Chương 158: Chapter 234: Hunter of Lords

Jorn staggered into the kitchen, arms laden with the day's catch: Rabbit and wild potato. He quickly skinned the rabbits and set the soft furs aside. He could make some mittens and hats with them later. He gutted the wild hares and removed their heads, tossing the offal in a waxed bin and dumping the rest in a pot, setting it to boil over the fire the other children were in charge of keeping going. There was a strange woman visiting their orphanage today.

Word was she was recruiting for Vassals for some hoity-toity Lord in The Tower. The excitement had consumed the entire orphanage and all the other children were crowding around the visitor in the main hall. Jorn could hear the commotion from the hall as he hauled the guts and skins out to the garden. He'd gotten a look at her earlier when she first arrived: She looked like an older-sister type. Blonde hair, a little plump, about the age of most of the young mothers in the town. None of my business.

Jorn thought, burying the guts in the garden before heading to the store-room and beginning the process of getting the skins ready for tanning. The orphans would need warm clothes in a few months. Lily would need warm clothes. Jorn shook his head. Jorn didn't really consider himself an orphan. Not in the traditional sense of the word. His father had only died recently, and his mother had tearfully given him up to the orphanage… ten minutes down the road from their house. … As a tax dodge.

He still saw her most days for dinner. There was a bit of raw feelings towards his mother for that, but Jorn had decided not to take it personally. He understood the math, the money would go back into their house, and this situation gave him a lot of freedom, because both his mother and the headmistress thought the other was keeping their eye on him. He had witnessed first hand how much two dozen kids ate every day, and had decided to make himself useful.

His father was a hunter and he'd taught Jorn a bit about hunting and trapping. Enough to… well, not enough to get by, but enough to not be a burden. One pelt clean. He set it aside and started scraping the next, his gaze wandering up to the bow on the wall. His father's. He'd brought it with him from his house, out of some reflexive need not to be separated from his father. He couldn't draw it, of course. Father was a Hunter with a Strength of a whopping thirty four!

He told stories about the fourth Floor and how he was facing death at every turn, one of a Party of intrepid Climbers determined to surpass the wall of the fourth Floor and make names for themselves. His father had such a gleam in his eyes when he began his tales, but then his expression always turned morose when he came to the end of the story.

"And then Rachel got sick and an eel took off Greg's foot." Jorn said, reciting the ending word-for-word. Jorn understood his father did better than most. Most Craftsmen stopped on the second Floor, and most soldiers stopped on the third. Father had gotten to level 17. That was something. Jorn sighed and shook his head. His own bow was drying on the other side of the room. The poles had spent the entire winter drying out. Soon it would be time to shape them and attach the string.

Once that was done, all he needed to do was pick the best one and head to the Hunting Ground with his father's arrows and hunt some good Sacrifices. Once he got his Class and some levels, he'd come back and set up shop as an independent hunter. The right pelts were worth a fair amount of money and any hunter above level 10 could easily earn a good living. His mind, though, turned towards his father's stories about the magical lands beyond the swamp. The land of giants. The never-ending ocean.

The blood-sucking jungle. The city of the dead. Jorn wanted to see them and prove Father wasn't a los- Jorn shook that out of his head. That was a stupid, dangerous dream. Can't feed people if you're dead. He understood that there was a fair amount of danger involved in going to the Hunting Grounds with nothing but a bow, but if he didn't get a Class, he couldn't support a family. Real men have a Class, at least level 15. Some other Hunter might move into town, bigger, stronger, and more handsome, and then…

"Hello there." A voice interrupted Jorn's musing. Jorn was startled, but he was able to muscle back a jerk. His father had coached him not to make noise of big movements, especially when you're startled. Made you look like prey.

"Good afternoon," Jorn said, glancing up at the young woman beaming at him. Her gaze was scanning the store-room, landing on the dioramas.

"Did you make these?" She gasped, moving past him to study the little figurines fighting monsters. They were figurines made from the tiny mouse bones in owl pellets, battling a skeletal raven made to look like a dragon. One of the bone Climbers had an oversized bow.

