The roads were long and seemed never-ending. Velancia was a land of extremes, I’d found. Where Herztal was mostly dominated by rolling hills, Velancia was plains and streams. It was one of the main reasons agriculture, and thus slavery, was so prevalent in the country. When nearly every stretch of Dwarven-owned land north of the Barren Forest was seemingly tailor-made to grow things upon, every peasant and his extended family could found a plantation. At least, at this latitude. It was only when you started to reach the more northerly and north-easterly areas of the continent that you would encounter a nearly unbroken stretch of tall peaks and mountains.

  That was where the Hold Dwarves still dwelled, deep in their mountain homes, forsaking the rule of the Five Principle Houses.

  But with the revelation of Kierla’s ‘finding stick’, we had sharply veered away from the wide, flat plains of the Velancian lowlands. Upon discovery of the innocuous enchanted stick, I had conferred with the leadership and convinced them it would be a good idea to seek out the man who might just be the last Paragon upon the face of Vereden.

  When they learned that, it hadn’t been too hard to persuade them. Even if he was in the depths of Core Collapse, the man knew more about this land than…probably anyone, really. The Barren Forest was his ancestral home, after all, and he had spent centuries conducting assaults on his former country. As he had told me, Alveron had spent the bulk of his life trying to free his people from the grip that Fynneas held on them. He had only stopped when he grew too old and feeble to do so.

  And instead, sought Precursors to do the job for him.

  It was a stroke of luck that I probably should have seen coming that the old Elf was up here, trying to sort out the mess of the Skyfall. It was possible we might not even need the help of Rhoscara if we could join up with Alveron.

  Still, we were still planning on reaching out to the Florens stronghold. According to the ‘finding stick’, Alveron was somewhere to the east of us, which had been the direction the expedition had been travelling in the first place. However, the position of his camp had us travelling a bit more southward than we were initially.

  Now, we were venturing deeper into the fringes of the Barren Forest itself. Not enough that we were within Elven land itself, I believe. Moreover, the border forests that were hotly contested between Elven raiding parties and Dwarven Rangers.

  When I had conferred with Bronzle about adjusting our route, the captive Dwarven Captain had been outright suspicious of our motive. The expedition Captains and I all agreed that our prisoner didn’t warrant an explanation as to our changing route, and we didn’t need his opinion on anything other than where to go. To our surprise, there were actually some small towns within the periphery between the Elves and the Dwarves. In this stretch of the continent, most were even under the governance of Rhoscara itself.

  I somewhat doubted they had contact with the Florens stronghold.

  However, it was easier to pacify Bronzle into assisting us these days. The presence of the Dwarven woodcutters who had joined the expedition as our guests had eased his concerns about us. At least, to a degree. The fact that we were willing to go out of our way to help stranded Dwarven civilians seemed to have reassured him that we had no intentions of outright raiding the Velancian countryside. These days, Bronzle was doing his best to ingratiate himself with the woodcutters.

  They were…pretty suspicious of him, from what I had seen. After all, the Principality Army hadn’t exactly endeared itself to the very people they had abandoned. That didn’t seem to deter Bronzle, though. I think he was just happy to see other Dwarves, who weren’t under my command. There weren’t many of them. But they did exist, and I typically assigned them to his guard duty. These soldiers had been told to keep a close eye on what exactly Bronzle was telling the woodcutters. We didn’t need him trying to rally them to his cause and do something stupid like stage an escape attempt.

  I’d been informed by his watchers that the ‘good’ Captain had been caught eyeing their APDs when he thought they weren’t looking.

  All that to say, it had been over half a week now, since we had adjusted our course towards Alveron. With the transition from wide-open plains into the border forests, the mood had grown tenser among the expedition. Even though the Skyfall meant that the only light we had was dim and grey, it was still something. But under the intimidatingly tall boughs of the Barren Forest, what illumination there was to be found was sparse.

  And in every shadow, everyone knew that there could be Elven raiders.

  Watching.

  Waiting.

  Even I was taking the time to keep an eye out, well aware of the suspicion among the soldiery. I was known to have a good investment into Perception, and a few well-placed ‘slips’ of the tongue in public places had told them I had minor sensing capabilities.

  All the better to fuel my reputation, as well as reassure them.

  As such, I was taking a shift in the crow's nest of the Ashen Bride. I was alone, for once, surrounded by the darkness under the boughs. It would be counterproductive to bring along Sylvia, considering just how easily distracted my lover could make me. Fade couldn’t exactly fit up here, either, and I doubted the Spirit Wolf would have been interested in the first place. At my request, the Familiar had been sticking with Walter as he acted as Kierla’s minder, here in the expedition. I had no real reason to distrust the Elf, of course. She had been nothing but forthright with us, and I didn’t really think she was in danger from my people either.

