Chapter Seventy-three

Chapter Seventy-three

Kay sighed as he walked past an interesting-looking rock. He thought it was something Murunel would have commented on. He hadn’t realized how much he was going to miss her. Even though he hadn’t been with her every moment of every day, he’d actually made sure that he wasn’t in order to let her have as much of a social life as possible while she was stuck in the ball, he’d still gone out of his way to see her at least for a little bit each day. And now she was gone. He was ecstatic that they’d managed to free her, and he was happy that she was planning on coming back, but while she was gone, he missed her terribly. Which led him to thinking about his other friends that he missed and had led him down a spiral of not having the best morning.

Eleniah and Ahthia had basically kicked him out to go play with his new toy, so his terrible mood didn’t rub off on anyone else. As a leader, he had to keep his good image going after all.

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Orb of Interesting Locales

- A small enchanted glass orb that locates areas of interest for mapping. Small lights will glow around the interior of the sphere, denoting locations of interest, with the very center of the orb being the holder’s position. Brighter lights mean the location is of greater interest than weaker glows.

[————————————————————]Witness the debut of this chapter, unveiled through Ñôv€l--B1n.

It was ironic that the Quest to destroy a magical glass ball had given him another different magical glass ball. The Orb of Interesting Locales was his reward from his Quest to free Murunel. While they’d been walking away from the clearing, a window had popped up in front of him:

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QUEST COMPLETE!

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And then the enchanted ball had appeared in his hand. Since the Quest had described the reward as a “Class related item (Tier three equivalent)” he was assuming it was related to one of the two classes he had for making maps, especially because the item’s description said it led to points of interest for mapping. He’d decided to head for the closest of the small lights in the ball, even if it wasn’t the brightest of them since it wouldn’t take much time to check out. He was just hoping that “points of interest for mapping” might also be interesting or useful in other ways.

He was north of the settlement again, in the forested area he’d trekked around before. The specific portion he was in wasn’t very thick, and he’d had more than enough space to detour around the coupe of deer he’d seen from a distance. He wasn’t feeling in the mood to fight if he didn’t have to, and the settlement didn’t really need the meat.

He pulled out the ball from the spatial bag he’d ended up borrowing from one of the new people that’d come with Cindy’s group and checked his position. He was close, but he was also off to one side farther than he had been. He turned a bit as he walked to get back on track.

A few minutes later, he stopped and looked around. There was a collection of fruit trees in a small grove surrounded by other trees. He reached up and picked one off of a branch. It looked like a yellow-colored orange. Is it a lemon? He spun it around and looked at it in detail, but it just looked like a yellow orange. I wonder what it is? Wait, I can just use Appraisal.

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Sweetpeel Fruit

- A large yellow-skinned citrus fruit with a sweet taste. The peels of the fruit are even sweeter and are used in various candies. Sweetpeel trees are a rare find, as they only propagate through the feces of one particular species of migratory bird. Due to the strange and unpredictable flight patterns of the birds, plus the uncommon sweetness of the fruit, many believe Sweetpeels are a purposeful creation by someone in the unknown past.

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Well, shit.

Kay brought his halberd up as they both charged at him, one scampering forward like a rat, somehow managing to keep hold of their weapon while the other charged on their two feet, holding their stone club up for a downward attack.

It was easy to deal with both of them; it only took one slash across the back of the neck of the scampering enemy that transitioned upward into a stab into the chest of the upright rat-man to kill them both in one fell swoop. He looked up from the bodies as he drew his weapon out of the dead rat-man.

“Food!”

“Food!

“Food here!”

More rat-men were scrambling out of the hole, pulling themselves up with their claws on dirt and the metal doors. They rushed him in singles and groups as more and more started flooding out of the ground.

Kay fought back, easily killing the attackers as they came at him. None of them were very good fighters, and they didn’t do a single thing to support each other as they attacked. The growing numbers looked dangerous, though, and Kay reached out to the blood from the dead to start making larger attacks.

A claw sliced across his arm, drawing a little blood from Kay as he gagged and staggered back. The same horrendous feeling from the dried blood in that underground room filled his senses, but this time so much worse as the blood was fresh. These rat-men were the enemy that he’d feared among the tunnels of the plateau, and something was terrible about their blood. Something disgusting and somehow malevolent.

A few of them tried to dogpile him as he wretched and gagged, but he managed to batter them off of his body as he drew blood from his flask. He pushed outward, making a wave of blood that bowled over the attacking rat people and pushed them away. He took the moment of freedom to cover himself in his blood armor and start up his Blood Boost. Whatever the hell was going on with these things, they needed to die, now.

A slightly larger and differently dressed rat-man crawled out of the pit as Kay prepared to jump back into the fray. He had tattered robes on instead of armor, and in his hand was a large stone staff. He looked around the area and saw Kay. He screeched loudly, interrupting the incessant cries of ‘Food!’ and ‘Food Here!’ from the other rats.

He pointed at Kay with one outstretched, clawed finger. “Not food!”

Alright, what’s going to happen here? Pay it off as a mistake or some-

“Sacrifice!”

Never mind. Fuck.

The rat-man thrust his staff at Kay, and a tendril of sickly glowing green energy lashed out like a whip. Kay managed to dodge the lash, and then the rat-men went back to rushing at him. He killed dozens of them, but dozens more kept coming. Eventually, he didn’t have the space to move or the timing to block it, and the green energy whip wrapped around his arm. With a yank, Kay was dragged towards the larger rat-man, who grabbed him by the other arm.

The creature looked Kay in the face and grinned. “For çצ¿ñ↓au▒!”

Kay lost all sense of reality as the horrible noise that came from the rat man’s mouth drove all sense of reason from his brain. It was like something was attacking his thoughts and feelings. After a moment of painful writhing, he managed to throw off the sensation, or attack, or whatever it was.

That was when he realized he was falling down the pit into darkness below the earth.