Goddammit!! Fucking nobility. Just wait for me to get some info on how protection spells work and I will visit you again, you bitch. Fuck! This has completely ruined my good mood.

The night before the start of the mission, Zortex went to “visit” the house of Lady Inevera. Previously he had a look at the building and he had found a couple of entrances were he could sneak in with his Slime form without having to touch anything. He thought that he would avoid any alarm, even if there was some sort of magical protection…he was wrong. As soon as he slid in the water pipe he had chosen as entrance, some sort of sound started to ring. Inside the house some lights turned on and Zortex decided to run away, afraid to be discovered. He was also seen by the old steward while he was running out of the garden. Luckily for him he was not wearing his Shadow Mask or his bandages, so he wouldn’t be recognized anyway. It was quite funny that for him not wearing a disguise became his way to disguise himself. Not even a minute and the city guards started patrolling the neighborhood looking for him. He was nearly discovered three times, but his flexibility as a slime allowed him to enter and hide in places guards would overlook. He had to spend hours hiding before the patrols subsided, so he could finally walk away safe from harm. He had really come really close to be arrested, and just before trying to leave the city. Zortex promised himself to be a bit more cautious in the future, and for now he put in the back of his mind the idea of robbing the old lady. There would be time in the future to complete the deed and if not, she was already old and she would die soon. He would simply find her tomb and destroy it. Revenge comes in different forms.

Zortex went back to his room at the inn and went to sleep for a few hours. This was the last night he had booked it and he wanted to enjoy the comfort of a soft bed before leaving. When he woke up in the morning he went through all of his possessions. He had tons of food stored away in his storage pouch. He possessed a tent, a sleeping mat and some cooking utensils. Soap and crystals for water were more than enough for such a trip, and if not, he supposed that there would be a way to get some new ones. There would be villages in that area, so some shops could sell them. For weaponry he still had all the things he had kept from his second robbery, the one at the store: a dozen knives, a spear, two leather armors, the skeleton’s sword, the dark cape and a small shield. His main weapon were spells, but he had not bought any items to improve his magic. He had gone around many shops in the city and he found a few interesting things, but they were too expensive for his finances and they would give too little a boost to his power. At the end of the mission he would know what he was lacking to better fight the enemies, and he would choose accordingly items to compensate his deficiencies. He would also see how much money he would be able to save up. Apparently the compensation depended on how well he would perform, with a base value of 50 coppers per day just for participating, and a plus depending on how well he would perform. Obviously if he did nothing, the boss would send him away empty handed. From a magical point of view Zortex bought for himself in a shop some spell crystals that could be useful, but that he would never be able to learn due to his class.

Low Dispel Ailments

By using mana you will be able to remove some damaging statuses.

Lower healing

By using mana you will increase the HP regeneration of the target

Stone Spear

By using mana a spear of stone will emerge from the ground

Electrical charge

By using mana you can charge electrically your weapon of choice

The spells were nothing special, but thanks to those he could vary a bit his range of possibilities in case things turned out bad for him.

Satisfied with his preparations he moved to the north gate of the city, which was the meeting point for the crew. The departure time was at noon, but it was better to arrive a lot earlier rather than a bit late. He arrived at the designed spot and he saw a caravan with ten carriages being prepared for a trip. The vehicles where as large as 5 meters and 10 meters long, and they were getting packed with boxes and barrels. Zortex was quite dubious that this caravan would be the one for his mission, since it seemed all the space would be occupied by boxes, but he supposed that they might know something, so he went to speak with the people who were loading boxes inside.

“Hi, is this the caravan for the extermination mission directed to the Cesuna forest?”

Zortex was talking to the guy directing the work of the other people, the most likely to be the boss.

“Not exactly, we are merchants who will go to trade to the northern cities. On the other hand you are not wrong, because we will leave together with you guys from the Adventurer’s Guild. We will move half of the way in the same direction and you will give us protection from thieves or wild beasts. It’s a win-win situation for both of our groups. We have basically financed your trip. You are a couple of hours early before departure, so your comrades are not here yet, but those two people over there are like you. They came and asked me the same question. You can go wait with them.”

So that’s why they choose this day to start the mission.

The merchant indicated a girl and a guy sitting on a low wall not far from his position, and chatting with each other. Zortex nodded and went away on the other direction, avoiding to spend his waiting time close to other people. There were still a couple of hours left before leaving, so he would wait somewhere else, making the time useful to train some of his skills, especially the Decay Bolt which required some grinding before becoming useful.

After 90 minutes of training his new spell gained 2 more skill levels, to Zortex satisfaction. He still didn’t understand why it was so easy to level up the spells he had just learned; all his other skills where much harder to perform and he was losing his patience grinding them up. Spying on the conversations of the other people at the wizard tower Zortex realized that most travelers were quite satisfied to reach lvl 15-20 on a spell by training it for few of months, and this only for the spell they were most talented and they had decided to focus on. Rather than increasing the skills level beyond that, they preferred to spend the time trying to learn new spells to vary their battle power, or to simply reach more powerful techniques. At the beginning that was something that Zortex also had planned to do, but after starting his training path, he saw that it was so easy to reach level 30 or more in a relatively little time, hence to him it seemed a waste to not spend a week or two more just to get there. He wondered why he was different on that account. Apparently he was a really fast learner, because not only he had little trouble learning the spells, but also because his first limits were higher than the normal guy. For a moment he wondered if he really was a genius, but then he discarded the idea. He had promised to not be arrogant anymore, so he believed that it had something to do with his class and his previous experiences.

