Wild Era, Ch 33: Guild Action

Yaris’s Perspective.

Yaris was in a foul mood as he headed back to his family’s mansion in Highmist.

He’d thought for sure that he would manage to catch the mage at the dungeon, and then he’d be able to tear some information out of him with Walli’s help.

Information about why the guild was protecting those two brats who’d seen him at the orphanage and what else they knew.

They were useless street rats, not anyone the guild should have shown interest in, but somehow they had ended up there and they’d been practically adopted by the guild captain and some of the staff.

That was too suspicious.

What would the guild want with two useless kids like that?

He’d thought they were unimportant at first and had decided to ignore them, but then that mage who was taking care of them had signed up with the guild and things had started to change.

It seemed like the mage and the kids must have traded the guild something for their support, and Yaris was worried it had something to do with him.

The only reason that came to mind was that the guild wanted them as witnesses against the Wind Hunters and him, and for something bigger than just that orphanage failure. 

He’d always been taught that bold action was the best course of action, so he’d been bold in dealing with it. 

As soon as he heard about the mage having a guild badge, he’d decided to cut things short before the situation could get dangerous. 

He wasn’t sure what they knew, but he planned to stop it.

He’d asked one of his father’s men to take care of the problem, but somehow Sannor had ended up captured by the guild, without even killing one of the brats.

The timing on that guild captain’s arrival to arrest him was just too coincidental.

Sannor should have been in and out of there with no one the wiser, and just a couple of dead targets left behind.

Yaris, like his father, didn’t believe in bad luck.

It had to mean someone was targeting him and their guild, waiting for an opportunity to arrest them, maybe with a couple of seers watching their every move. 

He just didn’t know who. 

Then, instead of any serious charge for attempted assassination or assault, Sannor had been fined five gold and released with only a warning from the guild.

At first, Yaris had figured that their backer on the city council must have done his job, like he was supposed to given how much money they paid him every month, but the man had denied it.

Apparently the guild had released him on their own.

That was even more suspicious.

When things were going too easily, something was wrong. 

That motto had helped him more than once, so he’d decided it was best to be cautious and to clean up before anything else could happen.

He didn’t know who was interested in those kids or why the guild wanted to help them, but if they wanted to protect them, that meant he needed to get rid of them.

He wasn’t going to let them turn into witnesses later down the road. 

Who knew what else they’d seen or what they were really there for?

He’d dealt with Sannor himself, burying his body in a dungeon near the town so he couldn’t reveal anything about who had sent him.

Then he’d gone to a seer who sometimes worked for the Wind Hunters and paid him 20 gold to track down the mage, figuring that he could tie up another loose end.

Then the mage had surprised him, showing up at Level 63 of all things. He’d checked with his men just to be sure, and the mage had been thirty levels lower a few days before at the inn with the kids.

That was the third strike.

No one leveled that quickly without noble help or a huge backer. He’d been solo in that dungeon too, probably outfitted with the best artifacts and potions money could buy to keep him alive.

It meant that he was important, too important to ignore.

Yaris should have been able to take care of him there, but somehow he’d escaped again, probably with a teleportation scroll out of that dungeon.

It made Yaris shake his head as a feeling of paranoia crept up on him.

Something was going on and he didn’t like it.

He needed to control the things around him and make sure they were moving the way he expected. That was how he’d qualified for the Blade Tactician subclass, by tracking the movements of all the weapons around him.

Right now, there were too many currents moving...things happening that were out of the ordinary. It was an itch he couldn’t scratch that left him on edge.

Those thoughts ran through his mind as he entered his family’s mansion and headed up to his father’s office.

The mansion was one of three in the Wind Hunter complex, each of them holding down one side of a triangle. The boss had one, the Nellens had one, and the guild used the last one as its headquarters.

When he entered his father’s office, sunlight was slanting through the window and fell on the desk, as well as the rack of blades on the wall behind it.

He had grown up staring at those weapons. Each of them had a name, each a history...something they had done in the world that left a mark, usually in blood.

