Chapter 8

Jack, Meredith, Noah, Nate and Katie lay on the side of a grassy hill, enjoying the bright sunshine, basking in the warmth and taking it all in. They’d also been joined by Cheryl who was lazily chatting with her niece.

It was several hours after the big operation to retake site alpha and every hunter who’d survived was allowed a couple of days to recover. They were even permitted to go through the Dire Woods gate and take advantage of the warm sunny weather out in the real world.

It had been a difficult job, not every hunter who’d participated had survived and many that did had to walk away with various injuries, or they were carried away. Overall, the number of dead hunters was confirmed at seventeen, that was around a fifth of the hunters who’d participated. Four members of the surveyor corps had also been killed, though the hunters were kept in the dark about whether that was a high number or not. A lot of information about the guild surveyor corps was on a need to know basis and the guild always kept its cards close to its chest where the surveyor corps was concerned..

Down below the relaxing hunters at the base of the hill, multiple large construction vehicles were parked along with massive piles of raw materials and crates. The sounds of engines and men at work echoed around the valley surrounding the Dire Woods. Once site alpha had been confirmed as safe, the way would be clear for construction crews to begin work on building the outpost proper. However, these same construction crews would only lay the foundations of the outpost fortifications, apparently it was costing the guild a fortune in insurance money whilst non-guild members and non-cultivators worked in a dangerous place like the Dire Woods. So the majority of the work in building the base would still wind up being done by guild employed hunters, surveyors and other guild personnel.

Jack stretched his tired muscles and sat up, thinking about what went down earlier. That was by far the bloodiest job he’d ever been on, he felt like the guild had really thrown them into the meat grinder. The whole organisation was supposed to run on voluntary work, you pick the jobs you want, you do the job and then get paid, better jobs mean better pay, hunters were incentivised to perform better that way. But now he found himself in a position where he was taking orders like he was in the military.

He looked over to where the others were lounging and was about to ask their opinions on the matter.

However it seemed Cheryl sensed his frustration and turned her head towards him.

“Something on your mind Jack?”

“Well….what happened back there, that wasn’t a normal job or hunt. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it, even with the Orc incursion in Park Estate and the ambush afterwards. That was….that was a friggin blood bath!” he exclaimed. He didn’t really want to complain to Cheryl of all people but it still needed to be said.

She looked at him for a moment before speaking. “Yeah I know,” she responded with sympathy. “But unfortunately it was necessary,” she said sadly.

“Necessary? How was that necessary!? That was crazy!” Katie sat up indignantly.

“Mm, too many hunters died today,” Noah put in.

“It was necessary because those things were camped right at the Dire Woods entrance, or exit in their case. What do you think would’ve happened if a horde of those things had escaped out here hm? We would’ve had you guys running all over the countryside hunting them down and walking through the slaughtered villages they’d left in their wake,” Cheryl replied calmly. “And where do you think I’ve been spending the majority of my time for the past couple of months? I’ve been right here having to cull the Vellast drones and preventing them from getting out,” she told them matter of factly. No one knew how to respond to that.

A fair few hunters had died, but it seemed they’d died for good cause afterall.

The group heard footsteps approaching from behind. Jack turned around.

“Oh bugger,” he muttered as he saw what was approaching. The others took note and also turned around. Journalists.

“Meredith! Over here!”

“Jack! Can you tell us what happened in there?”

“What made you want to join the Dire Woods expeditionary outpost?”

“Are these your new teammates?”

“Oh my god, is that Cheryl Shriverston!?”

They came at them with a barrage of questions. Jack could only grimace, he’d never been able to get along with the press quite like some of the less camera shy or photogenic well known hunters. Speaking of which, Meredith stepped forward with her usual polite, friendly smile and proceeded to handle the press like a champ.

Jack was about to sneak away with Katie and Noah but Meredith subtly grabbed his arm in a vice like grip. He was trapped and helpless, he shot a venomous glare at her but she simply smiled back sweetly before asking what Jack thought about what one of the reporters had just asked.

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A couple of days later, the foundations of the new outpost were completed. The base covered a large tract of land with the Dire Woods entrance being within the centre of the build. The outside construction company had used their equipment and vehicles to dig massive trenches where the various buildings and fortifications would be placed, they had also driven in many large crates filled with supplies, building materials and heavy weaponry.

