Zenith of Sorcery

Marcus was not an expert tracker by any means. He had lots of experience in traversing the wilds all over the world, but he tended not to dwell in any particular place for long. In addition, while he knew Cricket was heading for the Serpentooth Plateau, he didn’t have her actual trail, which made any attempt to retrace her steps futile.

However, he had lots of experience in doing all manner of strange requests, and that experience was telling him the best way to find Cricket was to find a vespid scout and see what they were up to. Vespids were highly territorial, and likely to notice an inexperienced kid entering their territory very quickly. They were also most likely the reason Cricket’s parents had never returned from their trip to the wilds, and if she was trying to find their remains…

Marcus shook his head. The chances of her being alive weren’t great, but he wasn’t the sort of person to give up now. He was going to see this through, even if he had to bury three corpses instead of just two at the end.

He glanced at Helvran, and found the priest and his raven familiar silently staring at him.

“Why did we stop?” the priest asked him.

“So, after a bit of thought, there are two ways we can go about doing this,” Marcus said. “First, we can go to the Serpentooth Plateau on foot, looking for any trace of Cricket’s passage as we move. I don’t know how good your raven is at scouting, but I have a contracted earth elemental that is pretty good at recognizing human footsteps and would likely be able to detect Cricket once we got close enough to her.”

Assuming she was still alive and moving once they did, of course.

“And the alternative?” Helvran asked.

“We can fly,” Marcus offered.

Helvran shook his head. “I’ve heard you are quite adept at flying magic, but I’m afraid I don’t know any spells for that.”

No? Marcus would think a divine bird would give its followers a way to fly… maybe Helvran just didn’t get to a high enough level to receive that particular blessing?

“Not a problem. I have a way to take us both into the air,” said Marcus, taking the orb of flight from his belt and proudly displaying it to the death priest.

The orb didn’t look like much, admittedly, looking very much like a cloudy white sphere made out of some semi-transparent stone. It didn’t look very magical, so Marcus wondered if Helvran could even recognize-

“Is that the ancestral treasure of Giant Thunder Hall that disappeared a few years ago?” Helvran asked.

“No…” Marcus said slowly. “It didn’t disappear. I defeated their leader in honorable combat and took it from him by right of conquest. It’s my ancestral treasure now.”

“I… see,” Helvran said.

“Anyway, that’s not the point,” Marcus said dismissively. “The point is that the orb of flight has the ability to transport entire groups of people, not just the user itself. Very useful stuff. With its help, there should be no issue with me flying us both to the plateau.”

“I see now why the Giant Thunder Hall wants to talk to you so badly,” Helvran said. His eyes lingered on the orb for a moment, but then he refocused on Marcus instead. “That aside, I must point out that vespids are essentially giant wasps. If we fly around in their territory, we’ll be extremely conspicuous and they’ll have no problems reaching us up in the air.”

“I know, but I want to get their attention,” Marcus said. “If they’re focused on us, they won’t be focused on tracking down Cricket.”

“It might also whip the whole hive into a frenzy, causing them to notice her when they otherwise would have overlooked her presence,” Helvran pointed out.

“Unlikely. Vespids are more perceptive than most people realize,” said Marcus, shaking his head. “Back when I was fighting them in the Viridian Forest, they always noticed our incursions very quickly, no matter how careful we were. I don’t know if they’ve got a really sensitive sense of smell or something more exotic, but their scouts are annoyingly good. The only way to reliably deal with them is to kill every scout you encounter before it can get away and warn the rest of the hive, and I don’t think a young girl with no adept powers can do such a thing. Her being alone should help her evade notice, but only for a while.”

Helvran frowned. “I didn’t know that.”

“Understandable, if you have never fought them,” Marcus said. “Anyway, I strongly believe the best way to help Cricket is to get to her as quickly as possible.”

“There is no real choice, then,” Helvran said. “What do I need to do?”

Rather than answer, Marcus gripped his staff in one hand and the orb of flight in the other, and cast a flight spell on both of them. He immediately caused both of them to float off the ground. Helvran finally lost his stoic look, sporting an outright panicked expression for a moment, before realizing what was happening. He gave Marcus an annoyed look, and his raven flew off his shoulder with a loud caw.

“Ready?” Marcus asked with a smile.

