Chapter 54 - Ambush

Overnight, Trey had a vivid… and unsettling dream.

He found himself stalking the streets of Teretog, moving like a blur across the rooftops - Much faster than he should be able to do. Sometimes he moved on two legs, other times he moved on all fours like some sort of beast. Bloodlust and a need to kill enveloped his very being and swallowed his mind while drool drizzled down his demonic fangs as he hunted.

Tail whipping out behind him, claws extended and muscles contracting as he bounded across large casms of space that no ordinary man should be able to jump, he searched for a new set of victims. It wasn’t that he was hungry, or that someone had offended him in some way, he just wanted to feel the pleasure… the euphoria of ripping someone apart. The need was all encompassing, to cause pain to some living creature, and as he landed on the next building he finally saw his next marks.

Three men were walking alone down a dark alley. He didn’t know who they were or what they were doing there, but it didn't matter. Trey’s night vision had no problem picking them out. Hellfire brimmed out of his mouth and shadows enveloped his body as he surged forward towards the unsuspecting victims. Jumping to the ground and bolting forward down the dirt road, he was on them in an instant.

Rending body parts and screams from the hapless men broke the silence while blood splattered across the walls of the nearby buildings. The slaughter was over in a couple seconds, but it was enough to satiate him… for now.

Sinking his teeth into the first of his innocent victims, he began to tear and gnaw at the musculature of the kill’s neck. The bloody feast did not stop until the majority of all three corpses were only bones and scraps, and with a primal growl he turned back to go home.

***

Trey shot up from bed with his heart pounding. It was still the early hours of the morning, but there was enough light peeking over the horizon to get a good look at his body. He patted himself down, looking frantically for any signs of blood. He’d been covered in it just moments ago after eating those three people, but now as he tried to find traces of it he saw there was none to be found.

But it had felt so real…

His breathing was quickly returning to normal and his Rivia stirred next to him in their bed. Atharost was still fast asleep in the other bed across from them, and he had no doubt Napoleon was still up in the rafters of the main room. It was just a dream, there was no reason to be upset… regardless of how vivid it had been.

‘Are you ok?’

Sithis’ voice flew through his mind like the sound of a bell.

Trey exhaled slowly and nodded, laying back down next to Rivia and settling in to enjoy the heat of her body against his. “Yeah. I’m fine… just a bad dream.”

Sithis pondered this for a few moments before replying. ‘A dream?’

Trey nodded again.

‘I did not experience any dream…’ Sithis continued slowly. The symbiote’s words were ridden with concern, and Trey began to feel Sithis digging through his memories.

Trey’s brows furrowed. “Do you usually experience my dreams?”

The symbiote’s response was immediate and firm. ‘Yes.’

Trey’s heart rate began to pick up again.

‘What was your dream about? I’m curious.’

“Uh… hunting people down and eating them?”

Sithis paused his search. ‘I see. Have you had any other dreams like this?’

“No.”

Sithis pondered this and began a wide sweep of Trey’s memories again, but in the end he still couldn’t find what Trey was talking about. It was a problem they’d never encountered before, and both of them were seriously disturbed by it.

‘Trey… tell me if you ever have any more of these dreams. I will continue to search your memories, but it disturbs me that you can recall this dream and I am not able to share your memories. Go back to sleep for now… I will let you know if I find anything.’

Trey smiled and thanked Sithis before closing his eyes again and putting his arm around Rivia. Drawing up the blanket and exhaling again, it took him a little bit longer than usual to get back into the realm of unconsciousness.

***

The guild compound was busier than usual that day. One of the Fost groups had come back with a large haul from the inner cities on the mainland. Security was doubled due to risk of assault from another group, and activity on the first floor was bustling as they categorized the different quality items.

“Hey Trey, long night!?” one of the guild warriors called out as Trey gave a wave back.

“Yeah, kinda!”

Napoleon was perched on his shoulder while Rivia and Atharost trailed the two Earthborn at a close distance. He quickly followed Ashe through the crowd just off the wooden steps leading down to the lower level, and tried not to stay too far apart due to the packed bodies.

Many were giving her weird looks or even staring as she went. They clearly recognized her, but were shocked to see the fox ears and fox tail that had sprouted in the past 24 hours. She was loving the attention and had already been stopped three times and was asked what had happened.

Jason was up on the second floor somewhere speaking to the other alchemist here in the compound, and Izumi had gone off for her daily lessons on blacksmithing from her dwarven forgemaster Jagla.

