Broken Lands

Chapter 414 – Starting the Challenge Chain

Sophia frowned. When she glanced back, it seemed just as dim back where they came from as it did in here, but it was bright earlier. It couldn’t be a cloud; the light seemed to come from the entire sky, not a single point source. Didn’t it?

Sophia looked down at her shadow. It pooled under her, weirdly diffuse and more or less evenly spread, just like the light came from above and … away from the statue?

Sophia took a closer look at her shadow where it extended much, much too far unevenly towards the statue. It didn’t really look like her, but shadows didn’t always. 

Then it moved when she didn’t.

“Shadow monsters!” Sophia called out as she summoned feathers from her Hoard. As the feathers filled her aura, Sophia realized she could feel the monsters and even knew what they were. “Shadow lurkers, one per person, in our shadows. Ambush monsters, weak to True Death, no Shield. I’ve got the buff going. You can’t hit them until they separate from the shadow but they also can’t attack until then. Be ready!”

Sophia had never fought shadow lurkers, even though they’d fought shadow monsters in several different zones in the Maze. She didn’t have to ask Cliff to know that he was the source of her knowledge; that was the only explanation. Scion of the Towers was already paying off, though in this case it wasn’t really necessary.

These were the absolute most basic version of them, essentially a jumpscare with teeth. They were unlikely to kill anyone, even if they did get the jump on them, because while they had teeth and claws, the effect of their attacks was pain, cold, and temporary numbness. They were able to bypass armor, but they couldn’t kill quickly and all you had to do was get away from their anchor to escape them. They could be dangerous in packs, but one per person wasn’t enough to be threatening, especially when they weren’t exactly smart.

Well, it might be threatening if you didn’t have any magic, enchantments, or elemental Abilities. In that case, you’d only be able to damage them with concentrated light or a torch. The better way to deal with them in that case was to run away, but finding their anchor and smashing it would also work.

The anchor was probably the statue. That was why the Flying Stars were here, after all. 

Destroying it probably blocked the Challenge chain, too. She didn’t know much about Challenge chains, since they weren’t present in the Maze, but that would make sense. If you had to resort to breaking the statue to deal with the shadow lurkers, you weren’t ready for whatever came next.

As she thought that, the shadow lurkers leapt from the far end of the shadows, the spot closest to the statue, towards the Flying Stars. Sophia triggered a single feather to form an Aural Plume near each of the shadow lurkers. The one in Sophia’s own shadow was seared in half by a fiery beam far stronger than it needed to be to immediately kill the monster. Wind tore through Xin’ri’s and Dav’s, while light obliterated Ci’an’s. An arrow tore through the patch of brightness immediately afterwards, but it looked like Xin’ri and Dav held their attacks for the creatures to reach them.

Which they didn’t. They were all gone.

“Uh, that was easier than I expected. Especially the one I hit with light,” Sophia admitted. She didn’t call her feathers back into her Hoard. While she couldn’t feel any other monsters immediately, she wasn’t quite ready to relax yet. She’d expected more than that; the shadow lurkers weren’t even close to threatening enough to work off the jitteriness of realizing there were monsters. “Wait. It’s getting brighter again?”

“The lurkers must have been making it darker.” Dav took the last few steps towards the tree, then reached up and tugged the statue out of the fork where it sat. “Oh, no, I’m wrong. The statue is glowing, but only on one side.”

“Connected Challenges are supposed to be easy to find when you’re higher upgrade than the area you’re in,” Xin’ri said as she moved to stare at the statue, clearly thinking the same thing Sophia was.

“I don’t think shadow monsters were on your list,” Sophia teased Xin’ri as she moved in to get a glimpse as well. 

“They weren’t,” Xin’ri admitted. “Which means they are specifically tied to this statue. The Challenge chain will probably be longer than average but give better rewards for completing it, if we care. The rewards for the basic tier Challenges aren’t very good. The difference might be a few leaves per person.”

Sophia shrugged. “I don’t see any reason not to. Maybe it’s more walking, but if those shadow lurkers are a sign of what we’re going to face, none of it’s going to be a problem. We might as well finish the one we’ve got; we have to do something.”

Ci’an and Dav both murmured agreement while Xin’ri simply shrugged. No one really cared about the difference, which was probably about right. 

Sophia turned her attention to the statue. It was about eight inches tall in the shape of a bipedal rabbit wearing a long, flowing robe. A globe sat on top of the rabbit-person’s head between its ears. The globe was the source of the light. Sophia could see why Dav said it was glowing on only one side; only a portion of the globe was lit, a circular patch that covered probably a tenth of the surface. It wasn’t lined up with the statue’s orientation in any way Sophia could see, which made her wonder if it meant something outside the statue. “Does the light move when you turn the statue?”

“Yeah.” Dav wiggled the statue from side to side to demonstrate. “Do you think we need to head towards the light or away from it?

