Seated among the leading members of the Adventure Society in Hennings, Mage-adept Hana Sovros was somewhat distracted by the new and improved secret council hall in which they were currently meeting. The tall recessed ceiling along with the specially ordered ornate stone table in the center of the room gave their proceedings a certain amount of gravitas which had been lacking up until now. All in all, it was quite the upgrade from their comparatively less-than-impressive meeting room in the Tower of Magic.

  Truthfully, she hadn’t expected the newly formed council to progress as quickly as it had. Of course, considering how easily the motion to unify the various groups that followed the Walker across the city had passed, she shouldn’t have been surprised. With so many new members joining up, it only made sense for them to have acquired their own building.

  That said, with change came progress. First, there was the nearly unanimous vote to organize dues along with a formal hierarchy. Then there was the codified set of rules and procedures that everyone could agree on which had needed to be ratified. New ideas and interpretations of how best to proceed had been a constant source of discussion considering all the new people coming in from the Royal Academy, Center, Merchant groups, and various other local powers,

  While some people were unhappy with having their ‘club’ becoming something more, Hana couldn’t have been happier. While at first, she’d just signed up to gain access to the scry records of the Walker, she had now become a true believer. Having found so many like-minded people from all across Hennings, it felt like an affirmation of everything she’d been feeling but not able to express.

  Returning her attention to the proceedings going on around her, she mentally reviewed what her mind had heard, but not yet listened to. It seemed that the representative from the Royal Academy’s chapter of the Adventure Society, Scholar Parkinson, had been giving a rather interesting report on some unexpected developments.

  Apparently, he and some of their members had been in contact with the former evaluators who’d left Hennings to personally serve the Walker in Dorchester. And while initially these former evaluators hadn’t intended to stay in contact with anyone from Hennings, arrangements had been to ‘misappropriate’ a pair of twinned communication orbs that had formerly belonged to the Academy. Now back in contact through such a secure medium, Scholar Parkinson had learned that a new chapter of the Adventure Society had been founded in Dorchester.

  “... and so you can see, they’ve chosen to go in a very different direction than we have,” finished Scholar Parkinson.

  Addressing the table, Hana noted, “Well, it makes sense that they would focus on a more practical interpretation of our policies. If they had questions about what the Walker taught, they could just ask him. We, however, are limited by distance and are therefore forced to rely only on our own interpretations.”

  Across the stone table, Merchant Xikis asked, “Have they provided any insights that we should apply to the codex?”

  Hearing mention of the codex, Hana, along with everyone else, glanced toward the end of the hall at the marble pillar that sat behind a specially created ward. Hovering above it was the codex, the handbound book of teachings painstakingly transcribed from the scrys of the Walker. While it had been hastily put together, it was the current culmination of everything they’d learned since the Walker had arrived on this plane of existence.

  Scholar Parkinson replied, “Not as such. Although, they do seem to have some slight differences in interpretations that might be beneficial for us to discuss.”

  Everyone in the room perked up. This was, after all, what most of them were here for. The Adventure Society had been primarily a venue for debate and analysis of everything the Walker said and did. In a way, it was the very reason their society had been founded in the first place.

  At the head of the table, Archmage Sorenson who was the newly elected head of the council, refocused the conversation by saying, “Interpretations can wait. I’d like to hear more about the ‘recommended’ classes at the local Center they’re having their members attend. And when you say, ‘They’re encouraging them to hunt’, what exactly do you mean by that?”

  Scholar Parkinson replied, “I meant just that. The Adventure Society in Dorchester seemingly isn’t focusing solely on discussing the Walker’s teachings. Instead, they’re organizing groups of people to sign up as teams in the local Hunter’s Hall to accept commissions. The classes I mentioned are part of the lesson plan they developed to help people refine and invigorate their paths. According to them, discussions of the Walker and his teachings don’t affect the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what they do. In other words, the Walker’s teachings aren’t the focus of their society, as they are more interested in using him as an example to follow. They do, however, still rely on his wisdom to show them the way.”

  Both interested and a little surprised, Hana responded, “So they’re more focused on creating a culture of adventure rather than exploring the Walker’s teachings. I can see that being effective in the short term, but in time most of their membership will likely return to their old habits. Without having studied and learned from the Walker, they will never become the adventurers they could be.”

  Archmage Sorenson replied, “I agree. But, I also believe this may be the perfect opportunity to apply one the Walker’s lessons - ‘Only dipshits think their way is the only way’’. We should work with the Dorchester chapter on their lesson plan and begin to organize some adventures for our members here in Hennings as well.”

