Chapter 218: Second Departure

“I can’t believe how much my Arcane has gone up,” Bridget said, a faraway look in her eyes as she stared at the status sheet only she could see.

“I know, right?” Sabina said from where she sat next to the orc with a pile of materials and crafting tools in front of her. “The ritual makes such a huge difference to our stats and it’s fun, too! At least I had a lot of fun, even the training was fun, though I guess maybe some people wouldn’t like it but I don’t know who wouldn’t. But it sounded like you were enjoying yourself to me!”

“It sure did,” Kerr snickered as she pulled her new pair of drake scale boots on. “I’m pretty sure the bandits hiding a mile underground could hear how much our lantern lighter here enjoyed that pounding.”

“They did not!” Bridget whirled on Kerr, her sharp eyebrows drawn down over fierce eyes. “I wasn’t that loud!”

“Sure, sure,” Kerr waved the orc off as she stamped her boots against the stone floor. “It is weird though, isn’t it? ‘Holy gods, how in the abyss is all this fitting in me’ is a legitimately good question. I mean, clearly Big Stuff’s Eldritch magic is rearranging our guts to make room for all that cock, but still. I’m pretty sure her cock should be tickling Eir’s heart when they fuck and yet—”

Kerr’s outspoken pondering was interrupted by two different hands smacking her in the back of the head. Bridget sat back down in her chair, flushed and embarrassed, while Aila remained next to Kerr, a cool look of admonishment on her face. As Kerr rubbed the back of her head, she gave Aila an unrepentant wink before she turned to address the blushing orc.

“We’ll talk about it more later then.”

“Looks like there weren’t any issues to report in the night,” Dys informed everyone in an attempt to move the conversation away from teasing poor Bridget. “Jay’s talking with Willa right now and apparently there were a few bone thieves that wandered into the village, but that’s about it. No sign of the bandits, though Gunnar reported hearing some sort of strange wailing sound during his watch early in the night…”

Realizing what she was saying, Dys froze. Kerr stared at her, a wide grin on her face while Bridget looked utterly mortified.

“Anyway!” Dys said loudly before Kerr could start. “It looks like the skies are clear today and it even feels a little warmer! The snow might melt a little, but at least it shouldn’t snow or rain or anything so we should be able to get to the neighboring valley pretty quickly!”

“Then we should finish getting ready so we can be on the road within the next hour,” Aila said while giving Dys a look.

“Yes, yes we should.”

After the events of the previous evening, Fortune’s Favored had woken up a little later than they should have, though not by much. It did mean they only had time for a simple breakfast of mushed up hardtack and honey, but at least it was warm. Despite the long night, there was one among their number who hadn’t slept in. When Jadis had woken up that morning, she found Sabina already up and hard at work crafting Kerr her new boots.

The sight of the half-elf sitting at the makeshift table naked while sewing together pieces of leather and scales stirred certain impulses in Jadis, though she successfully repressed those instincts. For the moment.

The boots Sabina had crafted were simple but sturdy. They also had a minor enchantment crafted into them that made them more resistant to cold and ice than they otherwise would be. When Jadis asked how Sabina had managed that enchantment, she’d explained that certain materials were more apt to produce particular kinds of effects. Since frost drakes were magical creatures of ice, the materials that came from them had a predisposition towards making enchantments or alchemical effects that would either enhance or counter frost elements.

Technically, Sabina had explained, since her attributes were currently geared towards Eldritch, she couldn’t do much with the more Arcane based elemental enchantments. Still, making the materials do what they already wanted to do wasn’t all that hard, though the end result was far from impressive.

Jadis had just been glad Sabina hadn’t made boots that turned Kerr’s feet into frost drake feet when she wore them. Though the look Sabina got on her face when she voiced that relief had triggered a warning in Jadis’ heart. She’d have to make sure to keep a close eye on Sabina’s creations.

Aside from Sabina’s early morning crafting, the new day had also brought two more events of note. Bridget had, of course, completed her Lewd Lover’s Bond ritual, which meant she’d gotten her Jadis-based boost. She’d somehow, despite the long hour of rough sex Syd had put her through, had the wherewithal to put the boost into her Arcane stat. Though she’d had no time to appreciate the large increase to her magical offense since Syd had kept true to her word and kept going for a good while after the ritual was over.

Everyone had congratulated Bridget on joining the club, so to speak, and Aila had spent some time discussing Arcane magic with Bridget over breakfast. Bridget’s stat increase wasn’t the only one, however.

With the completion of another bonding ritual, Jadis’ Perverted Ritualist of D class had gone up another level, bringing it to level twenty-two. With the even-numbered level came two more attribute points to put where she liked, which naturally went into the Eldritch attribute.

With that two-point jump also came a small boost to everyone else’s stats, increasing their lewd lover’s boosted attribute by a single point. While only a single point, it was a reminder that for each point Jadis gained in her Eldritch stat, the more powerful the whole group became. Jadis wasn’t sure how they were going to handle the logistics, but for certain they were going to have to at least try to redo the Lascivious Empowerment ritual with all seven people. The increase would be well worth the effort.

Though, as Sabina had so candidly put it, the effort was a great deal of fun, too.

