Gaia spins, and her WORTHY children fight on. That was one of the few certainties left in the world for Alexander Gerifalte. Recent years had left him with another: there was always another monster. Small comfort. Certainly, less so than the obliging heat of a campfire for which he increasingly longed. He sent up fervent prayers to all the gods above, below, and in between that his task would be done swiftly, so that he could be home before the fall. His son was growing fast, and he wanted to be there to help his mates handle the rambunctious little scamp.
“What are you doing, half way across the damned continent Alexander? Why are you here, chasing some twist, instead of helping the forge masters smelt the High Copper and Argentum from those new mine shafts? Or, better, finishing half a dozen projects you had on backlog in the comfort of your shop?”
A half-moon, leaning low amidst the star scape, gave no answer. Nor did the chilled, damp wind of the witching hour, nor the swaying, stunted trees and briar latticed thickets. The thickly cloaked and lightly, if robustly, armored young man, alone in unfamiliar territory, peered suspiciously around the dark in case a Windego, or dire wolf, or ghoul, or whatever else that might find picking through his viscera interesting, came to irony’s aid. It was not uncommon that irony mostly functioned to make his life worse, but nothing took up the gauntlet. Not yet. Peace reigned over the late-night wood, which remained merely indifferently, passively wild, and the twenty-four-year-old got no closer to one of the great philosophical riddles of his life, namely: how do I get myself into these messes?
Alexander sighed into the deep hours of the night at the answer: because it needed to be done, and he was the best one to do it. So, he’d do it, end the string of murders, see justice done. And then he’d go home.
Home was in the settlement he’d helped build from the ruins of his hometown in the wilding forests of middle Maine, along a little goat trail of a state highway, a few hours from the coast, perched against the Appalachian Mountains. Home was a cozy old New England farmhouse, with its wood shutters, cast iron stove, and library of books inherited from his old man. Home was listening to his wife, Annita Nguyen, scold their ambitious two and half year old for climbing the furniture. Or digging through Alexander’s study, and the Not To Be Opened By Children chests therein. Or picking through his second wife Brigitte O’Connor’s trophies of monster hunts, scattering gemlike monster cores, teeth, and claws across the floor in whatever imagined battlefields toddlers created for their pleasure. There were many reasons young Durian Garifalte’s name was called through the house, those were but a few.
Alexander missed terribly the boy’s clangor on his much quieter sojourn through the wilderness. He missed many things about his home, not the least the warmth of soft skin pressed to his and the smell of the ones he loved as he slept.
A frown painted his features, mostly hidden beneath cowl of his heavy cloak, a somewhat boyishly handsome face, slightly angular, over serious, and frequently scowling or locked into a laser focus on some objective or other. That frown deepened when he admitted to himself now that he would have to continue to miss them for a bit longer. Today would be the forty-sixth day since leaving behind kith and kin to pursue a killer, and Alexander was ready to have done with it.
But today would not be the day. Neither tomorrow, unless his fortunes turned.
Before him lay the trail, such as it was, pointing him farther away, instead. Onward to the west, since the spate of murders that had prompted the settlement of Concorde, located in what had been the state of New Hampshire, back when such lines on a map had meaning, to send a request for aid to Falcon’s Rest.
Alexander Gerifalte’s surname had the meaning of “gyrfalcon” a favored species of hunting bird. His class was Entropic Venator, which framework of arcana and metaphysic enhancement was built around the concept of the hunt, the decisive kill. A bird, a name, a Class, signs came in threes, wasn’t that the superstition?
The young man held no truck with superstition, but he would be the last to claim all knowledge. Magic was real as the clay on his boots, as pervasive as the heavy chill coming down from Lake Michigan that would kill a man unprepared for the cold, damp air that failed to penetrate his cloak, even absent a fire’s warding. Besides, bird, name, and class, he couldn’t deny what he was.
There! There it was! A disturbance in the leaf litter, faint, little more than a divot that had scattered the winter detritus in a manner only his eyes amongst any of his neighbors and fellow Matriculated warriors would discern as sign of passage. With the quarry’s trail renewed, he prowled onward, keeping his cloak close, his bow ready.