"Well…yeah, they're just for telling stories to the young ones." Jorn said, uncomfortable at the sudden interest.

"Sorry, I haven't introduced myself. I'm Anna." She said, offering him a hand.

"Jorn." Jorn took her hand and caught a whiff of flour from her as they shook hands. Her hand was strangely firm, as though it'd been carved out of wood.

"Keep going," she said, motioning for him to keep scraping his pelt before she grabbed a nearby crate and dragged it over, using it as a stool. Jorn shrugged and kept working.

"I've finished the interview for everyone else, and the headmistress told me there was one more I hadn't met yet."

"Me."

"Yep. I'm here to recruit a-""It's okay, I'm not suited for it." Jorn said.

"Did you hunt the rabbits in the kitchen?" She asked.

"Trapped 'em." Jorn replied.

"Why?"

"Because I can and kids need food."

"And you just decided to hunt on your own?"

"Nobody complained." Jorn said.

"Do you have many friends, Jorn?"

"Not really."

"Why's that?"

"Idunno. They just make me uncomfortable." Jorn glanced up an saw that Anna was smiling like she'd discovered some hidden treat.

"What?"

"I can't tell you the exact details before you sign a contract, but I'm recruiting for something like…a hunter." Jorn straightened from where he'd been scraping the pelt and looked at Anna.

"A hunter?"

"On the tenth Floor, we need a Vassal to venture out into the wilderness, clear out monsters, protect the local farmers, and earn Influence for the Lord." Jorn blinked. The tenth floor and above was where god-like entities with Abilities that defied logic waged epic battles for the fate of mankind. And she was just some baker girl. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Pfft. Tenth Floor? That would have to make you level fifty."

"Level fifty-three, actually."

"But you're…" Jorn wordlessly gestured to her unassuming older-sister persona.

"A girl?"

"Normal."

"Why thank you. I try very hard to be." Anna preened as though she'd been complemented.

"I don't buy it." Anna scanned the room until she spotted his whittling knife. She took the knife and grabbed the tip between her fingers before winding the blade around her fingers like a spool of thread. Twang! The knife shuddered as she released it, having been rolled into a spiral.

"Hey!"

"Oh, sorry." Anna put the rolled-up knife between her fingers and straightened it back out.

"…Okay, let's say you are level fifty-three." Jorn said.

"What do you need me for?"

"William Oh doesn't really… like taking Vassals. He's only got a handful at the moment, and none of them are dedicated to clearing land and earning Influence. We're looking for a loner for our Stronghold. Someone with a good head on their shoulders and the initiative to do their job even without supervision. It seems like you fit the bill."

"…William Oh?" Jorn asked, eyes wide.

"Yep. You see, Influence is earned when Vassals defeat monsters and gain XP. A small portion of it is siphoned away and converted to Influence. Now, if the Vassal is already at max level for the Floor, the ratio is a little-""The guy who punched a hole in The Tower? The demigod who outran Ouroboros?"

"That's made up. He is pretty great tho-." Anna hissed moment and clutched her temple.

"Ow."

"Are you okay, miss?" Jorn asked, rising to his feet and taking a step forward in case he had to catch her.

"I'm fine. Some of me just accidentally left the connection open when they died. I hate it when they do that."

"Ummm…what?"

"Oh, me and Lord Zodiac are fighting a monster on the Eleventh Floor right now that could turn the entire human race into mindless husks if it wins." Jorn glanced at his diorama of the Climbers fighting a dragon, a strange emotion flooding his body. Godlike entities with Abilities that defied logic waging epic battles for the fate of mankind.

"Right now?" Jorn asked. Anna met his eye, her gaze boring into his.

"Right. Now." Eleven Floors above them, godlike entities battled for the fate of mankind. Vincent waited for the secondary explosions from Cannibalize catching enemies in the explosion and making more undead, which should've proceeded to make more explosions… but there were surprisingly few. He took out his spyglass and scanned the Stronghold. The Climbers on the ground had deftly taken cover from the bombers, and only a few of them had even sustained any damage at all. Hmm.