Approaching the central room, it opened up into a large and wide area where the second floor could look down onto the first from a railing above. Large wooden pillars supported the building at intervals and the floor was made of old stone. Pulley systems were also secured at intervals for transport of heavier items and the crowd had gathered with a few hundred people present either watching from the railing or down on the first floor itself helping move the hauls they’d brought in.

“Ashe! Looking good! When’d you grow the ears!?”

“Trey, stop by my desk later today, I want to discuss a job with your group.”

“Hey Trey, I’ve got some fireproof linen your ifrit may be interested in. Want to step inside my shop and see?”

Trey politely shrugged off the random acquaintances and continued following Ashe until they’d gotten to the front entrance where a large set of reinforced double doors stood. Twenty people were posted at this entrance in a mix-and-match of races and classes. A dwarf mage, a human lancer, an elf swordsman and even an orc berserker were just some of the ones posted there.

Standing there talking to the officer posted there overseeing security was the guildmaster himself. He was a tall handsome man in his mid 30’s with curly black hair and had a clean-cut beard. He was wearing a red cloak with the Fost guild’s symbol along the back, being a dragon interlocked with a titan of some variety. Thick studded leather adorned him from neck to toe and a long enchanted scimitar hung at his waist. Upon seeing Ashe and Trey, his eyebrows lifted and a smile crossed his face.

“Ashe! You’ve… changed. Very interesting look!”

Ashe rolled her eyes pretending to be annoyed but secretly loving it just as much as she’d enjoyed the earlier comments. She patted down her own leather outfit along her hips where two daggers, some smoke bombs, a quiver of bolts and two crossbows hung. “Thanks Radian. You probably won’t believe it but I just changed races after breaking a relic of all things. I hope your fellow’s trip to Ornthas was a good one?”

Radian, the guild’s leader, threw up both hands to either side unknowingly. “I wasn’t with them on the trip. So who knows? I hope so and was told so, but we won’t truly have an idea of what we have until we get some good identifiers down here to check out the items we were unable to label earlier. We’ve already sent for three of them.”

“Three?” repeated Ashe curiously while Trey stood by listening.

Radian nodded happily. “Three. We have a lot this time… twelve chests of loot we were able to measure worth on and four chests full of mystery items we haven’t been able to label just yet. It looks promising.”

Ashe whistled. “Looks like you’re all going to be rich men! Congratulations!”

The man chuckled, then looked Trey’s way with a sly grin. “Hey Trey. Given any more thought to my offer yet?”

“About joining the guild?”

“Yes!”

Trey scratched his head and looked Ashe’s way. She just shrugged.

“What were the terms again?”

Radian sighed and facepalmed, but still remained in a pleasant mood despite this. “10% of your gains go to the guild. Your rent is free. You have our backs, we have yours. You’ll get perks with some of the local merchants. Then when All Spirit events come up we can join as a raiding group.”

Trey scratched his chin. He’d forgotten about those All Spirit events… though he’d never seen one just yet because he’d never been in a guild before. He’d just heard a lot about them. Most of the time people were only offered these events if they were in an actual guild registered with the All Spirit. Here, in this new world, guilds weren’t just a group of people you hung out with or did jobs with. Guilds were actually registered with this higher power and given opportunities to undergo raids, specialized dungeons, battles or competitions that yielded high prizes… sometimes even on other worlds before being returned after completing the event, but were oftentimes very dangerous. Many people died going through them, and some of these events were even mandatory. There had been rare reports of the All Spirit whisking away entire guilds at a moment’s notice, never to be seen again and presumed dead. So joining a guild always had the chance of a forced fight or forced event at any given time, therefore they were completely avoided by people who didn’t have the guts or skills to chance it. The big catch was that many events, raids, and even dungeons only allowed up to 100 members in at one time… so although a guild may be bigger than that, the members would be selected at random and if you kept any weaklings in your guild it chanced them being brought into a raid instead of someone who was more competent. There was definitely give and take for keeping larger numbers of members past 100 because of it. Why 100? Who knew. The cap wasn’t always at 100, but that was the general rule of thumb. Locally you’d be better off with a larger guild, but in a guild’s All Spirit event you were pretty fucked if you had only concentrated on quantity and not quality. There were also ‘Guild Alliances’ between different groups that could be formed officially by registering with the All Spirit that way too, but that was a little more complex and Trey didn’t understand the gist of what that was even about yet.

“Let me get back to you on that Radian. We’ve only been rooming here for two months now, but so far I like what we see.”

