The imdiate aftermath of a slaughter was always a jarring, surreal transition. The adrenaline that had pumped relentlessly through their veins, singing a frantic, violent song of survival, began to slowly recede. In its wake, it left behind the heavy, tallic stench of copper, the oppressive heat of scorched earth, and a profound, aching silence that seed entirely out of place in a gorge that had just played host to a war.
Josh lowered his massive broadsword, letting the heavy, blood-stained steel rest point-down against the cracked stone. Beside him, Bhel rolled his broad shoulders, his thick neck popping audibly. The dwarf's twin axes, which had been glowing a radiant, superheated orange during the height of the lee, were slowly dimming back to their dull, heavy steel grey, hissing faintly as the ambient moisture in the air touched the hot tal.
From his elevated vantage point atop a shattered boulder, Brett let out a long, shuddering exhale. The residual mana from his devastating spells radiated off his form in visible heat waves, distorting the air around his silhouette like a mirage on a desert road. He slumped slightly, the physical toll of channelling that much raw arcane energy finally catching up with his muscles.
Perberos, however, remained entirely still. He stood precisely where he had been when the final blow was struck, above a sea of carnage. His obsidian recurve bow was still loosely gripped in his left hand, his pale, unblinking eyes tracking the subtle shifts in the environnt, searching the shadowy crevices of the gorge for any signs of remaining movent.
Then, the System began its morbid, fascinating housekeeping.
It started at the very edges of the gorge, where the first waves of the horde had broken against their defensive line. The mangled, carbonised, and crushed bodies of the reptilian beasts began to shimr with a faint, otherworldly luminescence. The visceral, stomach-churning horror of torn flesh, shattered bone, and spilled viscera lost its stark, grueso reality. The edges of the corpses blurred, dissolving into a static haze.
Slowly at first, and then with rapidly accelerating speed, the physical remains began to break down into thousands of tiny, srising motes of golden light.
It was a process they had seen hundreds of tis by now, yet it remained a disconcerting marvel to watch on such a massive scale. The thick, viscous pools of black, coagulated blood that heavily coated Josh’s armoured boots turned to dry, weightless ash and blew away on the gentle river breeze. The nauseating, heavy stench of voided bowels, burnt hair, and rotting at began to rapidly fade, replaced by the clean, crisp scent of the surrounding pine forest and the sharp, tallic tang of ozone left behind by Brett’s bombardnts.
Within minutes, the horrific abattoir had been scrubbed terrifyingly clean. Where there had been a mountainous, tangled pile of twisted, broken reptilian corpses, there was now only the scorched, glass-like stone of the riverbed and a pathetic scattering of mundane, rusted items left behind.
Clink. Clatter. Thud.
The sound of minor loot hitting the bare stone echoed softly, almost mournfully, through the wide ravine.
Brett hopped down from his boulder, his boots crunching on the dry riverbed. He casually kicked a rusted iron shortsword that had materialised near his foot. It skittered across the rock, the blade heavily chipped, pitted with rust, and nearly entirely blunt. He sighed dramatically, pulling up his invisible System interface and staring at the translucent blue screens hovering in front of his face.
"You've got to be absolutely joking," Brett moaned, his voice echoing off the sheer, rocky walls of the gorge. He aggressively swiped his hand through the air, dismissing the notification prompts with a gesture of pure disgust. "Not a single level. Nothing. I just incinerated half a horde of monsters. I emptied a load of my mana reserves, and I got nothing."
Perberos stepped lightly over a pile of dissipated ash, his soft leather boots making barely a whisper against the stone. He approached the group, casually and thodically sliding an unspent obsidian arrow back into his dark leather quiver.
"You're genuinely surprised?" Perberos asked, his voice cool, level, and intensely analytical. "Look around us, Brett. Look closely at what they left behind."
Brett frowned, casting a disparaging glance at the wide scattering of crude, untreated leather scraps, chunks of rusted iron, shattered wooden bucklers, and yellowed teeth. "Yeah? It's absolute trash. Garbage."
"Exactly," Perberos nodded, gesturing with his bow to the wide, blast-scorched basin of the encampnt. "The sheer volu of the horde was intimidating, yes. It creates a very real psychological pressure when you see that many bodies rushing towards you. But the cold reality is that the vast majority of these creatures were incredibly weak. They were scavengers, runts, a few basic tribal shamans at best. I was keeping a very close eye on them while I was taking out their archers from the canopy."
