Bacon Macleod

B4 Chapter 422: Recap, finale

Walking across the frontier, Kaius enjoyed the warm summer air as he gathered his thoughts about how he wanted to continue their story. Glossing over his first delve and the missions of the Guild had been easy, but there was so much to cover about their most recent adventure that he didn't quite know where to start.

Almost offhandedly, he wondered what any onlookers would think if they saw them — three Golds, eight Silvers. Practically an army in this part of the world. People might w...

B4 Chapter 421: Recap, pt. 2

Kaius grinned as he looked at the slack-jawed expressions on Bronwyn’s team’s faces. Even Arc, his features obscured by plated bone and his ever-stoic disposition, was visibly surprised and confused.

He supposed that was fair, considering he had withheld mention of Honours until they would have maximum impact. The revelation that he and Porkchop, completed legacies or not, had managed to defeat a Guardian unclassed was one thing — but gaining something new from the system was almo...

B4 Chapter 420: Recap, pt. 1

After Ro had rushed ahead to warn Bronwyn and his team that the danger had passed, it took them nearly three quarters of an hour to reunite. 

While classers could move extremely fast with a growing volume of stats, most people’s comfortable walking pace didn’t actually increase all that much. At least consciously — a Silver’s forced march was a quick thing.

With the low rolling hills and the scattering of copses of trees that dotted the frontier, lush growth concealed...

Start of B4 - Chapter 419: Reunion

Kaius trudged along open fields, the rolling hills and scattered trees of the frontier spreading out before him. It had been over an hour since they’d left the burning pyre that contained the remains of Old Yon and his hirelings behind. Now he walked with his team, joined in their formation by Rieker, Ro and the Gold out of Grandbrook, Arc’theros.

None of them had been particularly talkative after their counter-ambush of the Onyx-aligned Silvers.

Kaius was exhausted, and he kn...

End of B3 - Chapter 418: Reunited

Alchemical power surged through her veins as the wind howled in Ro’s ears. Her feet blurred, slamming into the dirt as she sprinted across the frontier. 

Every step launched her dozens of strides. She felt almost weightless — rarely did she get the opportunity to push herself to such a great extent. 

Normally, she loved the feeling; now she could only feel the anxious knot in her stomach winding tighter by the minute.

With every footfall, the dirt cratered, lea...

B3 Chapter 417: Argent Clash, Finale

The wind carried a heavy note of finality as it cut across the ruined scars of their battleground. Surrounded by craters, shattered trees, and blackened, smoking grass, Kaius looked down at the feeble remnant of a man beneath him.

The old criminal still breathed, if weakly. He looked pathetic with his limbs missing and his armour torn and shattered. They had crushed him and his team.

Their interrogation — if it could be called such a thing, with Old Yon's cooperation — had las...

B3 Chapter 416: Argent clash, pt. 6

Puppeteer’s Strings erupted from his hands, a constant tangle that stretched for handholds he could use to move ever faster. Each violet wire whipped through the air; in twos and threes, they wrapped around the thick trunks of the forest, biting deep into soft bark. He barely touched the ground, hells, he was practically flying. 

Old Yon knew for a fact that it wasn’t fast enough.

How! How could it all have gone so wrong? What he had seen was simply impo...

B3 Chapter 415: Argent Clash, pt. 5

Across an engraved depiction of Deadacre and its surrounding landscapes, the scry net projected a layer of warbling blue light. 

Every time the artifice detected a fluctuation in the background mana, the illusion would spike, growing brighter and taller above that spot. The problem was its poor resolution — at best, it gave her a general indication of a location. That wasn’t so bad — but the poorly tuned accuracy of the machine was doing her head in. A few times a day, the ar...

B3 Chapter 414:  Argent Clash, pt. 4

She thought this would just be another kill quest. Oh, how wrong she had been. Lun Li held her saber in a white-knuckled grip, a grin twisting her face as she got an impression of danger from above. She forced stamina into her legs, flooding them with concentrated energy to launch herself forward. 

A screaming streak of mana appeared from the unnatural void above, slamming into where she’d been standing a moment before. Concussive booms wrecked the forest every moment, forcing he...

B3 Chapter 413: Argent Clash, pt. 3

Kenva was surprised at her lack of fear. More than ten Silvers — it should have been enough to put her ill at ease, or at least make her feel a creeping dread crawling up her back.

Yet all she felt was anticipation, and a sense of certainty in her own capabilities and strength, and in that of the team around her. Light and loose, she played her part. They were smiling and laughing as if they were just at camp.

She stared into her team leader's eyes and saw her own steely convict...

B3 Chapter 412: Argent Clash, Pt. 2

Warm sunlight cut through the canopy above, gracing Torrin’s skin with its touch once more. He should have been more at ease. He was a hunter, a man who had lived his life on the move out in the wilds. 

He was unscrupulous about his quarry, yes, but still a man of nature all the same. Keeping himself cooped up in a hole in the ground for months wasn’t natural. It was good to stretch his legs, breathe the late-summer air, and hear the rustle of leaves and the chirp of crickets.<...

B3 Chapter 411: Argent Clash, pt. 1

Kerel sighed and flipped the page of his book — a treatise by a researcher that chronicled a wayward expedition. The fool’s party had gotten pinned, forcing the mage into the Depths. This chapter was one of the better ones: detailing his desperate flight from a Champion on his second day there, barely surviving alongside the sole survivor of his initial chaperones — a guild Skirmisher. 

It had been riveting the first time — good enough writing that Kerel had felt his heart ...

B3 Chapter 410: Departure, Finale

Kaius bent over, tugging on the straps of his sabatons and making sure his armour was in place. With his Guardian rewards he was garbed in a motley collection — halfway between light plate and scale mail — but it meshed together well enough. Each piece was of a subtly different style, and as intricate as it was, he still hadn’t yet grown instinctively familiar with all the straps.

As far as artefact rewards went, they were relatively mundane. Each piece focused on three things: ph...

Chapter 409: Departure, pt. 1

Bare-chested, Kaius grunted as he scrubbed at Porkchop’s fur with a rough-bristle brush, doing his best to wash out the clots of blood and oozing weepings before they could coagulate into a sticky mess. It was tough with the new density of his brother’s fur, not to mention his sheer body size.

Kaius had gotten the worst of it out — at least on Porkchop’s sides. There was still a streak down his back that he couldn’t reach.

“Crouch down, you oaf. You’re too tall.â...