Battlefield Reclaimer, Ch 49: New Crafting Materials (Patreon)

As the hissing sound of the approaching pythons got closer, Sam’s talons flexed and the crystal spiral around him intensified. At the same time, he glanced toward his father to make sure he was ready. Jeric was also looking toward the front now, his muscles rippling beneath the tattered rathide tunic that he was still wearing.

At the sight, a practical thought passed through Sam’s mind, and he turned to look back at the pythons on the ground. They were pretty big, which meant there was a lot of snakeskin. He and his father were both still wearing their old clothes. Even if he turned some of the skins into spell parchments, maybe they could make some better clothes out of the rest of it.

He still wanted to see what the runes were on Ayala and Krana’s clothes that kept them clean and durable, and experimenting with snakeskin would give him a chance to try it out.

As for the approaching snakes, he barely gave them a second thought. He’d seen what they could do so far, and they were just crafting materials that had volunteered to deliver themselves to him.

These pythons were just beasts, not Outsiders or basalt gnomes with lesser evolutions to make them stronger. They might have an ability to use, but it looked like speed and strength were their main focus. That was the main difference between a beast and a monster.

Beasts could be dangerous, but they typically only had their powerful bodies and maybe one or two abilities to rely on. Monsters were something else entirely. There were animal versions of them, like the spiders, but there were also ones like the basalt gnomes with classes and the abilities to match.

The guards’ problem in this fight was that they had a common class and apparently no shielding abilities to create a barrier or any enhanced perception skills to help them evade. Without those, they were left with just their Agility, which wasn’t enough against the pythons who specialized in it. If it had been a more straight-up fight at their speed, they would have done better.

Sam glanced toward his father, taking in the radiating energies of Stamina and Earth mana all around him that were markedly different from what the guards had, and then revised his thought. A little better.

Perhaps his father’s Earth Sense and his own Crystal Focus were helping them more than he realized. Either way, it was showing the difference between common classes and rare or unique ones. The guards should have been using their Stamina too, but they hadn’t had the chance before the pythons wrapped around them.

At that moment, the next python arrived. Its speed was slowed down by having to cut back and forth, but it still slithered around the barriers like a whip. Its form lashed to one side and then the other as it came through the opening and shot toward them. Right on its tail, another python’s head followed, poking out a moment later.

For a moment, Sam hesitated, wondering how much he should help. He was confident in being able to kill these pythons as long as he had enough essence, but would it steal the experience from everyone else if he killed them all? He wasn’t sure on the etiquette of fighting in a party. He’d never done it before.

At the same time, he wanted to fight them himself. He wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands and spells, cutting through the pack until he found the source.... And then his mind halted as he analyzed what he had just thought, recognizing that it was quite different from a month before.

Then, he pushed the thought aside with a mental shrug. He liked the new Sam better and he didn’t see a reason to doubt himself. He wasn’t going to suddenly go on a killing spree and act like a real demon. It wasn’t a bad thing to enjoy a fight.

A half-dozen crystal flame arrows formed in the air around him, waiting for a target, but instead of killing the new pythons at once, he waited a moment, letting the others move in. He could be the patient caster, reserving his essence for critical moments. His aura was already covering the battlefield, including the two pythons, so he could probably get the experience from them.

Just to make sure, he sent a tiny spark of crystal flame at each of the snakes, about a tenth of a point of essence, zapping them on the head. The pythons were surging toward his father this time, who was at the front of the group, and when the stars hit, they writhed around. It was like a slap on the head that was enough to make them hesitate, but they recovered instantly and surged forward.

They slammed into the golden-yellow barrier around Jeric, their heads striking it in a flare of light as they were pushed away. Their instinct was to wrap around their prey, but the barrier kept them from getting any sort of a grip on him.

As they tried to wrap around him, Jeric’s hammer swung down, crushing first one skull and then the other. A moment later, both forms crumpled to the ground, their lives gone. It was just in time, as more pythons were already slithering around the wall.

The rest of the fight went as expected. The pythons were not a challenge to any of them except the guards, who just had the wrong classes to be effective against their speed. Yeres and Lesat did summon up their Stamina after the first few snakes kept coming, which made them move a little faster, but it didn’t look like they were able to shape it into a barrier.

The difference between classes was becoming clear, and it made Sam grateful that his subclass and his father’s class had both worked out. Without those, they wouldn’t have been any better off than the guards. Battlefield Reclaimer was powerful, but it wasn’t a combat class by itself. Those skills all came from his Outsider abilities and Scion of the Crystal Flame.

Now that her class was unlocked, Ayala was a force to be reckoned with. She blocked every attempt to reach her with a glowing, yellow Earth barrier. It looked like it was the same type of shielding ability that Krana and his father had. It had to be something that came with most Earth classes.

