The Fusionist Book 4 -- Chapter 34

Chapter 34

It was bad – worse than he thought was possible, in fact.

As soon as Larek passed what he assumed was the border of the Sealance Empire, which was designated by a change in the environment rather than any posted signs or other obvious landmarks, he realized immediately that he was going to have some issues.

That was because Lowenthal was a desert – or at least the portion close to the Empire’s land was a desert.

Sand stretched out as far as the eye could see to the east, with dunes breaking up the monotony of absolutely no visible environmental landmarks anywhere; it was simply a vast stretch of nothing as far as he could tell. Based on his map, which was extremely lacking in detail, the sand could stretch for a few miles or the entire length of the country? Nation? Uninhabited area? He wasn’t exactly sure, and he again regretted not asking anything about it while he had the chance, thinking that he would be able to pass through it without any trouble.

It wasn’t the heat of the desert during the day that was the problem, even though it was hot. A quick stop and the production of a Temperature Regulator that he was able to keep on his person was enough to alleviate the extreme heat that affected even him with his high Body stat. It wasn’t unbearable without the Fusion, only uncomfortable, but if he was going to be traveling through the desert, he might as well be as comfortable as possible.

It also wasn’t the brightness of the sunlight, which seemed to reflect off the sand like tiny mirrors if he looked at them the wrong way. It was annoying but not debilitating, and he eventually learned to squint and adjusted to the brightness after a few hours of travel.

The random gusts of hot wind that seemed to come from nowhere, kicking up sand that got inside his clothes and did its best to infiltrate his facial orifices was also highly annoying, until he pulled out an extra shirt he’d obtained all the way back in Swiftwater from his pack and wrapped it around his head. Leaving only a small space to see through, the protection helped sand from entering his ears, nose, mouth, and – for the most part – his eyes, while also helping to reduce the strain of the bright sunlight reflecting off the sand.

All of those added up together was bad enough, but it still wasn’t something that caused him too many issues. Solutions to alleviate most of the uncomfortable portions of traveling through a desert were able to be found, including a quick realization that the dry air was making him extremely thirsty. Utilizing a very weak version of his Water Stream Fusion, which was normally designed to be used offensively at higher Magnitudes, Larek was able to use the Fusion on a spare stone he had in his belt to shoot a stream of water into a traveling stone cup he'd been carrying around with him. While more than half of the water splashed out of the Strengthened stone cup in the process, wetting the desert temporarily before the water disappeared in the sand, it was still effective enough to provide him with something to drink anytime he wanted.

Food would eventually become a problem if he didn’t find someplace soon to pick up some supplies, but he figured he would be fine for at least a week – especially if he was able to find some more Apertures and monsters that he could butcher and eat along the way.

No, the main problem he encountered almost immediately upon setting foot in the desert was the sand itself. Loosely packed and almost slippery in consistency, Larek found himself floundering as his feet and legs quickly sank into the sand up to his knees, and it was a struggle to move forward. He attempted to fun faster so that he wouldn’t give the sand the chance to sink his feet, but it was like trying to run on water most of the time; at a few points, he was able to run nearly 50 feet before his right boot suddenly passed through the top layer of sand and got caught, causing him to trip and nearly fall flat on his face.

It was a pain to simply walk through the desert, and with running safely essentially out of the question, he could only go so fast. After a few hours and by the time the sun was starting to set, he thought he had maybe traveled a little over a mile in that time, which was, to say the least, disappointing. He was used to traveling dozens of miles every day due to how fast he could run, even with stopping to kill monsters and close Apertures; his current pace was slow enough that if something didn’t change, he estimated that it might take him a year or more to pass through the thousands of miles that Lowenthal was supposed to be.

He spent an uncomfortable night in the desert, mainly because whenever he laid himself down in his bedroll, he would begin to sink down; he buried himself in sand a few times before he decided to simply sit up while he tried to sleep, which helped to keep him from being buried but was necessarily uncomfortable. He was also blasted by the cold night winds every once in a while because he hadn’t been able to pitch his tent, as there was nothing for the stakes to hold on to.

