Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion - Chapter 63 - Er’al’ealia? Vaegon? Where Do They Come Up With These Names?

Melissa Donavan watched from the trees.

The elves, she’d found, were difficult to kill. She’d only ever gone after them when they’d been alone. Killing them didn’t bring the feelings she’d expected—guilt, heartache, a sense of having done wrong.

No, killing them had felt right. Not good—but right.

There was a difference, she knew. A difference she understood in her heart. Maybe her soul, if such a thing existed.

These elves were alien invaders, come to take her planet. Worse, come to take her forest. It wasn’t only the quest that kept her here—the one that told her to survive in the forest with the invaders—it was the fact that these bastards were trying to take her sanctuary.

And so she watched, high up in a tree, peering down at the elven camp. There were at least two hundred of them. After that first elf had stepped out of the portal, she’d almost loosed an arrow at him.

Then more had come, and they hadn’t stopped coming for a good while. She’d shrunk back into the wilderness and made herself hidden. Made herself small. Made herself invisible. It was something she’d always been good at.

And in doing so, she’d gained a skill called Stealth, one she’d levelled up relentlessly over the past few days of stalking her prey.

The elves knew they were being hunted. They spoke to each other in a language she didn’t understand—a language that the System would not translate for her, but she could tell they knew. Their words were melodic and pure. Almost sounded like the bastards were singing instead of speaking.

Tolkien would have, no doubt, felt vindicated. Their language even sounded similar to what she remembered the elves in Lord of the Rings sounding like. Not that she’d spent a great deal of time watching those movies.

That made her mind go on a tangent, something it was prone to do while she spent long hours silent in the trees, observing her enemy, gaining ranks in Stealth the longer she remained unseen.

If elves are real, does that mean we didn’t come up with their race on our own? Did we somehow know of their existence? When Tolkien penned his epic, did his creativity tap into some hidden knowledge of the universe, the words he inked closer to truth than fiction?

Melissa smiled to herself. Who bloody knows?

The elves, not doing much of interest, lost her attention for a moment. Melissa turned her gaze to the rest of the forest. From her vantage point, she could see over the tall canopy of branches. Could see just how far this forest stretched.

In her first days out here, all she’d focused on was survival. Killing animals-turned-beasts, gaining levels, finding water and cooking food. She’d been in a daze. Maybe even in shock, come to think of it. There were strange things about the forest—beyond the killer bunnies and the elves stepping out through portals.

Then she’d realised there were more animals in the forest than there should have been.

At first, she’d thought she must be in the local nature reserve near the city of Fronton, where she’d grown up. But then she’d encountered a pack of wolves that had almost savaged her to death.

Though she hadn’t come out of that encounter unscathed, she’d certainly discovered the necessity of boosting her Toughness attribute.

Seeing the wolves had snapped something into focus—there were no wolves near Fronton. None in the entire damned state. Which meant she couldn’t be near Fronton. She must have been thrown farther afield than she’d thought.

No matter. She didn’t have any intention to trek back to civilisation.

But then she’d seen something else. Something she knew certainly shouldn’t be in her forest. Not in any forest in North America.

A kangaroo.

It was wild. Tall. Had vicious claws that looked like they’d mutated and become strong and sharp enough to punch through steel. And God, it looked like a damned bodybuilder.

But it shouldn’t have been here.

Which, for a moment, had made her wonder if she’d been teleported to Australia. Only, Australia—she was sure—didn’t have wolves, and many of the plants she’d seen were, to her knowledge, native to America.

And that was why Melissa Donavan had taken a moment away from observing the enemy elves—thirteen of which she’d managed to kill when they’d strayed too far from their camp over the last couple of days—to gaze at the rest of the forest.

It’s too big. Too varied. The animals here are wrong.

It was still Earth. She was mostly sure of that. But it wasn’t her Earth. Wasn’t the Earth she’d known her entire life. The System had changed it in some fundamental way—in the same way that it had changed her, given her abilities she couldn’t have possessed before.

As she stared out at the forest, something caught her ear. Something incongruous, and completely out of place. An engine… a motorcycle engine? She swivelled her head to the left, but the canopy was too dense for her to get a look at it. All she could do was hear it.

It someone riding a dirt bike out here?

Seemed like a damned foolish thing to do, if she had any say in matters. That was one way to attract just about every hostile animal in the entire forest—and damn near everything was hostile now except the trees themselves, and she could still be wrong about that.

