The next week passed in a series of long days spent either in the saddle or on the ground, hunting down increasingly deadlier Mortka, in increasing bizarre scenarios.

Our second mission, which took place inside an abandoned chapel just outside the township of Bellwind, was relatively straightforward. A Profane Dread Shadow had taken up residency in the formally sanctified building and had started multiplying. According to Colin—who was surprisingly well versed in Mortka lore—that was straight out of the Profane Dread Shadow Operating Manual. But instead of Daddy and Mommy Shadow having their own little brood of Shades after a night of heavy drinking and poor decision making like regular folks, Dread Shadows replicated by stealing shadows from the living.

It was like a fucked up, nightmare-fuel Peter-Pan bedtime story.

The attacks were subtle at first. One day the pets of Bellwind, mostly barn cats and the occasional house dog, started getting sick. They didn’t bleed from their eyes or projectile vomit like cast members in the Exorcist. Nothing quite so dramatic. Instead, they just refused to move. And if they did move, it was listlessly, lethargically, as if they’d simply lost the will to keep going. They wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink. Hell, most wouldn’t even bothering getting up to go to the bathroom.

They just laid there in their own filth and withered away, dying an inch at a time.

And, because they moved so rarely, no one noticed that there was something else subtly wrong with the animals. Not a one of them had shadows.

The more stolen shades the Dread Shadow recruited, the stronger it got, and it wasn’t long before it started moving right up the food chain. Chickens, goats, cows, horses. Then people. Only two people by the time we arrived in Bellwind and intervened. Of course, the victims were an old woman and a young boy, because, like the disease they were, Mortka disproportionately affected the weak, the young, and the elderly. Those who couldn’t defend themselves.

The Bounty was also a two star and recommended a three-man team. There four of us, not counting Cal or Renholm. Berk and Marina were both Novice Silver-Ranked, Colin was Novice Gold-Ranked, and I had already hit Adept Bronze. And, to no one’s surprise, our skills were well balanced to boot, because Kerra was nothing if not a stickler for following standard operating procedures

If left to fester, the Shades could be turn into a nasty infestation, but they were individually weak. An errant beam of sunlight could end them on the spot, and they were vulnerable to silver weapons and were extremely weak against fire damage. The goal was to nip the infestation in the bud before it got out of hand. On paper, this mission should have been easier than the Eldritch Wither Vine from Willowbend, especially with Marina covering our six with Unbound Blaze.

Should have been, are the three operative words.

I had Renholm run Recon for us—there was no sign of the shades, but the church itself wasn’t all that large. A main sanctuary, a small library, and a simple rectory which would’ve acted as the sleeping quarters for the resident priest. The walls were fortified stone, so we couldn’t just set the place on fire, but clearing the building wouldn’t be tough. I’d take point, Cal and Berk would sweep left and right respectively, while Colin and Marina would hang back toward the rear, ready to act as our heavy ranged support if things went sideways.

It was the same basic wedge formation we’d used against the Wither Bloom. The problem was, we’d fucked it up during our last fight, so I wanted to make sure we had a chance to get it right before complicating things with new tactical formations.

For the time being, we were following Drill Instructor Screw Y’All’s KISS doctrine—Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Our initial game plan worked for all of about thirty seconds.

Then the Shades swarmed out from beneath the rotten pews and from behind moth-eaten wall tapestries and everyone and their brother panicked. Colin immediately leaped into the thick of things, eager to prove he could fight as good as anyone. Naturally, he was instantly buried in shadows. Cal had to break formation to save him, which allowed more shades to flank us, get behind our lines, and launch a direct blitz on Marina, who was as squishy as a stuffed animal. She lashed out wildly with gouts of fire, scorching the encroaching shades… and also accidently setting Berk on fire in the process.

The poor kid—who’d had the terrible luck to transform into a large simian creature covered in oily hair—went up like a tiki torch and ran around, screaming at the top of his lungs, waving his lanky arms in the air, which only made things worse. Apparently, Vigil training had not passed on the sacred wisdom of Stop, Drop, and Roll. That left me to fill in the gaps in our defense and do the bulk of the heavy lifting on the offense. It took twenty minutes to rein in the chaos, save Colin, extinguish Berk, and kill the Profane Dread Shadow behind the scenes.

