Return of the Runebound Professor

They reached the area that the rock monsters inhabited after a short trip. Noah managed a fairly decent landing with his flying sword at the top of a hill. He and Moxie stepped off as Lee fluttered out of his bag.

After returning her clothes to her, Noah looked around the hill. Like the majority of the area around Dawnforge, it was rough and craggy. Holes were scattered throughout the ground and rough stone formations jutted out at random.

Some of the protruding rocks were as tall as buildings and cast long shadows beneath them, giving the area a starkly unwelcoming appearance. Noah instinctively activated his tremorsense, feeling for any vibrations in the ground near them.

“Where are they?” Noah asked. “Blending in with the rocks, maybe?”

“Probably,” Moxie said with a nod. “We didn’t make too much noise landing, so we might need to root some of them up.”

“Using a bunch of power won’t just call them over?”

“Probably not.” Moxie knelt by a hole and sent a vine winding into it – though Noah noted that Moxie very pointedly did not grab onto the vine. If anything yanked on it, the vine was going into the ground without her. “Rock monsters are pretty common, and they’re not all that powerful. They’d probably run off if you started throwing around huge amounts of energy.”

“And then we’d get a giga-rock monster instead!” Lee said, thrusting her axe into the air and swiping it as if to chop off something’s head. “I bet the gems in that would sell for more money.”

“We’re delivering the gems for the job, not keeping them.” Moxie’s vine slithered back up her sleeve and she stood up, brushing her knees off. “Gems is honestly a bit of a stretch. Most rock monsters near Dawnforge have been hunted so often that their parts aren’t worth that much. It’s more like shiny pieces of glass.”

“They probably taste like rocks.”

Lee eyed a stone on the ground, a contemplative expression on her face. Moxie walked over to another hole and sent her vine writhing into it once more.

“I don’t imagine rocks taste great,” Noah said as Lee went to pick one up.

“Why? Have you tried one?”

“Well… no. But I’m pretty sure it’ll just taste like a rock.”

“And you don’t know what that tastes like.”

“I – fine. Eat a rock.”

“I don’t want to anymore.”

Noah wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh or let out a defeated sigh, but he spotted the twinkle of amusement in Lee’s eyes. She was screwing with him. Noah shook his head.

A few distant cracks emerged from the hole Moxie was beside. She straightened, taking a few preemptive steps back.

“I think I got one.”

“What exactly does that vine do?” Noah asked, watching the hole expectantly. “Like… why does it make monsters come out? Energy or something?”

“No. I tickle them until they get annoyed and come out to stop me.”

“You tick–”

A hand burst from the hole, and the ground around it bulged. They all took a few steps back as a craggy stone creature pulled itself out from beneath the ground, pebbles and dirt sloughing off its body as it straightened.

The monster’s weight was overbearingly in its upper body. It was somewhat humanoid. Its arms and chest were sharp and jagged, while its legs were bent out in odd directions beneath it and didn’t look like they served much purpose other than balance.

Instead of a head, it had more of a rough bump with a few jagged stones around a hole that Noah suspected to be its mouth. Two glittering red stones at the top of the bump marked its eyes.

“Wow. That thing is ugly,” Lee proclaimed.

The monster burst into motion – not using its legs, but its arms. Like a crab, it skittered across the rocks and lunged at Lee. She swung her axe like a bat, slamming it into the monster’s head with a loud, echoing clang.

It was sent flying back, bouncing twice across the ground in a manner remarkably similar to a stone skipped across a lake, and slammed into a large rock formation behind it. Dust rained down as the monster scrabbled upright, a large crack running through its heavy body.

Noah gathered power, but Moxie was faster. A red, thorned vine slithered across the ground and whipped up, driving straight into the monster’s open mouth. It shuddered, batting at the vine with its clawed fingers, but they rang off its surface.

The monster bucked, and a vine burst out of its stomach. More vines pushed their way out of it, ripping the creature apart from the inside within just a few seconds. It crumbled to dirt and Moxie’s vine slithered back to her, wound around its eyes.

Moxie plucked the gems from the vine and put them into her bag before flashing Noah and Lee a grin. “Mine.”

“Hey! That was my kill!” Lee exclaimed.

“Should have been faster. You’re the one that sent it flying. I just plucked the low-hanging fruit.”

Lee glared at Moxie, then stomped on the ground, pouting. “Bully.”

The ground rumbled. Another hand burst from beneath it, followed by several more. Four more rock monsters clambered out of the ground, letting out a synchronized roar.

Wow. If they worked on their pitch and tone a bit, they’d make a great quartet.

“Mine!” Lee crowed, bounding forward and bringing her axe down on the center of the closest one’s head. Stone exploded in a cloud of dust, flying everywhere – along with the monster’s eyes.

“We need the gems!” Noah yelled, sending a wave of stone through the ground beneath his feet and up into the stomach of another monster. It jerked the creature off the ground, and he shot a blade of wind at its neck, severing its head from its shoulders.

He went to catch the head, but thought better of it at the last minute and jerked his hands back. The rock monsters were basically large rocks. Trying to grab a falling stone sounded like a recipe for disaster.