Singer, a meticulously crafted compound long bow of his own design, was held with tension on its piano wire string, a stiletto tipped arrow, poisoned, as always, between his fingers. To draw and release would require a heartbeat. One beat for him, and then one final beat from his prey to see the task done, all the gods above, below, and in between willing.
Alexander was a hunter of monsters. Of all kinds.
One of the things he’d learned was that the game of prey and predator was turn and turn about on Gaia. To be careless was to find yourself on the wrong end of the contest. Mostly when you least expected it. A sniff of the air revealed nothing but the usual forest smells, slightly musty decay from the persistent damp of winter rains and too cool to ever dry off days. Ears attuned to the rhythms and melodies of woodlands that never slept found no discordant notes. Things moved, small animals crept, those natives of the midnight arbors still determined to find sustenance in the gap between winter dearth and spring plenty jostled around, just as they should. It was when the denizens of the forest went still that a man should worry.
Total stillness meant something bad was more immediately threatening than hunger. For the wild ones, it had to be quite dangerous indeed to be of more concern than hunger, for food was always precious to the fauna of the land. Silent, padding steps of his added nothing to the cadence of the wood, courtesy of both gifts of magic and long experience. Another miniscule scattering of leaves led, as it had since the chase had begun, deep through the wilderness of the Midwest, and with a bearing that directed him to the settlement of New Chicago.
He’d arrive tomorrow, probably mid-morning, at this rate. The hunt would not end then, probably, just enter a new phase, and one he loathed: city work. Nothing was so obnoxious as trailing a man, or man adjacent thing, through a populated settlement. Not as though his target was asking him his druthers. Despite the relative lack of sign it left, it was pushing, hard, toward the greater tangle of the reclaimed ruins of Chicago as if toward sanctuary. Or a lair. Man or beast, most creatures that knew they were pursued would attempt to return to a place of perceived safety, a home turf from which to defend with advantage. It was a familiar routine, like the chorus of a song Alexander had listened to many times now.
He’d come to embrace a role as something close to a bounty hunter, a seeker of justice, a monster hunter, or, depending on your perspective, an honorary hitman of Falcon’s Rest. He didn’t necessarily relish this place in his society, but somebody had to inhume the things that fed on what was left of humanity, and Alexander was good at it. Designed for it, nearly. The silence of his steps, the exquisite sensitivity and fidelity of his vision, the way his form blurred to the attempts of any creature to observe him with any specificity, and the lethality of his mana to living things, especially those for whom magic was integral. That was a condition becoming more ubiquitous, almost necessity on Gaia. Especially for the folk that now populated the remnants of man’s fallen glory.
Humanity was changed from before the Pulse.
Those for whom magic and mana was physically intolerable were Enshrined, transformed to stone in the very moment of the waking of Gaia, preserved by the planet that loved her sentient children but could not save them from her power. That was the first culling. The second came from the dungeons, as did humanity’s salvation.
On that note, Alexander was ready for a little salvation of his own, if only for his poor, tired muscles and shriveled stomach. Perpetual focus dulled the senses eventually, led to mistakes, lapses in judgement. He could afford neither, so he returned the arrow to its quiver and pulled Singer over his back, before he prepared a small fire in a hollow beneath a dense, difficult to access thicket. Here would be a temporary shelter for a meal and a few hours sleep. The tangled bramble and undergrowth made for a single easily navigable access pont, one he could readily defend. Efficient, practiced motions cleared a small piece of thicket floor, assembled stones for a pit, a base of damp sticks, nevertheless drier than the wet earth below his feet, and he had a single tongue of flame, fed generously within a few minutes effort. The wax, oil, and sawdust fire starters from his kit were miraculous for granting a weary traveler flame when suboptimal tender was available and time to improve it short. Wearly muscles finally relaxed as he huddled against the tree trunk around which the thicket grew and his fire began to project an even, comforting heat while its burning dance barely lit his hiding place.
From a pack now showing significant signs of wear, along with the rest of him, Alexander dug foodstuffs to break the ten hour fast of his last meal. He’d lost more than five pounds on this chase, too much, it would affect his combat readiness if he didn’t replenish lost calories, so he prepared generous portions. As always, Alexander’s mind drifted to the past while he went through familiar routines.