Radian frowned. “How much longer must you have to decide? You are getting a rather good deal on rent and protection you know.”

Trey knew Radian was speaking the truth and acknowledged it with a shameful glance downwards. “Alright. Give me one more month and I’ll have an answer. Does that sound fair?”

Radian sighed and pushed his hands through his locks of curly black hair. “What is it that concerns you about joining? Is it the raids? Certainly it is not our reputation, we are a trusted group I had thought.”

Ashe giggled and nodded adamantly. “Of course you are! You’re all very nice and that’s why we came to live here instead of elsewhere. We are just concerned about whether or not joining will win us more enemies than friends.”

The guild leader along with many of the guild members stationed at the front scowled or scoffed at her words, but they all knew what she was talking about.

Radian shook his head in irritation and folded his arms. “This is about the feud with Chekz, isn’t it.”

The Chekz, the Worvan, and the Ralabasta were the three largest and most dangerous guilds in Teretog. All of them boasted many thousands of members and each had undergone various blood feuds with other guilds or even faced off with professional armies from the western continent in the past and had won. These three guilds were nothing to be scoffed at. Although Fost was a good sized guild with a solid reputation, they’d had a couple run-ins with the Chekz guild in the recent past that had landed a couple of members from both sides in the grave. Thankfully the two guilds were on opposite sides of Teretog so they didn’t have as many encounters with each other as they would have otherwise, but it still led to problems. Teretog may be big, but it wasn’t big enough. Rumors had spread like wildfire, and it wasn’t a certain thing that the two military groups wouldn’t show-down sometime in upcoming months unless things calmed down.

If that were to happen, it was likely Fost would lose. This is why Fost was recruiting like crazy in recent weeks and defensive measures were being added to their headquarters even now. Someone like Trey who wasn’t already in a guild, who already had a solid reputation as both honest and a cold-blooded, competent killer, was someone Fost wanted very much on their side.

Trey nodded admittingly with a small frown of his own. He didn’t like admitting he was a coward, but he also wasn’t an idiot. “I’ll certainly fight for Fost if someone attacks our home, but yes. It’s a risk. I’m not saying no, I definitely like you guys, but I also know how badly those Chekz guys want your head. Three of your people have already been killed in ‘accidents’ over the past week. Before the situation with Chekz, I’m told your insignia alone warded off would-be assailants. It’s very likely that those attacks aren’t random. Am I right?”

Radian snorted and kept his arms crossed. “Yes. You’re probably right.”

“Alright, do you have plans to make peace with Chekz? Or are you headed for the warpath?” Trey hadn’t ever been so forward with his questioning of Radian before, but he figured he’d go ahead and ask now that they were on the subject.

Radian chuckled at the notion of going to war with Chekz. “My lad, fighting Chekz would be the death of all of us. I have already sent letters to their leader Bostaway, but he’s a proud man and never made an attempt to contact me back. It’s likely he won’t acknowledge us and will let this blow over… but just in case he doesn’t, I’ve already been working with some of our friends in other guilds to form an alliance. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, and if they did attack us they would also lose many hundreds of soldiers. I don’t think they’d want to lose their spot as a top dog here in Teretog. If they did strike, and did lose that many, Worvan would certainly strike out at them presented the opportunity. Worvan despises them. Chekz knows this, so let them continue to squash smaller competition that can’t put up a fight. They won’t dare take the warpath to us and don’t want it equally as much as we wouldn’t want to take it to them.”

The logic was sound, and Trey acknowledged it with a grin. “Yeah that actually makes sense. Alright, well I’ll get back to you within a month. Sound ok?”

“Agreed. Where are you headed off to now?”

Trey smiled mischievously. “To get some new minions. I need to replace the one that just died, the minotaur.”

Radian pooched his lips and stuck his hand out in friendship. “Didn’t know he was a goner. Sad to hear it, good luck and I’ll see you soon.”

They shook hands and parted, Ashe leading Trey and his minions out of the entryway and onto the dirt streets of west Teretog.

Ashe took them down a dirt road along the outskirts towards the south, passing by many of the older crustier buildings filled with rot and debris. They passed a couple camps along the forest’s edge as well and continued to stay off the main road to avoid pickpockets. After Trey’s recent news on Talsh’Noc’Un they also weren’t sure if the identifier he’d met or his two goons would truly keep their mouths shut about Trey’s ‘Sword of Ruin’, so spotting people following them would be easier to do in a less crowded area to traverse.

