Dungeons could shift their layouts, but it was a slow, gradual process that took days to complete. That was why the last dungeon Velik had been in had blocked off tunnels with some sort of monster that hardened itself into volatile, acid-filled blocks of stone strong enough that he hadn’t been able to bust through on pure physical strength.
This dungeon didn’t seem to know that trick, however, and so the way remained open. That was good, because Velik was eager to find a monster tha...
2025-04-10 12:50:49 +0000 UTC
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Velik hadn’t seen the monster tamer guy’s body get up and walk around, but he’d heard about it. He knew those two corpses were a threat, as was the man fully under an agent’s control. That made it three on three, and both of Velik’s teammates already had their hands full. That left him to deal with the shield-bearer.
The man—presumably Vudra, given his choice of equipment and the fact that he was still breathing—rushed forward to meet Velik in the center of the room. Velik...
2025-04-09 12:40:59 +0000 UTC
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Hi Everyone,
Just a quick update to let you know that book 5 made it to Amazon today if you were interested in that. That marks the completion of Keiran as a story, though I have plans to revisit the world in a new series sometime next year. The whole series is available on KU and the audiobook for Keiran 5 should be up in the next two to three weeks.
2025-04-09 12:39:40 +0000 UTC
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The skirmish wasn’t going the way Aria had expected, and that was a good thing. She knew a stall tactic when she saw one, and that was what this fight was. Trolls were notoriously difficult to put down, requiring both time and resources to finish off. She’d expected Torwin to take care of the spiders and Velik to do his best to keep some of the trolls tied up while she whittled down their numbers with her magic.
It should have been a long, exhausting battle that left her with nothin...
2025-04-08 11:58:36 +0000 UTC
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They paused at the bottom of the lift at Velik’s insistence. “I can’t do this fast enough to shift in combat yet,” he told them.
“Do what?” Torwin asked, but Aria just shushed him and put on an expectant expression.
Rolling his eyes, Velik activated [True Form]. His body rippled, the process as slow as ever. A few seconds later, he stood there in his wolf body. Surprisingly, the injuries he’d suffered felt significantly better. They were still there,...
2025-04-07 12:53:18 +0000 UTC
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Torwin put on a glib act to keep spirits up, but the truth was that he was appalled to see the state of everyone. Little shards of guilt stabbed at his stomach every time he glanced at the hunters sprawled out on the ground. I should have gone with them, he thought to himself again.
He’d had good reasons for staying, and it had become beyond obvious that Velik had no future with the guild. Part of that was the young hunter’s own fault—he’d almost seemed to go out o...
2025-04-04 11:31:07 +0000 UTC
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It was a well-documented fact that the more potions a person used in a short period of time, the less effective they became. Worse, too many at once could make a person sick, as could mixing different types. Velik had never been forced to experience that himself before today.
He limped back into camp, his clothes shredded and bloodstained. The only good part of the last half an hour was that a few minutes ago, he’d gotten a notification for helping kill another agent of corruption, wh...
2025-04-03 11:06:10 +0000 UTC
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The most powerful enchantment on Velik’s spear was called [Mana Drinker], and its effects were both subtle and understated. It did exactly what any reasonable person would expect: it stole mana from its victims. That drained them of resources, which didn’t have an immediate impact at the time Velik dealt an injury, but every strike hastened the fight to its inevitable conclusion.
What it did with that mana was perhaps more relevant. [Shape Shifting]...
2025-04-02 12:11:17 +0000 UTC
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Velik could vividly remember how fast Emberson was. He hadn’t seen the man move the first time he’d encountered him. But back then, Velik hadn’t been prepared for a fight. He’d been attacked suddenly, with no forewarning. Now, he knew what to look for. More than that, he’d spent some time fighting at the absurd speed [True Form] granted him, on top of being granted a huge bonus to his stats from absorbing the class orb.
When Emberson moved this time, a gl...
2025-04-01 13:03:33 +0000 UTC
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Either of the hunters individually would have been easy prey. Maybe not easy, but certainly not impossible, Velik mentally corrected himself. Both of them together made things difficult. If his goal had been simply to kill them, he was confident he could have managed. Subduing them was altogether a different matter.
Agora was fast compared to a normal person, but with what Velik was used to dealing with from gold-ranked hunters, she was nothing special. She had ex...
