Chương 86: A warm welcome

Breakstep. A burst of force detonated under Vera's heel as she launched herself backward, clearing the golem's arm by a margin most others probably wouldn't have been entirely comfortable with. Stone cracked apart in a spray of embers where it hit the ground. Vera winced. The Slag Sentinel didn't hold back even slightly. Why did they use this thing as their primary line of defense?

Sure, it made sense in the game where concepts like durability were more like an abstraction, but out here, every piece of that courtyard it demolished would come directly out of Last Hearth's coffers. Surely there was a smarter arrangement. The golem fixed its burning gaze on her—not that it had much of a face to speak of, its head little more than a craggy mass of fused rock and slow-churning lava. But she got the distinct impression it was pissed anyway. Could golems be pissed?

Flames erupted around the Sentinel and lashed toward her. Mark of Hollow Reach. Vera absorbed the extra cost of invoking the Fifth Seal Mark without Stillwake and slashed her hand through the air in front of her, stepping out of a rift directly behind the golem. The Sentinel spun with a sweeping strike aimed at her new position, churning up chunks of courtyard in the wake of the movement. Vera simply stepped back another dozen feet with Breakstep and kept watching it, trying to think of the best way to handle this.

The golem clearly hadn't recognized her, or it wouldn't have attacked in the first place. The problem was she had no idea how to shut it down. Breaking it was probably a bad idea. It would be easy enough—this thing was only level 230 in the game—but it had to be pretty expensive to build this thing, and it belonged to her guild. It felt wrong to be the one to wreck it. She briefly considered whether Mark of Withering Hollow could neutralize it without outright destroying it, but abandoned the thought.

That Mark had one-shot a level 225 Hollowmaw Sentinel. Even though she suspected that proper golems couldn't be Soulrended if they didn't have souls, she didn't want to find out she was wrong the hard way. She could already picture the reactions from her old guildmates if word somehow got back that she'd accidentally obliterated their base guardian.

Even if her actual friends weren't around in this world, just the possibility of handing their in-world counterparts that particular piece of ammunition was enough to make her shudder. Mireya especially. No. She'd do everything in her power to avoid it. A deep, grinding sound rose from the Slag Sentinel as it charged, trailing plumes of smoke and loose cinders with each thundering step. Mark of the Mourning Tithe.

A gray shroud of Resonance settled over Vera as the Fifth Seal barrier-type Mark braced around her, and the Sentinel's towering form crashed straight into it and stopped dead. Its fist hung a hair's breadth from her face, arrested completely. She stood there a moment longer, arms crossed, while the golem hammered against her barrier again and again and accomplished absolutely nothing. The courtyard around her was faring considerably worse. She should probably do something soon. An idea finally surfaced.

She invoked another Mark. Fourth Seal this time. Mark of the Gray Reliquary. She held out her hands as both were encased in a sheen of ashen Resonance. Normally, the Mark was applied to weapons, coating them so that each strike built a stacking Funeral Weight debuff on the target. She'd tried it against Veyrith during their fight, but the circumstances hadn't let her use it to any real effect. Here, though, she had a feeling it would come into its own. She saw no reason it couldn't work on her fists.

The Sentinel's arms began to shift, fresh cracks splitting across its surface as heat welled up from somewhere inside it, and it drew back for another strike. Watching that, the slightly less sensible—more daredevil—part of Vera's brain perked up with interest. … Well, she was going to win this regardless, and most of the damage to the surroundings had already been done. It was fine to enjoy the rest a little, wasn't it? She let the Mourning Tithe barrier drop just as the Sentinel's fists came crashing toward her.

She leaned back at the last moment, letting them pass just over her face, trailing spatter of lava and loose rock that grazed her without doing much of consequence. Then she immediately flowed into motion as the golem pivoted to track her. Slipping between its arms, she drove her fist into the side of its forearm. A large chunk of it simply shattered away and an ashen bloom spread outward from the impact point. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Vera paused. Whoops.

She'd been holding back. Apparently not enough. It was genuinely hard to gauge how much force to use based on Resonance levels alone. She was also fairly sure she'd grown somewhat stronger since arriving in this world simply from settling into her body and role as Chosen more fully. The Sentinel let out a rolling, reverberant groan and bore down on her with its entire body.

Vera wove past it, sidestepping several more strikes as it followed her across the courtyard, each of its footfalls leaving a small smoldering crater in the ground. After a few more exchanges to properly gauge its defense, she began to actually fight back, landing a few measured strikes after each of its attacks, leaving spreading patches of ashen-colored residue across its surface that hardened slowly. Funeral Weight chipped away at both its movement and its stamina regeneration. Mark of Hollow Reach.

Just as the Sentinel had a hard time keeping up and instead reared back to hurl a ball of molten rock at her, she stepped through a rift and emerged above and behind it. As she dropped, her hands moved in a rapid series of strikes down across its back. She landed with a light touch of Breakstep, more than half of the Slag Sentinel now coated in ashen Resonance. Its upper half was completely rocked rigid, unable to turn and reach her.

It tried to reorient by dragging one of its less-affected legs around, but by that point, it was almost embarrassingly easy to apply the remaining Funeral Weight. Within moments, the golem stood completely still and solid as a monument. Vera smiled to herself. That had been a nice workout. She wasn't sure how long the debuff would hold, but at least she hadn't destroyed anything beyond that one chunk of forearm.

