Savage Awakening 70. Winter Warriors (Patreon)

(1/2)

Before Zane left for the Abyssal Crater the next morning, Reina gave him a hug, buried her head in his chest, and sighed.

For a while she'd tried to be neutral toward him in public. She felt it was important to keep up appearances. But she'd come to the embarrassing realization recently that pretty much everyone already knew. People noticed her sneaking off to his rooms every night—including last night. And she was less discreet than she'd thought even in public. She'd asked Ethan, who'd become one of her trusted lieutenants, and the bearlike man shrugged. "Pardon, miss," he'd said. "Just look at how you look at him. It ain't subtle."

So Reina gave up.

"Here," she said, clasping a bracelet around Zane's wrist. It glowed with soft green runes.

"What's this?"

"A Signal Blocker, just in case," she said. "It'll block any weak essence signals within a hundred-foot radius. Including Life Crystal recordings."

She looked him in the eyes. "I read Elias's message. He played it down, but with these 'Tomb Kings'… they sound very aggressive. If something were to happen—if they were to attack you—we don't want another Stroud. If you have to act, we don't want it traced back to you."

Zane nodded. "Hadn't thought of that."

She came up close. "That's why you have me," she said softly.

She kissed him, and he set off.

He resolved to bring a gift worthy of her when he came back. She was just Level 48 and still an Aegis Cleric—she barely had time to Level. And she was only that high because he made her take some of his treasures. He felt she was almost too selfless for her own good—she ran herself ragged helping folk. He promised himself he'd find a way to take care of her.

***

For a while, it was just a wasteland. A burnt-out stretch of black, flattened out like it'd all been bombed. Eventually Reina would get around to rehabilitating all this, he knew, but… damn. The Cult had wasted this place. As he went through mile after mile, it gave him a post-apocalyptic feeling. Soon he left civilization far behind.

No one lived here. Nothing moved but ash swirled by the winds.

It took an hour of running before things looked up again. He crossed into a Safe Zone that was mostly green, nearly untouched by the war—save for a few trees blackened at the edges.

Then they all started turning up green. Southern Oregon was a rich place before the Change. Once he got out of the wastelands, the Safe Zones showed it. All lush evergreen forests. He was back to a long stretch of forest Safe Zones, just like in Washington. This time there was more of a dewy, watery feel. Dew dotted the leaves, wet the branches. Rivers ran alongside the paths. He vaguely registered some folk in the distance a few times. Some scouts on treetops or Rangers on distant hills looking out at him, but they didn't seem keen to come close. He ran on mostly undisturbed.

He dipped into a valley and came across an odd Safe Zone—just a weird maze of vines. It might've been a vineyard once. He tried solving the maze, got lost, eventually just blasted his way through and kept running.

Soon he started gaining altitude. The Cascades were coming up fast. He saw them marked out in the distance, white peaks daring the sky along the horizon. They seemed bigger than the mountains he knew way back when. They probably were.

The ground got rockier, more rugged. He started going up hills. Sleet and ice started dotting the paths. After a while, a thin film of frost caked pretty much everything.

By then he was well into the Cascades. He came across his first real dungeon, a D-rank. It covered a small mountain. Lots of frozen waterfalls and icy paths and rocky ledges. It took him just two hours to clear, and most of that was running around from Boss Lair to Boss Lair. Two golems and an ice spirit. Light work. A good warm-up.

It was strange to think that the dungeon, which was an afterthought as he went on, was probably about as hard as Mount Saint Helens.

When he went about life, he didn't think about it much. But he'd changed a lot, and quickly, hadn't he?

He had to be getting close now. He was sure he was going the right way. He had a compass to help, and Reina had drawn him a map. An incredibly good map, because of course she was really good at drawing. Because, well, Reina. Zane could easily imagine the type of girl she'd been in school—with note-taking and penmanship that looked like works of art, always neat, with perfect grades, the smartest girl in class, but always happy to help if you had a question. So pretty she could easily be mean, but she wasn't. She'd be the type of girl everyone liked—the type half the class had a crush on.

It still astounded him that she liked him, of all people.