“Next time, ask that before you cast a spell,” Helvran warned. “But yes, I am ready.”

After a moment of thought, Marcus extended the influence of the spell over the raven as well. They would be flying too fast for the bird to keep up with its natural flight. Helvran’s familiar cawed in surprise once again, but did not fight the magic.

All three of them suddenly shot up high into the air, and in the direction of the mountains.

* * * *

The flight did not take long. Advancing uphill on rocky forested terrain was a difficult task that could take days on foot, but could be reduced to a mere hour of flight, especially if one flew fast… and Marcus could use his orb to fly very fast. The main issue was that seeing the ground from on high was difficult due to all the trees getting in the way. As such, as they got close to the Serpentooth Plateau, Marcus slowed down their flight and lowered them closer to the ground.

He summoned Chompy, instructing him to listen for human footsteps and follow after him from underground as they flew. Summoned creatures could sense their summoner at a considerable distance, since the summoner acted as their anchor on the material plane, he didn’t expect there to be any issues with that. Helvran also seemed to instruct his raven to help with the search. He didn’t talk to the bird, but the way it suddenly flew away from them and started exploring nearby areas told Marcus the priest probably had some non-verbal way of communicating with it and giving it commands.

They didn’t find Cricket right away, which was disappointing, but to be expected. They did, however, find many groups of vespid scouts combing through the area. They were just like Marcus remembered them from his youth. Each vespid scout was roughly half a meter long, and reminiscent of a wasp – a striped yellow-and-black insectoid with a somewhat skull-like face. Although not visible from this distance, Marcus knew from previous encounters that each of their front four limbs had hand-like appendages.

In Marcus’s experience, vespid scouts tended to operate alone unless the hive was under attack or otherwise agitated. The fact these scouts flew around in groups of three or more told him there was something disturbing the hive, and he doubted that something was Cricket.

“They seem agitated,” Helvran said, floating in the air beside him, looking somewhat uncomfortable.

“They’re searching for something,” Marcus said.

Oddly enough, the vespids seemed reluctant to attack them. They clearly noticed the two flying intruders, but only one group immediately charged at them, the rest opting to leave the area immediately. That was very unusual, as vespids tended to be suicidally aggressive and rarely showed much in terms of self-preservation instincts. Especially in groups. They always tried to take care of intruders on their own first, and retreated only after they were reduced to a handful of survivors… who then went to fetch more reinforcements to throw onto the enemy.

“This is a good thing, no?” Helvran offered. “If they had already found the girl and killed her, they wouldn’t be searching for her still.”

“They could be searching for someone else. I have a feeling they’re dealing with something bigger than a single desperate child,” Marcus said. “But yes, it’s definitely a good thing. If the vespids have other things to worry about at the moment, they can’t focus their energies on finding her.”

“Hm. So what now? Are we going to… assault the vespid hive directly?” Helvran asked curiously.

Marcus raised his eyebrow at him. “Are you immune to poisons? These scouting parties may seem trivial, but we’ll get swarmed by hundreds of these things if we assault the queen. We’re both going to get stung, and not just once either.”

Helvran coughed in his fist in slight embarrassment, his floating figure wobbling in the air and he tried to move and shift as if he was still standing on the ground.

“Obviously, I am not capable of such a feat,” Helvran clarified. “But the familiarity and confidence with which you speak of them makes me think you might be willing to do such a thing.”

“Even for one such as me, that would be a dangerous move,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “Vespids have more than just scouts in their ranks. These small ones are just the lowest caste of their society.”

“You call these small?” Helvran asked, pointing at the charred remains of five vespids on the ground below them. It was the scout group that had charged at them earlier. Marcus had killed them easily with a single chain lightning spell, but that didn’t mean they weren’t a threat. If all five had successfully stung him, Marcus would have been in serious trouble.

Because it was so easy to get swarmed and it took only a handful of stings to get poisoned to death, vespids were greatly feared among adepts, and even powerful ones hesitated to take them on. Marcus was not surprised that people were reluctant to take on the commission to wipe them out.

“Yes, these are the lowest and most numerous kind of vespids,” Marcus nodded. “They only get bigger and more powerful from here. The queen in particular is about three meters long and a spirit-level creature. Thankfully, she never leaves the hive so we shouldn’t encounter her.”

