All The Skills

There were four scourgelings in total.

Arthur started forward with the intent to help, but a heavy hand landed on his shoulder.

Domingo pushed him back. "Don't bother," he said, almost boredly. "We have professionals to handle this."

Arthur looked wildly around. "But those are scourgelings! There's an eruption—!"

His eyes scanned the treetops, certain that he would see or hear Brixaby any moment. The dragon wouldn’t ignore something like this.

He looked, as well, for signs of a rising eruption cone. But there was nothing in sight. Come to think of it, he hadn't felt the slightest bit of an earthquake either. Was the eruption further away? Why hadn't the local dragon hives contained the scourgelings?

While Arthur reeled, the unlucky ox was pulled down by the scourgeling. It bellowed and kicked, but was hampered by the yoke it was tied to. Then the scourgeling bit down with a crunch over its head and the ox went still.

To their credit, the guards had acted quickly. They immediately began firing on the attacking scourgeling. One used his spear as a ranged weapon, pointing the tip end at the scourgeling and launching bright yellow bolts at it.

The other two guards jumped down from the top of the cart and took on the scourgelings with hand-to-hand fighting. One, the swordsman, must've had some kind of body enhancement card. He moved so fast that Arthur only caught flashes of him.

The scourgeling he was fighting fell, missing a front leg. Then, with another movement, the back leg came free as well.

The one scourgeling that had managed to reach the ox suddenly emitted a screeching cry and backed up, the thickest part of its body glowing. But this wasn't the light of ready-to-harvest cards. As Arthur watched, fascinated and horrified in equal parts, the thing self-immolated, fire suddenly erupting from its chest cavity and engulfing it.

Meanwhile, a few of the guards with ranged powers at the top of the wall started taking potshots at the remaining scourgeling.

They seemed to have this well in hand. Some of the guards up top were even taking bets on shots.

Arthur blinked. He hadn't seen people stand up to scourgelings like this before. Not in an organized fashion. Usually, people ran, even if they had combat powers, because where there was one scourgeling, there were likely others on the way. They overwhelmed people in waves, and brought with them disease and death. Already some of the foliage was beginning to wilt.

Yet while these guards treated the threat seriously, they didn’t seem surprised or even overly alarmed. This seemed like a common occurrence.

Just as he had that thought, three more oxen-sized scourgelings lumbered out of the brush, whistling a challenge. And then, beyond them, a true monster emerged. It had the same body shape as the other scourgelings, like one of those odd brown oxen, only with no fur and with outsized jaws. Only, it was easily twice as big. And where the hump of fat over the shoulders would normally by, additional limbs emerged. They were twisty, whip-like tentacles that lashed this way and that. It was a mega-scourgeling. One of the Rare, more powerful beasts.

When the mega-scourgeling entered the fray, everybody paused, as if sizing up the new threat.

Domingo said something in his language that had the flavor of a curse. And just like that, the fight turned earnest, where it had been almost casual earlier.

Orders rang up and down the high wall behind Arthur. Suddenly, everybody who could was shooting at the mega-scourgeling. But its hide must have been thick enough to shrug off every hit. It treated them like an annoying bee sting at worst. The side benefit was that the ranged attacks happened to kill the other three normal-sized scourgelings, but that was only a happy accident.

One of the mega-scourgeling’s wildly flailing tentacles shot out and snapped against the wood frame of the cart. It splintered as if it had been hit with an explosive card charm, and thick splinters struck two of the guards standing nearby.

"Do you have a knife or something metal?" Arthur yelled to Domingo.

"You want to go at that thing with a knife?" Domingo looked at him like he was crazy. "Get back, kid, let the professionals handle it."

I am a professional, he wanted to say, and wished that Brixaby was here. His dragon's stunning shout would knock that thing for a loop. But… it might also hurt the guards standing the mega-scourgeling.

The mega-scourgeling turned snapped up at the remaining guards on top of the cart, who’d taken to harassing it to keep it away from the the injured. The one with the self-immolation charm was sitting down, meditating. Arthur’s guess was that that particular card had a strong cooldown on it or it had sucked his mana dry.

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The fast swordsman tried his hand at the mega-scourgeling but couldn't seem to get past the whip-like tentacles. Arthur saw him retreat, his shirt torn and blood coming off his shoulder.

No one could seem to penetrate the skin.

Well, I can, he thought, and with a twist, moved past Domingo and ran straight at the mega-scourgeling.

Domingo called out after him, but Arthur ignored him, grabbing a shovel out of his Personal Space.

One of the whip-like tentacles lashed out, passing through Arthur as he phased out. This gave him a few precious moments to run up to the thing. He quickly had to use his phase-out again as another tentacle lashed at him, and the first came back for a return swipe.

