Duskbound

Book 2, Chapter 16

The bed was lumpy and it stank, which was actually kind of amazing when Aria thought about it. The whole damn village reeked with that particular rotting odor unique to swamps. Despite that, they'd somehow scrounged up the audacity to provide paying customers with a mattress that smelled so distinctively foul from the air she was forced to breathe in that she hesitated to even sit on it.

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Please let that boy find that hydra right away, she silently prayed, casting that thought off to whatever god was listening.

Torwin had assured her that the new recruit was strong enough to be a gold-ranked monster hunter, and they'd both predicted that the guild would find some way to try to use that to her advantage. She hadn't expected to be handling this all on her own, but Torwin had been sent off within a week of arriving, and the assignment they'd stuck him with was every bit as tedious as he'd expected it to be. It was the kind of work a good team of silvers could have handled, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that he was being punished for his apprentice not gaining the right class.

Twenty years ago, when she'd been a fresh-faced teenager just beginning to explore the power her own [Star Fated Conjurer] class had granted her, the guild hadn't been like this. It had stood for something back then, back before the reforms started flowing out from the main headquarters in Ashala. The senior members of the guild had been given two choices: get on board or get out of the way. Those that had tried to fight had found themselves isolated, unsupported, and given the most dangerous missions.

It broke her heart to see how the guild behaved today, to know that they were going out of their way to drive off fresh talent with no care for what it would cost the people of Ghestal, all so that they could play their stupid games. And it was absolutely infuriating that she was stuck playing those games, too.

All that having been said, Torwin had better have been right about how good a hunter Velik was, because Aria was not planning to linger in Eldmyrk a single second longer than she had to. She'd agreed to get herself placed on the list of examiners to protect Velik from the guild's machinations when they forced the gold-ranked examination on him, but she hadn't expected to be sent out to the Harclovi Swamps as part of the deal.

With one more distasteful glance at the bed—was that a bug that just crawled out of the sheet?—she settled into a cross-legged position and began channeling the power of [Horizon Seer]. The skill was an amalgamation of various scrying magics, limited primarily by how much mana it took to maintain it. As Aria was completely fresh from napping through the long carriage ride, she was more than capable of spying on her charge for a few hours.

It was the work of minutes to find him, roughly twenty miles deep into the swamp already. Considering it had been less than two hours since he'd set out, she was mildly impressed. The number of dead monsters he'd left in his wake, however, was downright disturbing. Apparently, the locals weren't concerned with thinning out the local monster populations. Maybe that's how a hydra managed to grow to be such a problem in the first place.

Don't be that stupid. I know I said I wanted this over as quickly as possible, but do not chase a gods-cursed hydra underwater and fight it there. Just be patient. It'll come out eventually to scrounge for food.

Of course, however talented Velik might have been, he was still a relatively inexperienced hunter. After pulling some trinket out of his pocket and staring at it for a few minutes while he paced back and forth around the edge of the water, he sighed, summoned that curious spear of his off his arm, and waded in.

Damn it. Now I have to go save his dumb ass.

* * *

Velik was... annoyed. He'd kind of been expecting it to come to this, but he'd been really hoping to catch the hydra out on the hunt. Instead, he'd found its lair. It had only been dark for a few hours, but given the famous regenerative powers of the monster he was hunting, he wanted as much time as possible to slowly wear it down. If it decided to just wait him out, he might be stuck facing it without the benefits of [Duskbound] to help.

He had two possible ideas for baiting the hydra out. The first was to draw its attention with a lot of noise and maybe some monster corpses to play to its appetite. The problem there was that hydras didn't actually eat all that much for creatures their size and they were prone to hibernating at odd times. He didn't think this one was going to be down for a long time, not with how fresh its tracks were, but it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days of waiting for it to show itself.

Or he could swim down there and jab it with his spear. That'd piss it off, but that strategy came with the downside of having to find a way to get back out of the water. Well, with [Burden of the Beast] helping him to slow the hydra down, he was sure he could manage something.

This thing is definitely going to bite me at least once or twice, though. Stupid hydra. Stupid monster hunters guild. Stupid Aria.

With a sigh, he willed his spear to slide down his arm and extend to its full length, then he waded into the water. Somewhere just off center of the middle of the lake, a sleeping monster was waiting for him.