He’d always wanted them. 

Then his attention was pulled back to the man in front of the desk, who overwhelmed the entire room with his sheer physical presence.

Orest Nellen was a strong, tall man with black hair and lean, hawkish features. He was the true power behind the Wind Hunters: strong, intelligent, and with all the connections that made their business work.

But he was rarely in a good mood, and that was no different now as he folded his arms and glared at Yaris. When he spoke, the words were harsh.

“What in the name of the nine gods do you think you’re doing?” he asked, biting off each sound. Anger was tightly controlled in his voice.

Unless the answer he wanted came swiftly, Yaris knew there would be hell to pay.

“Father,” Yaris said quickly, “I was trying to deal with the mage and remove him as a problem, but he escaped somehow. I’ll need more money for the seer again to find out where he went. It will be bad for business if we can’t clean up the issue.” 

His words were broken off as his father’s hand struck him across the face, sending him flying. He landed in a heap against the wall, his mouth filled with blood and the shards of a broken tooth. A hot wave of blood flowing down his cheek told him his father’s ring had left its mark.

“Bad for business?” Orest asked as he squatted down in front of Yaris. He took out a white cloth and began cleaning off the ring on his hand. “You think a random mage is what’s most important in our business?”

He shook his head, even as a flicker of red light flowed through his aura, twisting like droplets  of blood. 

His class was showing.

“I’m only going to say this once,” Orest said, looming over Yaris as he lay on the floor. “I shouldn’t need to say it at all.”

He continued wiping off his ring as he spoke.

“My business, the Wind Hunter’s business, is much bigger than you and your small plots. I’ve tried to teach you this before, but it seems you think that you’re in control instead. That means I need to spend the time to teach you otherwise, but thanks to your mess, now I need to spend that time in other places too, so I’m going to make this brief.

“Rule One: you check with me before you do anything. And more importantly, you do not kill my men without asking. I just had Sannor’s corpse dug up from the dungeon where you left him. 

“Sannor was useful to me, more than you are right now. He was loyal, and his skills as a shadow rogue and illusionist were rare. He filled a need, one that’s open now and that will cause me trouble. 

“He was the one who took messages to our backer, as well as a few other people, ones whose bad side I do not want to be on. You’ve broken that line of communication, and now I have to wait for them to contact me. That is a problem. We were at a critical stage in the plan. Not your little plan about guards of your own, but a true plan for power in Highmist and the money that comes with it, and after that maybe in all of Celadon.”

Orest wiped all the blood off of his ring and then he tossed the cloth on the ground in front of Yaris.

Yaris didn’t move. He just had to be quiet and his father’s anger would pass.  

It always did.

“So listen closely,” Orest said. “In order to keep you from causing me even more trouble, I’m sending you to Baralis. You have one job there, and that’s to keep our backers happy. You’re going to find out exactly who we’re dealing with and what they can do. And in the end, you’ll be wiser and actually useful, or they will kill you and save me the trouble.”

His face was only a foot away as he looked into Yaris’s eyes, but there was no hesitation in his words as he spoke.

“Now get up and get ready. You’re leaving within the hour. Once you’re there, if you want to keep using the Nellen name, you had better figure out something extra to do that is actually useful to me.” 

He was about to continue when a pulse of mana from outside the walls interrupted him, making him spin to look in that direction, toward the entrance to the entire complex.

The wave of mana was so strong that Yaris felt like he was suffocating. One of his artifacts activated, surrounding him in a shield that wavered under the force.

His father was still standing, but his muscles were looking strained, standing out across his body like steel cables as he held himself up.

The wave of mana built up and then it crashed down on the mansion, shaking the entire foundation. The walls wobbled under the force. 

Yaris’s shield cracked under the strain and Orest was slammed to the floor under it. It was so heavy that even he struggled to move.  

Orest managed to raise himself half a foot off the ground on shaking arms, and he looked toward the front of the house.

“Mana field. Second Evolution or higher,” he growled. “What the hell is going on?”