  Eager to prove that she was just as knowledgable about the Walker as anyone else, Hana replied with one of the universally agreed upon precepts that had been eternalized into the codex, “The thirty-first rule of Adventuring states that if it’s crazy and it works, then it’s not crazy.”

  In response, everyone took a moment to bow their heads in silent agreement and contemplation at having heard the Rules of Adventuring referenced.

  —--

  According to what little Nero knew of the plan, the kobald encampment they would be passing through was supposed to have been cleared out. The high-level super dwarves had sent the kobalds running for their lives when they blew past them on the way to the throne room. In fact, the only reason the army had come to collect his Wackos in the first place was because they were worried about the remnants of the kobald force regrouping at the former portal site. So, it came as a bit of a shock to hear the sounds of battle erupting further up the tunnel.

  Along with everyone else, Nero drew his weapon and got ready. Even though he was somewhat near the back of the formation, he knew that in battle things could change rapidly.

  “We’re in range of the Battle Hub! Connect with your team channels and wait for your orders!” shouted a voice echoing down the tunnel.

  Doing as he was told, Nero mentally reached out to the link in his pocket and connected to the Battle Hub. He quickly skimmed through the list of the available channels, connecting to both the command channel and the one for his team. Technically he was still listed as a ranged caster, although he doubted he’d be of much use as one until the front line managed to push out of the tunnel.

  Listening in on the command channel, Nero heard Cathleen shouting orders while dressing down the scouts who’d apparently been fooled by an illusion.

  ‘Did they walk us into a trap?’ Nero wondered while spreading out his perception field as far as it could go.

  Unfortunately, even with how far he could stretch his senses, it wasn’t enough to reach the front of the tunnel where the fighting was currently happening. The tunnel they were in wasn’t all that wide, and the formation stretched a fair bit of distance, leaving him far away from the battle.

  Growling to himself in annoyance, Nero debated whether or not he should try to slip through the crowd to join the frontline fighters who were currently having all the fun. The last thing he wanted was for everyone to get mad at him again for being so awesome. On the other hand, what was the point of founding a force of madmen… madwomen… madpeople, and charging into danger if he didn’t get to actually participate in the adventure.

  But, before he could come to a decision, he began to see wounded Wackos being pulled back through the formation deeper into the tunnel. Fresh troops were obviously replacing them, as the formation began moving forward a few steps at a time. Near the edges of his perception field, he could see the healers already beginning to attend to the casualties, occasionally even having to resuscitate a few people who’d suffered a lucky shot or two.

  Unwilling to sit back and wait for his turn, Nero flexed his will to manipulate the essence around him. Once more like a ghost, he slipped through the crowd. While dodging people in such tight quarters wasn’t easy, he was getting surprisingly good at hiding his presence. Even when he bumped into someone, they didn’t seem to notice. All the while, he kept his eyes on the wounded, surprised at how many injuries he was seeing.

  ‘What the hell did they run into up there? Why are we getting our asses kicked?’ he wondered.

  By the time Nero finally got to where they were dropping off the casualties, the edges of Nero’s perception field allowed him a glimpse of the situation. He quickly dropped his hiding technique to allow his brain to multitask so he could pay attention to both what was happening and who he’d be healing.

  Edging one of the healers out of the way, Nero said, “I got this one. Just focus on the wounded.”

  With barely an acknowledgment that she’d heard him, the healer he’d interrupted moved on to the next patient in line waiting for healing. Meanwhile, Nero focused on resuscitating the corpse in front of him while part of his mind tried to interpret what he was seeing near the front line.

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  It looked like the kobalds had set up a curved illusionary space to hide themselves behind a fake stone-like wall. The frontline fighters seemed to be struggling to defend themselves. While Nero could tell they’d figured out what they were seeing was an illusion, it was obvious they had no idea what to do about it. And honestly, if it weren’t for his ability to perceive essence the way he could, he’d likely have fallen for it too.

  From where he was currently at in the formation, he wasn’t able to reach the illusion with his mental probes. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He could reach it, he just couldn’t do anything about it. It was simply too far away.

  Once again caught between the need to be here to deal with the wounded and his desire to help the Wackos who were still fighting. Not allowing himself to be distracted, Nero forced himself to focus on bringing the corpse he was working on back to life.

  After using a couple of healing spells to fix the ripped-apart throat and collarbone, Nero didn’t waste time being gentle and just yanked the Wacko’s soul back into his body.