Shortly after the flood of magic that swept over the Earth when its consciousness awoke to godhood, came spaces called “contested zones”. These manifested alien life, impossible life, the kinds of things that haunted stories and fairytales, and nightmares, spawned from a giant gemstone of solid magic that harnessed Gaia’s arcane lifeblood. Mana to some. The Dragon Pulse, from those who had heard the planet’s own voice.
From those nexi of power, the dungeons arose. Some across the surface of the planet, large swathes of transformed space called “field dungeons”. Some hidden in pocket dimensions called “closed dungeons” spaces where the environment was wholly fabricated from the stuff of a foreign realm. These were separated from reality at large by glowing gates, often surrounded by what appeared to be stone temples or monuments akin to ancient Egyptian ruins, Druidic ritual places, and pagan cult sacrifice stones long abandoned by humanity by the time of the planet’s apotheosis.
“We forgot them, but they sure didn’t forget us.” Alexander chuckled to himself as he stirred the growing bed of coals to produce a hotter flame.
A sputtering log, damp with the recent spring rains, burned fitfully and with heavy smoke when he placed it on the fire. Long would it contribute to creating a bed of ash and cinder. Aggravating though such smoke could be, it was intentional on his part. Wet or green wood was best to make a dense, protective fog to ward him from the flying insects, who were ferocious. An early thaw and mild march had accelerated their hatching. They couldn’t bite through his skin, a tier three human was too tough a nut to crack for probing skeeter mouths, but they could, and did, annoy a man to madness in their trying.
And besides, there was a special something about a popping, hissing fire that drove back the darkness, and let you feel a little safer from the things that crawled around in it. Even if Alexander could see through the dark, he couldn’t deny the flame’s comfort, the easing of his mind.
Things tended to hunt in the night. As they always had, just not so often or in as sinister a manner as in the days before the Pulse. The way he figured it, weak places in the aetherscape, fleeting gaps in reality or quantum foam or whatever the fuck magic was, permitted things from beyond to travel between worlds. Probably not frequently, or in masse, or humanity would have been wiped out eons ago. But enough for their existences to be passed down in lore and story, mostly with a nice bright fire around to keep the fear of them at their mention at bay. The spawn of dungeons were mostly inimical to Gaian life. Fed on it. Hunted it. Loathed it.
As far as he knew, and Alexander had picked many a brain in search of answers from those early days of chaos, when the Pulse brought to Gaia’s surface enough mana for the dungeons to coalesce, these monsters poured out and consumed humans en masse. The second culling then, destroyed the cowards, the weak, those who were unwilling or unable to fight, until brave ones fought back and struck the hearts of the dungeons to destroy them. As Alexander had done, almost six years ago, to end the scourge of a horde of goblins, hobgoblins, and ogres from Tirnanog in his home town in upstate Maine, which later would be rebuilt as Falcon’s Rest. As he did again when zombies came calling from a budding necropolis a day’s long march away from his home. As he had done a dozen times since then, in defense of his people and his planet.
Alexander stirred once more the coals and then placed a foil package into its glowing heart, a wrap of wheat flower, beans, rice, peppers, and wild pig, the meat taken yesterday morning on his hunt for the murderer. Or murderers, Concorde had not been clear and the trail he followed had been deliberately obfuscated. If not for the clarity and sharpness of his Outsider’s eyes, he would not have been able to follow such minute traces of their passage. They knew he pursued them, tipped off about two days before his arrival to Concorde by some loose lipped numb nut, and he chewed his lip in frustration over that failure of intelligence. In all of its contexts.
As he covered his meal in ash to bake more slowly, as they often did when he was in repose, his thoughts pondered mortality. In many ways, he’d been born three times. First, when the Pulse knocked him from the sky, but also claimed him as one of her children. And then, when he Matriculated. That’s what they called advance from a tier one Normal, a regular human, into a Classed tier two human, with nascent blood line.
The first was given, the second, earned. You had to touch a dungeon core. Or kill it. He’d chosen the latter.
On slaying his first dungeon, he was transformed. His body was enriched by the liberated magic of the dungeon core, whose stolen energies quickened the genesis of a core inside his body and the gifts that Gaia bequeathed to those who fought the infestations of other worlds on her behalf.