Anyway. Even so, it was hard to tell one mountain apart from another after a while…

Soon—

You have entered: Safe Zone: Frostspire Ridge

Faction: Winter Warriors

Not Luminous Faction. Huh. After they had vanquished the Cult, all of the Cult's territories had been grandfathered into Luminous territory. So far, he'd only been running through what was technically Luminous territory.

He figured these folk would know where the C+-ranked dungeon on their doorstep was. He thought about paying them a visit. He saw smoke curling up from the top of the mountain—people lived there.

He kept up the mountain path, still debating, when he saw dots pop up on his mini-map. They were coming the other way—just around the bend. Soon he saw them. They wore thick hooded parkas furred white along the edges. They all looked young—college age. Young and fierce.

And at the head of them was a lean, handsome young man who wore his hair long and loose; he kind of reminded Zane of Tarzan. He was bright-eyed and lusty, maybe a little younger than Zane even. Unlike the rest of them, he was half-naked; his chest was striped with bright blue war paint. His face was too.

Henry Colt (Creature)

Essence Level 46

Faction: Winter Warriors

"Halt! In the name of the Winter Warriors!" shouted Henry.

Zane held up his hands awkwardly and halted. "Look, I mean no harm. Just passing by," he said.

Henry considered him. "So you say," said the boy. "But from where I'm standing you seem awfully suspicious, big guy. A random passer-by on this out-of-the-way, hard-to-get-to mountain? Sure. You know what I think? I think you're a Black Flame cultist, come back for more!"

Zane scratched his head. Was it his face? His body? This kind of thing happened so often he figured something about him gave off villain vibes.

Henry thumped his bare chest and laughed. Not mockingly, but in a brave carefree way. "Haven't you goons learned your lesson last time? So long as I'm still around, I'll never let you touch my people! So you can go back and tell your boss—the Winter Warriors are here to stay!"

"That's right!" shouted some of the youths behind him. They were eyeing him nervously—really just the bulk of him, the way you might eye a grizzly bear. But they still seemed spirited. "Yeah!"

"I'm really not a Cultist," said Zane helplessly.

"Then prove it," Henry declared. He thrust out a finger, pointing straight at Zane's face.

"Show yourself! Now!"

"…"

"If you keep hiding, you leave us no choice! We'll be forced to come to blows," warned Henry. "Choose. Or face the consequences!"

Zane thought about it. He didn't seem like a bad person. Just… enthusiastic? They were probably just scrappy survivors hiding out from the Cult. Like those other stragglers had been.

So Zane shrugged. He dropped his mask.

"See?" he said, gesturing, "Not Black Flame. Luminous Faction."

"Aha!" Henry shouted. "That's—"

Then he fell silent, his eyes bulged, and his mouth hung slightly open.

By now, Zane was so used to this he could see the thoughts playing across the boy's face in real-time. First, he must have seen Zane's Level. He went pale. Then he must have seen Zane's Title, and he went very pale. He started trembling a little, like he realized who he'd just threatened.

"Savage… sage?" whispered one of the girls.

They all looked ready to piss themselves.

If Zane was honest, the Title didn't help either. It sounded like a pretty villain-y thing, didn't it? He was pretty sure his reputation was mostly positive. At least to neutral parties and friends. Nearby factions mostly knew him for liberating other factions and treating folk well—his entire reputation coasted off of Reina's work, basically.

His reputation as a fighter, though, against enemies… he wasn't even around the campfires much, and he'd heard some wild stuff. The farther he got from headquarters, the wilder the stories got. Just last night he'd overheard some Portlanders saying how he'd single-handedly turned back five Iron Legion galleons, chopped off Marcus Blackwell's head in a single blow, and drank the man's blood raw. Apparently he was some kind of vampire…? He wouldn't want to fight the Savage Sage they told stories about either. Well, he would, but—figure of speech.

“Uh,” stammered Henry. "I, uh… woah. Uh. Good! So, not Black Flame, definitely not Black Flame! Haha!"