Josh grunted, using a rag he pulled from his belt to wipe a stubborn sar of grey, greasy ash from the polished tal face of his massive shield. "I didn't exactly have the luxury of analysing their combat proficiency while they were trying to violently chew through my kneecaps and swarm my blind spots. What were we actually dealing with?"
"Fodder," Perberos replied flatly, without a hint of arrogance, rely stating a fact. "I didn't spot a single creature in the main charging body of the horde above level nineteen. The vast majority of them, the ones Brett turned into glass, hovered around level fifteen. The only threat of any real, asurable substance was the boss, and he was, at most, a low-tier twenty. You didn't level up, Brett, because that wasn't a genuine challenge for us. We drastically, almost comically, out-levelled the entire encounter."
Brett blinked, slowly digesting the information. He looked down at his own hands, which were still lightly smoking with residual arcane heat, then over to Josh’s immaculate, magically reinforced alloy armour, which bore barely a scratch, and finally to Bhel, who hadn't even broken a proper sweat.
"Oh," Brett said, the realisation dawning on his face, extinguishing his outrage. "Well... I suppose that perfectly explains why that felt so incredibly easy. I thought I was just having a really good spell-casting day."
"Aye," Bhel chuckled, a deep, rumbling, earthen sound that vibrated comfortably in his broad chest. He reached down and hooked his heavy axes onto his harnesses with a familiar, tallic clack. "I barely even felt a jolt throughout that fight thanks to your new skill. You took the absolute brunt of that, Josh, but the actual damage output from their crude weapons was downright pitiful. Half of those rusty mauls and stone-tipped spears simply shattered against your shield.”
"It’s pretty scary, isn't it," Josh noted, a hint of quiet satisfaction rumbling in his deep voice. He sheathed his broadsword, adjusting the heavy straps of his pauldron. "Think back to a few weeks ago. A horde of a hundred and fifty monsters of any kind would have been a desperate, gruelling, life-or-death struggle. We would have been driving Carcan mad and we’d be in real danger. Today? Today it was just a at grinder. A chore. We are definitively getting stronger."
"Stronger, yes," Perberos agreed, his pale eyes continuously scanning the scattered, unimpressive loot. "But unfortunately, not richer. At least, not from the rank and file."
They began to walk slowly, almost leisurely, through the dissipating remains of the camp, moving purposefully toward the large, flat, grey slab of rock where the biggest kobold had t its end. As they walked, their eyes naturally tracked the various items left behind by the dissolving bodies out of deeply ingrained habit, but none of them made a single move to bend down and retrieve anything.
There was a ti, shortly after their chaotic and terrifying arrival in this brutal, unforgiving world, when they would have frantically scrambled in the bloody dirt for a rusted iron dagger or a small handful of tarnished copper coins. Back then, every scrap of cured leather, every cracked, half-empty health potion, every minor, chipped crafting material had been absolutely essential for their day-to-day survival.
But their reality had fundantally changed. They had ascended the hierarchy of this world.
"Leave the junk," Josh instructed, casually and disdainfully kicking aside a tattered, foul-slling shaman's robe that was crusted with dried mud and suspicious stains. "It's not worth the backache to lean down."
"Agreed," Brett said, deliberately stepping over a pile of brittle, yellowed fangs and shattered claw fragnts. "Besides, we have the town's massive haul to think about. By the ti we get back from this little excursion, the quartermasters will have fully swept the walls, collected the drops from the main siege, and catalogued everything. The sheer volu of loot we generated defending the town will absolutely dwarf anything we could possibly pick up in this dirt pit."
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Perberos nodded in silent agreent. The lower-levelled civilians who’d stayed to help, and had mostly been uninjured, had swept the battlefields, collected every single drop, and pooled them into a heavily guarded central repository. Rusted swords, cracked wooden shields, and filthy loincloths were entirely beneath them now; they likely already had a big payday coming their way.
They only paused briefly to collect items that they thought could be enchanted or magical—a small, surprisingly pristine erald, a tightly bound pouch of unrefined, crackling magical dust, and a handful of genuine silver coins that clinked with a satisfyingly heavy resonance as Bhel eagerly scooped them into his thick leather coin purse.
Eventually, taking their ti, they reached the very centre of the sprawling encampnt.