His set abilities scaled with Focus, so those first few explosions lacked the same Resistance penetration as the last ones, giving the defenders time to come to their senses and take cover before more damage was done by the more potent explosions. I see. This tactic is flawed. Good to know. I should try to invert the formula. Start with one powerful explosion that kills multiple enemies, then use the resulting smaller undead to sow chaos. Vincent made a mental note, then flapped his wings, launching himself down.

Telekinetic threads tried to close around him, but since he was an undead under his own control, he had a flame aura that burned away the threads before they could touch him. Zodiac seemed to change tactics, ripping up pieces of the Stronghold and flinging them at Vincent. Vincent dove underneath the building flying towards him and landed hard, sending out a spiderweb of cracks through the crystal. Something's wrong, Vincent thought as his gaze landed on the ground. The ground's too clean.

The Stronghold had a persistent muck on the ground that covered parts of the crystal. He wasn't seeing it. This isn't the Stronghold. This is a trap. The buildings looked the same, but Vincent doubted there was furniture in any of them.

"AAAH!" A dozen young women with phantom halberds leapt out of the empty buildings, charging towards him, their faces identical. William Oh's Tangled. Vincent deployed his newest cantrip, a blatant abuse of 'Unliving One'. You are considered Undead to Abilities. You may extend this property to objects at will. Now it was a pretty generous leap of logic to consider the air in front of him to be a discrete 'object', but leaps of logic were the playground of cantrips. Vincent snapped his fingers.

An unnecessary movement, but it added a certain flair. He made the air between them count as an undead with Unliving One. It was now 'undead'. He took control of it with Grave Commander. The air was now an 'undead under his control'. Both Grave Commander and Necrotic Balm allowed him to enhance the air's durability and shape, compressing it down and allowing him to give it a cobweb-like structure, making it distinct from the other air around it.

It was a complex, 3-part cantrip, but it worked well enough to trigger his set bonuses. When the charging young ladies ran through these cobwebs, scattering them everywhere, the 'undead under his control' counted as being destroyed by them. The Burning Court set bonus kicked in and applied Cannibalize to the air automatically, creating a faefire explosion right in the girl's faces while healing himself.

The effect was extraordinary: a ring of faefire sent scorched young woman tumbling in every direction, reeling back from the heat as he dodged their blind strikes. Air doesn't have much mass. The explosion was free, but it was still a cantrip. You know what does have a lot of mass? Vincent turned the crystal under a cluster of three of them. The crystal wasn't weak enough to 'be destroyed' effortlessly like the air-cobwebs he'd made earlier, so he had to do it manually. Cannibalize 55 Charges remaining.

Faefire and shrapnel engulfed the three Tangled, sending a wash of flames and sharp crystals across Vincent's body. I was standing too close. The pain dwindled to nothing in a matter of seconds, though, as his exploit of Tempered Resolve had drastically improved his toughness. As the dust cleared, the three corpses were whole enough to stand on their own, raised as flaming zombies by his set bonus, turning on their former selves.

The lingering healing from Cannibalize returned the charred corpses to fighting fit and the new zombies launched themselves forwards. A rush of power shot through his body as all undead under his control gained the set's on-kill buff, most importantly, his three deployed fae got much stronger. This was why he had chosen to start with the small-fry rather than Zodiac himself. He cold easily gain an enormous amount of power buffing himself up by taking on the easy fights first.

Ideally, this should trivialize his eventual battle with Zodiac. Let's see how many we get through before they figure out- BOOM! The walls that formed the alley around him slammed inward, aiming to crush Vincent into a paste. Unliving One Necrotic Balm Vincent deployed his other cantrip, reshaped the walls around himself, forming a bubble with him inside, negating most of the force of the blow. He shrugged off the crystal shrapnel, then leapt up and tore his way through to the surface.

Vincent felt another rush of power as his fae must've taken out another enemy. This process can only accelerate. Even if the Tangled were fighting my fae on even ground at the beginning of this battle, after a few more of them die, they'll be powerful enough to cut through them by the dozens. Your deaths will accelerate faster and faster.