When first he’d drank of the energies released by a dying dungeon core, that crystalline metaphysical parasite that fed on the planet’s mana currents to create pockets of other space, the seeds of realms beyond Earth, Gaia spoke to him. WORTHY he was named, and his being bolstered by the planet’s children to defend themselves. And it. Then had come the class, core and a bloodline, a Shaggoth, the immature version of some nascent mystical heritage. The third birth was when his bloodline matured, and he became an Outsider. He, and the people of Falcon’s Rest, had taken the first steps toward truly mastering the new world when they catalyzed their tier three advancement, wakening dormant powers and strange physiology by drinking the blood of a dragon.
Threes again, there if you looked for them, he noted with chagrin.
It had been a young one, the dragon, thank all the gods above, below, and in between, because the big ones were terrors. He’d run if he ever came face to face with a great old wyrm from one of the hundred and eight realms. But achieving tier three had been a thing worth celebrating, worth the close shave of tangling with a red wyrmling from Muspelheim, the land of fire.
A scattering of leaves sent the young Venator into a blur, hands moving faster than a Normal could follow, and he had his war bow pulled from his back, metal string drawn full, with thumb thick arrow topped by a half inch stiletto of an arrow head. A second from rest to combat posture, just as in the hundreds of hours of practice that made it second nature. Grey scale night vision resolved in sharp contrast the raccoon struggling through a briar caught in its fur that had prompted Alexander’s brief journey to defcon three. A release of tension, both in the bowstring and his body generally, accompanied the return to resting levels of ready to kill.
Gaia was dangerous. Unwary folk didn’t last long, especially alone. Alexander had spent the first eight months of the post apocalypse in isolation, a thing unheard of, and had survived it. It had required luck. Caution. Talent. And sheer teeth grit will to live no matter what. Grit defined most of those who survived the Pulse.
While he was up, he poked his fire again and drank from a half-full canteen of river water, before returning to a slouch that, as evidenced, wasn’t far from combat readiness before returning to his meandering about the past. A slain dragon, and the rich, iron tang of its blood. Followed by surging energy that roiled his core’s energies, magic that infused and saturated his body unlocking its potential, forcing its evolution. It had been a curious combination of pain and ecstasy.
That transition marked a drastic change in circumstances for the people of Falcon’s Rest. It had opened the doors to humanity’s survival. The reason being, tier one and two humans couldn’t reproduce, they were sterile, immature. But reaching tier three had permitted them to create children, new hope for a future for the species. His boy, carried a full year to birthing by his darling wife, a wonderful woman of Vietnamese descent, who bore a dryad bloodline with a harvester hybrid class, was proof of it. Annita Nguyen, with the spirit of a hedge witch, and a work ethic to shame a puritan, had demanded a child at the first opportunity, and he had granted her wish. Durian was born a tier two, a dryad like his mother, with a dormant class that not even Alexander’s Greater Analyze could decipher until it was ready to empower the child’s core.
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Granny Nguyen hoped he shared her harvester class, not her father’s more militant aspect. He did too. Her gifts made her a gatherer and cultivator, and more recently, alchemist of things green and growing. That was a beautiful thing. Perhaps the always inquisitive boy would take after his grandfather, be a tinker, a crafter, a smith and maker of things.
Alexander shook the thoughts away, he always turned maudlin thinking of his parents, still Enshrined in the vault at Falcon’s Rest, still awaiting him to find a cure for the petrification. He had come up empty these six years later, and the failure stung when he thought of it.
Instead, he forced himself to his remembrances from those days after Falcon’s Rest had kickstarted their own evolution. There had been some fears, his included, that you had to drink dragon blood to advance, but that turned out not to be the case. Draconic blood was merely a powerful catalyst that drastically shortened the incubation period, tier two humans would naturally, after four to five years, mature. But only if they were diligent in the exercise of their cores, drew on their powers, and grew them. It was like exercise, but for the metaphysical.
Classes. Bloodlines. Magic. Ravening monsters and dungeons that housed them. These were part of the new world, the new reality that had followed the Earth’s apotheosis, and the flood of aetherical might when her veins lit from within, surging with mana. For some, the differences were more obvious than for others.
For Alexander in particular, he had trouble convincing people he meant no harm. Most people didn’t get past the eyes, disturbing black sclera, vivid green and brown irises that reminded you of a bird of prey, instead of a human.