At the moment the crowd was getting big around the caravan and a few NPCs soldiers had arrived, so he made his move to get in. He needed to find the people in charge, show his badge and avoid any situation that would put him in the spotlight. He actually had no idea how they would travel to their destination, as he could see the carriages of the merchants, however there was nothing for the adventurers. Even more important he could not see anything to push the carriages. Are there horses? I haven’t seen any since I arrived and normal animals from reality haven’t made any appearance yet. Maybe they want us travelers to push the carriages to save up money. Ehehe that’s stupid, but it would be funny to see other people do it. It would be unfortunate for wizards, because it would train muscles, so on the next level up they would increment strength and endurance. From a distance he spotted a guy who was writing down the names of the people around him showing their badges, so Zortex assumed that he had found his target. He pulled up his hood and reached the queue of people waiting to be registered. Of course some onlookers whispered and pointed at him, but he was used to it by now and many of the travelers joining today had already seen him moving around the wizard tower or the city, hence the lack of commotion. In the last few months some people had approached him to start a conversation, taken by their curiosity, but he had always stayed silent, thus the rumors around were that he had been cursed to not be able to speak to other travelers. Zortex gave his information in a low voice to the NPC guard and filed away in a less crowded area, brooding on the loss of time for bureaucracy. Finished the counting, there were 47 people joining the expedition, plus 10 NPC soldiers who would coordinate the mission. Zortex saw the captain send someone away with some orders. Five minutes later some of his questions got answered. Zortex casually watched 5 big carriages arriving at the rendezvous point carried by one large monster each. Or at least they looked like monsters to him, because they were much different than anything he had ever seen. They looked like giant beetles, with a long horn in the front and what looked like a strong-armored carapace, their color was different for each of them, from red to blue to black, and after looking for a while Zortex thought that there could be wings under the shell.

“Finally the Hurgs are here” one of the merchants said. Apart from the ones moving the new carriages there were some free ones that they were herded to the trading caravan and getting strapped to carry all the vehicles.

So this things are called Hurgs. Apparently no horses around here for moving between cities. I bet this are used only for heavy loading. There should be some other kind of animal for fast moving, especially if it needs to carry just one or two persons. The people say that the continents here are immense, much bigger than Earth, and there were already 12 discovered and many other places still unchecked.

All the people waiting started walking to the rendezvous and chatting to each other excited for the beginning of the trip. Considering that this was a yellow mission, most of the people present were noobs who had never set foot outside the city, just like Zortex. Probably they even were just level 1 travelers who had just trained their skills, but never fought a battle against an enemy. Inside the city there were no monsters, so the only way to level up would be to go down to the sewers and kill some rats, or get some weird mission that would bring to some fight, like the one against the skeleton that he had already accomplished. For most of the adventurers here this would be the first chance to level up and improve their stats. Zortex also missed the idea to increase his physical attributes after all this months on the surface; his level up period happened during the time he was at his worst case of madness, so he didn’t really enjoy the feeling.

“Ok everyone. My name is Cvor and I am the Captain coordinating this mission. We will reach our destination in approximately 7 days, where there is the town of Asiago which it has been suffering from this invasion of Srenc. There we will be joined from another expedition of travelers moving from the city of Carmignano. For more details we will discuss during the trip as there will be a lot of boring time. For now just get in the carriages, so that we can leave this place”

Oh. So it will not be only us. This suggests that Asiago is probably halfway through two cities. I should have bought a map. It is awful to not be able to orient myself.

People started mounting the carriages and Zortex started sweating. He was dreading this moment from the time he took the mission. It is one thing to shrug off a travelers while walking somewhere, but it is much more difficult when he will have to spend hours and hours inside a close space with them. He waited for a while screening the carriages for something to alleviate his worries, until he noticed someone boarding the third vehicle. It was Jake, the guy he was first paired with during the Spear training. He already knew Zortex, sort of, and he was the type to keep talking indefinitely. Although his presence was irritating to him, he had in mind a plan.

Jake already knows my fake name and the fake story about my situation. At least if he remembers me. If I board in the same carriage he could speak on my place in case they try to start a conversation with me. Also he could attract all the attention with his blabbering. I will have to cover even more my ears with other bandages, but it might work. I need to get used at being called Shad, my made-up name.

Zortex made a sprint to the back to get into that carriage before it would get full. There were two padded planks on the sides where people could sit and one scaffold in the center where people could put their things, or probably useful to eat while traveling. Although there were some small windows on the sides, the more internal places where darker that the one closer to the entrance, so they were still empty. Without reservation, Shad moved to the darkest zone and he sat down. People kept entering and Zortex had a good look at everyone as all of them looked back at him, still dubious about his appearance. Most of them where weird in their own way. The skin colors and hairs colors varied from pink to orange, eyes were of all shapes and many other details would have been impossible on Earth, but here they were displayed commonly. That was also one way to distinguish travelers from NPC, as the created characters had always the appearance of normal humans. Not losing any time, when all the people went inside the vehicles started moving outside the gates of the city.

All of his companions looked outside of the windows at the new environment, as most of them had never seen anything beyond the city walls, just like Zortex. He also would have liked to look, but instead he used the time to fold another bandage around his ears. The doors at theback of the carriage were kept open to let some fresh air to come through, so after a while he could see a bit of what they had passed through. There were still building outside of the wall, but not too close. Rummaging in his brain he recollected that it was build this way to prevent to offer hiding places and protection to the enemies in case of siege. Also this buildings were made completely in wood, so that they could be burnt down if the situation became dire. Afterwards the scenery gave way to cultivated lands and villages.