Summoned A Hundred Years Too Late

There were many small valleys like the one Alexandra was exploring around Balrum. Flanked by steep slopes going high up to the snowy peaks surrounding the basin, those valleys were havens for wildlife, and more importantly, various types of elementals.

This time she’d opted to hunt alone. Willow and Kam could fight, depending on the opponent, but they were not fighters. They didn’t enjoy the thrill of the hunt. They were afraid of injuries and pain.

Alexandra didn’t blame them. She was afraid too. But it only served to make the process even more thrilling.

So Willow had stayed in town to work on some enchantments, and Kam was doing something else only he knew.

Parsing the list of elementals from Medh, Alexandra’s attention had fixated on one of the strongest elementals described. The solar elementals. It just seemed fitting for her to aim to defeat one of those beasts.

Yet, she was far from being able to. Solar Elementals were described in few details, but one thing was certain: they were Platinum-rank monsters. Granted, Alexandra had defeated a Platinum before. However, her victory over the Yshant was the result of a technicality. She knew better than to believe she could replicate that feat.

First, she needed to work on beating Silvers consistently. She was at the midpoint of Bronze, so she knew she was close. But there was still a significant distance between a new Silver who hadn’t unlocked many perks of that level and one who was closing in on Gold.

Her trip today was about closing in on that distance.

She’d picked a type of elemental that seemed like a good match for her and ranged from Bronze to Gold. The source trader’s list included a few locations where the elementals rarely pushed Gold, so she picked one of those and, once she arrived, started tracking them.

It was both simple and complicated. A result of her choice of target. In a forested valley, wood elementals were common but hard to spot among the vegetation.

Still, with her skill to guide her, it was only a matter of time before she found one.

Her first wood elemental was a pine tree, or rather, the elemental inhabited the pine tree. Alexandra stared at it from a distance, making sure Tracking was not lying to her. It didn’t seem like it. She could feel the faint undercurrent of mana run through the sap of the tree. It was smaller than she expected for a tree fit to house an elemental.

The wood elemental either hadn’t seen her or didn’t care about her presence. Alexandra pulled on her mana, preparing to cast a powerful Solar Blast. She went all-out, readying to fire her largest explosion to date. She saw no reason to hold back, seeing how difficult the stone elemental had been.

When she had the strongest version of her spell ready to go, she fired. A massive burst of solar mana traversed the distance between her and the tree in seconds and engulfed her target. When the light dissipated, there was nothing left of the tree but a burnt stump.

“Ugh…”

Alexandra reactivated Tracking, looking for traces of the wood elemental. Nothing.

Sword in hand, she stepped closer to the stump. Embers were still lighting up the insides of the wood. She was expecting an ambush to come, but it never did.

When she reached the stump, she had to accept that the elemental was dead.

“Shit.”

Considering the state of the tree, she had no hope of recovering the source.

Alexandra sheathed her sword and walked away from the ashes to avoid the charred smell. This wasn’t going to work. She’d picked the wood elementals knowing it would be a good matchup for her, but this was a little too much. There was nothing to be gained by massacring elementals when she couldn’t even gather their source.

She frowned. Well, maybe she could gather their source if she pulled back a little on the intensity of her spell. This would be a decent way to farm contribution points from Giant Slayer.

Still, her goal today was to stabilize her ability to hunt Silvers. If she could earn money while doing so, good, but she believed continuing to hunt wood elementals was a waste of time. Buying an extra uncommon skill wasn’t going to change her fighting prowess significantly. What she needed was experience, the real kind.

If she could find the right type of elementals, she would be able to kill three birds with one stone. Do all three at once.

She summoned her journal.

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Light a fire (1/1) -> Quest Completed: +10 exp, +1 DEX

Daily Quest Streak: 112 -> 113

Basic Hygiene 5 -> 6

Tracking 4 -> 5

Solar Blast 3 -> 4

“At least it wasn’t for nothing,” she muttered.

Now that her idea of hunting wood elementals was out the window, she considered her options. She had hoped to make progress with her Solar Affinity, but such a thing felt complicated.

Even the training quest was obscure.

Solar Affinity Training Quest: Deepen your understanding of solar mana (0/1)

She pulled out the list of elementals, looking for a new target and weighing them against her skillset. If wood was too easy, maybe she could return to the mud wastes and—

“No, terrible idea.”