Those eyes closed briefly against an errant wind that drove the dense grey smoke into his face, forcing him to hold his breath or choke for a few moments. The glare leveled at the ascending column of almost indistinguishable from night cloud, would have made most cross the street, their hands to find and hold tight the hilts of their weapons. He couldn’t help the sinister cast to his gaze, any more than his excessive six-foot, four-inch height. Or his tendency to lapse into silence and stillness when he chewed on a problem in his thoughts.
At least, from afar, they mostly didn’t notice that the fine, silky hair was actually a dense, black, downy crest of feathers that grew in an approximation of a glossy, styled, back swept business cut. All told, his Outsider bloodline did him no favors in the social scene. Physical features distinct from Normals were more blatant for some bloodlines than for others. Most Jinn could pass unnoticed, and a Morrigan was normal enough except for the feathered markings on their skin, almost like tattoos. These relatively minor outward features contrasted with the Ifrit with the pale flames that rose from their skins when their ire was roused, or the Oreads, that towered over normal human stock, like giants, and, most of all, the Outsiders, which could have angelic wings spanning thirty feet, or multiple eyes and limbs.
Alexander used two middling small twigs as tongs to fish his dinner out of the campfire. The thick aluminum foil he carefully unwrapped, it being a gift of a friend to help him travel with food ready to heat as he had just done.
Since the fall of old mankind, such things as a metal foil were harder to come by. Less now than just after the Pulse. He’d played an important role in the northern regions in those early days by helping to make steam engines, based on the texts of a nuclear engineer father with a tinker’s heart. That got him scouted into a Guild, an organization of classed individuals for the fighting and harvesting of monsters and dungeons. Killing dungeons the Guilds were farming, instead of eradicating, got him kicked out of said Guild. And blacklisted from trading within that Guild’s territory, which was more or less a soft exile.
Karma was a bitch. The joke, a cruel one, was on them, when the dungeons they were farming went critical. When a dungeon core absorbs enough of Gaia’s mana, it “breaks” or explodes in a transfiguration of the surroundings into the realm from which it was seeded. Then the monsters trapped inside come out in a mob, instead of a few at a time. The land transformed in that event is, as far as anyone knew, permanently changed.
If the dungeon core becomes a Gateway, it opens a two-way path for a period of time between worlds.
Nobody had ever come back out of a Gateway though, so who knew what the other realms were like? He did know that some of the beings that cross the dimensional space were sapient. Hell, some of them were friendly, and not so shabby neighbors. But life on the frontier was tense and good fences was often what made good neighbors, in the immortal words of one Mr. Frost. Falcon’s Rest had a great big wall, and thus, most neighbors were tolerable.
But his mind wandered. Again. Avoiding remembering the tragic end to the tale that was the town of Safe Harbor and its Guilds. And two thirds of its population of over three thousand souls.
The hyper dungeon of Belfast Maine, all of its contributing cores, broke, and then the tide of horrors within washed over Safe Harbor and scoured it from Gaia’s surface. Destroyed it utterly and drove its people, all that could run, into flight. Of three thousand three hundred or so people, half of them Matriculated, only a thousand and change lived to escape to the safety of Falcon’s Rest and its fortified walls.
Alexander and sixty-four brave colonists had built a home for themselves free from the Guilds and a neobarony kind of emerging governance there in Safe Harbor. They’d elevated themselves to face the wilds and to take vengeance for an assassination of four of their number, meant to be many more, had not those brave souls laid down their lives to delay the murderers. Falcon’s Rest grew strong that winter, and hard. As well they had, or they would have shared in their sister settlement’s fate.
Instead, they fought and killed the monsters that chased the escaping peoples and took them in. He hadn’t been there for that, he’d been with an expedition to cull a dungeon threatening the town with werewolves, Dracul, or vampires, and these eyeless, maggot skinned cultists. Black hearted inflictors of pain as worship to their pain god The Flayed One, a race of monsters called Xiptotec. Skin Peelers by common parlance, so you might guess how much fun they were.
In any event, the citizens of Falcon’s Rest protected and sheltered the evacuees, and took them in, gave them a home. Amongst those, Alexander eventually found the man who had coordinated the decision to let the dungeons break, as well as gave the orders for the assassination team that attacked Falcon’s Rest earlier that year, and according to rule seven of the Contract, killed him, after months spent investigating, questioning, and following breadcrumbs left behind.