He laughed nervously. "Wow. Savage Sage, huh. So. Mr. Sage, Mr. Savage? What, uh, should I—"

"Just Zane's fine," said Zane hastily. "I mean no harm. Really."

"Right, right! Of course!" Henry swallowed. "Would you, uh, please come with us, sir? We'd love to have you—we'd be happy to, honored, actually! Can I… uh… make you some tea, or…”

"Sure. Lead the way."

They led him up the winding mountain path, staring wide-eyed at him all the while. By now Zane was so used to the 'animal in a zoo' treatment he could shrug it off.

At the mountain's peak, he found a flat patch of snow-covered land. A horseshoe of yurts ringed an ever-burning bonfire. Dozens more wide-eyed stares greeted him there. The folk there were overwhelmingly young, in their 20s, some even younger. But it turned out their leader was an older man named Walter. He said he'd been living in the mountains here since before the Change. He'd still been here when a bunch of bedraggled refugees came fleeing the war, and he took them in. They became the Winter Warriors.

Walter was a short, gruff old man with a weather-lined face, a thick head of gray-white hair, and piercing blue eyes. He seemed a little surprised when he saw Zane coming. But then he just grunted and asked if Zane would like to come in for a chat. He, at least, seemed capable of acting like a normal person. It was a bit of a relief.

The yurt was heavy-duty, draped over a sturdy wooden frame with a thick hide covering. It looked rough from the outside, like it was built to take a battering. The inside, though, was cozy—gentle lanterns bathed the place in warm yellow, and a stove in the middle brought warmth. They sat down on thick little hide cushions. A little stone table lay between them.

"So," said Walter, "Henry tells me you took care of our Black Flame problem—"

The door flaps opened, and in came the boy in question, juggling a tray of hot tea. He set them down. "For you, sir—fresh off the stove!"

"Thank you," said Zane.

Then the boy just stood there awkwardly. Zane noticed he'd put on a shirt and wiped off the face paint. "Sir," he said again, "Actually, this is kind of embarrassing… uh." He flushed. "I'm… something of a fan of yours, actually… if you don't mind, uh. Could we have a spar? Just, you know, as practice—it's something of a dream of mine, sir—well, not a dream, just a goal, y'know—"

"Later, Henry!" snapped Walter. "Can't you see we're in the middle of something?"

"Right, right, sorry!" The boy scurried off.

Walter shook his head and sighed. "That boy. He's got a big heart, sure. But nothing between the ears. He wants to make himself a great warrior. A 'legendary' warrior, as he puts it. Fool boy. He wants to be spoken of… well. Like they speak of you."

Zane felt a little uncomfortable. "Don't believe everything you hear."

"You did free Washington from those Iron Legion scum, didn't you?"

"Well. Yes."

"And now you've cleared out the Cult of the Black Flame."

"That's right."

"Then we owe you a lot, Savage Sage," said Walter gravely. "So." He laced his knobby fingers. "How can the Winter Warriors help you?"

"I need directions to the Abyssal Crater," said Zane.

"You too, huh," Walter grunted. "Well, maybe you'll have better luck with it than the rest of them."

"The rest?"

"Oh yeah, it's a popular place. Not many C+ ranked dungeons around."

"Right. I was wondering about that. What's with the plus?"

"As far as anyone can tell," said Walter, "It means a dungeon between B and C. I'll tell you this, it's a hell of a lot harder than those C's. At least four of the teams that went in these past few weeks have cleared C's before. And none of them have come back out."

Zane blinked. “…There’s four teams in there?”

“Oh, far more than four have gone in. That’s just the strongest ones in the last few weeks.”

“Why?” That… seemed an unusual number of strong teams, to him. For one dungeon.

“Well,” said Walter heavily. “This dungeon’s a strange one. You might know—the place used to be Crater Lake. A meteor struck there a very, very long time ago. And when the Change happened… well. If you believe the rumors, a Treasure Area formed in the crater. Some kind of extraterrestrial shit. That’s all I got. But from what I can guess, it’s... very good. It’s got strong folk running in like moths to a damned flame.”

He chewed on his lip. “Trouble is, they don’t come out.”