Duskbound

Book 2, Chapter 1

The split tailed bull stood ten feet tall at the shoulders and was wider than any three people standing abreast. It had horns like spears and hooves that could crush stone. The steel bars holding it back looked far too flimsy to keep such a monster confined, and Velik was sure if it had been given any room to gain momentum, it would have easily crashed right through them.

He stood as part of a group of thirty-two iron-ranked monster hunters in a field just east of the city of Cravel. If he'd bothered to climb one of the trees ringing the field, he'd be able to see the walls from here, not that he thought he'd get away with that. Their field instructors all stood in a line, flanking the bull's cage while Pevril paced back and forth. He ignored the way the bull's eyes were locked on him, probably because he was deliberately aggravating the monster with that stupid scarf he always wore flapping around in the wind.

"Every three months, we do this trial," Pevril announced. "Some of you pass. Most of you don't. Occasionally a few of you die. That hasn't happened in the last four years, but this is a dangerous job, and even under the most controlled conditions, mistakes happen. I see some familiar faces from the last trial, and I hope you'll share your experience with those who are here for the first time."

Velik didn't bother looking around. His fellow irons weren't important to him, despite the past twelve weeks of his instructors attempting to instill a sense of comradery in the group, they all knew Velik was an outsider. He was here to pass the trial, where he'd almost certainly skip bronze rank and ascend immediately to silver, maybe even gold.

Still, he had to prove his ability to work with a team. There were no exceptions, no matter how famous or powerful an iron was. They went through the guild's training program or they left the guild, and Velik needed access to their resources for the moment. He was quickly losing patience with the whole process, however much his sponsor promised him it would be worth it.

Would have been nice if Torwin could have just found this information out for me and saved me the time.

"Today, you'll face this monster in groups of four. None of you are capable of killing this alone—" At least half the irons glanced at Velik when Pevril said that, but he ignored them and continued, "—but fortunately, a monster hunter doesn't have to be alone. You've been placed in teams that complement each other's strengths and compensate for each other's weaknesses. Your team leaders will draw lots in a moment, and we'll clear the field to give the first team room to fight."

Velik's team leader was a bossy woman with a hair-trigger temper who hated Velik's guts. He'd quickly realized there was nothing he could do to stay in her good graces and hadn't bothered trying, something that seemed to infuriate her all the more. Admittedly, it probably didn't help things that he hadn't bothered to learn her name, but he planned on never seeing her again after today, so it was a little late now.

"We'll be judging you not only in how you act as a team, but in how well you fulfill your individual roles," Pevril said. "It is entirely possible for some members of the team to pass and others to fail. However, if anyone on your team dies, you will all fail, instantly. Ensuring the safety of all hunters involved is your top priority. Killing the monster is secondary to that."

This wasn't anything new. Everyone knew the rules, and it was honestly starting to annoy him that the lead instructor was wasting their time going over this again. They all knew what monster they'd be fighting, had known for three days now to give them time to come up with their strategies. He tuned out the rest of Pevril's speech until it was time for them to figure out what order they'd be fighting in.

When his team's leader came back with a grimace on her face, he could guess what had happened. "Number one," she reported to the groans of the other two people on his team.

"Do you think it was rigged on account of… You know," the boy with the bow asked. He was around the same age as Velik, but he still had a lot of baby fat hanging off his face. It made him look a lot younger than he actually was, and the spotty stubble pretending to be a mustache across his upper lip didn't help things.

"No, I think it's just bad luck. It's fine, we'll just have to show everyone else how it's done, assuming we can all remember our jobs and stick to them," the leader said.

"Got it, Milly," the boy dutifully responded.

Milly? That doesn't seem right. Maybe it's a nickname?

Milly turned a sharp look on Velik and waited for him to say something. He returned her gaze steadily, but remained silent. With a huff, her eyes shifted over to the other woman on their team, the useless one. She was in her mid-twenties and seemed to have some sort of laborer class focused on harvesting resources. That meant she sucked in a fight, and Velik honestly wasn't sure why she was trying to be a monster hunter with that class.

"You up for this, Lesta?" Milly asked softly.

The woman nodded and patted one of the four knives sheathed around her waist. Each one was shaped differently, sometimes with hooks on the end or flared blades designed to carve around different musculatures and ligaments. Velik would be the first to admit that he was no butcher, being far more interested in the extermination of monsters than in harvesting them for parts, but it all seemed like overall to him. One knife was plenty.

"I know what to do," she confirmed.

"Velik?" Milly asked, her voice harsh.