Once everyone was fully equipped and ready to go, Jadis and her team loaded up onto the Behemoth and got moving after sparing a moment for a brief farewell to Captain Willa and the soldiers. As they had already discussed the day before, Fortune’s Favored would head to the east to search the neighboring valley as part of the search mission. The soldiers had decided to stay in Sweet Pine Valley. While there was no guarantee that the bandits would come back, in fact Willa thought it likely that they were already long gone, they wanted to at least investigate the mine for any signs of illegal eleria mining. Despite the attack the bandits had made on them, there hadn’t been any actual evidence of eleria mining or smuggling found so far. Since that was ostensibly the whole point of her squad coming out to the mountains, Willa was going to do what she could to find as much evidence as possible, both for future legal prosecutions as well as potential interruption and prevention of the illegal trade.

There was a definite sense of nostalgia tugging at Jadis as she pulled the wagon down the road, leaving the “dwarven village” for the second time. This departure was a lot chattier than the last, though, and far warmer despite the winter cold.

Jadis’ trek southward out of the valley was interrupted after only a few minutes, however. As was her inclination, Kerr had set to scouting around the wagon as they went, moving through the snowy underbrush surrounding the road. Maybe three minutes after they had pulled out of sight of the outermost village building, the archer came running up to Jadis.

“I found signs of a camp.”

“What camp? Where?” Jay asked, immediately on alert.

“How many people?” Aila chimed in from her seat on the wagon.

“Couldn’t tell how many but couldn’t have been more than a few based on the size of the fire,” Kerr explained as she pointed to the west. “It’s over there.”

In a flash Jadis had removed the harnesses from her bodies and had her weapons in hand. All three of her, along with Aila, followed Kerr to the site she had found. Eir, Thea, Sabina, and Bridget stayed behind with the wagon in case of ambush. Kerr didn’t have to lead them far, the camp she had found only a few hundred yards away from the road.

The campfire wasn’t much. In fact, if Kerr hadn’t pointed it out to her, Jadis never would have noticed it. A natural cluster of old rocks with a couple of small fir trees growing out from between them had created a small shelter. The snow in the little nook was lighter, but still present. However, as Kerr showed her, the snow was actually disturbed, having been taken from elsewhere to cover up the ash and soot of a recent fire.

“Whoever it was had to have been here last night,” Kerr said as swept some of the snow away to reveal a couple of shallow holes in the ground that might have been peg holes from a tent. “This wasn’t here yesterday, I found this hollow before and none of this was here. It’s a perfect spot to build a fire without exposing the light to anyone watching from the village.”

“You think it was a bandit scout?” Syd asked, keeping her eyes to the forest around them.

“I don’t know,” Kerr shook her head.

“Who else could it be?” Aila asked, frowning at the remnants of the fire. “There can’t be many other people out in these woods. It had to be the bandits.”

“I don’t know,” Kerr repeated as she rose from her crouch. She scanned the forest and trees as she spoke quietly, her tone as serious as it had ever been. “I found this fire, but no tracks. None at all. Those pute were decent at covering their tracks, but I still found plenty of signs. This camp? Nothing. Not one boot print for a hundred feet around it.”

“Alright,” Jay nodded. “Might be an unknown third party, but it could also just as easily be one of the bandits that we haven’t run into yet that’s better at hiding their movements than the others. Can you run back and inform Captain Willa of what you found? She should get the warning before we leave the valley.”

Kerr nodded and immediately jogged off, heading back north as quickly as she could go. As Jadis headed back to the wagon, she asked Aila a question while it was just the two of them.

“What are the chances of this being a demon camp?” At Aila’s raised eyebrow, Jay hurried to explain. “Not a bone thief or twisted wretch or anything like that. I mean a person possessed by a demon, like Jana was.”

Aila nodded slowly at Jadis’ reminder of the mercenary who had gotten separated from the group during their disastrous retreat from the village of Alawar into the demon tunnels. She had shown up later, apparently injured, but in fact possessed by a demon that had tried to kill them. While they had killed Jana, or disabled her corpse, depending on how one looked at it, the demon possessing her had slipped away unharmed.

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Aila allowed, though her face showed her doubt. “However, most people who are possessed are quick to try and infiltrate a community and then do as much damage as possible since their mimicry is imperfect and usually easy to identify by those who knew the original person.”

“But taking Alex into consideration,” Jay prompted. “Do you think maybe some of the possessed are a little better at it than others? Maybe enough to trick people who don’t know the person from before they were possessed?”

“Maybe.”

Aila’s pensive answer left them both with a lot to think about. Jadis wasn’t sure why she suspected the watcher to be of demonic origin, but the possibility was something she didn’t want to discount. Still, a bandit scout seemed more likely. Or, as she herself had suggested, an unknown third party. It wasn’t as though there weren’t quite a few different parties out there that had a strong interest in the things that she, the only “three” living Nephilim were up to. Jadis wouldn’t have been surprised at all if someone like General Egilhard had sent a spy to follow her on her expedition.

Somehow, the idea of Egilhard sending a spy to track her made Jadis’ thoughts turn far darker than they had when she’d been thinking of demons and possession.

Soon enough, Kerr returned to them after having reported her findings to Willa. With her back, Jadis resumed their march southward out of the Sweet Pine Valley so they could hopefully find her potential ally hiding somewhere out in the frozen forest. Whatever came next in her search, be it bandits, demons, or worse yet, politicians, Jadis would just have to make sure she and her team were strong enough to handle them.

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