TASTKA POV
I awoke to the sharp jab of a spear butt against my side. I dug in my claws reflexively so I wouldn’t fall from the branch. My eyes snapped open, blinking a few times. Clearly, the faint glow from the trees had faded somewhat, but since I didn’t know what that meant, I had no way of knowing how long I had been asleep.
Was it my turn to take a watch?
I scowled and looked toward the holder of the spear that had poked me. I was always irritable when forced awake before I was ready, but at least I had little trouble waking fully, unlike some. Fisk was the one who had awakened me, and when I looked at him, he quickly drew a finger across his lips, signaling me to stay silent.
I tensed and slowly lowered my hand toward my own spear, propped up at the joint of my branch where it met the trunk. Aside from my skill with throwing weapons, I was far from the best fighter in the group, but I didn’t know the situation yet.
Duvad – the last of our group, who had stayed up to watch for danger – slowly pointed down toward another tree, one that was far more infested with the strange growths we had seen earlier. Partway up its trunk, a strange shape was climbing. Two large claws repeatedly dug into the bark, hauling the body upward. Each of those sharp legs was probably as wide and long as my forearm. The creature itself was about half the length of an elf… not very big, but if those claws could be used for anything other than climbing, it could be deadly.
I could barely make out smaller legs along its sides, keeping its grip on the tree as it climbed. I wondered why we hadn’t seen any marks on the trees from creatures like this while exploring, but I didn’t have time to worry about that now. I shook my head to clear it, but couldn’t dismiss the strange feeling of urgency that suddenly filled me. The creature didn’t seem to have noticed us, so why did I feel like I was in a hurry?
I tried to push that feeling away and centered myself with a deep breath and a firm grip on my spear. My eyes were adjusting to the dim light quickly, and I took a better look at the slow-moving shape. It had some kind of hard skin or carapace, but most of it was covered by a mossy texture, like the undergrowth. For all I knew, we could have been walking over some of these without noticing.
I reached out with my Mana Sense to try and feel it that way, but it didn’t seem to be there… blending in perfectly with the struggling Vital essence of the tree. That didn’t make sense. This was definitely a different creature than the tree.
It must have some way of hiding its presence, I thought. Unfortunately, while I had ways to pierce such protections, they would almost certainly alert the creature to our own presence.
By now, all of the others had been awakened as well. Fisk must have wanted all of us awake to see what the wildlife was doing here. So far, it didn’t seem to be a threat to us, but I definitely wouldn’t want to see one of those things climbing up toward me.
I glanced down at the trunk of my own tree but didn’t see anything like that… but nor did I smell anything. Well, nothing aside from the tree itself and the rot of the marsh. This place was definitely not made for elves, who relied so much on scent for guidance when vision failed.
Yet I still felt uneasy. These creatures had hidden from us during the entire trek here, but they had to be nearby… unless they could move much faster than they were doing now. The canopy hid the sky, so I couldn’t tell what time of evening it was. I was pretty sure dusk had already started when I’d fallen asleep, but I couldn’t be sure how far into it we were. This season, dusk actually had a brief period of twilight, while dawn’s lengthy partial-light was extended even further. That always messed with my sense of time.
We all watched as the strange animal continued its climb up the trunk until it finally reached one of the growths. A small, beady-eyed head emerged, with large mandibles that bit down on the growth with surprising gentleness. Then it just stayed there, so still that I wondered if it had suddenly died.
That was when I tensed again and looked at the others. I flicked my tail upward, twitching it toward the creature to let my companions know that I had sensed something. Of this group, I had the sharpest mana sense, and I could feel the creature now. It was strange, because I felt Umbral essence – normally much harder to detect.
This confused me at first, but then I saw that it was secreting some sort of liquid over the growth, carrying the Umbral essence with it. I finally put it together and risked speaking, though I kept my voice a soft whisper. This close, all of us could likely hear me.
“It’s going to feed on that thing, I think,” my hushed voice told the others. “It’s covering it with Umbral essence, and then it’s going to either eat it or take it away, I think.”
“Why would it do that?” Duvad asked, confusion in his tone.
It was Eyssa who answered him, not me. She was slowly climbing upward and now clung to a branch above my head, giving her a different angle to look at what was going on.
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“It must be trying not to alert something else,” she murmured to the rest of us. “Which means we really shouldn’t touch those things. If it needs to cover it before it can eat, then whatever put those things on the trees must be able to tell when you disturb them. Those things are everywhere, so I don’t want to get the attention of whatever it is that put them there.”