Since this hive was established outside of the Viridian Forest, it was likely that this particular queen was driven out of her home by rival queens, meaning she was young or a bit on the weaker side. But a spirit-level creature should never be underestimated, especially when it had hundreds of underlings willing to sacrifice their lives for her.

“I see. I’m too ignorant, it seems,” Helvran said. “Let’s avoid the hive for now and let someone else deal with it.”

“Let’s do that,” Marcus agreed. “Instead, we should take advantage of the relative passivity of these vespids to spy on their movements. I bet we can find Cricket faster by monitoring their movements than by flying around randomly.”

Helvran’s raven turned out to be a better scout than Marcus anticipated. Vespids did not seem to recognize it as a spy, even when it flew very close to them, viewing it as a simple wild animal. Helvran could see and hear through its eyes and ears, making the bird a highly effective spy under the circumstances.

As for Marcus, he found all his usual spying methods foiled one by one. He could attach a literal invisible eye to certain vespids, but the spell required the caster to stay in range of the spell to keep working, and that range wasn’t big enough to let Marcus follow after the vespids undetected. He tried attaching stone beetles on their backs instead, but vespids traveled in groups and had hands – they simply had one of their fellows remove the beetle clinging to them.

He was just about to try and capture one alive to paint a spying sigil straight on its carapace when Helvran motioned for him to land in a dense cluster of trees to his left.

The moment they landed, Helvran seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

“Your flight magic is convenient, but I find myself indescribably glad to be back on the ground,” Helvran admitted. The raven, which was once again perched on his shoulder, cawed loudly in agreement.

“Is that what we’re looking for?” Marcus asked, pointing at what seemed to be an abandoned campsite in the middle of the thicket.

“Yes,” Helvran nodded. “Someone had been here, probably a small group of people. It’s probably unrelated to the little girl we’re looking for, but it’s worth checking up on.”

The campsite was in rough shape. Whoever had set it up clearly didn’t finish their business in peace, and instead had to leave in a hurry. Backpacks and sleeping blankets were still there, and a small overturned cooking pot and some wooden bowls were scattered all over the place. Wild animals had eaten everything edible, including any trace of blood, but the claw marks on the trees and the freshly broken branches spoke of a violent battle. It was likely that the group was forced to abandon the camp or simply perished in the attack.

“This doesn’t look like a vespid attack,” Marcus said.

“I was just about to ask you about that,” Helvran said. “You are more familiar with these creatures than me, but I imagine even higher forms of vespids would be less destructive on the environment than this.”

“They also don’t have claws,” Marcus said, gently tracing the parallel lines crudely carved into the bark of a nearby tree. Sticky dark sap had already began to seep and harden from the wounds inflicted on the tree, but the pattern was quite obviously inflicted by something big and clawed. Much bigger than a human. “Strange. Vespids don’t like large beasts hunting in their territory. They tend to drive them out.”

“Somebody died here, but there are no bodies,” Helvran said, frowning. “Do vespids take corpses to their hive for processing?”

“No,” Marcus said, shaking his head. He didn’t question how Helvran knew somebody had died. “They eat people, but they just strip the flesh from the corpse and carry it off in small pieces, leaving the bones behind.”

They spent a little while searching the area, coming up with nothing. Well, Marcus had come up with nothing. Helvran seemed to have seen something Marcus didn’t, because his expression grew more unpleasant as he inspected the area around the campsite.

“I suspect something, but I would rather not discuss it at this time,” Helvran told him once they were done. “We should find Cricket and get out of here. Something far more sinister than a vespid hive is active in this area.”

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Well, that much had been obvious for a while now. Still, Helvran had been remarkably tolerant of the way Marcus did things, so he didn’t intend to push the death priest on what he found. He didn’t really care to get involved in Raven Temple’s business.

They got back to the air and continued searching. They found one more abandoned campsite, as well as a torn backpack that belonged to some unfortunate traveler. But no Cricket. And unfortunately, it seemed that their intrusive actions were finally becoming too much for vespids to bear. While the vespid scouts initially avoided them and tried to go about their business, they gradually became more belligerent as it became obvious they weren’t just passing through their territory and intended to stick around for a while. Eventually Marcus realized several large swarms were converging on their positions, smaller scouting parties merging together as they flew towards their location.