"Girls, he's gaining power when he kills you. Fight from a distance and abandon your bodies if you must." Zodiac's voice carried through the fake Stronghold, radiating from every thread covering the trap.

"Got it!" Hundreds of voices cried in chorus all along the fake Stronghold. A moment later, phantom javelins began to arc over the nearby building by the dozens, aimed with impeccable coordination, forcing Vincent to turn the air and blow them away.

"URK!" a phantom javelin jutted out of Vincent's chest, forcing a groan through his lips. He glanced behind and spotted a hole in the wall where the Tangled had thrown it straight through the wall with deadly accuracy. They're sharing my location with each other. That was how they were able to shoot him without seeing him directly. The ones perched on the rooftops were instructing the ones in the alleyways on where and how to shoot. Vincent envied their ability to coordinate.

He dove to the side as more javelins shot through the walls from every direction, the phantom spear dissolving as his flame aura rapidly wore it away. the hole in his chest closed up in a heartbeat, the bleeding wasn't a problem either, thanks to his passives.

"What's taking so long?" He asked aloud.

"As soon as we get close to taking one of them out, they die of their own accord." Neka manifested beside him to speak. He had to kill them with fire, specifically, or else he didn't get the buff. They were surely wary of him now that he'd taken out a dozen with flames, trying to avoid his line of sight, and if any of his fae got close to winning they simply abandoned the fight to deny him any further advantage.

"Looks like we'll have to turn our attention to Zodiac," Vincent said, spreading his wings and launching himself off the ground. He couldn't see the telekinetic threads, but his Focus was certainly high enough to get a feel for where they were. And there, at the densest point, was an old man in white. Vincent launched himself forward. Zodiac made a tearing motion with his hands, creating a tear in reality that propagated between them.

Neka manifested beside Vincent and shoved him aside an instant before the tear in reality snuffed his bodyguard out. Vincent kept flying forward, weaving around the tears in reality. Once he was close enough, he released the fae he'd been keeping in reserve, Neka included. The four fae pinned the Lord down with incessant attacks, gradually forcing him up and out of range of his Tangled helpers, while Vincent circled cautiously around the battle like a houndmaster taking down a large beast.

Waiting for his chance to deliver a spear into the heart of the lion. Once the old man had been properly whittled down, Vincent went in for the kill, reaching out to seize control of the air around him. Vincent's cantrip was violently disrupted as Zodiac seemed to sense the Ability and countered it with a blast of raw telekinesis. But the distraction allowed one of his fae to deliver a grievous wound to the old man's abdomen, piercing him with a burning rapier.

"Damnit." Zodiac muttered, blasting the undead away from him, blood leaking down his chin.

"Guess I can't do it alone. I'll bring more lords next time."

"There will be no next time," Vincent said, attempting another coup-de-grace, only for it to be countered again, allowing another fae to score wound on the aging lord. They were wearing him down.

"Foolish worm, I'm two hundred years old. You think I wouldn't have a backup plan?" Zodiac said, pointing up. Above them, a crystal island was rapidly growing larger as it shot towards them, on a collision-course with the island below, at outrageous speed. Despite all his preparation, Vincent wasn't sure if he could survive the raw kinetic force of two islands crashing into each other. And he didn't do things he wasn't sure of.

Zodiac's telekinetic threads reached out for Vincent, attempting to prevent him from leaving. Vincent scowled and shot away, burning the threads away while instructing his fae to continue fighting. Maybe they would manage to kill the wounded Zodiac, maybe they wouldn't, but it was more important that Vincent survive to try again, rather than die pointlessly. He was still figuring out his Build, and had more room to grow than a 200-year-old man.

Vincent was already hundreds of yards away when the approaching island winked out of existence, and a figure arrived beside Zodiac, assisting the ancient Lord with fending off the fae. … The old man was bluffing. I could've killed him. Noted. If I could feel amusement, I surely would be laughing. It was too late to turn around and go back. The newcomer had unknown abilities, so running while they were dealing with the fae was still the right move.