This particular card could be mana-hungry when his body was phasing through many objects at once. He'd only get one shot at this. Mentally holding onto his phase-in, phase-out card, he ran through the side of the scourgeling. His mana dropped like a stone. But when he came out the other side, he made sure the flat end of the shovel was stuck inside the scourgeling.

Then he phased back into reality.

Its hide was impervious, but having a large shovel lodged in its chest would give anybody a bad day. The scourgeling shrieked a sound like nails on a chalkboard, raising up as if ready to come down on Arthur and squish him. But as it did, it revealed a soft belly.

Finally, one of the guards on the rooftop nailed it with what looked like a wind bolt edged with razor blades. Intestines fell free, and Arthur wisely backed away, letting the guards wear it down now that he had proved it was not completely invincible.

The thrashing scourgeling landed sickeningly on the handle of the shovel still sticking out at its side, driving it in further. This seemed to hit something vital. It collapsed and a few moments later, it was dead.

A cheer went up from the top of the wall, and the wagon both.

Domingo came up to Arthur, looked at the fallen oxen, and spit. "Shame 'bout the by-son." Then he looked at Arthur. "Seems like you do have some tricks up your sleeve, though."

Arthur wasn't amused. He looked around, suspicious of every bush and tree. "There have to be more where that came from."

"There are always more," Domingo said with a laugh. "As I was about to tell you, the damn forest is full of the things."

"Then why aren't you gathering to fight them off?" Arthur wanted to know.

“What, this wasn’t enough excitement for the day?” With a laugh, Domingo slapped his shoulder and then walked off to inspect one of the fallen scourgelings.

Flummoxed, Arthur stared after him. He had to be missing something… and he was a stranger here. So, he shut his mouth and tried to observe, instead.

The guards from the wagon were all smiles. They had lost two of the oxen, one from the initial scourgeling attack, and the other from, unfortunately, friendly fire. But this didn’t seem to bother them overly much. A couple of the guards went to unhook the bodies and reestablish the line.

Meanwhile, more guards came to inspect the scourgelings along with Domingo, commenting to each other in their language and laughing, and joking. The most attention went to the mega-scourgeling. People gathered around its head and traded comments, looking as he remembered the men from his village used to do when they hunted deer and scored a huge buck. One even went so far as to whip out a measuring tape from his pocket to size up the head.

There were smiles all around. He didn't get it.

Then, naturally, they started harvesting. This was the part that Arthur dreaded. He'd seen people get vicious when there were cards or card shards up for grabs.

Indeed, several shards were pulled from every one of the minor scourgelings. Domingo attended to the mega-scourgeling himself. He pulled out a full card and held it up to cheers. From the moving pictures Arthur spotted on the card, he knew it was a Rare. No wonder it had shrugged off so many of the other attacks. If they were Common or Uncommon, they would have had a much harder time getting through.

Instead of fighting, the guards turned the shards over to Domingo who made a show of tucking the card and the card shards away in a bag that was too small for its size. It must've been some kind of spatial enchantment bag.

Domingo returned to Arthur. "That was a Rare beast," he said. "Good, good. It won't be long now."

"Long? What do you mean?" Arthur asked.

"You're here to try for the..." Domingo uttered more incomprehensible words before adding, “Right? Looks like the whole area is almost ready to pop.”

Pop? Arthur pensively looked around for a scourgeling eruption. “I don’t know what that is.”

That earned a surprised laugh out of him. "Kid, you've come at the right time. If you don't know what that is, you've got the luck of the demi-scourge. Here," he gestured for Arthur to follow him back to the desk, then wrote on a slip of paper, stamped it with ink that glimmered with a card anchor charm, and handed it over. "Get into the city. This note will hook you up so you don't need a translator following you around. Then, get signed up for the,” Again, he uttered that string of words. It sounded impossible to twist a tongue that way. “With rare beasties emerging at any moment, you'll want to get in on that action." He winked.

Another guard who stood next to the oxen called out to Domingo. The man turned and waved that he’d heard. Then he looked back at Arthur expectantly.

The man was busy, and while Arthur had many questions, he knew his answers would be found in the city.

“Would you sign up for the… uh…” He wasn’t going to embarrass himself by trying to repeat the words. “If you were in my place?”

“Kid, I’m going in myself! Now, hurry along through that gate. Anyone hassles you, show them that note.”

It was a dismissal. Instinct told Arthur not to ask too many more questions. Domingo wasn't his friend; he was a guard, and Arthur did not want to stand out or be too suspicious. His answers would be found inside.

Arthur took the piece of paper, nodded, and left.

He stopped in front of the archway that led to the city and glanced back the way he’d come.

Scourgelings don't just appear from the forest. There had to be an eruption site somewhere.

And as he turned and looked again at the city with new eyes, he realized that if one thought about it from the right angle, the buildings that started short and grew taller and taller further back vaguely resembled an eruption cone.

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