He immediately lowered them both to the ground and dismissed the flying spell.

“It seems we have overstayed our welcome,” Marcus told Helvran. Ominous buzzing could already be heard in the air, coming from all around them. “Prepare for battle.”

“I will be counting on you, Master Marcus,” Helvran said shamelessly. “Please protect me.”

“Don’t give me that,” Marcus protested. “I’m sure a follower of the death god knows how to protect himself.”

There was no time for further argument. An entire swarm of vespids, dozens upon dozens of giant insects with skull-like face, burst out of the trees and descended towards them from the sky with remarkable speed, their stingers pointed at them.

Marcus fired off a chain lightning spell, killing half of them with an arcing bolt of lightning, but the other half continued on as if nothing had happened, heedless of any danger. Their simple minds understood that if they could get even one sting in, this would be a victory for the hive. Behind them, Marcus could sense another swarm of vespids had burst onto the scene.

He slammed his staff against the ground, and a slow-moving wave of yellow energy erupted from him. Every vespid that made contact with the seismic wave was stopped in its tracks and burst open like it had been hit by a huge rock, but many of them veered off course when they realized they had no chance of piercing the expanding field, evading instant death.

Marcus spun in place, throwing around chain lightning spells and fireballs, and bodies of incinerated vespids fell to the ground like rain, but they kept coming nonetheless – fearless, tireless, inexorable. Many inexperienced mages perished when placed in such circumstances, even if they had the power to survive, demoralized and distracted by the relentless assault. But Marcus had fought vespids before, and this was familiar. He kept killing, kept a close watch over his mana reserves to make sure he didn’t deplete them too fast, and kept an eye on any sneaky vespids trying to get him while he was dealing with the bulk of the swarm.

One of the vespids landed on the ground and tried to slowly crawl across the ground towards Marcus and Helvran, no doubt hoping it could sting them in the legs before they realized it was there. Chompy swiftly ended that plot by bursting out of the ground, biting into the unfortunate vespid, and then descending down into the soil again, taking the vespid with him to suffocate underground.

Just as Marcus was getting into a sort of battle trance, assured that the battle would be one of attrition that he could win by simply outlasting the enemy, something very big and very fast rushed at them from the trees.

And it was targeting Helvran, not Marcus.

Marcus reacted quickly, yanking the man back by pulling on his clothes, which meant that when that thing swung at Helvran with its big clawed hand, it missed the death priest’s face by about half a finger.

Helvran was unbalanced by Marcus’s sudden move and shocked by the sudden attack, but the thing that attacked them was unfazed by its failed assassination attempt and the vespids didn’t relent in their attacks. As such, Marcus had only a brief moment to study the creature.

It was… made out of bone? It was a large humanoid, and covered in armor made out of bones, but it didn’t look like an animated skeleton.

It rushed at Helvran again, but Marcus stepped in front of him, conjuring a bluish shield of force. To his shock, the bone giant’s claw seemed to pass through his shield completely unimpeded and collided with his chest.

Marcus’s shirt was ripped open like paper, despite the light defensive enchantment he placed on it. At the point of impact, his skin cracked like a broken stone, creating a spiderweb of cracks that spread across his upper body, including his lower face. The force of the blow made him slide back a couple of steps, his feet leaving deep grooves in the soil, but it did not throw him back like a rag doll, which is what the bone giant had probably been expecting would happen.

One of the vespids took advantage of this momentary distraction to dive down on him and sink its stinger into Marcus’s back. Or at least it tried to – its stinger slid off his armored skin, failing to penetrate, and it tumbled to the ground beside Marcus.

Marcus angrily stomped down on it with his boot, crushing it into paste, and then cast the seismic wave again. Dozens of vespids, emboldened by his seeming distraction slammed into the slowly-moving wave of yellow energy, and were immediately crushed into paste.

The bone giant didn’t stop either, and slammed into the seismic wave with his claw, much like he did to Marcus’s force field earlier. Alas, the seismic wave wasn’t really a defensive screen, despite its apparent effects. It was more like an attack that shook enemies to death from the inside out with vibrations, and stopping enemies in their tracks was just a side-effect. If one could ignore the vibration attack, they would find that the wave did not impede their movements in any way.

