(TLO) Chapter 70: Just Got More Important (Patreon)

Seth’s hunt for his brother was long and annoying. He stumbled a few more times from nothing and his breathing never subsided. He had no worry for the cold, the heat of his poisoning still running through his bones, muscles, and skin. The fur coat he had taken off the dead caused him to sweat and he unfurled it from around himself. He held it in one hand and dragged it along the snow. It trailed a path behind him that any who searched could follow.

He didn’t care. It was better than sweating buckets. He took another bite of meat taken from his pocket, hunger winning over caution.

[You Have Been Poisoned.]

[You Have Suffered Multiple Instances of Poison.]

[Poison Stacks.]

[You Have Been Afflicted with Status Effect: Reia Poisoning.]

[Insufficient Reia Reserves Discovered.]

[Status Effect Reia Poisoning is Now Blood Poisoning.]

[You Have Been Afflicted with Status Effect: Blood Poisoning.]

[You Have Been Afflicted with Multiple Instances of Blood Poisoning.]

[Status Effect Blood Poisoning Stacks.]

[You Have Been Afflicted with Blood Trait: Hemophilia.]

[Blood trait Hemophilia is in Effect.]

[You Are Under Multiple Instances of Blood Trait: Hemophilia.]

[Blood Trait Hemophilia Stacks.]

That doesn’t look good, a mind pointed out as he read the new additions.

“It wasn’t there before, either,” he said, staring at what was left of the piece of meat in his hand. “Status Effect: Hemophilia,” he muttered, thoughtful. “Isn’t that that sickness where you bleed a lot.”

Only if you’re wounded.

Seth looked down at the few injuries he had, small cuts and bruises. There was a deep length of a healing injury in his side. He’d gotten it from one of the reia beasts he had killed recently. None of the injuries were bleeding currently. He was grateful for that; suddenly bleeding all over the place would be uncomfortable for him.

Another thought came to him soon after: he still had a few days left of the test, and a snake to hunt. It made this blood trait deadlier than it was supposed to be.

He frowned mildly as he dismissed the notifications and trudged on. All he had to do was not get wounded.

……………………………………………………………..

He searched with pale moon light and hot ears. He listened and waited, bucked at the barest twitch and stumbled from nothing. His breath left a trail of steam behind him and his minds grumbled over the delayed murder of a snake.

He gave no attention to any of these. With a nigh single minded will, he sought out a missing brother. He did not do it for the reward. What was Mental Fortitude in the vast array of rewards. He’d garnered Mental Resistance a year ago and had seen no use for it even now. No. He searched religiously because the missing brother could be anyone. It could be Timi.

It was near two hours before first light when he found something. The night air was growing colder, notable from how much more steam he breathed out. A whisper of the blizzard wind was also presenting itself. Whistling like an over-enthusiastic drunkard in the presence of a fancy lady. It raised stacks of snow from trees and undulated weaker branches so that they danced like thin-armed Wendigos.

The wind blew snow in his eyes and he shielded them with a forearm. Where he could not see, his minds guided him. They directed him with the things they noted. Left was left and right was right. They took him around a tree, cowered him under a branch, led him through a half frozen shrubbery.

He took their guidance with a grain of salt. For all he knew, they could easily have led him back to the snake’s trail. Trust for them was already becoming a commodity as scarce as girls his age in the seminary.

He found a splatter of blood in the snow somewhere after a tall black tree with shivering leaves and drooping branches and before a dwarf tree, fat and strong. It spread across the snow in an arc. Its crimson red shone under the beauty of moonlight and he spotted it from afar.

He abandoned his hard-won path, discarded the position his minds had led him to, and chased after it.

When he got there he found it was more blood than he’d thought, almost a full jug’s worth. It was also frozen.

You think it’s from who we’re looking for? One of his minds asked as he bent in the snow to study it.

He shrugged quietly, having no other answer.

It could belong to anyone. Over a mile ago he’d seen two bodies and a torn cassock he had wrapped around one hand. He wouldn’t have thought to guess at the chance of a survivor if the Emergency Quest had not popped up. But no one said there were only two men. All he knew was that there were only two dead.

The blood could belong to anyone.

The arc of blood was crudely splattered, as was expected of every randomized work of art. He leaned towards it. Studied it. He built a possible outcome in his mind. In it the owner had been struck a vicious blow. A particularly powerful swing must have cut him open at the front. Why the front? Because his back would’ve carried more protective clothes to shelter him from the winter cold. They would have absorbed much of the blood from any cut.

He was still playing at detective when another mind drew his attention away from it.

Up ahead, it thought.

He raised his head, eyes moving as if guided by a disembodied hand. A few trees ahead of him, hidden in the blowing snow, was a liquid glint. He cocked his head to the side, looked at it from another angle, the way a person might look at faded words on a card under light. The moon light hit it at just the right angle and he saw the color red.

Two signs of blood in such a short distance. He was contrived to believe he was getting close. So when he approached it, he worked hand in hand with caution.

The second line of blood splatter was almost completely gone, covered by the falling snow. From the little he could see of it, it was spread out in frozen droplets. Someone had swung his blade to rid it of excess blood.