Whilst teams of hunters and earth cultivators especially were being put to work, Jack and his team found themselves back in the white outpost command tent in front of the commander.

“Glad to see you're all still alive,” he told the assembled hunters gruffly.

The commander himself looked a little worse for wear. He’d led his own group of hunters in search of the Broodmother. The surveyors hadn’t known precisely where the Broodmother was but they’d narrowed it down to two locations, both of which needed to be investigated. Where Cheryl and her group had found the Broodmother, the commander and his group had found the old nest and an army mutated Vellast exiled from the main hive as well as a host of other creatures scavenging what they could.

The commander and his group had found themselves in yet another pitched battle, so they certainly didn’t have an easier time of it than Cheryl’s group.

“Right, now we’re finally free to construct the main base, it’s time to put you lot to work,” the commander rumbled as he scratched at some bandages covering his neck.

Put them to work? What did he think they’d been doing so far? Twiddling their thumbs? Jack thought indignantly.

“For the next couple of weeks at least, I’ll be sending you on hunts for specific monsters. This is all so boy wonder over there can use his special skill and retrieve whole monster corpses intact,” the commander informed with a nod towards Jack.

“Got it. What are we hunting first?” Meredith asked.

The commander smiled slyly at her.

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Several weeks later, an exhausted group of hunters trudged into their accommodation's common room and collapsed onto the large circular sofa contained within a lowered pit in the centre of the room.

“Hola amigos!” an annoying tinny voice piped up from the round table they sat around. It was an Echo Lily, during one of their hunts in the Dire Woods, they’d happened across a patch and Nate had the ‘inspired’ idea to take one as a ‘pet’.

“Hola flower!” Nate replied happily.

“Hola amigos!” the annoying voice repeated. Nate smiled proudly at it, he insisted he was teaching it to hold a proper conversation and to act as a stereo system but after about two weeks, progress was limited.

Everybody else found the thing to be rather annoying and Nate had needed to physically restrain Katie and Jack from destroying it on multiple occasions. Jack thought he’d been quite justified in trying to throw it in the oven when the thing had woken them all up at three in the morning with a sudden, earsplitting, broken rendition of the guitar solo from ‘Free Bird’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd. He didn’t know how intelligent it was, but at that moment he was convinced the thing had known exactly what it was doing.

They were in their new living quarters in the newly constructed outpost. It was a large apartment with five ensuite bedrooms surrounding a large common room and kitchen area. When they’d first been assigned it, the rooms were pretty bare and basic, but they’d been given complete freedom on how to furnish and renovate it. For a change this was something in which Meredith hadn’t minded bossing Noah about at all, making certain their living quarters had a contemporary but classical feel, according to her at least.

Nate meanwhile had decorated as much of the place as he could with monster skulls and fur pelts.

Jack was just happy he had a walk in luxurious power shower that could strip paint if he wanted it too, the massive king sized bed with the mattress that had cost him a fortune also provided him the best sleep he’d ever had.

“That thing really creeps me out Nate, seriously, get rid of it!” Katie protested about the flowers' presence for the umpteenth time.

“No way! She’s here to stay!” Nate protested.

“I don’t think flowers have genders, Nate,” Jack said quietly but was ignored.

“That thing has grown way too big, you’re feeding it too much!” Katie pointed out. As well as watering the flower, Nate had also been feeding it his leftovers from his meals, the flower had grown from several inches long to almost two feet in length. They’d had to replace its plant pot three times so far.

“Every exercise is a lower back exercise if you do it wrong enough!” the flower cheerfully piped up with one of its random comments. Jack always found himself wondering where the flower had overheard these remarks and who from, or if it was just making things up.

“Too big!? Don’t size shame her!” Nate spluttered indignantly. No one could tell if Nate was serious when he said those types of things.

“I keep having nightmares about that thing coming into my room when I’m asleep,” Katie continued to complain with a shiver. She wasn’t alone in being creeped out by it, Jack always made sure to keep one eye on the flower when he was in the common room. The way it leaned slightly towards someone when they sat near it did not help.

“I think the main question here is…how sticky is too sticky? I mean really,” the flower interjected again, with a contemplative tone to its tinny voice. Everyone looked at it for a moment but when it failed to elaborate, they ignored it.

“Oh don’t be a baby,” Nate scoffed. From there it devolved into the usual arguments and bickering, though there was no ill feeling behind any of it.