The bone giant could not ignore the vibration attack. It visibly stumbled as the seismic wave passed through it, the bones that made up its armor cracking and falling off, or even turning into powder with its passage.

Through the holes in the armor, Marcus could see… an inky black void. It was empty. A walking armor of bone with no one inside.

A faint blue wave rippled across the surface of the bone giant, revealing a network of complicated runes inscribed upon the various bones that made him. The damage Marcus just inflicted began to heal.

“Oh no you don’t,” Marcus loudly protested. “Chompy!”

His loyal earth elemental responded immediately, already knowing what to do. It launched itself at the bone giant, wrapping himself around its torso. It then brought its powerful jaws onto the giant’s head, crunching through the rune-enhanced bone with great ease.

Unfortunately, having its head chewed on didn’t seem to bother the bone giant too much. It seized the earth elemental with its clawed hands and began to squeeze, causing Chompy to squeal in protest.

At this point Helvran, who managed to gather his wits after the failed attack on him, fired a ghostly white beam at the bone giant. It didn’t seem to do any damage to the thing, but it paralyzed it and made the network of blue runes inscribed on the bones light up again.

“The core!” Helvran shouted. “Have it chew through the rune core in his chest!”

Hm. The runes did seem a little denser there…

He gave Chompy a mental command to do just that when two more giant shapes descended from the sky towards them, accompanied by the terrible buzzing of insect wings.

Unlike the bone giant, which seemed to be some kind of undead, these new uninvited guests were vespids. But not the normal scout vespids they had been fighting so far. No, these were more than a meter tall, with more pronounced humanoid features and a skull-like face that looked more demonic and frightening than just a weirdly-shaped wasp. Each of their four arms held a different weapon, likely looted from human adepts they had killed in the past. Both of them had a belt made out of human skulls, and seemed to have been smeared in red war-paint.

The left one screeched at him, a string of sounds that sounded suspiciously like some kind of speech that Marcus didn’t understand, and then they both charged at him.

The lesser vespids that had been assaulting them immediately regrouped behind the new arrivals, ready to give them any support they needed.

Marcus immediately focused all of his attention on them. Chompy and Helvran would have to deal with the bone giant on their own. These two… they were royal guards. The most powerful vespid caste beside the queen herself. Strange. He didn’t think the queen would send these out to take out intruders… they were supposed to be her bodyguards, and even big hives didn’t have too many of them. Losing these two would be a big loss, so most hives were reluctant to send them out without a really good reason.

Clutching his staff tightly in his hand, Marcus made a sweeping motion, as if sowing seeds. A fountain of yellow motes of light erupted from his staff and immediately scattered across the battlefield, burying themselves into the ground with seemingly no effect. Marcus felt his mana reserves dip dangerously low – this was not a move he could throw around too often.

The royal guards were smarter than the average vespid, and a little less suicidal – they could tell Marcus had set up some kind of trap in the area, and so hesitated to enter it. But that was just fine as far as Marcus was concerned – he was a mage, and had no issues attacking people from a distance, whereas vespid royal guards were basically warriors, relying on their powerful armored bodies. If they didn’t dare get close to him, that was already a win for him.

Hm. Maybe he should look into including illusion spells into his combat repertoire more. Making opponents think he set up a trap would be way cheaper and possibly just as effective…

The royal guard screeched some kind of command and pointed one of his swords at Marcus. The swarm of lesser vespids immediately rushed forward, eager to prove themselves by triggering whatever trap he set up instead of their betters.

Marcus inwardly sighed. Well that won’t do. He pointed his staff at the incoming swarm and fired a burst of brightly shining red motes at it. The motes looked small and feeble, but when they reached the mass of vespids they erupted into massive fireballs that engulfed half of their number.

The royal guards seemed to quickly realize that sending their fellow vespids at Marcus would just result in them being slowly whittled down to nothing. Marcus didn’t need to activate his trap to deal with them. As such, they soon rushed forward and attacked.

They were fast. Supernaturally fast. The moment they decided to seriously attack Marcus, their forms blurred and disappeared, rapidly flickering in and out of existence. Every time they reappeared, they were considerably closer to Marcus. He managed to hit them with a chain lightning spell and engulf them in a fireball, but it did nothing of note. It wasn’t that they had some kind of exotic immunity to these attack spells – they just had extremely tough bodies and were covered head-to-toe in magic-resistant chitin. The spells Marcus hit them with probably did hurt them, just not very much. He would have to hit them dozens and dozens of times to put them down with just chain lightning and fireballs.