The large, flat slab of grey stone was slightly elevated, acting as a crude dais that offered a commanding view of the entire riverbed. Two distinct, substantial items remained resting heavily on the cold stone. Unlike the trash scattered throughout the camp, both of these items pulsed with a faint, hypnotic, and undeniably magical light.
The group gathered closely around the stone slab, a collective hum of interest passing between them.
"Well now," Bhel muttered, stroking his thick, elaborately braided beard, his eyes catching the faint magical glow. "That right there looks a fair bit more promising than rusty daggers."
Resting heavily on the stone was the massive, spiked iron armour the beast had worn, along with the incredibly long, jagged halberd that Perberos had seen it wielding with such devastating force.
Josh stepped forward, his gauntleted hand reaching out to grab the heavy chest plate. He gripped the thick iron collar and lifted it with a very noticeable grunt of effort, his reinforced muscles straining slightly against the sheer dead weight of the piece. The tal was dark, incredibly crude, and aggressively covered in rust-coloured, forward-facing spikes. It was ugly, brutalist craftsmanship, but it visibly thrumd with a heavy, latent, and incredibly stubborn energy.
Brett leaned in close, waving a bare hand inches over the rusted, spiked surface. He closed his eyes, his brow furrowing in deep concentration as he actively felt the magical currents radiating from the tal.
"I still don't have an Appraiser's specific skill to give you the description," the mage murmured, keeping his hand hovering over the chest piece. "But it's definitively magical. The mana clinging to it is thick... heavy. It feels incredibly aggressive. It honestly slls a bit like raw at, old blood, and pure, unfiltered anger."
Josh inspected the physical properties of the item, slowly turning the massive chest piece over to look at the leather strapping on the inside. "It's absolutely enormous," he noted, his voice echoing from inside the hollow cavity of the armour. "The weight distribution is entirely front-heavy. It looks like it was forged from very low-grade, porous iron, relying entirely on the ambient magical enchantnt and its sheer, ridiculous thickness to absorb heavy blows."
He shook his head decisively, lowering the massive piece of armour back onto the stone slab with a heavy, resounding clang. "Even if we knew exactly what the enchantnt did, I wouldn't wear it. There’s sothing with it I just don’t like."
"It's obviously far too big for ," Bhel snorted, eyeing the massive, towering proportions of the chest piece. "I'd look like a child wearing his father's barrel. And I don't wear heavy plate anyway. I need full rotation in my shoulders. Thick tal like that heavily interferes with my swing arc."
"Well I don’t want it," Brett pointed out needlessly, dusting off his robes. "If I put that on, my spine would probably snap in three places."
Josh stepped to the side, moving his attention over to the massive weapon. He gripped the thick, reinforced iron haft of the halberd with both hands and hefted it off the stone. The weapon was incredibly long and punishingly top-heavy. The massive, jagged axe-blade at the top emitted an ugly, sickly, pulsing green glow that made the air imdiately around it feel noticeably cold, damp, and stagnant.
"Now that," Bhel said, taking a step closer, a glint of genuine, martial appreciation in his dark eyes as he intensely studied the brutal design of the weapon. "That is a truly nasty piece of work. Just standing near it makes the skin on the back of my neck crawl. That's a strong necrotic enchantnt if I've ever seen one. Festering wounds, stopping blood from clotting... those are always a brutal, highly effective bonus in a prolonged, grinding fight."
"True," Josh reasoned, carefully testing the balance of the weapon by swinging it in a slow, controlled arc. He imdiately frowned at the sluggish response. "But none of us use polearms. It’s too slow, too unwieldy. It doesn't suit any of our fighting styles," Josh concluded, a hint of practical disappointnt in his voice. "It requires too much wind-up. It's entirely useless to our current party composition."
"Not entirely useless," Brett corrected smoothly, stepping into the centre of the group. He reached to his hip and unclasped his enchanted spatial satchel. The magical bag, seemingly made of standard, supple brown leather, began to expand at his command. Its leather maw widened impossibly, stretching the fabric of reality to accommodate the massive items.
He took the heavy spiked armour from the slab and slid it inside, followed by the eight-foot, necrotic halberd. The satchel swallowed them both whole, the opening snapping shut. Brett reattached it to his belt; the bag hadn't gained a single ounce of weight, nor had its external dinsions changed.