The light seemed to stay fixed in place while the rest of the statue moved around it. The sphere was symmetrical enough that Sophia wanted to say that it was turning to stay in the same orientation, but she knew that probably wasn’t true. It was probably just a trick of the light. Probably.

Sophia looked in both directions. The glowing part of the statue seemed pointed more or less towards the forest, which meant the other direction would lead them back out of the World Tree. “I think we need to follow the light. We won’t get anywhere the other way.”

Dav glanced behind them, then chuckled. “Fair point. Let’s get going.”

“No, wait,” Ci’an interrupted. “Look here, near the tree.”

She pointed at a series of indentations in the soft ground. “This looks like something jumped out of the tree and headed off towards the left. I think we should follow it first; if the light really is pointing at something, we can always follow it later. We won’t be able to find the trail later.”

Sophia could see the dents but she wasn’t sure how Ci’an was saying what they were. Despite that, she was inclined to believe the Nightowl; Ci’an was much better at tracking than Sophia was, even though Sophia managed to still be better than Dav and Xin’ri combined. “Sure, why not? I didn’t really expect choices in the challenge chain.”

Sophia pulled her remaining fathers back into her Hoard. Keeping them out wasn’t useful; she couldn’t reposition them quickly, so it would slow them down too much. The faster she went, the more the feathers would be damaged by it, as well. It was simply better to keep them in her Hoard and pull them out when she needed them.

They started forward slowly with Ci’an in the lead. The others followed, relaxed; this was basically a safe area for them. The other monsters would probably be more dangerous than the shadow lurkers, but that didn’t mean they were actually dangerous. They’d all keep an eye out, but that didn’t mean they needed to be tense about it.

“I heard about a few with choices when I was asking around,” Xin’ri admitted. “As far as I can tell, it doesn’t really matter which choice you make, you can follow the Challenge chain either way. It seems pretty likely that you find different things if you do, but who knows?”

“The World Tree, probably.” Sophia paused and frowned as she realized she did know the answer, now that she thought about it. That wasn’t something she expected; her Plumed Knowledge Ability was just about monsters, wasn’t it?

Plumed Knowledge 

As your Plumes gather knowledge for your partner from all within your Demense, you may relay your partner’s information to those marked with your Arcane Signifier so long as they are within your Demense.

No, it wasn’t. It only specified knowledge from her partner, which meant … she could know almost anything she needed to if Cliff knew it? That was insane. Having that amount of information on monsters she’d never seen before was useful. If it extended to the functionality of the World Tree, it might be incredible.

Or it might be nothing. After all, she hadn’t known anything about it until it came up, did she? It seemed likely that the Archons knew everything she’d be able to gather from Cliff and probably more. It wasn’t like she was linked to the World Tree, after all. Scion of the Towers replicated her link with Cliff, which was why Taika could follow her, rather than linking her to the other Towers.

Didn’t it?

Sophia glanced at the markings Ci’an kept finding to direct them in following whatever jumped out of the tree, but she still didn’t know what left the marks. It was probably whatever “left the statue behind,” but that wasn’t knowledge; it was a guess based on the fact that whatever-it-was jumped out of the tree. It was also entirely possible that the marks were left by whatever infected the statue with shadows. Either would fit the narrative structure of the Challenge chain.

Okay, that was knowledge from Cliff. It matched what she knew from dungeons back home, but she shouldn’t be certain the narrative structure applied to Challenge chains. Cliff hadn’t established any that crossed zones yet, but he knew it was possible and was intending to do it as soon as he had enough of a base established for it to work. 

“And, apparently, me,” Sophia admitted slowly. “I don’t know anything specific about this Challenge set, but Cliff says it fits the narrative structure and that the more we complete, the better the rewards are. He also says that if he were designing the quests, there would be very few that were only three steps long unless you picked the absolutely shortest route and ignored all other possibilities. I don’t know if the World Tree feels the same way about them or not.”

Dav shrugged. “Well, the first quest we found had a choice that you could miss. We found it more or less by chance, too, so it’s probably pretty normal. What if it likes having optional steps?”

“Like, say, the base task is taking the statue somewhere, probably with some trouble along the way, but if you want to you can also figure out why the statue was in the tree and why there were shadows with teeth hiding around it?” Sophia nodded. “That would make a lot of sense. If you never find the marks in the ground, maybe there’s another way to figure out what the point of the statue is.”

“Well, you could follow the light,” Dav pointed out.

“Not what I mean.” Sophia wrinkled her nose and shook her head at her boyfriend’s obvious teasing. “I mean understanding why we need to do something with the statue. It’s magical, obviously, but there’s not much magic in it, only a simple enchantment. That can’t be the whole story.” 

Sophia paused, then realized she’d said it the wrong way. “Er, I mean, why the Challenge chain wants us to do something with the statue; we want to do something to complete the chain. Ah, you know what I mean!”

Dav chuckled softly and smiled. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”