"Don't worry about me," he told her.

"I'm not," she snapped back. "I'm worried about you letting everyone else down."

If Velik had a tendency to go a little off-script, that was only because Milly was bad at evaluating her team's capabilities and kept trying to get more out of them than they were capable of giving. Things consistently went wrong, the other irons panicked and made the situation worse, and Velik was forced to step in to salvage things. It was hardly his fault. He always performed his role perfectly, right up to the point where everything went wrong.

The real mystery to him was how Milly had gotten sponsored for a leadership role in the first place. But he wasn't here to argue about guild hierarchy. He was here to get through iron-rank and gain access to the full guild support infrastructure. As long as he made a decent showing in this fight and no one died, things would be fine.

That bull was at most level 25, according to the feeling he got from [Apex Hunter], so he wasn't terribly worried about it. The challenge here wasn't to kill it, which he could do in less than a second, but to keep its attention on him while his team did their best to kill it much less efficiently.

"Final status reviews," Milly ordered. "We're up in two minutes."

Dutifully, Velik checked his status, not that there was much to see.

[Name: Velik]

[Race: Human (Duskbound)]

[Class: The Black Fang]

[Level: 41]

[Physical: 119(+29)]

[Mental: 64(+6)]

[Mystical: 44(+40)]

[Free Points: 0]

[Decarma: 124732]

[Skills:]

[Apex Hunter (Rank 6)]

[Spear Warden (Rank 9)]

[Dread Lance (Rank 3)]

[Savage Rhythm (Rank 5)]

[Burden of the Beast (Rank 2)]

[Gear:]

[Harbinger of Dusk (+15Ph, +5My)]

[The Sixth Plague (+10My)]

[Night Striders (+6 Ph, +2 Me]

[Invoker's Pendant (+20 My)]

[Earcuff of Unbreakable Will]

[Ravensfeather Cloak (+15 My)]

[Twilight Bond]

[Heart of the Inferno (+10 Ph)]

[Chimeric Vest (+4 Ph, +2 Me)]

[Chimeric Pants (+4 Ph, +2Me)]

As always, he had to laugh at how foolish he'd been back on the frontier. He'd had three pieces of gear, with only his weapon being any good. Since coming to Cravel, he'd spent a small fortune equipping himself with the best he could find, and now had some twenty-five levels worth of extra stats, not to mention five different active abilities from his gear. His backup weapon, which the system identified as The Sixth Plague for some reason, wouldn't actively contribute its stat bump until he was holding it, but for this fight, he wanted the spear he'd been using for years.

"First team, approach. Everyone else hit the sidelines," Pevril called.

Milly led them to where the head instructor was standing. He gave them a once over, almost sneering at Velik for a moment before catching himself, and nodded. "Any final questions before we open the cage?" he asked.

Velik let his gaze wander over to the split tailed bull, then past it to where seven identical cages held the monsters the other teams would fight at the far end of the field. They'd gotten the largest, most impressive specimen of the lot for their battle. No wonder the team lead was so upset. Not only do we not get to witness the other fights and learn from their mistakes, we got the strongest one.

The instructors had disappeared with the rest of the irons, forming a ring to protect the other teams if needed and clearly marking out the boundaries of the arena his team would be fighting on. Velik had never fought this particular monster, but part of every iron's training regime including classroom studying. They'd gone through dozens of bestiaries, learning the most common monsters, their behaviors, habitats, diets, and what kinds of skills they were known to possess.

He'd taken it even further, privately funding outside tutors on a variety of other topics he'd learned his knowledge was criminally deficient in. If he'd known half of what he did now a year ago, he'd have put an end to that mess on the frontier long before the guild had gotten involved.

"Good luck, Milly," Pevril said. "I know you can do this."

"If I had any luck, I wouldn't be going first, Dad," she joked.

I didn't realize they were related, Velik thought with some surprise. Now that he looked, though, he could see some resemblance in the shape of their noses and the ridge of their eyebrows. He wondered which one of them had decided they hated him first and spread the attitude to the other, or if they'd both arrived at that conclusion independently.

"You have thirty seconds to prepare," Pevril said. He slapped his hand onto a square metal plate on the front of the cage, then turned and jogged off to the sidelines.

None of them said anything. They just spread out to take their assigned positions, leaving Velik alone in front of the cage to stare the bull in the eyes. Right on cue, the magic in the cage swirled through the bars, releasing each side to fold out and fall. The bull, not one to ponder on its change in circumstances, immediately lowered its horns and charged.