2025-03-31 12:48:44 +0000 UTC
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Velik had originally been planning on waiting until Yugon was cleansed of the monster infesting him, but when Sildra had informed him that it might take as much as an hour to kill the creature, and then another hour or two for Yugon to recover enough to really answer questions, he’d changed his mind.
Giller was more than powerful enough to keep Yugon contained with her metal controlling skill, especially with the man already beaten down. Velik left them behind without too much worry a...
2025-03-28 11:57:26 +0000 UTC
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Though Velik no longer possessed [Stealth], remnants of the skill lived on in [Apex Hunter]. It had changed, of course. All skills did when they merged into something greater. Now it was focused on hunting, on seeking prey, unseen and unnoticed, until it was time to move in for the kill. Right now, that was exactly what Velik needed it for.
He entered the mine shortly after dusk, following the ruts in the stone from the countless wagon-loads of rock and...
2025-03-27 12:55:03 +0000 UTC
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If anything, Aria had understated the extent of Phun’s injuries. The man had lost an arm at the shoulder, and his other one was so badly mangled that Velik doubted he could so much as remove his shirt without help. Chunks of bone stuck out in two different places, and muscle had been sliced away cleanly up and down the limb.
Phun’s hand was pressed against his stomach, clearly holding it closed to prevent his intestines from spilling out onto the ground. One knee had been completely...
2025-03-26 12:29:02 +0000 UTC
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Jensen’s life had taken a strange turn, and he wasn’t sure exactly where it was going or how he’d gotten here anymore. When he’d taken [Vault Seeker], he’d gained a few skills—[Find Object] and [Appraise]—and mixed them with [Tracking] to form the fabled [Treasure Hunter] skill. His understanding of things was that the hard work was done at that point. He just had to listen to wha...
2025-03-25 12:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Things went about how Velik had expected them to go. Giller didn’t argue about leaving the inn, and neither did Jensen. Sildra wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but she didn’t put up a fight either. Aria, on the other hand, was a problem.
“Look, this is simple,” Velik told her once he got sick of arguing about it. “Too many people have already seen us, so we can’t just hide out and leave you behind to pretend you’re still waiting for us. As soon as Emberson’s team comes b...
2025-03-24 12:32:57 +0000 UTC
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There was one major drawback that Velik hadn’t considered to his new skill. Enhanced hearing was fantastic. Sharper vision was wonderful. Even his new nose was fine, all things considered. He considered his honed senses to be a win in every regard.
But spears didn’t have taste buds, and mouths did.
Why is it so dusty?! It’s solid stone!
Velik crunched down on the elemental’s arm, his teeth easily tearing through the monster’s body. Being made of rock, ther...
2025-03-21 11:22:23 +0000 UTC
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Velik slotted [True Form] into his final skill slot. The skill was so much more than he’d imagined it could be when he’d thought about it. Though he’d taken the time to consider what he wanted it to do, the system had gone above and beyond that, and what he’d gained was something better than he’d expected.
With a thought, he called up his status to review.
[Name: Velik]
[Race: Human (Duskbound)]
...
2025-03-20 12:01:02 +0000 UTC
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The class orb was still sitting at the bottom of Velik’s bag. He’d been too afraid of the consequences to mess around with it, not that he’d shared that with Aria. That conversation with the guild archivist was probably off the table now, but following the trail of the corruption was more important to him.
“No progress,” Velik said. “I couldn’t get into the archives to research anything.”
“By ‘research,’ you mean ‘get Thett to look it up for you?’” she ...
2025-03-19 11:58:15 +0000 UTC
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Velik was honestly surprised that he hadn’t seen it coming. In retrospect, of course this would happen. He couldn’t really think of another way Sildra could easily get her hands on a horse, at least not without some money and time.
“Okay,” he said. “I get why Jensen is here. But somebody explain to me what Giller is doing.”
The three of them were mounted on horseback and staring down at Velik. He was sitting on a rock about fifty feet off the side of the main road, and...
2025-03-18 12:17:20 +0000 UTC
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Granite Peak.
The name wasn’t familiar to Velik, but that was hardly surprising. His knowledge of the country was limited to broadly defined regions and major cities. It didn’t matter. He could get directions easily enough. The problem wasn’t finding it or even getting there, it was whether he believed Pevril was telling the truth.
It was possible he could even confirm that. His former instructor had already given that info to the leadership here. If Velik asked the...