“Helvran, get away from here!” Marcus warned.

“What? I’m doing something here, you can’t just-” Helvran started to protest.

Marcus pointed his palm at him and fired a gentle kinetic blast. Helvran was immediately lifted off his feet and flew out of the area.

And then the vespid royal guards were upon him. One of them swung a sword at his neck while stabbing a spear at his flank, and the other swung a pair of swords at him in an overhead strike. The water ball circling Marcus immediately expanded into a mirror-like shield that blocked the attacks.

The water mirror shattered upon contact, but not before reflecting the force of the attack back at the royal guards. They stumbled back, largely unharmed but unbalanced by the backlash.

Marcus clapped his hands together and activated the trap.

From the ground, dozens of seismic waves erupted into slowly expanding spheres of vibrational force. Where the expanding waves met each other and overlapped, they amplified each other to even more destructive heights. The two royal guards screeched in pain as the waves washed over them, passing through their powerful chitinous armor to merge and intersect inside their squishy interiors. They dropped their weapons and tried to fly off into the sky, but their wings refused to work correctly.

“You should have trusted your instincts and stayed away,” Marcus murmured, fishing a cheap gem out of his pocket and forming it into a crystalline spear, which he hurled at one of the royal guards.

The spear hit the vespid right between the eyes, passing through its demonic, skull-like face with little resistance. It dropped dead on the ground immediately.

Unfortunately, seeing one of its fellows die seemed to give the remaining royal guard the burst of strength it needed to finally take off into the air and out of the field of overlapping seismic waves.

It immediately fled into the distance. After a second of indecision, the lesser vespids that had been circling the area followed after it, unwilling to continue the attack.

Marcus immediately went to search for Helvran, and found him sitting on the ground with a deep frown.

“Your earth elemental was banished by the bone golem when you… disrupted my concentration,” Helvran told him. “Unfortunately, the abomination took this chance and retreated from the area. I… didn’t think it would be a good idea to follow after it.”

Marcus nodded. He felt his connection with Chompy break, so he knew the bone golem got to him. It was no big matter, though. Although Marcus couldn’t summon Chompy back immediately, he should be able to have him back in a couple of days when his soul reformed on the elemental plane of earth.

“What were those things you fought?” Helvran asked.

“Royal guards,” Marcus said. “I’m afraid the queen will be incredibly angry with us now that I’ve killed one and heavily wounded the other. I’m afraid we can only look forward to more attacks like this.”

“If we come under more attacks, I wouldn’t be surprised if the necromancer who lives in these woods sends his bone golem after us and takes the chance to distract us with his minion,” Helvran said.

“Necromancer?” Marcus repeated, his eyebrow raised at him.

“I’ve suspected it for a while, since I felt traces of negative energy on most of the attack sites we visited,” Helvran admitted. “But this confirms it.”

“What would a necromancer do in the middle of vespid country?” Marcus asked. “That’s a pretty dangerous place to set up shop.”

“It’s also a place with lots of bodies,” Helvran said. “The vespids kill intruders, but only take the meat. They leave the bones behind, and perform no burial rites to put the soul at rest. There are not many places where a necromancer has access to such a wealth of… raw materials.”

Marcus nodded slowly. Most human communities cremated their dead – a custom that was developed as a direct consequence of necromancers attacking burial sites. Graveyards were rare, and where they existed, they were often just full of stone or wooden markers with no actual bodies buried beneath the soil.

“I’m sorry to say this, but I think we’re going to have to give up on this task,” Helvran told him. “I know you want to find Cricket, but considering the seriousness of what is happening here, it is extremely important that I get back to the temple and report this to my superiors.”

