With the death of the [Tyrant Tarantula], the spiders became significantly less coordinated, and there was no longer a powerful monster pinning down Iona. We were able to focus our efforts more broadly, and the remaining spiders were quickly wiped out.

Iona’s helmet slid away, and she spat half a spider out of her mouth.

“Pleh! Agh, that was gross.” She complained, spitting a few more times. “I got a bite skill recently, but it never mentioned that I’d have to taste the spider.”

“First time?” I asked Iona with a grin, remembering how many blasted times I’d needed to chow down on spiders.

I’d like to say never again, but my luck wasn’t that good.

That explained what happened to the spider I’d seen crawl into her helmet. I tapped her one more time, healing any bruises or cracked bones she might’ve gotten at the end of the fight.

“That’s it?” Artemis asked, and a lot of things happened practically at once. Iona threw her axe at Artemis’s feet, so quickly I only saw a fraction of a blur. I wasn’t an expert on this - she moved so quickly - but I swear I’d just seen her move faster than she had during the entire fight against the spiders.

Artemis was on her usual hair trigger, and a blast of Lightning erupted from her feet, crackling and sizzling the ground around her right as the axe landed, cutting through Artemis’s foot as it did so.

Julius was starting to move towards Iona, but he was comically slow compared to the Valkyrie. I was unsure of what, exactly, was going on, but Iona seemed incredibly competent. If she was trying to suddenly betray us, attacking Artemis’s foot wasn’t how she’d try to kill us. No, something else was going on, and I blasted healing around me to make sure we were protected, all while looking around for threats or problems.

Whatever was going on near Artemis’s feet had enough attention. Someone needed to keep an eye out.

[*ding* Your party has slain a [Vorler - (Decay - 9)]

“Vorler!” Iona shouted at the same time we got the notification. She pointed to Artemis’s foot, while casually catching Julius’s sword in her gauntleted hand. He stopped, and Iona just gave him a disappointed look.

Artemis cursed and hopped away, holding onto her foot which I snap-healed back up. Iona knelt down, grabbed her axe, and scooped up part of the ground.

“See?” She pointed to a spot on the dirt. I focused on it, but didn’t quite see it.

“I’m missing it.” I said.

“I slightly obliterated it.” Iona casually said, poking at the dirt. “Here we go!” She extracted a mottled brown piece. I looked at it closely, finally seeing three legs and a pincer on the side.

“They’ve got a deadly venom in their stinger. Can kill creatures much larger than they are, especially ones with lower vitality.”

‘Artemis’ and ‘low vitality’ didn’t exactly compute for me, but Iona was clearly operating on a different scale. Also, I was all too aware that some venoms needed absurdly tiny doses to kill a person. Even being eight, nine times as tough as the human baseline would change the lethal dose from micrograms to slightly more micrograms. Still barely anything.

Artemis whistled.

“That was quite some feat! I was almost de-feeted.”

We groaned at Artemis’s terrible puns.

“That was some throw! Good eyes!” She threw one of her arms over Iona’s shoulders. “Healy-bug, Iona’s my new favorite. Can we keep her?”

“Thank you for saving Artemis’s life. Sorry about…” Julius’s apology had a note of embarrassment and contrition to it.

“You are welcome.” Iona gracefully accepted Julius’s apology. “I completely understand your concern and reaction. Now. We still have work to do.”

“You’re the expert here.” Julius deferred to the blonde warrior. “What’s your proposal?”

Iona’s eyes quickly flickered over Artemis and I.

“Artemis, you’re low on mana. Why don’t you stay with Fenrir and Auri, and start the pyre? Elaine, come hunting with me, and Julius, can you bring what we kill to the bonfire? That should get us done quickly.”

I thought over the plan. It seemed reasonable.

“Brrpt?” Auri wanted a little bit of help with the spiders.

“Yeah sure.” I agreed with her. “Can you handle it once I’m gone?”

“BRRPT!”

Iona grabbed her axe and started to go to town on the nearest dead tree, swiftly cutting it to pieces.

We started stacking the bodies, leaving the [Tyrant Tarantula] where it fell to be the centerpiece. As each spider and log got added, I quickly flashed some light Radiance over it, drying it out a bit to make Auri’s job easier. Once a proper bonfire got started, the heat and the flames would create a self-perpetuating cycle of heating, drying, and flames. Auri just needed a little boost on the early, water-filled bodies.

Iona knelt, bowed her head, and quietly murmured to herself while we were working on the fire. It looked like she was praying. Julius and Fenrir went to fetch the previously frozen spiders.

Before long, a roaring bonfire was going. Iona got up from her pose, and joined us by the flames.

“Ready?” Iona asked us.

“Ready!” I said.

“Let’s go.” Julius said.