It didn’t take long for an answer to arrive. A woman’s powerful voice filled the air, shaking the foundation of the house. 

“By authority of the Stars Alliance, the Wind Hunters are under investigation for probable banditry and attempted assault on a guild member. Yaris Nellen, you are under arrest and will be taken for a hearing. All those who shelter him today will be arrested as accomplices.”

With that, guards from the guild began to rush through the complex, their boots thudding against the stone until it sounded like thunder.

As Orest heard that, his eyes turned to his son. They were blazing with so much fury that a red tint was visible in them.

“You fool,” he growled. “What have you done now?’

He tried to raise his hand to hit Yaris again, but his muscles gave out and he slammed into the floor under the weight of the mana field. That didn’t stop him from continuing to glare at him, and the red light from his class was only building.

Despite his father’s anger, Yaris felt a thrill of satisfaction. He’d watched that light gather many times, and he knew that the angrier his father was, the worse it would be for their enemies.

There was a reason Orest was the power behind the Wind Hunters. 

Soon, blood would flow.

***

Kelin’s Perspective.

When Kelin awoke the next morning, he noticed that Yaris’s position had changed. 

The mercenary was about a mile away in a different part of the city. It seemed he was back from the dungeon. Kelin marked the position on his mental map of the city, but there was no need to do anything else for now. 

Instead, he worked on his mana cycling for a while before he visited Yao and Naomi at breakfast. He gave them a few reminders and told them he’d be back in a few days, or perhaps longer if the dungeon took a while.

He also left them a few more message runes and a stack of his older talismans, offensive and defensive, in case they needed them. 

There were eight of the original Runic Shield Talismans there, as well as seven of the Fire Blade Talismans.

It was a reward of sorts for their practice in mana cycling, since that was what they needed to strengthen in order to activate them. If they reached a basic level of proficiency, enough to awaken the key runes, they would be able to use them.

If he wanted to stay at the guild and simply keep making talismans, he could have made a decent living buying materials and selling the finished ones to the guild for a profit, but it wouldn’t be anything like the loot he could get from a dungeon.

After that, he checked the amount of gold he had left, which was at 90, and he decided to swing by the guild shops, where he added five more intermediate mana and healing potions.

That took his supply up to ten of each, along with ten more of the basic types. 

It was enough for a long dungeon run, but he would only need them if things went wrong.

Then he stopped by the front desk and deposited the remaining gold and a handful of credits into his account for the kids, taking it up to 67 gold and 551 credits.

It was enough to give them about sixteen months.

“Yaris and his team were arrested yesterday,” Jesra told him with a smile as she recorded the deposit. “His father threw a huge fit. I hear it looked like he was on the fence between killing Yaris or attacking the guards, and he nearly got himself arrested too. The captain had a good time with that.

“She’s still questioning them and the intelligence section is going through a few things that they found, but there’s no obvious result about their backers yet. She wanted you to know.”

Her eyes lingered on him as she spoke, but she wasn’t as starstruck as the day before. It looked like she was just enjoying what she saw.

“You’re still going to be a target for the Wind Hunters,” she added, “perhaps more now that you’ve gotten them in trouble, but with the guild watching hopefully they won’t do anything.”

“I expected that,” Kelin said calmly. “I picked up a scrying blocker, like you suggested. I’ll be out of town for a bit again, so as long as the kids are safe, it should be fine.”

“Yaris and his father are too busy today to look for you anyway,” Jesra said with a grin. “Where are you headed now? I’ll mark it down.”

“The Coral Fire Remnant,” Kelin said. “West across the Sirenflow.”

Jesra’s eyes widened slightly at that, but then she made a note on her runestone.

“Got it,” she said. “Be careful with that one. It has a high rate of adventurer deaths. The heat is a killer.”

“I have a method for it,” Kelin said with a smile. “Take care.”

With that, he waved to Jesra and then he headed out of the guild.

The Coral Fire dungeon was another one on the high danger, high reward list. 