Marcus took a deep breath, thinking. The bodies of Cricket’s parents, if they indeed perished here, were probably unrecoverable at this point. If there was a necromancer claiming bodies here, he’d probably already found them and incorporated them into that bone golem of his or something. Cricket… well, she could be alive or dead, he didn’t know. He initially thought they would at least be able to find her remains if she died, but…

He shook his head. He couldn’t stay here. The vespid hive would be hungering for his blood, and even if he could fend them off, it would be impossible to search for a little girl with their swarms constantly harassing him. And a necromancer… those were very rare in modern times, and Marcus didn’t have much experience fighting them. Who knew what kind of subtle and sinister attacks they had at their disposal?

“How powerful do you think this necromancer is?” Marcus asked Helvran.

“Bone golems like that can only be made by spirit-rank necromancers,” Helvran said in a grave tone of voice.

Oh.

“It didn’t look that powerful, to be honest,” Marcus said.

“It’s not finished,” Helvran said, shaking his head. “Its creator has yet to gather enough materials to fully complete it.”

“Ah,” Marcus nodded. That made more sense. “I’ll tell you what. I agree with you that this is getting too dangerous and that we need to leave… but let me try something before we go.”

“You saved my life,” Helvran told him seriously. “I will wait.”

Marcus quickly used an earth-shaping spell to raise a series of small pillars and carved a bunch of sigils on them. It was crude work, but it didn’t have to be fancy for what he had in mind. The only thing the pillars had to do was amplify a spell he was about to cast to an absurd degree.

Helvran watched him as he worked with undisguised curiosity, but did not say anything or ask him questions.

Eventually Marcus finished his work and dusted off his hands in satisfaction.

“Put your hands over your ears,” he told Helvran.

Helvran gave him a strange look, but did as Marcus told him.

Marcus walked into the center of the small pillar forest he made, took a deep breath, and then started to shout.

“CRICKET! GET OVER HERE NOW! WE CAME TO FIND YOU BUT WE’RE LEAVING AND NEVER COMING BACK. IF YOU DON’T GET YOUR SORRY, STUPID, SUICIDAL ASS OVER HERE RIGHT NOW, WE’RE LEAVING YOU HERE WITH THE WASPS AND THE UNDEAD, DO YOU HEAR ME!?”

Amplified by the pillar formation, his voice boomed out like a voice of god, washing over the entire forest. Every vespid in the region heard him. The necromancer probably heard him. Hell, the villages in the neighboring region probably heard him.

In the corner of his eye he could see Helvran curled on the ground, trying to block out the impossibly, painfully loud sound of Marcus’s voice.

Just like his pillar formation amplified his voice, it also amplified his hearing, albeit to a much lesser degree. It was enough, though. Faintly, he could hear a childish voice to the north shouting back at him.

“No, don’t leave me here!” the voice shouted. “I swear I’ll never do this again, just wait for me!”

He turned to Helvran, who was still curled up in a fetal position on the ground and smiled.

“I know where Cricket is,” he said. “Let’s go get her.”

* * * *

Marcus stared down at the girl in front of him. She was around fourteen years of age, with short brown hair, prominent freckles, and an underfed appearance. Her clothes were dirty and torn, but he suspected that had more to do with trying to survive in this forest than in her family being too poor to afford better. She looked very embarrassed as she stood in front of him and Helvran, holding her arms behind her back and shifting uncomfortably in place.

“Coming here alone was a very dangerous and irresponsible thing you did, young lady,” Helvran told her.

“I-I know, okay!?” she protested, dropping out of her ‘embarrassed child’ stance and swinging her arms animatedly as she talked. “I already said I’m sorry! But I just… I just…”

She suddenly seemed to be on the verge of crying. However, she quickly shook her head and slapped herself a few times.

“No, you can’t cry now, it’s not the time,” she mumbled to herself. “Stay strong! Stay strong!”

“You don’t seem to be carrying anything with you,” Marcus pointed out. “Did you seriously come here with just clothes on your back?”

“No, I, uhm, lost my things while I was running from the wasp demons,” she said.

“How did you even survive all this time?” Marcus asked.

“Marcus…” Helvran warned, giving him an annoyed look. “Ignore him, young lady, he can be a little strange sometimes.”

“It’s okay!” she said, sounding excited at first, but then getting more depressed as she talked. “I can tell you all about it while we walk back home… uhm… not that I have a home anymore…”

Marcus stared at her for a few seconds.

“What?” she asked, looking uncomfortable again. “I said I was sorry, okay?”

“How do you feel about flying?” Marcus asked with a smile.

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