  But…

  Trust, but verify was a lesson I’d had to learn the hard way.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  For most people, I think they would have been uneasy, being this high up into the darkness above the Ashen Bride. Far below me, I could see the pinpricks of light that were the torches and Mage lights coming both from the ship itself, but also from the dozens and dozens of ancillary wagons of the expedition. From where I was, it almost seemed like a rolling ocean of stars upon the turf of the forest, creeping through the undergrowth in rattling waves. The light didn’t reach me at this height, though, and thus I was enveloped in darkness.

  Good. All the better to see through it, then. The light would only blind me.

  For a time, I existed only within that darkness. It was startling, just how easy it was for me to fall back into the shadows after spending so long standing directly in the light. Once upon a time, I had been a blade hidden within the gloom, acting as an assassin in a civil war that had not been my own. Those days were past, now, and I had stepped out of the shadows to stand at the forefront of a new movement. A new paradigm that I hoped to help guide not only Herztal, but the people of Vereden as a whole.

  Maybe one day, when the Skyfall was nothing but a dim, frightful memory, it could be done. With the help of my comrades, and especially with the hidden Netherim repository I’d left back in Blutstein…

  Maybe.

  But that day was not today.

  What strange, maudlin thoughts crept through my mind, embraced in the darkness as I was. That wasn’t even the only one, either.

  During this entire trek, from the docks of Blutstein all the way to the central border forests of Velancia, I had grown.

  In…many ways.

  The most expected one was likely to be my leadership capabilities. I’d been the Marshall of the Order of the Polaris Reach for some months now, but that was different from this expedition. There was more urgency, more tension to managing over a thousand different soldiers in hostile territory, I had found. Yes, I had all of the other Captains to help in my decision-making, but I was still the person at the top. I was in overall command, and thus all the responsibility and the consequences of it fell to me.

  Sometimes, that weighed heavily on me. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Sylvia and Fade to help me in my darker moments.

  However, the most impactful to me personally was likely in regards to my Status. All of the fighting, either with the marines of the Principality off the coast or with the many monsters that were dogging our heels, had contributed to my growing strength. However, as I had expected, not quite as much as I would have hoped. I had left Blutstein as a freshly Ascended level two hundred, and I had reached the central forests growing only thirteen more levels.

  In other words, level two hundred and thirteen.

  That was much slower growth than I had experienced only last year. The sheer quantity of monsters I typically fought, that everyone had to fight in the expedition, meant that I would have expected at least double those levels. But, as I had experienced in my trek across Goryuen, the higher you climbed, the steeper the incline grew, as you grasped endlessly for more and more and more power from the System.

  The System that was suffering a long, slow death of its own.

  Two thirteen wasn’t enough to receive the gift of another Skill or Talent from the ailing System, and thus the only things I had really gotten from it in the intervening weeks were Virtue points and a few random Talent level-ups.

  Idly, I pulled up my Status with Hidden Amidst the Spheres, and scrolled down to the General section of it, where the General Skills and Talents I’d accumulated dwelled.

  Sometimes, it startled me just how few General Skills and Talents I had. Many of my General Skills, I had only picked up in passing from other students at the Academy. They were unimpressive, but the process for acquiring them was well known to most people on Vereden. That included students eager to show off to the initiated. Things like Spark did little else but cause a single spark of flame to fly from my fingertip. Really, it was only good for things like…lighting a candle, or perhaps setting the flame on a campfire. It was a similar story for things like Gust of Air or Produce Water. The former created a small breeze no greater than a wave of a handheld fan, and the latter a stream of water similar to the pour from a small pitcher. Neither were all that impressive, which was probably why I had never sought them out until enthusiastic students all but forced them on me.

  I did eventually get that light Skill, though.

  Hah.

  I’d made a little more progress on my General Talents, but really, the only exciting note was that I was near to maxing out General Weapons Proficiency. As I had learned back when Hook had set me on that path, during my initial training in the Nocturne Division, that meant I was close to evolving the Talent. From General Weapons Proficiency, I could then transition it into General Weapons Mastery.

  Most people didn’t choose the General Weapons path in favour of specialisation, and I didn’t blame them. The sheer otherworldly skill that possessing higher tiers of weapon specialisation granted was likely the single most common form of Mysticality that the common man had access to, other than Skills. Most people weren’t dedicated Cultivators or Magi, after all. You needed specialised training for that.

  I even sometimes envied people that specialization, but in the end, I was content with my generalist build. It was much quicker to level, anyway. To get a Master level weapons talent you had to grind on it for years.

  But to get a Master level General Weapon Talent? Well.

  About a year or so.

  I was looking forward to seeing what that was like. Just one more level up to the Talent, and I could transition it and find out.

  I was knocked out of my brief bout of woolgathering by the feeling of my Core Lattice sliding back into place. It had been lingering in a Sprite not far from me, helping me keep a lookout.

  It had spotted something. Something a bit…out of place.

  Far in the distance ahead of us, my Core had spotted what it thought…was a settlement.

  An intact one.