So, of course, instead of catching it, the rock fell on his foot. Noah let out a slew of curses and hopped back on his good foot, shaking the other one off. He barely noticed the energy he got from defeating the monster through his annoyance. The two remaining monsters skittered toward him with their odd, crablike movements.

Moxie’s vine snagged both of them, sweeping them up and dangling them in the air. Lee bounded into the air, slamming her axe home on one of their chests. She grabbed its head and ripped it straight off, dropping to the ground and plucking the gemstone eyes to hold in the air victoriously.

“Got them!”

“Good job,” Noah hissed through clenched teeth, still hopping around. There were a lot of kinds of pain – and he’d been through quite a few of them – but getting a heavy object dropped on a toe somehow managed to hurt more than getting ripped open.

Maybe it’s because I know the pain will end as soon as I die. Maybe I should –

Noah caught Moxie staring at him. He cleared his throat and put his foot back down. “What?”

“I just had the feeling you were thinking something stupid.”

Noah went to call out a warning as his tremorsense picked up a monster moving through the earth beneath Moxie, but she was way ahead of him. She thrust her hand down and a vine wound through the ground, bursting out beside her with a monster impaled through the chest.

It crumbled to dust and Moxie caught its eyes, flashing Noah a smug look. He cleared his throat and just settled for answering the question she’d asked a moment before.

“I wasn’t. I never think stupid things.”

“Right,” Moxie said dryly. She flicked her fingers and her vine whipped the remaining monster she’d captured into the ground with a loud crash, shattering it to dust. She walked over to the pile and rooted through it, plucking the eyes free. “Why don’t I believe you?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea,” Noah replied. His tremorsense sent off a warning and Noah launched himself into the air with a blast of wind. Natural Disaster sent him considerably higher than he’d been planning for, but it still let him get out of the way as a rock monster lurched up beneath him, its claws passing through the air.

Noah sent a bolt of lighting crashing down, blowing the monster apart with a single spell. He landed with a grunt, staggering and catching his balance. Energy slithered into his Runes and he gathered up the gemstones from the monster’s remains.

“These are pretty fun to fight,” Noah said. “Not too dangerous. Not a whole ton of energy in them either. Looks like their attack patterns are pretty similar as well. Either they slide at you or they come up from beneath the ground.”

“There’s a Great Monster in the area that’s influencing them. Pretty sure it’s beneath Dawnforge,” Moxie said.

“Beneath? That doesn’t seem wise. Considering how much stronger Great Monsters are, I’m picturing a hill-sized rock monster right now. Maybe a small mountain.”

“Small mountain, according to the rumors. And it’s not just lying around. It’s bound.”

A rock monster traveling through the ground had its attack interrupted by Natural Disaster forcibly slamming the stones around it together. Noah split the ground open a moment later, plucking the gemstone eyes from the rubble.

“That’s kind of screwed up. They’ve got the Great Monster chained up? Aren’t Great Monsters more intelligent than normal monsters? I don’t feel bad about killing these rock monsters, but if they were actually sapient…”

“I never said I approved of it, but is this coming from the same person that relentlessly tried to kill the Hellreaver?” Moxie teased.

“That’s different. It was using me as a food delivery service. The Hellreaver deserved what was coming to it.”

“Yeah!” Lee crowed. “And I also got lots of snacks out of that as well. I liked the Hellreaver.”

Noah shot a look at Lee, who grinned sheepishly.

“Seriously?”

“Well, you weren’t using your bodies. I was helping!”

Noah just shook his head. He turned his attention to his tremorsense, trying to see if any more rock monsters had been drawn into the fight, but he couldn’t pick up on any more. He opened his mouth, then paused as something flitted by at the top of a nearby hill.

Something red.

Oh, come on. This happens every time we go out now. It’s not even a surprise anymore. Can’t you at least try to make things a little more interesting, if only so I don’t have to deal with random crap every single time I go outside?

The cat wreathed with reddish-purple energy, the spikes running across its body shimmering with every movement as it raced toward them, didn’t seem to care about Noah’s internal complaints.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Moxie said, turning to follow Noah’s gaze. “Again?”

“At least it’s alo–” Lee started.

A huge, stone spider the size of a building skittered over the top of the hill behind the cat, its spiney legs blurring across the ground as it raced in pursuit. Noah sent a glance at Lee out of the corner of his eye.

“Alone,” Lee finished.

Noah rolled his shoulders and called on Natural Disaster. “Get ready for a fight. That thing looks pretty tough.”

Moxie stepped up beside Noah, vines writhing around her feet and rising up like a sea of snakes at her side. Lee readied her axe, and the three of them waited to meet the charging spider.

They never got a chance to strike.

A flash of purple lit the sky for a brief instant. The spider stumbled, its legs getting caught up on each other as they curled inward, and its body rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill that Noah and the others stood on.

Yowling in apparent amusement, the cat dove into a hole and vanished. Noah barely noticed – he wasn’t paying any more attention to it.

His eyes were fixed on the man who had just appeared behind the spider, a massive sword slung over his equally massive body.

It was someone that Noah hadn’t seen in quite some time – and someone that he was surprised to find he’d actually been looking forward to meeting again.

Brayden.

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