BT - Book 1 - Chapter 34

The Onkert slammed one of the scale wolves against the dungeon wall.  Micah lashed out with his spear, willing mana into it to make it wrap around the wolf on top of Will.  The monster clawed and bit ineffectually at Will’s stone face and throat while the portly man screamed in panic.  It wouldn't be able to harm Will through his blessing until he ran out of mana, but Micah was getting a headache from the man’s shrill yells.

He yanked the wolf closer to him with his right arm, taking advantage of his increased body attribute to overpower the burly animal.  With his left, Micah cast paralytic sting and jabbed his fingers into the soft spot in its scales right under its right foreleg.

The green glow flowed from his hand into the rust colored monster, stunning it.  Micah flicked his wrist, releasing the wolf from the spear entangling it and kicked the limp beast over onto its back.  Planting his foot on its chest, he thrust the spear into its throat.  The wolf shuddered and kicked twice before it went still.

Micah glanced over to the rest of the party.  Trevor was holding one of the wolves at bay with a series of lightning fast jabs from his spear, drawing its attention while Drekt stepped into position with practiced ease, his cleaver raised to finish the creature off.  Jo danced back and forth, darting in and out of the shadows to drag her short swords across the fourth monster’s flanks.  Meanwhile, Sarah put arrow after arrow into any wolf that presented her with an opening with smooth efficiency.

He reached down and helped Will to his feet, grunting and struggling against Will’s weight.  The man wasn’t light in any form, but turning his skin to stone didn’t help matters.  Will reached down and picked up his hammer, his lower lip vibrating as he tried to calm himself.

“Micah it it,” Will blubbered at him.

“I saw,” Micah replied, his eyes on the other fights just in case another party member needed emergency intervention or a quick heal.  “You have to watch out with the tail on scale wolves.  They’re heavily muscled and prehensile.  Not enough to harm someone wearing proper armor, but more than enough to loop around an ankle and pull you to the ground.  That’s a useful blessing you have there, it saved you a fair amount of bleeding and pain today.”

The Onkert leaned forward, ripping the wolf’s throat out before dropping the limp body to the dungeon’s floor.  Drekt slammed his cleaver down to a startled yelp as he nearly bisected the animal.  Micah frowned slightly and thrust forward with his spear, slamming a spike of wind into the final monster’s haunch, disrupting a knee-high sweep of its tail that likely would have caught Jo.

An arrow sprouted from the back of the stunned creature’s neck as Sarah shot it again.  The wolf twisted around to snap at the attack, exposing itself to another pair of slashes from Jo.  It flopped to the ground, the tendon in both forelegs severed by her sudden attack.

“-bit my throat Micah!” He tuned back in to Will’s breathy rambling.  Micah knew he should be annoyed, but for some reason the man’s panicked rambling was endearing after his years of solitude.  “I was stronger than it, but it just kept squirming away from me.  I did everything I could, but it kept just biting me.  If it wasn’t for my blessing I would have died Micah!”

“I would have healed you in time Will,” Micah smiled at him.  “Don’t get me wrong, it would have hurt like all of the hells at once, and the feeling of the flesh of your throat magically knitting shut while your breath whistles out of you isn’t something you’d forget easily, but other than that you’d be fine.”

The rest of the party began to circle around Will and Micah, their eyes straying to where the Onkert crunched and chewed its way through the scale wolf.  As far as Micah could tell, the daemons didn’t actually need to eat.  For them it was more a matter of pleasure.  They enjoyed the taste of blood and flesh, the act of taking life.  

“Thanks for the save on Will Micah,” Trevor grinned at him before crouching down next to the corpse of the scale wolf that Micah had paralyzed and slain.  “That’s a clean stab there.  How’d you manage it?”

“His spear bent around it,” Sarah frowned slightly as she looked from the Onkert to Micah.  “He pulled it off of Will  in one quick motion before he stunned it and killed it.”

“What she said,” Micah chuckled weakly.  “He looked like he was having a bit of a rough go of it, so I stepped in just in case.”

Drekt frowned and picked up the corpse with some difficulty.  Jo whistled as the big man’s biceps bulged with effort.

“What level are you again Micah?” Trevor asked a bit uneasily as he looked from Drekt to Micah.  “Hells, how did you find a spellcasting class that improves your physical attributes? I thought you were just bragging earlier, but it looks like you have the levels to back it up.”