Someone was hunting another. His brother was being hunted.

Emergency Quest: [The Missing Brother].

You have stumbled upon bodies in the aftermath of a short lived battle. Each one has suffered a dire fate, and whatever had inflicted it upon them has lived long enough to escape the scene of the massacre. However, a piece of clothing has been left behind. A seminarian was here. A brother is missing. Find him.

Objective: [Find your brother: 0/1].

Reward: Mental Fortitude.

Consequence: None.

Bonus Quest: [The Hunter and The Hunted].

Your missing brother has been on the run. Now you have realized there is a hunter and a hunted. Find who hunts who and render your aid as you see fit.

Bonus Objective: [Find The Hunter: 0/1].

Bonus Objective: [Find The Hunted: 0/1].

“I guess that tells us one thing,” he muttered, dismissing the notification.

What do we do? A mind asked.

Seth turned his attention from the blood and stared ahead without answering. There wasn’t much left to do. The bonus quest had drawn him to a potential miscalculation. He had thought his brother the hunted. What if he was wrong? What if his brother was the hunter?

It was a possibility.

But the torn cassock? A mind objected.

A torn cassock could mean anything, another opposed. Doesn’t mean the owner is the one that’s in trouble.

Seth nodded. The mind was right. Still, they were missing one thing. It crossed his mind like a shot bullet as he started in the direction of his next possible clue.

“One of our brothers,” he said to the wind, “could be hunting another.”

………………………………………..

It wasn’t long before he found a third body. He waded through a stretch of snow, walking for barely five minutes when he found it. His minds did not draw his attention to it, and he liked to believe he saw it before them.

It was a massive man clad in a black fur cloak, like the one Seth held in his hand. He lay on his side so that his back was turned to Seth and he was unable to see the person’s face. Seth was moving to it when something else caught his attention.

Off to the left, a few trees removed from the body, was a massive tree. Its girth was so large Seth failed to akin its size to anything. Perhaps it would suffice to say it was as wide as eight trees. Wide enough to house one, maybe two, persons in the hole he saw at its base.

A resting place.

He abandoned the body and made his way to the tree.

The closer he got the larger the tree loomed, until it blotted out his sky and pierced the heavens. It was as brown as most trees with a touch of ice here and there. They stained its bark with the touch of winter, as all else was stained. There were places frozen solid where Seth assumed moss grew in warmer seasons, where little bugs and insects would nest and crawl and live.

The entrance to the hole in it was wide enough for three grown men to enter if they walked side by side but not as tall. He would need to crouch to get in.

The dawn of first light poked from the sky like a shy kid, its light threatening to reveal Seth’s action to the world. It brightened the day, almost imperceptibly enough that it was hard to tell were the moonlight stopped and it began.

Seth rested a hand against the side of the entrance as he entered into it in a crouch. It was rough to the touch, artificially done. It was old work, but human work. Someone, once upon a time, had carved this hole into the tree. Someone had once seen good reason to take shelter within it.

Inside it was moist and dark. Filling the air with a comfortable humidity, he smelled the touch of moss and algae. It smelled like trees were supposed to during the season of rain. Damp and earthy. There was also the faintest smell of wood-smoke, burnt hair, and something akin to meat. At least, he hoped it was meat.

The space inside wasn’t as large as was expected of a tree so large, and he assumed the tree hadn’t been hollowed out in the creation of the space. Whoever had done it hadn’t carved out a deep enough hole. Perhaps the person had been in a hurry, or perhaps they had not been strong enough to keep going. Whatever the reason, he did not care enough to decipher it. Instead, he squatted and took stock of everything.

There was a long dead hearth at the centre of the hole. It was nothing but ash and wood now. Not the faintest trace of smoke. Whoever had been here had been gone for quite a while. Piled up against one side of the hole was a fur cloth. He walked up to it and picked it up. He found it to be large, larger than the one he’d brought in with him. Larger than what the dead wore. He unfurled it, stretched it to its full size and found it had been cut up to a size as a piece of it dropped severed from the one he held up.

He turned, cloak still in hand, and faced the entrance. It did not surprise him to find it was the right size to block the entrance. Cut up to keep the winter chill out.

Who stayed here? one of his minds mused.

“One of us,” he answered, dropping the cloak where he’d picked it from.

The shelter carried nothing of significant note. Like his shelter, there was a stack of twigs and sticks likely for the use of building a fire. There were three cores rolled into a corner. He ignored them. Somehow he doubted they’d count towards his own quest if he picked them. Despite the humidity, the place was as dry as was to be expected of it during the winter.

At one end of the shelter he saw something that was finally of import. It was a piece of grey cloth, torn and battered. Ripped. Bloodied.

He picked it up with hot fingers and raised it to the small, pale light at the entrance.

A cassock, a mind observed.

He held it up in two hands, spread it out in the dark space. “What’s left of it.”

It was tall enough and large enough for a priest and its hem scraped the floor where he stood. There weren’t many seminarians he knew that were the size of a priest and it narrowed his choices down to three brothers. Timi. Fin. Bartholomew.

We take it the quest just got more important, a mind thought, gravely.

He discarded the cassock with an angry frown and left the shelter.

“It just did.”