Krana’s efforts in the battle were also extremely effective. Her eyes were bright silver and she seemed to predict where the pythons would be as she moved to block them, her war hammer swinging before they even arrived. There were beads of sweat on her forehead, which said it wasn’t easy, but she didn’t have any trouble keeping up.

Before long, there were more than a dozen dead pythons scattered around them, and they went forward to clear out the rest of the nest that was blocking the path. There was no way that they were willing to leave them there as they continued on. The pythons were dangerous hunters and would only have crept up on them from behind.

When it was finished, there were twenty-two python corpses scattered across the stone tunnels.  It didn’t take long for him to find out that anyone in the party could take the experience from them.

“It’s something to do with our auras,” Krana explained as she answered his questions. “As long as you’re in a battle together, your aura is blending with everyone else’s, and so you can take the experience from shared kills, even if you didn’t hit it.”

In the end, they divided the pythons up evenly, with everyone getting four, except for the guards. They got three, since they hadn’t helped as much. After nearly dying to the first two snakes, they didn’t even complain about it.

Congratulations, Scion. You have used your Class abilities to slay your enemies.

You gain 88,455 Class experience.

Total Class Experience: 401,240 / 533,000

Total General Experience: 406,130 / 533,000

The experience surged through Sam with its usual bubbling merriment. It was almost as much as he could gain in a single fight, if his theory of what the World Law allowed were true, but it wasn’t enough to bring him to the next level. That would take a couple more fights still.

As he looked around, he saw the glow of energy surrounding Ayala and Krana, which meant they had leveled up though, and after a moment, his father also had the same glow, which meant he’d just hit 32.

Sam bent down next to the pythons, but as he searched for the auras on them, there was only a sense of emptiness. A sort of comfortable absence, as if he were touching the world. He frowned and searched again, looking for the thread of energy, but there was nothing there.

His forehead wrinkled as he looked down at them. Puzzlement and frustration flickered through him. He wanted more auras and he’d been looking forward to gathering all of these. What had happened?

He looked back through his memories of the battle and to when the pythons had first appeared, and after a moment, he realized that these had never had a glow of aura around them. The only energy that had been running across their bodies were their scales and white energy that had to have been a form of Stamina for their race.

It didn’t make sense for a moment, until he thought about how that wizardess had also not had an aura, and then he combined it with his current theories on monsters and Outsiders.

He had just been thinking that there was a difference between monsters and beasts. Apparently, he’d discovered one more. The pythons weren’t monsters..., they were beasts. If all of his theories were true, that meant they were natural inhabitants of Aster Fall, just like the civilized races. These were not monsters who had been created from the essence of Outsiders.

It didn’t mean they were harmless, since clearly they had been trying to kill him, but it suggested that the world had once been this way. Perhaps there had been no monsters originally, before Outsiders appeared. There had just been beasts and the civilized races living in the world.

Then, Outsiders had come and things had changed... Probably slowly, over time, or after the war that had caused them all to fall out with each other. That had resulted in the current state of affairs.

It meant that the rats in the tunnels actually were fragments of monsters, just like the salamanders and basalt gnomes, even though they were very weak. He suspected that the pythons had even been eating those rats, but they hadn’t gained any auras from them. Perhaps they couldn’t be passed on that way.

It was a bit frustrating, since it would have been a nice pile of auras, but he supposed he couldn’t ask for too much. It had been a pretty easy fight and the experience was good.

Despite that, the pythons did have something left to offer. Sam rubbed his chin before he turned to look at Yeres and Lesat, a slight smile forming. The guards might not be that good as fighters, but they were definitely free hands.

He was going to need some help skinning these things.

“If you help me, I’ll help you,” he offered simply, as he explained what he wanted. “If you do, I’ll see what I can do about enchanting a defensive barrier for you, perhaps into your armor or shield. You just need to help me with various tasks on the way home. Deal?”

It was an opportunity to get some cheap labor, which would make things easier, and at the same time he could study their equipment as he practiced enchanting. Either way, he would win. He didn’t mind giving them some enchantments either, since it would make their whole party stronger. It might also help to bring the guards over to his side more, cementing their opinion of him as a human.

He would just be sure to leave his mark on the enchantments, so that he could take control of them again if he needed to. That was a feature of placing his soul mark on items that he’d discovered in the last few days, although he hadn’t used the symbol much since he made his stylus. As long as an enchantment he’d crafted was within his aura and marked, he could still connect with it.

If the guards wanted to sell the items when they got home, that was up to them. They could count it as a tip for their service. They would still be bound by the contracts to stay silent about him and to protect him, unless they wanted to give up a lot of levels.