In the morning, which couldn’t come too soon in his opinion, Larek trudged back toward the Sealance Empire side of the border with the desert of Lowenthal, spending hours backtracking until he stepped onto solid ground once again. He then emptied his boots of all the sand that had accumulated inside of them, shook his entire body to dislodge the itchy granules that snuck their way inside his clothes, and set up his tent there and then with his Secure Hideaway to prevent anyone from seeing him. After a quick meal and then a much-needed nap, he woke up in the afternoon and contemplated what he was going to do now.

What he needed first and foremost was information. At the moment, he had no idea how large the desert was inside of Lowenthal; if it was only 20 miles or so before it changed to something else, he thought that he could traverse it even if it wasn’t the most comfortable trip. Possibly a little bit longer if necessary, all the way up to 50 miles, but he couldn’t see himself having the mental fortitude to slog through the desert day after day for weeks on end – especially if there was no place to stay and resupply. Which was another tidbit of information he needed, because as far as he’d been able to see in the desert, there had been no sign of any type of habitable land.

If Larek discovered that the desert was even larger than 50 miles in width, he wasn’t sure what he’d do. What was even worse, at least as far as his development was concerned, was that he hadn’t sensed any Apertures around him while he had traveled through the desert. He was sure they were there somewhere, because it would’ve been strange had they completely skipped the large desert area when they were all over the Sealance Empire. Even if he did eventually sense them, how difficult would it be to get to them? Going out of his way and heading north or south instead of east would only delay his trip over the sands, and he would have to make a decision if it would be worth it or not.

In the end, there was no help for it: Larek would have to go someplace to learn more about Lowenthal. He thought that he could probably head back to a previous town he’d visited, one which he hadn’t been involved in the killing of a guard, but he also didn’t want to have to backtrack almost an entire day if he could help it, as he’d already wasted one going in and out of the desert.  As a result, he headed back to the town of Day’s End, wanting to try one more time to get through its walls without causing an incident. If he was lucky, there wouldn’t be any more people there that would be affected by his Perceptive Misdirection Fusion, and everything would be fine. If not… then he’d figure it out from there.

Contrary to his fears, when he arrived at the town he had the fortunate opportunity to insert himself into a small caravan of wagons that was arriving from deeper in the Empire. Walking calmly into the rear of the caravan, his presence only drew a few glances from the caravan guards and a few merchants, but they ignored him as if he was of no consequence. He was slightly nervous as he passed through the gates, but none of the guards – all of whom were Mage and Martial Protectors this time – looked at him twice.

Soon enough, he was inside the remarkably large town and surreptitiously broke off from the caravan to look for supplies and information. He was surprised at how extensive the town was, as it was almost as populous as a small city, given its location on the border and the complete lack of farming being done outside the walls or anywhere within miles of the town. Knowing that this meant all of their food had to be brought in from outside, likely from caravans such as the one he just snuck in with, he couldn’t understand why the town existed in the first place.

While he was tempted to stay the night rather than sleep outside again, he knew that the longer he was inside the town, the more likely someone would have the right (or wrong, depending on how one looked at it) stat allocation to detect what he was doing to their perception. Instead, he did some shopping through the marketplace there, buying up foodstuffs at a premium rate – further validating his thought that the town of Day’s End brought in all of their food supply from elsewhere – so that even if he did have to run, he’d at least be properly supplied.

From there, he was at a bit of a loss of where to go to find out the information he needed about Lowenthal. Normally, he’d visit the Protectors and see if they had any information he could acquire from them, but with his previous visit still visibly setting the few Protectors he saw patrolling the streets on edge, he didn’t think it was a good idea. Besides, from his experience with them, he found that it was at least twice as likely for someone to have gone through the whole Mage and Martial change a few months before if they were already a Protector, so the chance of one of them being a Mage that could identify him as the “monster” was much greater.

Instead, he decided to visit an Inn anyway, though not to stay; he’d learned on his travels that the common rooms of inns were a place where the people who visited them tended to gossip and share information that Larek had found largely inconsequential, but occasionally he’d heard a little about the road ahead. This was especially true when he stayed in places that catered to merchants because they tended to travel a lot and therefore had a lot more to say, which he was hoping to find here.

It didn’t take long to find out where the caravan he had snuck into the city with had gone after they had unloaded their wagons, and he made his way into the Inn of Daylight’s Trust, which was a strange name – but many of the Inns he’d visited had been oddly named, so he thought nothing much of it. Sitting down at an unoccupied table in the corner, he recognized a handful of the people from the caravan seated at the others, along with many that he figured were on the wagons but hadn’t been visible.