“Summoning isn’t really a class thing,” Micah scratched the back of his neck.  “It’s more a matter of studying and research.  My class is more of a healing and support caster.  Usually I just go into a dungeon with one or two daemons and let them do the hard work while I keep them in fighting shape.”

“As for my attributes,” Micah shrugged, “there are rituals that let you fortify them.  They’re hard to pull off, but you know me.  I always have my nose in one book or another.  If you put in enough work, it’s not that crazy to augment yourself.  As far as I can tell, most nobles have the rituals cast on them just after they receive their blessings.”

“Leave it to you to find a way to end up in better shape than me just from reading some books,” Trevor burst out laughing.  “I knew I should have tried to get an apprenticeship with Keeper Ansom.”

“Did you say that you’ve been hitting dungeons on your own?” Drekt asked, dropping the monster corpse he’d been struggling with.  “That sounds fairly dangerous even with the  strength of that daemon you’ve displayed for us.  If you get outnumbered badly enough, something could slip past your summon and an accident could still happen.”

“I’ve had to heal myself a couple of times,” Micah replied, chuckling.  There was some truth to that.  Admittedly, it’d only happened in very high level dungeons, but an area effect attack that would just scratch a Brensen might cripple him.

Had crippled him.  His conversation with Will about healing a torn throat wasn’t a matter of speculation.  He vividly remembered the moment.  A monster shattered a nearby boulder and he took a face full of shrapnel.  He still had nightmares about  having to hold his throat together, the blood pumping out of him, as he struggled to push enough oxygen past his vocal cords to croak out the words to augmented mending.

“That sounds traumatic,” Drekt rumbled, wiping some of the viscera from his cleaver.  “It also sounds needlessly lonely and dangerous.  Why not join a guild?  You’re clearly powerful enough to warrant special treatment.”

“There’s special treatment,” Micah smiled half-heartedly, “and then there’s too special of treatment.  I don’t want to be treated with kid gloves.  It would make me soft and prone to mistakes.”  Micah’s eye settled on Will as the large man whined animatedly to Sarah.

“Plus,” Micah continued.  “If you reveal a blessing past a certain level people take notice.  Sometimes it makes them want to be your friend, and sometimes it makes powerful people think that you’ll grow into a threat.  The nobility aren’t dumb.  They won’t let a potential problem turn into an actual problem.  Potential problems have a tendency to die of fortuitous accidents.”

“Wait,” Trevor’s eyes widened.  “Is that why you’re always so cagey about your blessing and level?”

“Maybe I just like being a man of mystery,” Micah winked back at Trevor.  “Didn’t you tell me that the ladies were into men who kept them guessing?”

“How is that working for you?” Jo asked, her voice barely concealing a smirk.  “As far as I can tell, Trevor’s idea of being mysterious is to keep a girl guessing as to whether he’s cheating on her with her best friend or her neighbor.”

“You wound me to the quick madame,” Trevor gasped and grabbed his chest.  “To hear my honor so openly impugned, I don’t know if I will ever recover fully.”

“I’m pretty sure the answer is both,” Micah snorted.  “I don’t remember how many times he forced his ‘cute brother and sister’ to run interference with a jilted lover while he escaped out his bedroom window.”

Jo burst into laughter, the clear tinkling of bells that filled the dungeon.  A second later both Trevor and Micah joined her.  Drekt even managed to crack a smile.  

This is what he’d been missing.  The camaraderie, the mutual aid, a cure for the loneliness.  As great as Telivern was, it couldn’t fill the emptiness that Micah had carried around with him since he joined the Golden Drakes in his last life.

“But seriously,” Jo intruded upon his thoughts.  Micah’s breath caught in his throat as he realized how close to him she was standing.  Maybe it was her stealth skills, maybe it was her blessing, or maybe it was just good old fashioned inattentiveness on his part, but at some point she’d approached within a hair's breadth of him.  “How is that man of mystery thing working out for you?  You’re attractive, powerful and not attached to any of the guilds.  It sounds to me like you should be beating off the ladies with a stick.”

“That’s our Jo,” Drekt chuckled, “if she sees something she wants, she just goes ahead and takes it.”

“Could you at least try to avoid picking up my brother in front of me,” Trevor groaned.  “Or I don’t know, at least wait until we’re out of the dungeon?  It just seems so wrong to try and pick up boys in a dungeon.”

Micah opened his mouth to reply, but just blushed instead.