That made a lot of sense to me. As curious as I was to see what the creature was like, I wasn’t that curious—not enough to risk my life. Eyssa was the one who tended to be more reckless, and if she thought it was a bad idea, I doubted anyone in our group would disagree.
I turned back to watch the thing begin to consume the growth. It was fascinating. I had always been interested in how mana was used, and this place had far more of it than where we normally lived. I tried to watch every movement, to discern the nature of whatever technique it was using to keep its feeding hidden.
Umbral mana was one of the most difficult to work with, aside from Pure mana itself. My [Soulkeeper] class gave me a relatively high affinity with it, but my clan had few who could teach me anything about it, so I knew very few spells that directly used Umbral mana.
I felt something strange, a stirring within me. That sense of urgency flared again, my tail curling about a smaller branch to my side in a reflexive motion as a shiver ran down my spine. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on the feeding creature and my Mana Sense watching it. Even then, I almost slipped at the sudden notification.
The notification was a huge distraction, and the only thing that kept me focused on the bizarre creature was that I was seeing more than before. My Mana Sense had allowed me to tell that Umbral mana was present, and I had guessed it was a result of whatever fluid was leaking from the creature’s jaws.
When I stared at it now, I saw much more. If I concentrated, as I was trying to do, strange patterns and colors I couldn’t describe began to appear. The fluid was one pattern, the tree had traces of another, and the air around it and the rest of the creature had yet a third. It was briefly terrifying before I realized what I was seeing… the types of mana, or more accurately, sensing them. Even when I blinked, the patterns remained, so I didn’t think it was vision that let me interpret them.
My heart raced with the sheer strangeness of it all, but I kept watching. My spear trembled in my hands while I tried to take in all the information. The notification itself was strange as well.
In all my many Moves preparing for this journey, I had tried everything I could think of to increase the level of my [Soulkeeper] class. Nothing had worked. Even as I’d advanced all the way to level five as a [Flux Speaker], the [Soulkeeper] class – whatever it was – had stubbornly remained at level one. Yet now, when I had just been staring at a bug on a tree eating its meal, it had suddenly leapt to level two.
I couldn’t understand what I had done. The benefits were strange too. It wasn’t uncommon to have one, two, or even three attribute increases upon a level up. My [Flux Speaker] class was particularly rare and valuable in that it also gave me a slow but steady advancement to my Flux Affinity. But the number of benefits this class gave from a single level-up was more than any I had ever heard of.
My new ability – to see the flows of mana and determine its essence, or at least that’s what I assumed it was doing – was also strange. It didn’t have a name, and once more I saw that same word: Provisional. Only now, instead of being after the name, it seemed to indicate it had yet to be completed.
The creature finally finished its meal and began slowly descending the tree. I saw that the marks from its claws were already beginning to seal up, with a faint, definite gathering of another essence, which I assumed must be Vital essence. That one I was sensing in a more vague way through my Mana Sense, so was easy to identify. This, too, was in a different pattern, and I had the feeling it meant something.
Duvad started to relax, but Fisk held up a hand, telling us all not to say anything until the creature had left. I had no problem with that decision. We watched it descend slowly until it began to vanish into the muck below, almost as if merging with it. When I concentrated again, a throbbing started behind my eyes. This new ability must take some effort to use, I realized, but I could see it clearly now: the various strange colors mingling together, twisting, and forming the structure of something.
I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but I knew it was important. Then, just before the creature vanished completely into the muck and the pattern faded – likely through some Umbral ability that let it hide itself – I received another notification.
It was starting to dawn on me that this was something new – something even the Status Menu we relied upon to show what we had learned didn’t know how to handle. My class was strange, and the menu that was supposed to tell me what it did wasn’t sure what it did either. Yet somehow, it was able to describe it… eventually.
“Should I finish my watch?” Duvad asked, breaking into my thoughts.
Fisk started to answer, but then I held up my hand. “I’ll take over,” I said. “I have next watch anyway. I’ll wake Dashe when I feel myself starting to fall asleep again. I have some things to think about, anyway.”
Fisk looked at me strangely but then gave a short affirmative flick of his tail. “Fine. But in the morning, we move as fast as we dare. I don’t want to spend any more time in this place.”
I had no problem with that. I said nothing as I propped myself up against the trunk of the tree and laid my spear across my lap. I doubted anything more would happen tonight, but I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep right away.
Why was my class so different?
The Orpheus Gambit