  The not-so-dead-anymore corpse shot up like an overdosed heroin addict receiving adrenaline shot directly into his heart, latching onto him with both hands. Already crying, the newly revived Wacko wrapped his arms around his neck and whimpered, “Thank you, my lord! Thank you!”

  Patting him gently on the back while he tried and failed to pry the man’s arms off him, he muttered, “Um… yeah, you’re fine now. Nothing to worry about. It was all just a bad dream.”

  His frown grew more and more pronounced as he watched the increasing number of Wackos being funneled back through the formation. Through his perception field, he could see the front-line fighters swinging their blades, spears, and abilities like drunken lunatics at what looked like a solid wall of stone. Occasionally, a kobald would slip out of the illusion, popping up out of nowhere to land a few hits with their simple but effective weapons.

  He could hear Cathleen calling for them to pull back while ordering the mages to move up to the front so they could cover their retreat with a shield. The edge of the tunnel they were fighting in was only a few paces wide, and there wasn’t a lot of room for them to maneuver.

  He could immediately tell what her plan was.

  She was obviously hoping to bait the little monsters out of their illusion so that the front-line fighters could see who they were facing. Intending to fight them in the tunnel, Cathleen would likely be relying on the fact that kobalds were by and large incapable of stopping themselves from engaging in combat like rabid animals on a sugar high.

  The only problem was that Nero couldn’t tell how many kobalds were on the other side of the illusion. Instead of it being a static spell construct, the illusion the kobalds were using was more like an active spell. They clearly had more than a few shamans or casters maintaining and adapting it to hide their fighters.

  Even with their disadvantage, Nero could see that the Wackos were putting up one hell of a fight. For every Wacko that went down, they took two or three kobalds down along with them. The only ones who seemed to be able to react fast enough to avoid injuries were Cathleen and Angelton.

  Looking down at the barely breathing body that had just been handed to him, Nero’s eyes widened in shock at seeing the normally strong and self-assured Natalie Keening bleeding to death. She had a large gash across her thigh, along with several stab wounds around her belly.

  “My lord…” she whispered before falling into a coughing fit and spitting up blood like she was aiming for an Oscar.

  Furrowing his brow in anger, Nero snapped a spell form into place while reaching out to collect what little soul stuff had begun to coalesce at the edges of his perception field. He could tell the kobalds had either begun to catch on to what he’d been doing because he was barely able to get a hold of a single stream of soul essence. Or, probably more likely, the kobalds on the other side of the illusion had already set up a collection ritual to power their spells and were therefore hogging it all.

  Forced to rely on his own center, Nero firmed his will as best he could and began healing Natalie as quickly as possible. While pumping his center into the spell form, Nero couldn’t help but notice how inefficient he was being. And if it weren’t for his prodigious skill at reinforcing his center, he knew that he’d be emptying his entire center just to keep the woman alive. Without the soul stuff, he didn’t have the near-infinite center that he’d gotten used to.

  Realizing that this level of casting wasn’t sustainable, Nero quickly stabilized Natalie before handing her off to the healer seated right next to him.

  “You guys keep doing what you can. I’m going to go even the playing field,” he said while slipping forward through the formation toward the frontline.

  Ignoring the loud, somewhat awkward requests from the healers for him to remain with them, Nero muttered under his breath, “They can’t accuse me of being overpowered if I don’t do anything too flashy. Jennings you nosy bitch, if you’re watching, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just widening their path.”

  The closer he got to the fighting, the clearer his picture of what was happening in his perception field became. He figured it was something like being nearsighted but with essence instead of his vision. The distance seemed to be a factor in every aspect of his essence field. It also became easier to manipulate essence flows and constructs the closer he got to them.

  Unfortunately, the constructs the kobalds were using for their illusions were being actively fed by mages and shamans. He couldn’t take control of them. It was like trying to overpower a spell connected to someone's center. The essence flows were refusing to cooperate with him. He’d have more luck trying to grab onto a smoke.

  Undeterred, Nero kept slipping between Wackos as he pushed his way further up the tunnel. He could feel the tension building in the ether as the area went from a near-combat zone to an active one. The moment he crossed over into the active control range of the enemy’s essence fields, he felt the ether change. All he could do was grumble in annoyance at now being ‘in combat’ and having to adjust his thinking so that he could still cast spells.

  ‘Why can’t magic here be simple,’ he complained.