That still didn’t mean there wouldn’t be trouble though, and like many other trips they’d undergone here - all it took was one group of idiots to cause problems.

Trey saw it first - the numbskull hiding behind a large tropical tree to his right with bow drawn taut in ambush. He shook his head in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of these people and quickly turned around to see five more men falling in behind them by about ten yards. Without waiting to warn the others, chaos balls exploded from his hands and were sent flinging past Atharost’s face by a couple inches to shatter three of the stalkers in explosions of body parts with either direct hits or splash damage.

“Your skill Chaos Ball has gained 1 level. You have gained XP.”

In the next moment, carnage broke out. Atharost exploded in flames of his own and sent an inferno blazing across the trees, setting many of them alight, to where more people had sat in waiting and had just started to run out. Screams of the dying and cursing lit up Trey’s ears as Ashe blew by him to startle him with her agility. Then to his massive amount of confusion, there were many Ashe’s running around in various directions - jumping, sprinting and pulling out daggers or crossbows.

The treeline lit up with bolts from Ashe and her many illusions, and Trey couldn’t even tell which ones were real due to the realistic sounds they made and illusionary bolts they shot out. They even threw out smoke bombs that acted exactly like real ones to his immense amazement - and he paused in his own killing to just watch.

Then he saw the real one, identified by the way the men she targeted actually died. Her improved reflexes were noticeable after the 300 dexterity points and fox tail added to her repertoire. His jaw dropped as she effortlessly performed three actions all within the same second: she sunk a dagger up into the throat of the first man who rushed her, then planted a bolt into the skull of a second while round-house kicking a third man in the jugular at the exact same time as she shot the second guy. She’d never been able to move like that previous to today. Withdrawing her dagger from the first man she flung it into the third man’s heart with a sickening thud.

Trey began to chuckle as Ashe used the multiple smoke bombs and illusions of smoke bombs to her advantage, activating her sacred art ‘Stealth Field’ for a chameleon and blending into her surroundings. Then as she activated her next sacred art ‘Accelerator’, her speed amplified. With the vast upgrades she’d procured just last night, he was utterly amazed at how fast and nimble she’d become. Lightning-fast strikes severed hamstrings and arteries with movements he wasn’t even able to really make out given her camouflage and the smoke mist surrounding her.

“Atharost, go help her out.”

The flaming ifrit cackled and began to confidently fly up above the fray, spraying blasts of fire into the people stupid enough to have chosen them for an easy target.

“Your minion Atharost has gained 1 level in the skill Fireblast. Your minion Atharost has gained 1 overall level.”

“TREY!”

The scream was Rivia’s, and he immediately whirled around to see her being rushed. The men were almost upon her and he cursed himself for not paying better attention to the two survivors he’d left when he’d killed their three flanking companions.

But Napoleon wasn’t having that kinda shit. Not on his watch. “NO NO! I KILL KILL!!!”

The primal imp bolted from Trey’s shoulder, simultaneously slamming two firebolts into the first man as he jumped and then sending his victim head over heels as the imp collided. Napoleon’s claws ripped open the screaming, terror-stricken man’s guts in sprays of blood and bile, but the second man had just reached Rivia.

Trey lunged forward to try and intercept with Talsh’Noc’Un as it materialized from shadowform, but it was too late. He saw the grungy man’s shortsword strike down and a cry of victory fell out from the attacker’s lips, only to turn into a confused grunt as his sword bounced off Rivia’s glowing orange skin.

Her miracle, ‘Immortal’s Infernal Blessing,’ had given her complete immunity to all damage. In that instant, with a sneer on her face, she took out her sacrificial dagger and drove it into the man’s left lung.

The attacker staggered back, horror stricken and then shuddering as green and black Dark mana flew out from the blade into his body. She pulled it out, blade writhing with green-black flames before plunging it into his chest again. He dropped his sword and screamed, trying to tug the weapon out just before Trey’s own weapon lopped off his head and sent his corpse tumbling to the ground.

“You have gained XP. Your minion Rivia Ahst has gained 1 overall level.”

“Good shit Rivia.” Trey slapped her on the back and flung his sword forward in a spinning arc to skewer a fleeing man wearing a green tunic, dropping the target immediately with sparks of crimson and black mana sending him into convulsions.

Rivia was panting, not from exertion - but because she’d been so close to death. Shaken and clutching the dagger her goddess had bestowed upon her, she checked the area for any more that might be nearby amidst the screams and explosions of battle. “That… was close.”

Trey chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it was.”