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Over the past three weeks they had been on numerous hunts together all at the outpost commander’s behest. As such they’d all grown close, becoming good friends having shared in the perils of the Dire Woods together.

The vast majority of hunts they’d been sent on were to simply retrieve intact monster corpses so they could be sold to whoever was buying. However there were a few hunts here and there where they had to retrieve large quantities of specific materials that would be used to build up the base. On one such occasion the team had to accompany Cheryl and a couple of A rankers to hunt an Armoured Viper. This was a massive snake like monster with metallic bone armour covering its body, it was an A rank threat and normally better left alone but its territory was relatively near the outpost. However the main reason for the hunt was to harvest the extremely large amount of armour and bones it possessed, which could then be smelted and combined with the material used to create the outer perimeter walls.

The Armoured Viper was the last job they’d been on. Actually killing the thing had been simple, well standing back and watching Cheryl and the A rankers kill it had been simple, what wasn’t was actually having to attune a great big gigantic three hundred foot snake that measured wider around than a car. It took him close to four hours and by the end of it he was on his knees with a migraine from having to delicately channel so much lightning energy.

They then had to lug back every bit of the snake through the difficult terrain of the Woods which took them three days. It had been gruelling work. However, from every monster he’d had a hand in slaying, he’d also cultivated from, some of the monsters had been rather powerful too. Because of that, Jack’s cultivation level had reached new heights, he felt far stronger and faster, abilities that had strained him before now felt far easier and more powerful than ever before.

The plethora of high ranking monsters for him to use as cultivation material made a welcome change to the various goblins, slimes, mutated animals and other lower ranked threats he’d had to make do with in the outside world. Now if only he could get access to a dungeon by himself so he could then have access to the dungeon monsters to cultivate from then he’d be a very happy hunter. He always gets a massive surge of power from cultivating from dungeon monsters, even the common weaker ones, however that was a secret he felt he shouldn’t share with anybody else.

Now that they’d completed the Armoured Viper job, enough of the base was finished to allow more hunting teams to go out into the Dire Woods on their own expeditions. Team Meredith was free to pick and choose its own jobs now, though from the bedraggled state of everyone sprawled around the common room, it would be a couple of days before anyone wanted to go out again.

Whilst everyone did their own thing, Jack tiredly got back to his feet and went to his room. As soon as he entered, he stripped off his armour and clothes and dumped all his gear on the floor before stepping straight into the shower. It was a bad habit of his, he should take better care of his gear and clean and maintain it properly straight after every job but no one had ever accused Jack of being disciplined. In fact Noah had accused both him, Nate and Katie of the exact opposite on more than one occasion.

After a good half an hour of standing under the jets of piping hot water Jack got out and walked back into his room. It was a spacious area, the outpost had been generous in allocating personal living spaces to its resident hunters, and so Meredith had used the maximum in allocated space to make sure everyone had large rooms to themselves.

Jack’s room was a large space with plenty of furniture including a large plasma screen and a single large window taking up one side of the walls letting in what natural light the Dire Woods had to offer, it also allowed him a decent view of the parts of the outpost base. However, what dominated the room, covering the walls, his large desk and other table surfaces, were various documents, pieces of paper, notebooks and more. The result of his study into runes, much of the available space in his bedroom was taken up by the results of his research into the topic. Countless different runic symbols in countless different variations, patterns and sequences could be seen all around in some semblance of order.

In whatever free time he’d been able to snatch, he’d been studying what information on the runes he had and what he could get Cheryl to share with him. In three weeks, he believed he’d made good progress, though he wasn’t sure what he’d achieved in comparison to the actual professional researchers in the guild’s employ.

Through a great deal of trial and error, he’d been able to get some of the runes to activate to see what their purpose was, this had a variety of different effects from the encouraging to the disastrous. What was fascinating to see, was that even though the runes could be classed as magic, they weren’t necessarily elemental in nature, which was strange to see since everything seemed to revolve around fire, water, earth, wind and to a lesser extent lightning in this day and age.

Although his trial and error experimentation had limited results so far, from various combinations of runes he’d been able to identify all sorts of different effects including flashes of light, minor shifts in gravity, altering different items in size, creating some sort of solid but incorporeal blue matter and many more effects besides. However there were still countless runes that he was unclear as to their purpose. But as far as he could tell, or at least his current hypothesis, was that the runes were essentially a written language with tangible meaning and the meaning very much depended on the combination and patterns you put them in.