Her gaze moved briefly across the courtyard, taking in the cracked stone, scorch marks, and small craters. She recognized she'd stopped worrying about the surroundings fairly quickly. But the Sentinel had caused most of this, hadn't it? That wasn't really on her. Whoever had decided a level 230 combat golem was a reasonable thing to keep as a gate guardian bore the lion's share of responsibility here, in her considered opinion. That said… She held out her hand, and Stillwake appeared in her grip.

Experimentally, she let the halberd's blade trace a single smooth arc through the air as her Resonance surged in white-gray light that bloomed into a pale sigil. Mark of Hollow Mercy. The Fifth Seal Mark focused on a small section of ground to her left. The hollow, cratered pit of melted stone left behind by one of the Sentinel's strikes glistened faintly, as though catching moonlight, and then the memory of what had been there before began knitting itself back into existence.

Within moments the ground was smooth and unbroken again.

"Huh. Would you look at that." She hadn't been sure that would work. But since House Hollow's healing worked less by mending flesh and more by the restoration of memory, she'd thought that principle might extend to something like this. Turns out she'd been right. Her eyes returned to the full extent of what her little spar had done to the courtyard. She raised Stillwake again. A massive surge of Resonance rolled outward from her. Mark of Hollow Mercy. The entire area began restoring itself.

A small furrow formed on Vera's brow. Doing it at this scale was much harder, and the sections that had taken damage earlier clearly demanded more from her. But her reserves were pretty massive, and soon enough she was standing in a courtyard that looked entirely untouched, save for the motionless Slag Sentinel beside her. She nodded to herself, feeling rather pleased. If she ever broke something in the future, she now had a way to fix it.

Which meant she didn't have to be quite so afraid of breaking things and then earning the slow, withering judgment of someone like Elaria. She'd always known House Hollow was the coolest House. Setting aside the whole unremembered god and eldritch prison baggage that came packaged along with it, of course.

"How—" Her thoughts were interrupted by a voice behind her, and she turned to find a group of people exiting the guild building at a run, armored and armed, eyes wide and locked on her and the sentinel. Vera didn't recognize any of them, but all of them looked to be Kindled, ranging from the Seventh Binding to the Tenth.

"Hi there," she said, raising a hand and smiling.

"Sorry about the mess. I cleaned up most of it, so hopefully we're fine." Their apparent leader was a dark-skinned man of the Tenth Binding, with a close-cropped beard and an axe that could have doubled as a door slung across his back. Most of his frame was covered in flame-wrought plate. He looked between her and the Sentinel, then his gaze traveled past her. Vera turned to follow it—and went still.

Past the gates, along the stretch of street and square beyond, what seemed like every person within a few hundred meters was staring at her. People had come out of neighboring buildings. A small crowd even pressed up against Last Hearth's gates for a better look. Her smile faltered. She'd fought a Silent Lord while the entirety of Marrowfen watched and hadn't so much as blinked.

Somehow, though, the realization that all of these people had just witnessed her using her own guild's gate guardian for a casual spar and tearing up half the courtyard in the process sent a dull heat crawling up the back of her neck. Vera turned away from the audience, schooling her expression, and brought her attention back to the group in front of her. See no evil, hear no evil. She forced her smile to return.

"So. New faces, I'm guessing?" Wariness was written across the face of the man at the front as he studied her. His attention snagged on Stillwake for a moment before returning to her face.

"…If you don't mind, could you tell us who you are?" Vera swung Stillwake idly a couple of times. Several members of the group flinched.

"I get that the hair color throws you off, but you've got to recognize what this is, yeah?" They all stayed silent. His gaze moved to the Sentinel one final time, then to the unblemished courtyard. Eventually, he gestured to the others to stand down. The weapon on his back disappeared into what looked like a Vaultring based on the Resonance use, and he raised both hands in a formal greeting Vera didn't recognize.

"Lady Mournvale, I take it," he said with an accent she couldn't quite place.

"I am Falko Rhahler. Welcome to Last Hearth."

"Thanks. Feels good to be back." She let Stillwake disappear into her own Vaultring and looked over the rest of the group. Three men and two women, though the younger of the two women was closer to a girl than anything else. They were fairly strong as far as Kindled went, but she'd assumed they were new faces because none of them had seemed entirely sure who she was on sight. But that begged the question of what exactly they were doing here. Was Last Hearth recruiting? If so, from where?

Someone at the Tenth Flamebinding was rare by any measure, as she understood things. Most people who'd reached that point had probably been around long enough to have at least seen Veralyth Mournvale once.

"Lady Mournvale," Falko said with some hesitation.

"Did you destroy the Sentinel?" Vera patted its arm.

"Nah, just put it out of commission for a while. Mark of the Gray Reliquary, for anyone who knows it. He'll be back to demolishing courtyards eventually." Just don't ask her when.

"That's…good." The man exchanged a brief look with the woman beside him, who was tall and impressively built, with a wild crop of gold hair and an outfit that left her abs doing more work than Vera felt was entirely necessary. The woman gave a short nod, then turned and jogged back toward the guild building. Vera watched her go without comment, then looked back at Falko.

"So," she said.

"You wouldn't happen to know if anyone's home?"