The three of us started to make ever-widening circles. I believed most of the danger and threats had passed - plus there was Iona and Julius as backup - so I had a lot of fun. Iona was a melee warrior. She killed things with her axe.

Every time she was about to kill a spider, I darted a little closer to get in range and lanced a fine beam of Radiance through it, killing the web weavers before Iona could. Julius was kept busy running the bodies back and forth to the bonfire, throwing one in before coming back for more.

“You’re doing that on purpose!” Iona complained after the fourth one.

“Yup!” I cheerfully hovered over her. “Try and stop me.” I stuck my tongue out at her, needing the bit of humor in my life. Everything had been so…

I locked the thought away, and went back to teasing Iona.

“Just you watch.” She smirked at me. I was hovering close enough to her that she could grab my ankle - a deliberate weakness that she could exploit if she wanted to - but instead she knelt down, grabbed a rock, and threw it like a baseball at one of the larger spiders lairing in its web.

Remembering that it was one of Brawling’s favorite tricks sent another wave of sadness through me, one I failed to crush. I turned to discreetly wipe a tear away.

“Oh come on!” Julius complained, getting back just in time to see the spider guts go flying. “That’s going to take ages to clean up and get back to the fire!”

Iona and I glanced at each other, laughed, and the race was on. She ran ahead, fleet of foot and perfectly stable on the rough forest floor, magically levitating rocks to her hand as she ran, then throwing them out with a flick of her wrist. I knew she had Gravity magic, and this confirmed it. Occasionally, the rock would simply maim a spider instead of outright killing it, and Iona would need to detour, finish the spider off, then keep going.

I almost sniped those out from under her, then realized it was better for me that she was distracted and sidetracked.

I flew in a zig-zagging path, searing and burning spiders where I found them.

The two of us raced, and it hurt me a bit to admit that she was doing better than I was.

Still, I had one class to use, and Iona clearly had her third unlocked and was getting good use out of it. It wasn’t terribly fair.

It was loads of fun, the two of us zipping through the forest, pushing ourselves to the extremes of our skills and abilities.

Julius had quite a few words to say about our pace, and I started to take the lead as Iona silently added an extra restriction to herself - she needed to cart her dead spiders back to the bonfire.

Occasionally we got a notification on a low-level vorler kill.

“Stop!” Iona called out, serious. I halted, and twisted myself in mid-air.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“I think there’s a vorler caught in this spider’s web.” She said. I swung back, and incinerated the offending web in question.

We looked at each other at the same time.

“No notification.” Iona shrugged.

“Might’ve been dead already.” I generously allowed. Her eye for vorlers was much better than mine, and I was willing to accept minor detours.

Soon enough, we’d cleared a large area, and Iona was satisfied. We headed back to the roaring bonfire, Artemis waving at us.

“Brrrpt! BRRRPT brrpt BRPT!” Auri was the boss, fiercely chirping at Julius and Iona when and where to throw the various bodies in the fire for maximum burning. She hovered over the body, then flew over to the fire and hovered in a particular spot, showing where she wanted it thrown in.

“Grrrr?” Fenrir growled at Iona.

She growled back, and Fenrir curled up. The characteristic lights of someone classing up appeared around him.

Iona cut up part of a tree trunk and dragged it over near the fire, and sat down on it, protectively sitting over Fenrir.

“Come! Sit! Let’s chat!” She called at us, patting the log on either side of her. “We’ve barely had a moment since we met, and I’d love to hear more about your adventures!”

Julius gracefully sat down next to her, and I took the other side, while Artemis moved next to Julius.

“Brrrpt.” Auri told me, and continued to officiously fly around the fire, tending to it in a way only she could see.

“Tell me everything! I’d love to hear all about the place where you three came from!” Iona’s eyes were practically shining, eager to hear and learn more.

“I’d love to! But can we do it in the local language? We need to learn it, and literally nobody except you can act as a translator.” Julius, you wily old fox. That was brilliant, and I never would've thought of that.

Iona flashed him a charming smile, clearly aware of what he wanted, and that the only way she could get what she wanted was by humoring him. It was a win-win situation all around.

“How about a weighted split in your favor?” She proposed.

I wasn’t going to weigh in on that. Julius was much better at this than I was. I missed Amber being here, I was sure she could fleece Iona for three full languages and her suit of armor besides.

Julius nodded acceptance.

“Ok! What language do you want to learn?” Iona asked.

“There’s more than one?” Artemis asked.

Right. She’d never been exposed to different languages in the same place.

“Yes. Sanglo’s the main language spoken in Rolland, but most people speak a bit of Hakka. Hakka is popular in other countries as well. If you want to stay in Rolland? Sanglo’s your best bet. If you want to travel? You’ll get further with Hakka.”

“What’s the best language for traveling the world?” Julius asked.