If he wanted results then he needed to learn the language and learn how to write it, as such he had a growing list of runes with their accompanying translations. Actually learning the effect of a rune and writing down its effect as a translation was surprisingly less than straightforward due to the fact that many runic effects couldn’t be described by the English language with anything less than an entire paragraph, sometimes with accompanying illustrations.

He’d also burned through a hefty amount of paper because whilst he needed it to write down runes to experiment with, the actual material didn’t take kindly to having Jack’s magic running through it and after one usage would rapidly fall apart. Though it was interesting because sometimes the paper burned up into ashes, other times it seemed to decay and other times it crumbled to dust, something to look into later perhaps.

In anycase, he was making progress. Jack was especially interested in the incorporeal but solid blue matter that could be created. He had plans for that stuff.

After getting out of the shower he made sure to pick up his gear. He cleaned his armour and weapons and deposited them on racks in the corner. It was only late afternoon but he and the team had been working non-stop throughout the day so he decided to flop onto his bed and sleep the rest of the day away.

The next day…..

Jack wandered around the newly built outpost, the vast majority of the buildings had been set up quickly thanks to a team of dedicated earth cultivators the guild kept on staff. However, work was still ongoing for some of the less essential elements of the base. But a lot of the essential buildings were up and operational such as the armoury and forge, warehouses and harvested material processing areas, laboratories and quarantine areas, various administration buildings and one of those oh so secret restricted facilities where the surveyor corps got up to god knows what.

The finishing touches were just being put on the large outer perimeter walls, Jack stopped at the side of a wide paved avenue to let a forklift truck by as it carried a large crate of something down to the southern section of the wall in the distance. Large towers lined the walls with massive, thick chains trailing down from the towertops to large coils resting on the ground. The chains were connected to huge harpoon guns on top of the towers, meant to be used alongside other harpoon guns along the wall against large monsters that assaulted the outpost directly. Other towers lining the walls were also topped with huge tank killing, armour piercing machine gun turrets.

The base seemed to be coming along nicely, clearly someone in the guild had a specific vision for the place and they were determined to see it through judging by all the resources that had been thrown at it. Walking through the base, Jack could see the lively hustle and bustle of hunters, surveyors, guild support staff and more than a few journalists. There were several wide stone paved avenues lined with various buildings. The buildings were unfortunately a tad utilitarian for his tastes in comparison to various dungeon towns that had a free hand in their design aesthetic, but the outpost was sitting in an exceedingly dangerous area so that was probably to be expected. Amongst the buildings were numerous long poles extending high into the air above, in between the poles were strung many chain link nets. They had been set up to catch and hinder any monster or creature that could fly when attacking the base.

Sunlight streamed out from the large and tall Dire Woods entrance providing light to the entire base, due to that, the base could operate on a regular day and night schedule, unlike the rest of the Dire Woods.

Jack yawned and stretched contentedly as he walked to the newly built canteen. Things were going well, he was exactly where he wanted to be as a hunter, exploring one of the great unknowns, he was getting stronger and stronger, he had a decent team and he was currently richer than he’d ever dared imagined before in his entire life. And now he and his team were finally able to start choosing their own jobs. That feeling didn’t last however as he saw Stacey across the street, that was one issue he hadn’t managed to resolve yet. Every time he’d tried to approach her, she would avoid him and disappear.

She looked miserable as he watched her walking along the street towards the canteen, same as him. She was fully kitted out in her armour and hunting gear, carrying her massive sabre wrapped up in some sort of cloth. She hadn’t seen him so on a whim he decided to discreetly follow her, perhaps he could finally corner her and they could talk it out, clearly she was still pissed at him.

He followed her all the way to the canteen, it appeared like a large metal and log warehouse from the outside. Jack opened the door and slipped in a few moments after Stacey, he looked around for her and saw her heading up the stairs to the mezzanine area. He watched and waited in as non-stalkery a fashion as possible before following her.

When he got upstairs he saw her sitting down at a table with her new team, four men and one other woman. He discreetly found a seat a few tables away and sat down, looking over at them. Fortunately the canteen was busy as always because it served the same quality food as the guild hall in the North Yorkshire branch headquarters, so no one noticed him with all the hustle and bustle.