It was a Level 75 dungeon on average, but it was constantly filled with flames that took the shape of sea coral in a thousand colors, turning the area into an ocean of flames. 

It was supposed to be one of the prettier dungeons in the area, but only if you could survive the environment, which was deadly for most people.

His high Fire affinity and soulfire physique would both help with the heat, but thanks to the salamander’s ring, he shouldn’t need to rely on either of them.

That was the main reason he’d chosen it.

The other reason was the high mana density and the large number of Fire elemental materials that came from it. 

The undead dungeon hadn’t been great on materials, at least for his own use, so he’d decided the next one should provide more interesting things for crafting.

It didn’t take him long to leave the city and begin running to the west. 

The dungeon was on the other side of the Sirenflow River and farther away than the ones he’d gone to before, about eighty miles. 

It would have taken him half a day to reach it before his body changed, but at his new running speed, it would be about four hours.

One of these days, maybe he would get a horse or learn a decent teleportation ability, but until then, his feet would do.

The distance passed beneath his feet in a blur as he took the bridge over the Sirenflow and then kept going. 

There was another river to the south of him called the Fallen Peak River, which flowed toward Highmist and merged into the Sirenflow, similar to what the Shieldrun did to the east, but he wouldn’t be going far enough south to run into it this time.

Both of those rivers, as well as the major river from the south that was called the Southern Run, came together near Highmist and then headed north as the Sirenflow. 

As  he ran, he totaled up the improvements from the gear that he’d just made. The combination of enchantments was leading to a decent mana savings now.

Between the mana efficiency on his tunic, the fire efficiency on his belt, and the soul and fire efficiency from his staff, he was up to 31.7% efficiency on Fire spells, 26.25% on soulfire, and 10% on pure soul spells. 

That was better than any young mage he’d seen in a long time.

He could still push it a bit higher, but it was good enough for now.

By the time he reached the First Evolution, he’d have to upgrade all of those runes again, but it wasn’t a problem yet

The various efficiency runes worked by helping to gather ambient mana and add it to his spells, saving him the need to use his personal mana.  

His tunic, his staff, and his belt created three spirals of energy around him, each of them concentrating ambient mana for his use.

The nature of those enchantments meant they would work as long as the ambient mana was high enough, and if it wasn’t, they would start to fail. That wasn’t an issue at his current level, but as he got higher, it would be. 

Each Evolution resulted in an increased mana density, sometimes starkly different than before. The First Evolution was a hefty upgrade, like moving from a low-grade mana crystal to a high-grade one. 

His mana would become more pure and stable, which would show in all of his spells and in the runes he could craft, making them stronger across the board, but at the same time, the requirements for it would also become stricter.

Runes that worked right now would have to be changed out for higher ones that could handle the increased density requirement. 

Otherwise, the efficiency he had now could end up chopped down by two thirds or more and the runes would burn out, unable to keep up with the mana flow.

But that was a problem for later, and by then he would have more mana.

He would take advantage of it while it lasted.

His run across the plains was fairly normal, with few people or monsters willing to bother him, and he eventually left them and the road behind as he headed into a dry region where the trees and grasses took on a distinctly hotter temperature.

He was near the center of the western plains, cradled between the Fallen Peak and the Sirenflow, but what should have been a lush and green area was instead a valley full of fiery elemental essence.

There was a Fire essence vein in the earth that spiraled in a knot here, infusing everything inside the valley with heat. 

The grasses of the plains looked like golden strands with red tips, waving like flames in the wind, and the bark of the trees was a mix of hues from molten silver to burnt orange, as well as highlights of red and gold.

The entrance to the dungeon was at the center of it all, right next to where the fire vein twisted around on itself. The familiar silver and black portal was faintly visible at the base of a rocky hill, but it showed up clearly in Kelin’s mana sight.

It was already searingly hot here, with every wave of the flaming grasses making it feel like an oven, but the Ring of Everlasting Flame kept the temperature from affecting him.

Kelin checked the surroundings and then he walked inside, passing through the starry barrier in a wash of dark light.