Needless to say, we had a very thorough after action debrief with lots and lots of notes.

Our next bounty was better than the second, but the second had been an absolute clusterfuck of the grandest proportions so that wasn’t saying much.

We headed south and west to the rugged township of Eastmouth, which served as the main trading outpost between Bimura and Reverren. Eastmouth had few farms, produced no real goods of their own, and existed almost entirely to serve the near constant stream of merchants that ebbed and flowed through the city. Those caravans were the beating heart of the town, the blood that kept Eastmouth alive and the citizens feed and cared for. There were a slew of Inns, brothels, mercantile stores, and blacksmiths that specialized in crafting horseshoes, wheel struts, and wagon axels.

Anything and everything a merchant train could need while on the road and far from home.

But Eastmouth had a big problem. One that couldn’t be solved with a black smith’s hammer or a penicillin shot to the ass. Over the past couple of months, merchant caravans had started going missing. They hadn’t merely been robbed. Nope. These caravans had vanished. At first, the town Arbitrator had assumed it was the work of bandits operating out of the abandoned mines that littered the mountainous hills surrounding the town. A good guess, given the circumstances. Robbery was part and parcel of the life of traveling caravans—especially during winter when food was scarce, and men were desperate.

There were a couple of problems with that theory, however.

Generally, bandits and caravan raiders weren’t outright mass murderers. Slaughtering a caravan of innocent people was the best way to get a disgruntled Vigil to show up on your doorstep ready to dish out some of Raguel’s justice in the form of a holy lightning bolt right up the ass. No one wanted that. Besides, most bandits weren’t bad people, just hungry people who wanted to survive like everyone else. For the most part, they were happy to set an ambush, take what they could, and beat feet back to their hideouts.

So the question was, what had happened to the merchants and their guards?

After the third caravan went MIA, the Arbitrator organized a hunting party to scour the hills and drive the raiders from whatever boulder they were hiding under. They didn’t find any bandits, but they did find the merchant wagons. They’d been driven deep into the forest and seemingly abandoned with all the supplies and goods completely untouched. There was no sign of the horses or cart mules but also no indication of overt violence. There was no blood, no gore, no lopped off body parts. What kind of self-respecting bandit waylaid a merchant train but didn’t bother stealing any of the goods they were carrying?

None of it made any sense.

After another few days of searching, the Arbitrator eventually found the corpses. The bodies were bloated, the eyes glazed in death. According to the priest there had been trails of blood running from their ears and their throats and been ripped out. The strangest thing of all was that the wounds appeared to be self-inflicted. For all practical purposes, the merchants and their guards had driven their wagons into the forest, hoofed it five miles through dense forest, sat down at the mouth of a small natural cavern and ripped all of their throats out by hand.

It was the work of a coven of Ettersirens.

Ettersirens were female, sprite-like Mortka that typically lived in small communities called covens. They had the ability to charm travelers, luring them to their deaths by conjuring illusions of deceased loved ones and speaking through their stolen voices. It was all one big con. Victims would follow the ghostly apparitions for miles right to the foot of the Ettersirens lair where they would sit down, happily rip out their own throats, and offer up their vocal cords to the monsters.

The whole thing was absolutely fucked.

Thankfully, Ettersiren’s were about as dangerous as wet toilet paper to Vigils. Their spells and illusions were pitifully weak against someone with an even slightly elevated Insight stat. I saw my Memaw lingering near a dimly lit trail, a broad smile stretched across her leathery face, a platter of freshly baked cookies in her hands. The image lasted until I took a single long blink, then dissolved in a glimmer of dust like fog burning away in the morning sun.

All it served to do was piss me off.