Just after a serving woman took his order of whatever dinner they had ready, Larek’s hearing detected something that caught his interest. It wasn’t an entire conversation that answered all his questions, as much as he would’ve appreciated that, nor was it something that gave a hint of where he could go to discover what he needed to know – that would be entirely too easy. Instead, as he looked over at what appeared to be a raised platform in the opposite corner of the room, he saw someone bent over a stringed instrument of some kind, plucking the strings while they seemed to be adjusting some knobs along the side.

As he looked closer at the figure, a few things stood out to him. First, the long green hair looked somewhat familiar for some reason. When he got a better look at the brown-skinned, six-fingered hand that looked like the tips of tree branches, attached to stick-like arms, it finally clicked.

Verne.

He was about to get up and shout with joy at being reunited with his roommate when the figure lifted their head and he got a clear look at their face, which had a small scar running down the side, it was obvious that this wasn’t Verne. In fact, judging by the shape of their figure under a tight-fitting green dress that matched the color of their hair, this individual was female.

As she began to strum a few chords on the musical instrument she held in front of her, supported by a thin strap that wound over her shoulder and was attached to two points on the instrument, Larek looked for any sort of familiarity in the dark-skinned, tree-like woman, but he couldn’t see anything other than her general appearance that reminded him of Verne.

His perusal of her features was interrupted when she began to sing in a language that was completely unfamiliar to him, and yet he could almost sense the meaning behind the words as the song flowed beautifully through the Inn’s common room, capturing the attention of everyone inside. Even the Innkeeper behind the bar seemed to be enraptured as he leaned forward on his elbows and watched the woman with a small smile on his face, and all movement came to a halt as the servers stopped in what they were doing to listen.

Larek wasn’t sure how long he and the others simply sat or stood where they were, listening to the green-haired tree woman, but his hunger sharpened a bit once she stopped, and he twitched a little as if he had suddenly come out of a hyper-focused state. Glancing out the window, he was slightly startled to see that the angle of the sun showed that approximately two hours had passed while he had been entranced with the woman’s singing.

Wow. What in the world was that?

As the woman twisted to put the instrument behind her back, Larek caught a glimpse of some sort of dark chain around her neck like a necklace, though he had to say that it really didn’t suit her either in style or coloring. Not that he was an expert or anything – far from it, actually – but it seemed to him that it was extremely out of place.

“Serena, Serena! Beautiful as usual, my darling,” Larek heard coming from one of the tables where the caravan people were seated. An older man with short dark hair streaked with two front-to-back bands of white hair like the horns on a ram, taller than the rest by at least a few inches – but nowhere near Larek’s real height – smiled at the woman, though Larek didn’t see any sign of enjoyment or happiness in that smile. Instead, what he thought he saw was greedy pleasure, and it was just barely short of being lecherous.

It was a wonder what Larek could pick up from watching people over the last month when they completely disregarded his presence, which was yet another benefit of his Perspective Misdirection Fusion. He was somewhat thankful that his observation of so many people without their attention had been so fruitful in further discerning social interactions, but at this point he wasn’t sure if it was beneficial or not.

Mainly because, while he wasn’t 100% sure, he was fairly confident that there was some sort of negative relationship between the singer and this merchant. This was nearly confirmed when she seemed to ignore his comment as she looked away. He wasn’t sure if it was intentional, or she was just trying to look elsewhere, but she ended up looking straight at Larek and almost instantly locked eyes with him.

At that moment, he knew he would have to extricate her from what was obviously some sort of forced situation that she had no way to escape from without his help. Not because she looked similar to his roommate, Verne, or because she had a nice singing voice. No, it was because when she looked at him in the eyes, she looked at his actual eyes and not the fake, shorter perception that everyone else saw.

Great. I don’t have time for this. But… well, if she’s originally from the Dyran Hearthwood the same as Verne, she might have information that could be beneficial to me. It would be a shame if I let her go when she might know about Lowenthal and the desert and would be willing to share. If she was near home recently, she might even know what’s going on in the nearby Kingdom of Androthe, for that matter.

It was an extra complication that he didn’t really need, but he knew that he would have to save her from whatever situation she was in, even if it jeopardized his stay in Day’s End. He simply had to figure out what was going on – which was probably the easiest thing in the world, right?