2025-03-17 14:02:17 +0000 UTC
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He’d had to promise a few favors he’d rather not have, but Pevril was on the mend. It wasn’t the kind of care he could have afforded if that monster hadn’t taken over his life nearly six years ago and wasted his funds progressing its horrendous agenda of rotting the guild from the inside out, but it would get him his legs back. That was a good start.
Fixing the disaster that had become the Monster Hunters Guild wasn’t going to be quite so easy. Even he wasn’t sure exactly ho...
2025-03-14 13:04:14 +0000 UTC
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It was just after noon when they entered town, much to Velik’s annoyance. They’d made abysmal time getting to Dansworth, entirely on account of how the hunter Velik had saved was too weak to do more than walk at a sedate pace after his ordeal trapped in the cave and climbing up the cliff. Velik honestly could have gotten them both to town faster by carrying the man the whole way.
Fortunately, it turned out that the time hadn’t been wasted. The hunting team had been out on the wate...
2025-03-13 13:03:40 +0000 UTC
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It was a good thing Velik was already in the water, because he was covered in a film of scalewark ichor with chunks of meat stuck to it. He’d been bitten probably a thousand times, especially after the water had been chummed so thoroughly that he couldn’t see anything at all, but the end result was never in question.
The scalewarks were dead, or at least eighty-three of them were, and Velik was unharmed. He swam away from the battle, hoping to find some relatively clear water to scr...
2025-03-12 12:21:32 +0000 UTC
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Velik sat at the front of a rowboat and stifled a sigh of impatience. He’d chanced by a local fisherman just after sunup who was about to shove his small boat off the sand and into a sheltered cove. A few questions and a trio of decarmas later, the man was showing him to the tidal caves he claimed he’d seen a pod of scalewark coming out of a week earlier.
Rowboats, as it turned out, moved very, very slow. Even a powerful rower could only do so much to speed things up, and Velik doub...
2025-03-11 13:26:44 +0000 UTC
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As part of his attempts at obtaining some semblance of the education he’d missed out on growing up in the woods, Velik had attended a lecture on what people called ‘system theory,’ which was pretty much exactly what it sounded like. People wanted to know how the system worked, and it didn’t come with instructions, so they made a lot of guesses based on what information they had and tested those ideas out when they could.
It was an indisputable fact that new skills would show up ...
2025-03-10 13:25:08 +0000 UTC
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Not everyone made it back that night. While Velik’s team was ultimately successful despite the complication of Pevril’s presence, four other teams failed to subdue their targets and took casualties in the attempt. Not only was the number of golds working to cleanse the monster infestation from the guild down now, but the enemy had no doubt become aware that they’d been exposed. Rescuing those people from their captors was now going to be that much harder.
None of that was Velik’...
2025-03-07 14:04:49 +0000 UTC
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The skill merger was an unexpected surprise. After how many months he’d spent trying to push those two together with no luck, Velik had given up and hoped to revisit the issue once one or both of them were a higher rank. Whether it was the strength of his opponent that had made the difference or just his shift in thought as to how to use [Savage Rhythm] to control Pevril’s hellfire attacks, Velik wasn’t certain. Either way, he wasn’t going to complain about it.
2025-03-06 14:34:32 +0000 UTC
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Hellfire was a known quantity, observed and documented from encounters with demons by hundreds of monster hunters over the years. The color varied, but was usually two-toned and never the standard orange-red of a normal fire. Its properties seemed to be linked to the variety of demon conjuring it more than the color, which meant that there were multiple pages of information about specific effects a hunter might need to be prepared to counter.
One thing they universally agreed on was tha...
2025-03-05 12:56:00 +0000 UTC
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Hi guys,
So Patreon has started rolling out their App Store fees now. They initially said that anyone who was already subscribed would not be subject to the increased fees, that only new subscribers would have to pay them. Regardless, I encourage you all to check and be sure you're not paying extra. Apple charges 30% on top of the normal price, and they keep every penny of that.
If you are using an iphone and the Patreon app, you can avoid this fee by subscribing directly through ...
2025-03-04 21:03:59 +0000 UTC
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Upon seeing that he’d failed to escape, Pevril spun in place and put a sneer on his face. “Ah, my little failure of an iron,” he said. “So full of himself, so indignant that anyone might refuse to bow down to his supposed greatness. How much money have you wasted persuading your betters to back you on your little quest for revenge?”
Whatever Pevril’s goal was—maybe to distract Velik, maybe to anger him and shake his focus, or maybe to just buy some time—he failed t...
2025-03-04 13:59:12 +0000 UTC
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