Lesat’s eyes widened as he heard Sam’s offer, and he turned to Yeres with a nod, encouraging him to agree. It wasn’t every day he got offered an enchantment that could possibly save his life. The battle with the pythons had been terrifying for both of them. The snakes were so fast that they’d barely been able to see them moving.

Yeres didn’t hesitate much longer, glancing at Lesat and then toward Sam before he gave a slow nod of agreement.

“I’ll help too,” Jeric chimed in. “We don’t want to spend too long here, but that’s a lot of good materials.”

“The skins are actually worth a decent amount,” Krana agreed, moving to help as well. “They can be sold back in the city if there’s extra left. The skins are a favorite of leather workers and the scales have a high demand among alchemists for pills or potions that boost agility temporarily.”

Only Ayala refrained, shaking her head slightly as she looked at the task in front of them. Skinning snakes wasn’t really a task for a church princess. Sam shot a glance over his shoulder at her as he headed towards the first python, but there wasn’t any disdain on her face. She just didn’t seem interested. Perhaps she didn’t want the materials or the wealth from them.

He turned back to the job at hand with a mental shrug, sizing up exactly how best to skin the pythons. A moment later, he was joined by the others, including his two new assistants, who were cautiously enthusiastic about the whole thing.

The offer of an enchantment marked a turning point in their behavior.

---

It took a couple of hours to skin all of the pythons and then for Sam to treat the hides with a low-level flame. He took the opportunity to purify them slightly, which helped to keep them supple, almost as if they’d been appropriately tanned.

In the end, there were twenty-two new rolls of Ivory Scale Python hide, which mostly went into Sam and Jeric’s bags. Krana also took four, but she waved away the rest, saying that it was enough for her share. As for the guards, they were content enough with the offer of an enchantment, and Sam decided to start on that the same evening.

Each hide was about fifteen feet long and nearly three feet wide when it was stretched out. When they were rolled, they were fairly compact, but each one was still three feet long and about half a foot wide. When they were put away in their dimensional bags, there was barely any room left, which also raised an important issue.

Storage space.

Each bag only had about five cubic feet of space inside and there were already a good number of other things in there. Even when the hides were split up between their two bags, there wasn’t a lot of room left.

The list of things Sam needed to enchant was growing longer, and he wished he could just set up a workshop here. He needed to make better dimensional bags, if he could. He had the feeling it would take a while to figure that out. He wasn’t even sure it was possible for him yet. He had only taken a brief look at the runes on the bags, but they had almost all been unfamiliar to him. In one way, that was good, since it would teach him more, but he needed the time to study it.

He also needed to enchant the guards’ armor so they didn’t die as easily on the way home, make some clothes for himself and his father, study the durability and self-cleaning runes on Ayala and Krana’s gear, make new spell scrolls, make himself a better offensive or defense artifact..., and so on. His father still needed more equipment and he wanted to make some gifts for his mother and sister.

Unfortunately, a lot of what he wanted to do would have to wait until he got home, except for what he could work on while they were resting. He rearranged the list of things to do in his mind, sorting it into an order of priority.

At the moment, dimensional bags were not at the top, no matter how much he wanted them to store more materials. That spot was reserved for things that were useful in battle. The guards’ armor was going to be first, followed by new jerkins for him and his father. Maybe Jeric could make those while he enchanted the armor.

His attention was pulled away from his plans as he noticed Krana was staring down the tunnels ahead of them. They had just finished putting away all of the snake skins and were getting ready to leave again, when he noticed what she was doing.

The Seer was frowning, her eyes shading to silver as she searched the area ahead of them. After a moment, she turned back to them with a troubled expression on her face.

“There’s something big happening ahead,” she said with a deeper frown. “Many things are moving, like a series of small packs of monsters and beasts. Past that, there’s something else, some type of bigger monster, but I can’t get a good enough feeling from its aura to tell what it is. It’s shrouded in a golden haze that’s blocking my vision. It sends shivers down my spine when I look. It must be what drove the pythons here.”

She paused, as her eyes searched the dark tunnel for more information that wasn’t forthcoming, and then she shook her head as she sent a long glance with them. Her back straightened, her hands resting on her hips as her expression became harder.

“There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the next closest thing is a day or two away at their current rate, so we have some time to prepare.” She turned to look down the tunnel again, her attention drawn back to whatever she could see.

“The bad news...,” she continued as she reached down to the war hammer at her belt, gripping the handle tightly. Her expression became even more fierce, her tone sharpening until every word she spoke was as sharp as a cliff. “Is that whatever that bigger thing is behind them, it’s coming this way. And it’s pushing all of those other things ahead of it.”