That act of justifiable manslaughter and persistent gumshoeing got him elected Sheriff.
Not really, there was no such official office within Falcon’s Rest, but Alexander had garnered a sort of tacit understanding with the town’s leadership. When a Matriculated broke the laws or circumvented them to do his fellow man harm, and the Adventurer parties either weren’t available or weren’t equipped to handle it, then Alexander was called on to act for the good of the region. He named himself sheriff because he had to joke about it or he grew annoyed, and a bit sad. Human life was precious. They were so few now. So very few. And every one lost was a tragedy. But, sometimes, cancer required surgery to save the patient, as painful as it was.
Idly, since he had little better to do while chewing his food than brood, he called the blue scroll that Matriculated could summon that encapsulated their being.
Given his skills and abilities as Entropic Venator, as well as Outsider, Alexander was best able to function as a culler for the sickos that might attempt to abuse their powers to harm other people. Entropic magic that unraveled most spells or manipulations of mana and pierced Soak, the mana barrier that acted to buffer damage to the living things with cores. And skills and arcana that all seemed geared toward single minded stealthy pursuit, with a bitter end. An end that the folk of Safe Harbor, and Falcon’s Rest, and all the other settlements, come think of it, had thought avoided by use of the Contract.
Law mages, Classes who could impose a set of strictures on willing Matriculated, magical lawyers in effect, had very quickly emerged after the Pulse and society had gravitated around them to enact a set of bindings to prevent supernatural gifts from being used maliciously. A Contract, with its strictures and compulsions, was supposed to prevent such things as the assassination attempt from the Guilds, among other things. However, outside of destroying free will, nothing would stop evil men from doing evil. Except for killing them. Hence Alexander being here, not a day’s hike from the ruins of Chicago, where New Chicago sprouted from its remains, and a maybe multiple, but definitely cannibalistic, murderer was on the loose.
Fan-damn-tastic.
On that note, the road weary young man huddled deep inside his cloak and, with the fire burning low now, closed his eyes to gain what fitful sleep was available to him. Three hours later, he woke, greatly refreshed, but not fully rested. That would have to wait until his duty was complete. In the dim predawn he ventured from the thicket and resumed tracking. Spacing between the target’s mistakes was shrinking, broken branches or trodden limbs becoming more frequent as he ascended hills, skids where steps too hasty, too tired to be well measured on the downslopes began to appear.
Finally.
Alexander had wondered if the man, men, or something else entirely he hunted was immune to exhaustion. It appeared it was not, merely incredibly resilient. At least as much, if not moreso than himself. Troubling, that. Alexander was in the peak of his lifespan, with a tier three body honed by combat, training, and the energies of the dungeon cores he’d slain. For something to outpace him meant it was no doubt going to prove gnarly once he’d actually caught it. If he could manage, the sonofabitch would never know he was there before he’d put a chaos infused arrow into it.
An hour and change later, from the top of one last small rise and Alexander saw the terminal point to this phase of the hunt: the shoreline of the Great Lakes and the settlement that sprawled along its shores. This mission, the fourth like it in the three years since he’d accepted the burden of culling rogue Matriculated, had taken him all the long way to the outskirts of New Chicago, one of the largest cities left in the North American Continent, and the biggest by far in the Midwest. He looked out over the expanse from between limbs growing fuller with budding leaves, and managed a smile at the returning prairie, grown wondrous with color in its spring bloom. The ugliness of the ruins of what had been a major metropolitan area detracted greatly from his view.
Credit where it was due, he couldn’t imagine managing to do much better to recover from the ravages of Gaia’s apotheosis given the dense urbanity, the high rises, packed together buildings, and narrow streets. How goddawful would it have been to come out of a coffee joint to see a street with thousands of statues silently judging you, just before all hell broke loose from every direction? Pretty fucking, Alexander decided, while making careful way down from the incline toward the oft trod paths that led toward the settlement. The quarry’s tracks were now devoid of attempt to obscure themselves, it had made all haste toward the city and merged with the foot traffic of those who lived in and around the capital of the Midwest.