It took us an hour to find their lair, which ended up being a natural cavern tucked away in a rocky crevice. There were twenty of ’em holed up inside, each about the size of Renholm. Even without Colin’s Pierce Veil spell, we all saw through the conjured lies and Ettersiren were on trick ponies when it came to offense. There was one little wrinkle, though. The nasty little sons of bitches were completely immune to magic, which meant we had to spend three hours chasing them down and popping them like blood-filled water balloons with our bare hands. Utterly revolting but also strangely cathartic.

By the time we were done, everyone was covered in sheen of fairy blood.

It was still better than the Dread Shadows.

Every mission got a little more difficult, but we got a little better too.

We went toe-to-toe with a Metalflayer holed up in an iron mine outside of Aldermore. It was a giant centipede as long as a school bus, composed almost entirely of metal. Marina hated bugs with an unholy passion, but when push came to shove and the fucker had us pinned down in a tunnel with no way out, she stepped up to the plate and blasted the flayer with enough fire to turn it into smoldering slag. In that moment, she proved to herself that she was more than just a pretty face wrapped in a privileged upbringing. She was a certified badass.

Berk lead the charge against a vicious pack demonic, ember-eyed Craighounds that had taken up residency in the moors surrounding Velipan. The Mortka were like werewolves but built from stone and earth instead of muscle and fur. They were pack hunters by nature, smarter than most humans, and had a better understanding of the terrain than we could ever hope to achieve. We managed to take one down, earning a Transformation Token in the process, and Berk used it to help us beat the Craighounds at their own game.

Even Colin got to flex his Truth Seeker muscle when we found ourselves confronting a Glutenous Devourer, who’d managed to bewitch an entire village using dark magics.

The secluded hamlet of Plainscross was tucked away on the edge of a foreboding forest on the very outskirts of human civilization. The place was tiny, maybe a hundred people all told, and when we stumbled in just after dark we found every single resident in the center of town, sitting around a series of enormous wooden tables, celebrating with a seemingly endless feast. Beautiful lanterns festooned every house, casting the town in warm light while happy music jangled in the air. The people seemed genuinely welcoming, inviting us to join the feast and eat our fill.

But there was a curious thing. None of them would leave their seats.

Still, the aroma of delicious food tickled at our nostrils and enticed us toward a series of empty benches.

Colin was the first to catch on. The people were real and so were the tables, but the food was all rotten, diseased, and covered in maggots, worms, and plump spiders. The portly “town mayor” was really a Mortka in a cheap skinsuit, slowly siphoning the life from the partygoers as they gorged themselves to death on the rancid meal.

We learned our individual strengths and weakness.

Learned to work together as a team.

Learned to trust each other even when it seemed like the odds were stacked against us.

Each encounter was perfectly suited to help us overcome our own shortcomings and I knew that wasn’t by accident—Kerra knew exactly how to get the best out of people.

And speaking of Kerra, she had also stared to thaw toward me as the days passed. As she slowly lowered her guard, I found myself likewise warming up to the person who was buried beneath the rigid, no-nonsense exterior. She was too serious by half and was more than a little OCD when it came to rules, but that was only because she genuinely wanted to help people. She intensely cared about the well-being of others, and not just the would-be Vigils entrusted to her charge. To her, the world was a dark, evil, chaotic place—a cruel beast that chewed up the poor, the weak, and the overlooked.

In her eyes, it was our job to bring some measure of order to all that chaos. To care for those who fell through the cracks and were, invariably, the first to get preyed on by hungry Mortka.

In some ways, she reminded me of Pascow, the Builder from the Steel Griffon. Both wanted to be out in the world, saving people, killing monsters, righting wrongs, fulfilling bounties. Both had sacrificed their personal desires to better serve Raguel and the Citadel. Early on, Kerra had recognized that she could do more good for humanity as a whole by making sure that every Vigil who left the Akademy was properly trained, than by galivanting off to kill monsters.

My gut told me that was part of the reason she didn’t like me. Because she wanted to do what I was doing… and couldn’t. Not with all the other responsibilities she had.

Still, by the time we rolled into Sarugia for our last mission, some of that resentment had disappeared and I even caught her smiling a time or two. A far greater achievement than any of the other bounties we’d cleared.