  While ducking under the elbow of a Wacko who was waiting for their turn at the melee, Nero detached his emotions from the overlapping essence fields and began collecting what little essence he could in order to power his essence shield. He decided to hold off on forming his mage armor, as he didn’t feel like it was a good idea to waste his center if he wouldn’t be able to so easily recover it.

  Barely a minute later, he was right behind the front-line fighters, catching glimpses of the illusion that was covering the kobald’s advance. Taking into account the fact that he couldn’t affect the illusion directly, at least not easily, he instead decided to nip the problem in the bud.

  Between his hands, he formed an overcharged acid ball spell and prepared to lob it into the illusion as if it were a grenade. Granted, he probably should have tested a weaker spell to ensure that the illusion was actually an illusion of a stone wall and not an actual constructed stone wall, but he’d already released his spell before he thought of that. Although he couldn’t ‘see’ what was happening on the other side of the wall, he was able to use his perception field to have a general idea of where the illusion was drawing its power from.

  ‘Shit! Don’t hit the wall! Don’t hit the wall! Kobalds can go through, right? My spell should be able to too. The wall is an illusion. There is no wall…’ his thoughts raced as he watched his spell construct fly.

  Luckily, his construct went straight through the illusion as if wasn’t even there. He did, however, notice that his construct paused for just a moment when it made contact, as if it weren’t sure exactly if it should be able to make it through. But, with a small flex of will, he was able to assure his construct that the wall was only an illusion, and not really there. It had happened so quickly, that it had felt like an instinctive reaction rather than a conscious decision to alter his spell while it was in flight.

  ‘Huh… I didn’t know I could do that. And really? All of reality here is affected by perception? I wonder if people that are batshit insane can make their surroundings as crazy as they are. High-level wizards on the local equivalent of acid must be all kinds of fun to be around,’ he thought to himself.

  While he was pondering on the nature of reality and whether or not anything he knew about physics actually mattered, his spell construct exploded. His aim must have been pretty good because he felt a few of the threads connecting the spell constructs back to the shamans and casters disappear. While it didn’t cause the illusion to falter in the slightest, it did make it so they were no longer being actively controlled so strongly.

  Reaching out with his mental probe, he shoved his mind into the spell construct and attempted to rip control away from the few kobalds who’d managed to keep hold of it. As a result, he felt like he’d just slammed his head into a wall. He recalled that the last time he’d tried to actively take control of someone else’s spell was back in the wilds when those assholes had tried to assassinate him.

  For just a moment, his thoughts trailed off toward that one guy who’d survived, ratted out his boss, and subsequently joined up with the Wackos while on work release. ‘I wonder what that guy is up to? I hope he didn’t die up at the portal. That would suck. He was really turning his life around,’ Nero thought to himself before refocusing on what he’d been doing.

  Gritting his teeth, Nero pulled back for a second before hurling his mind at the construct like a battering ram. Quickly deciding that he needed a bit of extra power, he added a little bit of center into the string of mental energy leading off from his brain.

  The moment he did, he almost lost control of what he was doing. He hadn’t ever visualized his mental probe so clearly before, and seeing his center infusing itself into the mind connection through his essence field nearly blew his mind. Just like numerous times before when he’d done something by instinct, the action spurred a deluge of insights into the nature of reality which he’d been ignorant of up until right before he’d done something impossible.

  He remembered reading once that perception fields were made up of mind and soul, but he hadn’t realized what they actually meant. Now, he could ‘see’ it, and it was mindblowing.

  Conveniently, his minor epiphany didn’t affect his ability to rip apart the controlling mechanism of the spell construct, and the illusion came apart like confetti burning up into the ether.

  Seeing what the dissipating illusion revealed, Nero couldn’t help but mutter under his breath, “Well… shit.”

  If someone were to look up the definition of horde in the dictionary, then what they’d see is exactly what had been hidden behind that illusion. There must have been hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. Nero couldn’t tell for sure because they were packed together so tightly that they formed a solid wall of evil little hangry lizards.

  With the illusion dropping, the combat seemed to pause for a moment as everyone took a second to reassess their position and optimal strategy before they continued.

  Unsurprisingly, it was his Wackos who recovered first, led by Cathleen and Angelton. They shot forward into the kobald line like wrecking balls, eviscerating kobalds by the dozens.

  Over the command channel, Nero heard Cathleen shouting, “Mages! Get up here and get that shield in place! We’re going to hold them at the entrance and chew threw them until either we’re full or they’re dead!”

  Thinking to himself, Nero said, ‘Damn is that woman intense.’