There was a reason people hired veteran guides when they crossed the wastes. While she was confident she could dry any mud elemental that met her path, she wasn’t when it came to avoiding the pools of quicksand that painted the wastes.

She ran her finger down the list, looking for anything that would fit her needs.

“There it is,” she whispered, stopping on the entry about darkness elementals. Light was the perfect skill to counter them. “Maybe too perfect. Might repeat the wood elemental situation.”

Alexandra stopped to consider her options. It wouldn’t be ideal if she countered the darkness elementals too perfectly. However, the short description included with the list seemed to indicate that darkness elementals weren’t so easily defeated. Honestly, if all it took to kill them was a lamp, anyone could hunt them.

However, the listed purchase price for their source was higher than that of wood and slime, reaching the level of stone, which was solidly in the middle of the list.

Even better, darkness elementals were easy to find, dwelling in any place that was devoid of light. It wasn’t a scarcity issue, meaning that hunting them should prove a real challenge.

Should.

The uncertainty bothered her, and Alexandra decided to inquire about a more detailed description of each elemental type the next time she’d be in town.

For now, however, she had made up her mind and activated Tracking to lead her to a darkness elemental.

It didn’t take much time for Alexandra to understand where her skill was taking her. As she walked deeper into the valley, she spotted the wide mouth of a cavern opening from the mountain. A gaping hole of obscurity opened in the rock, stalactites and stalagmites warding off the entrance like teeth.

Alexandra climbed up the slope, using her hands when it got too steep, and summoned Light when she stood in front of the entrance. Despite having some level of control over the shape of the orb, she couldn’t quite lower its temperature enough for it to be tolerable. As a result, she had to keep her distance from it, lest it burn her clothes.

She sent the orb into the cavern, lighting up its walls. There was nothing of note in the mouth of the earth but a small tunnel leading deeper in.

Alexandra wiped sweat off her temples, wondering if she should go in. It wasn’t a dungeon this time. Getting lost was a real possibility, and she had no idea what she’d encounter inside. Darkness elementals weren’t the only thing dwelling in there. She wouldn’t be surprised to see a few stone elementals, and perhaps other types of elementals and beasts depending on the layout of the cavern.

“Well, I’m here now. Might as well take a look.”

She swore to turn back if it seemed like more than she could handle.

Her steps echoed on the walls of the cavern as she walked inside. She had to duck to enter the tunnel. The heat of Light was worse in the confined space, but she endured. The tunnel turned and twisted, taking her deeper into the mountain. She crawled for a minute, then two, then more, to the point where she lost track of time. On a few occasions, she seriously considered turning back, but she knew she would always wonder how close she’d been to the end, so she didn’t.

At the end of the tunnel, when she was finally able to stand back up, she found herself standing on a rocky ledge at the edge of a massive cavern that extended below her. It was so vast that she couldn’t see the end of it, even with Light turned up to its maximum intensity. It was so deep she could only hear the underground river flowing at the bottom of the ravine.

She could, however, see the ceiling, meaning she was close to the top.

“Okay, this is a bit much,” she said, wondering if she should keep exploring, and if so, how she would climb down from the ledge.

It didn’t look like there was a path. She could maybe climb, but she didn’t know how far the bottom was.

“I could see if it would complete that Diving skill quest for me,” she joked.

Not that she would actually do it. It would be idiotic, even if there was a river flowing at the bottom and her constitution was probably high enough to survive the fall.

“Jumping when I can’t see shit is just dumb. How would I get back up anyway?”

The words had barely left her mouth when the air changed.

A high-pitched shriek cut through the dark, then another, then a hundred more overlapping into a single shrill wave. Alexandra spun toward the sound, Light flaring wider on reflex.

Wings. A wall of them, pouring out of a fissure in the cavern wall she hadn’t even noticed, black and leathery and impossibly dense, folding over each other in a current that had no end.

Bats. Thousands of them.

The swarm hit her orb of Light first, dozens of small bodies veering off, screeching, colliding into each other in their panic to escape it. But more kept coming, funneled straight at the ledge, straight at her.

She tried sliding back into the tunnel, but that was exactly where the bats were going. She threw an arm up. Something clipped her shoulder. Another wingtip caught her jaw.

The swarm flew into the tunnel. But more kept coming.

The ledge was narrow, barely wide enough for her boots. A hundred small impacts hit in half a second, none of them enough to hurt, all of them enough to shove.

Her back foot found nothing.

”Oh—”

The ledge was gone, and there was only black air and the sound of the river getting louder.