The elves’ sharp ears perked, heads turning in the direction of the sound. Weapons appeared in hands. Bows, swords and staffs. Roughly two hundred elves stared off in the direction the noise was coming from.

The revving halted, becoming a low thrum, then a violent noise cut through the sudden quiet.

Pop-pop-pop-pop!

It sounded almost like metal punching through cardboard, but she knew what that was—

Gunfire.

Melissa wasn’t much for company. She was happy to do everything herself, if need be. But she supposed someone handy with a gun wouldn’t go astray in a situation like this.

She looked down at her own weapon. The bow she’d received when this had all started. Wondered if a gun would be a better choice, even after all the practice she’d had with this thing.

The elves began running. En masse. Toward the noise.

Melissa released a sigh. Whoever that idiot on the motorcycle with the gun was, they were liable to get themselves killed by a whole lot of elves. At least two hundred of them. And that portal was still standing open—it was what they’d built their camp around.

Melissa herself wasn’t an idiot. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to kill this many elves on her own—not all at once, at least—and save whoever that was out there. She’d chosen her moral faction, fight for yourself, for a reason, and that reason still held true.

It wasn’t that she didn’t care about others. She did. She simply wasn’t going to put her own life on the line for them. How would her getting herself killed help this situation?

That would just be two people killed by elves in the middle of a massive forest.

No, she knew her actions weren’t going to save anyone, but she also wasn’t one to let an opportunity slip through her fingers.

Stealth.

Melissa pulled an arrow from her quiver, nocked, pulled back her string, and aimed at the elf farthest back from the pack. A woman that none of the others could see, for she was the last out of the camp. A woman that they wouldn’t notice was gone until much later, what with all the excitement.

She loosed the arrow, using Precision Power Shot—a spell she’d ranked up all the way to 8. She’d gotten the cooldown to half a second.

Her aim was perfect. The arrow slammed straight into the back of the elf’s head, killing her instantly.

You have defeated a Level 9 Elf!

You have gained 900 Mastery Points.

You have gained 900 Spirit Energy.

Melissa took out three more elves like this before she knew she’d need to get on the ground to pursue.

Stealth.

She slipped down the tree, from branch to branch, quiet as a falling leaf drifting to the ground, and silently set her feet upon the grass.

Then she was off. The noise the elves made bounding through the forest masked the sound of her own rushing feet.

You have defeated a Level 10 Elf!

You have gained 1500 Mastery Points.

You have gained 1500 Spirit Energy.

You have defeated a Level 11 Elf!

You have gained 1650 Mastery Points.

You have gained 1650 Spirit Energy.

The elves went down easy. Easy as they ever had. Even when they were a higher level than her. Her Stealth skill gave her a double-damage bonus to an opponent unaware of her presence, and she took full advantage of it. Her Precision Power Shot let her hit the target dead-on in the most vulnerable area she could sight.

Killing these bastards was easy as anything.

The sound of the motorcycle’s revving grew louder and louder. Closer and closer. After taking out twenty of the elves, Melissa slipped back into obscurity, not wanting to be too close when they encountered whoever had that gun.

I might get hit by a stray bullet.

When she saw the elves slow, she scrambled up a tree, nimble, fast and quiet, and got a good vantage point. Saw the motorcyclist—the dirt biker—put a foot down and skid to a halt twenty feet from the elves, who had their arrows trained on the man.

The dirt biker swore, shook his head, then dismounted off his dirt bike and kicked the stand to keep the thing upright. He had one gun already drawn in his left—looked like a six-shooter revolver—and he drew another into his right once his hand was no longer on the bike’s throttle. How he’d managed to clutch through the gears with that gun in his left, Melissa didn’t know.

Two bandoleers of bullets were criss-crossed about his chest, and a cigarette jutted out of his mouth. He had a few days’ worth of stubble creeping up his neck, across his chin and up his cheeks.

He spoke around the cigarette. “You fellas don’t wanna be making any trouble now, do ya? There may be mor’a you than me, but I’ll take a good share of you to your graves on my way out.” He had his shooters pointed at two different elves, each with arrows pulled back.

Yeah, I don’t like your odds, Shooter, Melissa thought. But she was eager to see what those guns could do.

The elves frowned, glanced at each other, and relaxed. To Melissa’s surprise, they put their weapons down. The tension didn’t escape their shoulders, but their bows were no longer drawn.

