experience. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking when I healed you, I didn’t imagine you had any lasting wounds that would harm you like that. If you would like to know if I can finish this healing and get your arm back into working condition, I should be able to.”

Felix’s face lit up in excitement at that news. Even what she followed up with didn’t dampen his excitement.

“It’s going to hurt even more than it did during the fight.”

“I can deal with pain if it means I stop having to get my arm tied to me like some cripple.”

“Not like some cripple,” Benedict snarked, “you actually have been a cripple.”

Now that full recovery was ahead of him, Felix was no longer excused from the rest of the party’s teasing, and he welcomed it all with a wide grin on his face. Nobody delayed from getting to where Chloe could get to healing, and it wasn’t long before they found a nearby location where she could do her work. The Healer settled into a nearby hollow in the canyon, where something had carved a slight indent just large enough for Felix and Chloe to be largely hidden while she healed him. While she prepared to do the healing, the rest set up a firm perimeter, just outside of the “cave’s” mouth.

A few short minutes passed, and through the entire time, Felix’s quiet groans of pain filled the air. Regardless, the others who listened didn’t worry, and instead only watched for any monsters approaching. Astrid had hoped to pass this time without issue, but it wasn’t to be. A quartet of drakes seemed to have found their scent or that of the nearby roc corpses and came down the canyon towards the fighters.

“Do you want to fight them?” Astrid asked the other three delvers. “Or do you want us to take care of it?”

“All together, if we can,” Aaron answered without looking at the others. The Ranger stood and took his bow in his hands, though the actions seemed to be more habitual than out of any real eagerness to kill some monsters.

“The one getting healed as your frontliner, right?” Gretchen asked. Getting an answer in the affirmative, she stepped forward. “You’ll probably need me. I’m a Shieldmaster, but I do better if I have somebody beside me taking some of the aggression?”

She framed it as a question, looking at Astrid in the hopes that she would be willing to step forward into that position. Astrid supposed that the other delvers hadn’t seen the Wanderers fight much, so Astrid nodded as she mentally extended a party invitation to the other three. She felt them accept it as she hefted her hammer and strode forward.

“I’m trying this thing again,” Skandr warned. “I think it should be pretty effective now.”

“OK, everybody,” Astrid cautioned the others. “Stay back, let him get his experiment out before you close in.”

Astrid spared a glance towards Skandr as he cast his spell, but to her surprise, she could feel a different quality in the spell he cast. So far as she could tell, he did all the same things that he usually did, but his face paled as lightning gathered in front of his hands. The spell somehow tinged red instead of its usual white blue, and Skandr released the lightning bolt with a gasp in a record time.

The lightning crackled and thundered as it smashed into the lead drake without seeming to take any time to cross that distance. In that first hit, the drake‘s eyes burned out, and it fell to the ground, leaving a trail of dust that rose up in its wake. It hadn’t died, but it didn’t even twitch as the lightning fried its body, and leapt to one of its companions. There, the lightning continued its deadly work, and the second drake stumbled and weakened as the spell died out inside of it. It managed to keep its feet, but only barely, and Astrid didn’t hesitate to capitalize on the opening.

With a shout, she ran forward and, with a Spectre Burst to ensure the hit was a kill, smashed the second drake’s head in. Two remained, and though she’d paused in surprise, Gretchen stepped forward as she prepared to fill in as the frontliner. A more ordinary attention drawing Skill came from her, but the Shieldmaster quickly proved her worth as the two shields she used, somewhere in size between a buckler and a round shield, glowed with a golden light. The drakes both came towards her, and she smashed her shields into their faces and forced them to come to a stop. She was pushed back a handful of meters, but kept her stance through the monsters’ charge.

Arrows flew at eyes as the monsters pulled themselves back just a little, two of the projectiles missing, but the third sinking in and half blinding one of the enemies. The rest of the fighters closed in, and Aaron reappeared in a way that was somehow different from Muti’s Shadow Leap on the other side of the blinded drake. A dagger maybe 40 centimeters long plunged into its remaining eye and the Rogue disengaged as Astrid and Muti closed in.

To kill two drakes, one blinded, and the other painfully outnumbered, took the group only a handful more seconds, and as they finished, a disappointed voice echoed from behind them.

“Curses. I was hoping to make a splash with my reappearance.” Felix stood on his own two feet, both hands placed deliberately on his hips as he dismissed his helmet. He grinned widely and lifted his left arm in a circle, his face betraying no twinges of pain or discomfort as he made the movement. With the monsters dead, the Wanderers retreated to their ally, and Muti was the first to wrap him in a strong embrace. 

“And you desired to give up,” she said with mock reproach in her voice.

“Only for a little while,” he replied with a slightly embarrassed smile on his face. Benedict and Skandr both drew closer after that as well, teasing and ribbing as their relief was obvious in every movement they made. Every time Felix moved his left arm, Astrid couldn’t help but smile. She gave her congratulations as well with a firm hug that was returned with both arms. She then turned her attention to Chloe as she looked at the others. The Healer smiled in a genuine way, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“What would you like us to do?” Astrid asked as she reached a gauntleted hand out. With only a second’s thought, she dismissed the gauntlet to gently take Chloe’s hand. The healer sighed and shrugged.

“I just wanna get out of here,” she spoke quietly, barely more than a whisper. “Lancelot seems to have lost his ability to speak, or he’s just… broken. I don’t know how much better than that I am.”

“Do you want to talk about it…?” Astrid didn’t know what else to say, but Chloe‘s firm shake of the head was an obvious denial of that as a good idea.

“Would you be willing to just escort us to an exit? It shouldn’t take too long.” As Chloe asked, her voice’s tone shifted to a desperate plea. 

“Yes, of course,” Astrid answered. “After all, we wanted to get another level here, and we’re close, but not quite there. It’ll just be an exercise in getting that experience en route there and back.”

Chloe’s eyes misted with tears as she thanked Astrid, and the Warrior smiled as she patted the emotionally delicate woman on the back. They would escort the other delvers backward, and before long, an exit back to the surface would appear. Then, the Wanderers would pass the watershed and could push harder and faster than ever before. 

Only nine days would remain, and they wanted to pass through at least that many floors in that time.