Stacey’s team all appeared to be discussing something seriously as they leaned over the table they sat around, looking down at a map, though not everyone appeared to be happy as there were more than a few harsh gestures and raised voices amongst the group. However, Stacey just sat silently and morosely throughout it all. Jack tried to listen in but couldn’t hear much, however from the fact that they were all kitted out in full hunting gear like Stacey, it looked like they were about to go out on a job.

Eventually, after a few minutes, one of the men turned to Stacey and said something, pointing back towards the stairs leading down to the canteen ground level. Stacey nodded quickly, looking tired, before getting up and leaving. The group all watched her leave with stoney faces, however once Stacey’s back was turned, some of them started to smirk.

Jack frowned, he wanted to follow Stacey in order to get her alone so they could speak. But he didn’t like those looks on her new team's faces, call it instinct, but he had a very bad feeling about them. He had tried recently to find out about the people on that team and why Stacey had switched to them, but wasn’t able to get information on them beyond their ranks, names, elements and list of completed jobs, all that information was available to the public. As a lowly D rank hunter on contract with the guild, he wasn’t entitled to more unless he either ranked up to B or joined a division of the guild where they dealt with sensitive information like that.

However, being a lowly D ranker and not being entitled to know shit didn’t stop him from finding a table nearer the group so he could eavesdrop on their conversation.

“I fucking hate that bitch!” the female hunter of the group complained viciously. She was a tall slim redhead wearing black body armour. She leaned against her chair with an arm swung over the back rest.

“I know, you’ve said, repeatedly. But we’ll soon be rid of her,” a man coldly remarked next to her. He seemed to be the leader of the group, wearing bulky armour with a thick black pelt over his shoulders.

Jack’s heartbeat quickened at those words and he leaned forwards to hear more.

“Are we sure about this? I mean…we…..” one of the others hesitated, an unsure look on his face.

“Aww, still got a hard on for little miss perfect?” the woman sneered mockingly.

“No! It's just risky, can’t we do it another way?”

“Pfph! Risky he says! Going out there every week is risky!” another one of the male hunters piped up, pointing off to the side.

The leader leaned forward and spoke quietly to the rest of the group. “This is the best and only way to go about this, if Stacey gets killed on this job then we get a free ticket out of the Woods ‘cus our team will be ‘understrength’. We can even collect the insurance money on her for some extra cash,” he explained quietly with a smirk and mimed quotation marks when he said understrength.

Jack’s eyes widened in alarm and he almost jumped out of his seat in outrage, but he held himself back so he could keep listening.

“Damn right! I’m ready to get out of this fucked up place! We should never have come here!” one of the men exclaimed loudly. His team looked around in alarm and quickly shushed him up. Jack ducked behind someone for a few seconds so they didn’t see him.

When he brought his head back up he saw that the team were already on their feet and walking down stairs. He got up quickly.

He debated what to do, he needed to stop this, but how? Should he confront them or should he go to someone for help? The hunters guild didn’t really have any kind of enforcement or policing system in place, though from the way some hunters behave, maybe it should. It seemed to Jack that the only reason the hunters of the guild stayed on task was because of the money and because overpowered hunters like Cheryl and Russel would look at them menacingly if the rank and file got too rowdy.

He followed the team out of the canteen and watched as they walked down the avenue towards the perimeter entrance in the distance, he saw Stacey was already waiting for them. He didn’t have much time, it was decision time, or indecision time in Jack’s case. He didn’t know where Cheryl was and the only authority figure he knew of was the commander whose command building was all the way over on the other side of the outpost. It would take him twenty minutes just to get over there and Stacey’s team was literally stepping outside the main gates.

In a snap decision and with a grimace, he ran after them, he wasn’t exactly kitted out for a sojourn into a death zone like the Dire Woods. He had no armour, no supplies, he was wearing trainers, jeans and a t-shirt and had foolishly left his pager behind in his room, charging up. All he had was his short sword on his belt.

He reached the main gate at a run and stopped there, receiving some strange looks from the guards on duty, he couldn’t see where Stacey’s team was, having lost sight of them in the shadowy tree line beyond. With one last moment of hesitation he stepped beyond the threshold and ran across the clear no man’s zone beyond the walls and into the darkness.