"It's useless for us to wield, yes," Brett clarified, patting the satchel. "But enchanted heavy armour and a potent, necrotic polearm? We don't need a high-level appraisal skill to know that's going to make us so gold. When we finally get back to town, we can have a professional appraiser fully identify them and get them sold."
"A very fair point," Josh nodded, his practical nature imdiately satisfied by the logic. "Loot is loot I guess, whether it's gold coins or enchanted ugly iron. What else have we got here?"
They spent another ten minutes thoroughly and thodically searching the imdiate vicinity of the boss’ elevated slab. They brutally overturned wooden crates filled with foul-slling, rotting at, kicked through massive piles of gnawed, unidentifiable bones, and forced open a few crude, leather-bound chests that had been hidden under the dais.
Unfortunately, the hidden hoard was almost as pathetic and impoverished as the horde itself. They managed to uncover a few dozen more silver coins, a small handful of low-grade, cloudy mana crystals that barely held enough charge to light a campfire, and a few peculiar, intricately carved bone totems. Brett handled the totems gingerly, quickly coming to the conclusion that they were minor, rudintary magical trinkets with barely any practical use or market value.
The vast encampnt, for all its terrifying size and the sheer number of bodies it had held, was entirely devoid of anything else of genuine interest. The horde had been incredibly nurous, but desperately, fiercely poor.
Josh rested his heavy, gauntleted hands on his hips, taking a long look around the empty, unnervingly silent gorge. The wind whistled mournfully through the jagged, scorched rocks, a lonely, hollow sound that replaced the chaotic din of battle.
"Well," Josh said, turning to look directly at Perberos, recognizing the Ranger as their primary tactical scout. "The camp is thoroughly clear. The imdiate threat to the town from this direction is entirely neutralised. What now? Do we finally head back, hit whatever passes for the taverns, and collect our dues?"
Perberos didn't answer imdiately. He had silently crouched down at the very edge of the stone slab, his long fingers lightly, almost reverently, brushing against a small patch of deeply disturbed dirt. He slowly closed his pale eyes, actively filtering out the casual chatter of his companions, the lingering, acrid sll of the ash, and the sound of the wind rushing through the gorge.
He tapped deeply into his tracking skills, letting his heightened senses expand outward like an invisible net. He felt for the subtle, unnatural vibrations of the forest, the freshly broken twigs, the bent blades of river grass, the displaced dew. To the others, the forest was just a chaotic jumble of trees and mud. To Perberos, it was a perfectly legible book, and the text was currently written in bold, glowing letters.
He opened his eyes, rising gracefully to his feet without making a sound. He pointed a slender, black-gloved finger toward the far side of the riverbed, where the dense, ancient pines grew thick, dark, and unyielding up the steep, muddy embanknt.
"Not just yet," Perberos said softly, his voice carrying a deadly, focused calm. "The main, fighting body of the horde is dead, yes. But they didn't all charge blindly into Brett’s flas. So of them were smarter. Or, more likely, just far more cowardly."
Josh frowned deeply, his hand instinctively tightening on the familiar leather-wrapped hilt of his broadsword. "Stragglers?"
"Scouts, foragers, and opportunistic deserters," Perberos confird, his eyes tracing an invisible line, tracking a series of faint, panicked, clawed footprints leading frantically up the muddy bank and disappearing into the brush. "When Brett dropped the barrage and incinerated the big mass of them, so of them bolted. I can see at least four distinct, fresh trails branching off deep into the woods. Mostly small, disorganised groups. Two or three Kobolds each, running blind."
"Are they actually a threat?" Brett asked, crossing his arms and sounding incredibly bored by the very prospect of chasing down cowards.
"To us? Not in the slightest," Perberos replied, adjusting the heavy quiver on his back to ensure the arrows were easily accessible. "But a pack of three desperate, starving, heavily ard Kobolds wandering blindly too close to the town's outlying farmlands could easily butcher a family of unard settlers before the town could even mount a response. A threat isn't always defined by its level or its stats, Brett. Sotis, it's defined entirely by its proximity to the vulnerable."
"He's right," Josh agreed instantly, his tone turning grim, authoritative, and resolute. "We ca all the way out here to ensure the area was definitively safe. We don't do half a job. If we leave stragglers, they might regroup and eventually cause absolute havoc on the supply roads."
"Right then," Bhel sighed heavily, cracking his thick, calloused knuckles in preparation. "Let's go hunting in the dirt. Lead the way, shadow-walker. Try to leave a few for my axes."
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