Weaker in the south though it was, where the magnetic Maridians of the planet had spread out the mana, the Pulse had done its work here too, had petrified the elderly and the young, and left a fair number of the in between Enshrined in stone. Alexander scanned the lake shore, the glittering golds and reds of dawn’s light skipping over the wind driven waves of the water resplendent and wondered briefly what had happened to all those thousands of petrified bodies. He and his fellows had placed their Enshrined in a large vault to be kept safe until such time as a cure could be found. Or left intact in memorial if one could not. An idle thought, and he passed on, drifting his hands idly over the tall grass and flowered stalks, closer to the center of the one time metropolis.
Still was, honestly, he realized. More people roamed around in squared off gardens, plying trades, and coming hither and yon from between clusters of structures like a web of small villages or homestead compounds that grew closer together the nearer they came to the huge wall that encircled the city proper than he’d seen in his entire life. It made him vaguely uneasy, this many together in one place.
No beasts, no monsters, no dungeon spawn or sign at all, as far as he could see. The kernel of peoples left must have been resilient, must have fought back against the monsters that spawned from Gaia’s emptied wilds. A good sign, a reason for hope. With this many people out and about, many unarmed, the dungeons that manifested nearby must have been vanquished. These folk had ground out what made for a peaceful, bustling metropolis. Relatively speaking.
Large populations had meant plenty of food for dungeon creatures, which had accelerated dungeon growth. According to travelers’ tales, and the sights of his own eyes as he’d gone wide around some of wrecks of Boston, New York City, and others, many of the old human cities had been completely destroyed and succumbed to consumption by the contested zones in the first great wave of dungeon breaks across Gaia. The same set of breaks three years past that had caused Safe Harbor to fall to ruin and Falcon’s Rest to become the lone bastion of civilization in the North American continent, so far as its citizens had heard.
Old Chicago might have suffered the same fate. The only difference was, that Old Chicago had been a conflux of many trade routes, had been a nexus for humanity, and, when a haven emerged thanks to those who had survived the initial fall of man, it drew survivors like a lodestone draws iron filings. Folk in smaller pockets gravitated toward it. Little villages of a hundred here, forty there, they packed up when traders and scouts came through with word of an actual city. New Chicago was born from these migrations.
Alexander had to give these Flatlanders no small credit indeed, they’d cleaned up the Midwest with a vengeance. He hadn’t spotted a monster or Gaian spawned super predator since he’d bypassed the clusterfuck of transfigured regions that bespoke a Cleveland hyper dungeon break. That had gotten hairy, and he’d needed every trick in his tool kit to keep to the trail of his prey while harpies canvassed the skies for anything edible. But, since then, nothing to indicate that any dungeons had long lived to spew critters that belonged in a Brother’s Grimm compendium.
That was almost a pity, if there had been more hazards along the way, maybe the man or thing that looked like a man, would have run into trouble, maybe some nasty spook would have saved him some time. That hadn’t happened, and Alexander didn’t foresee it happening. His luck wasn’t that good.
No, unfortunately, his quarry had skills, and a class that was suited to covering ground, that was sure. They also had experience living off the land and doing it very goddamned well. Alexander could see through darkness as well as daylight, thanks to the disturbing black and green eyes that were a product of his Outsider lineage. Thanks to that, a tier three constitution, and the infusion of conquered dungeons, he pulled fourteen and sixteen hour days following the winding track and still could not close the gap. Worse, the killers left no fires. Made no camps. Left little spore. And they always found water where it was good and clean and easily had. As if they knew the landscape ahead of time. Maybe they did. Maybe they even knew where he was, which wasn’t impossible.
Bonnie Richards could use a hawk to scout the way for her, seeing through its eyes, covering hundreds of miles of terrain from the sky. Maybe these had some other way to scry their surroundings. He couldn’t know, he could only try to consider the possibilities and prepare for them.
Gaia’s mysteries were many and she was loath to give them up. Especially unearned. You want Gaia to doll out her mind filling wisdom, you have to kill a dungeon for it. When he finally laid a Greater Analyze on the sonsofbitches he’d probably just shake his head at the magical horseshit Gaia brewed up.
That was enough though. He was here, on the outer edges of the city, two days behind his target whose trail vanished amongst the fresh foot travel of hundreds. Today he would try to find a needle in a stack of needles, with the added fun of doing it through the unfamiliar warrens of New Chicago