One of the elves—looked like the one in charge—stepped forward. His bow disappeared completely, something she’d seen the elves able to do, and he placed the arrow he’d had back in its quiver. He tilted his head to the side, opened his mouth, and began to talk.

In perfect English. More perfect than Shooter, if Melissa were being honest.

“We have claimed this forest in the name of the Kingdom of Er’al’ealia.” The elf presented a hand, palm up, to the man. “Relinquish your weapons and your will to the might of our good and ancient King Vaegon, and know that you will live a good life as a slave. Refuse, and you shall instead forfeit your life.”

Er’al’ealia? Vaegon? Where do they come up with these names?

Shooter raised a single eyebrow, quite prodigiously, all the way up to his receding hairline. “Slave? There ain’t no slaves in ‘Merica no more.” He pointed one of his revolvers straight at the man’s head. “I don’t know what in all hell is going on with the world. Got pulled out of my house by some words in my face. Then, when I was thrown back, returned to my home, my damned farm was gone. Just had the house and the shed in the middle of a bloody forest. Family was gone too, but they’re mostly a nuisance these days anyhow, since the kids learned to talk and the wife got herself an ed-you-cation and learned to talk back.”

Shooter took a long drag of his cigarette, the ash just about longer than what was left of the cigarette itself. He stepped forward, blew the smoke out of the other side of his mouth straight into the elf’s face.

Charmer, this one, Melissa thought, no longer all that worried for the man’s life.

“But ya know what I found, in the forest? Some peace. Some quiet. Not to mention a whole lotta animals that suddenly wanted to kill me.” He turned the gun in his left hand, the right still trained on the elf-leader’s forehead. “But these still seemed to work on ‘em alright. Knew I loaded up on ammo for a good damned reason. The System wanted me to have a sword. HAH. I’d like to see a sword do what these can.” He tilted his head forward, cigarette still hanging from his mouth. “So why don’t you and your white-haired, pointy-eared lot of fancy-looking bastards get the hell out of my forest so I can have me some of that peace and quiet again!”

He looked at the other elves. None of them looked the slightest bit worried.

“Go on, then, git! Or I’ll blow a hole through the head of your boss-man.”

Boss-man, the elf, stepped forward, until the gun touched his forehead. “Your primitive weapons will not work on us. You should have taken the sword that was granted to you by the Holiest Above. You should have adapted, foolish human. I will give you one more chance. Relinquish your will, or forfeit your life.”

“Primitive?” Shooter said around his cigarette. “Says bows and arrows over here. Calling a gun primitive.”

Melissa leant forward on the branch she was perched on.

“Guess there’s no talkin’ to you bastards.”

Shooter pulled the trigger.

The elf’s head did not snap back. The elf stayed rigid, standing exactly where he had been.

The gun, however, exploded. Shooter stumbled back. Two of his fingers were missing, blood pouring from the wounds.

The elf touched his forehead. There was a slight red mark where the bullet had contacted his skin, but it healed in a moment, and there was no blood. The elf drew his sword, stepped forward, and pushed the point straight through the man’s chest as casually as one might punch a sewing needle through fabric.

The elf tilted his head to the side, peering down at the man who was now spluttering and coughing up blood, the cigarette having fallen from his mouth. “Perhaps you shall have peace and quiet in death.”

Melissa’s eyes widened, thinking about the implications of what she’d seen and heard.

Guns don’t work against the elves.

That man’s house was plucked and plopped into a forest, just like kangaroos and wolves were thrown in here together. The world’s been all jumbled up, animals have turned into beasts, and invaders stepping through portals have come to kill and enslave us all.

And guns don’t work.

The elf’s words replayed in her mind.

You should have taken the sword that was granted to you by the Holiest Above. You should have adapted, foolish human.

Part of her had thought the military would be out there, somewhere, responding to the threat these weird portals held. Sending in troops. Firing missiles at portals. Something.

But the haze that had been over her eyes was lifted. If guns didn’t work on much more than weak animals-turned-beasts around here, then could she expect missiles to do much? And what if every member of the military had been scattered, torn from wherever they were, and placed somewhere else?

If there were kangaroos and wolves here, and farmhouses plucked from one place and put in another, could the army bases have been split in half? Would the whole world need to be re-mapped?

Suddenly what had happened to the entire world had been put into stark perspective for Melissa. She was still fighting for herself, fighting for her sanctuary.

But now, she hoped, she wasn’t the only who was willing to adapt. Willing to use the weapons the System handed them.

Otherwise she was rather sure humanity was doomed.