“Beats me. There isn’t a global language or anything like that.” Iona said.

“Enough waffling. Hakka!” Artemis decreed.

Iona turned to look at me.

“You onboard with Hakka? You might want to learn High Elvish, it’s spoken in most of the Immortal lands.”

I thought about it briefly. I had to be heading over there anyways, otherwise I risked getting hunted down for my class.

“Will it help Artemis and Julius?” I asked Iona.

She shook her head, long blonde hair waving, dancing with the embers thrown off the fire.

“Hakka it is!” I proclaimed.

“Ok. Hakka is a very tonal language. Same words, different sounds create dramatically different effects. Let’s start with ‘My name is’. It’s ‘Bǒ kiào’...”

We sat around the fire, one of us occasionally getting up to throw another log into the fire under Auri’s commands, slowly learning the bare bones of the language. The fire was burning low like the sun that was on the horizon when a deep crashing noise came from the forest.

We quickly got up and on our guard. Iona’s metal flowed over her, forming her armor. She continued to stand protectively over Fenrir, and this time part of her armor flowed to make her a kite shield. Auri perched on my shoulder as I flew up, and Artemis and Julius took a position behind Iona, with their backs to the fire.

“I see pennants.” I called down to the group.

“What do they look like?” Iona asked back, but I had no time to respond, as they burst into the clearing, rearing their mounts to a stop.

There was a dozen of them, led by someone in fancier armor, and what drew my attention initially were their mounts. Badgers. Oversized badgers, coated in armor with a bridle, that the knights were all riding like it was perfectly normal.

Six of them identified as various levels of [Warrior], three of them were [Rangers], two of them were [Mages] - still coated in armor, I approved - and the fancy armor one along with the last knight was a [Leader].

They were armed, dangerous, but not attacking. The knights parted way to let the fancier one through, and she and Iona started rapidly talking, occasionally pointing to the fire. I only recognized a few words, and while my education in Hakka had just begun, it didn’t sound like it at all.

I heard “vorler”, which seemed to cross language barriers, “Elaine” which also had that annoying tendency - I was going to end up with whiplash or ignoring people at this rate - and “Valkyrie”, said respectfully from the leader type to Iona.

There were some happy noises, and some really upset noises, along with lots of pointing at everyone.

It seemed safe enough, so I landed behind Iona. Eventually negotiations or discussions or whatever finished up, and the knights dismounted.

“What’s up?” I asked Iona, entirely confident that the knights couldn’t understand me.

If they could, that would be a huge win in my books.

“They saw the fire and came to investigate. As a Valkyrie, I’m usually happily accepted into anyone’s territory, especially in Rolland. There’s some politics going on which makes my presence here less desirable to [Countess] Lakewood there, but explaining that we were on a vorler clean up hunt has both made her happy, and supremely irritated.”

“Ah. Irritated?” I asked as one of the knights came up to me and offered me a nice travel meal.

“Something Elaine.” He half-bowed to me. I did a half-double take, before remembering what Iona had said about my name meaning “healer”. This was going to get old, fast.

Free food wasn’t going to get old though.

“Is it safe to take?” I asked Iona, who instantly divined my meaning.

“Yeah, they’re not going to expect anything of you.” She answered.

“Chiechie.” I told him.

“Chièchiè” Iona lightly corrected me.

“Chièchiè.” I said again - repetition was the mother of learning - and the knight happily withdrew.

“What about us?” Julius asked, having relaxed. Artemis hadn’t, still holding a handful of pebbles with her back to the fire.

“Countess Lakewood’s more than a bit unhappy that you two are here.” Iona frankly told them. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for the fact that you were with me, and that vorlers are everyone’s enemy and now she needs to do a thorough search of the area, she might’ve taken significant exception to your presence.”

Artemis got one of those calculating looks on her face.

“Don’t you dare.” I strode up to her and poked her in the chest. “Don’t even think about it.” Artemis was naturally planning on how to murder everyone who could possibly want her dead, and naturally she was figuring out a massive pre-emptive strike to make sure that happened.

“You know I need to.” Artemis protested.

“Please don’t. Why don’t we just all leave?” Julius said.

Iona looked torn, looking down at Fenrir. She hadn’t moved from her protective position, simply twisting and turning.

“The vorlers are handled, the local [Lady] is here, and I need to get to Lyon.” She muttered to herself. “Right. Let’s head back to pick up your friend.”

We got up, Iona made a number of polite noises with the countess, and after some words one of her attendants gave Iona a small satchel. As the dragoneye moons rose on the horizon, I used my [Radiance Conjuration] to light us a path back to the road. We didn’t need to stop for the night, nor did we want to. I had [Sunrise] to keep us all going.

Heading north, to Amber.

Heading north, to Lyon.

Heading north, to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft.