Chapter 8: The Urcia Road

The first few days of escorting were entirely uneventful. We took a smaller side road until we reached an old trail called the Urcia Road. Once upon a time, it had been paved with a layer of cement and flagstones, but it had long since cracked, and weeds sprouted up everywhere. Grass encroached along the edges.

After the first day, we left the forest. Plains of pampas grass and fluffy dandelions rolled across the horizon, and it reminded me of snow. As best I could tell from the angle of the sun, we were travelling almost directly north now, with a slight west bend. But we were still close to the front lines, and we had to stay vigilant.

There were a few other wagons on the road. Most were Greenway merchants, heading farther west as the season latened, aiming for central Gate. On the second day, we encountered a wandering bard, and Shave flicked him a copper sceat—much to Luiger’s displeasure.

Every evening, we made camp off to the side of the road. Trench and Elf made a fire, and we were assigned watches. The mercenaries kept their own watches, but Shave didn’t trust them to do a good job of it.

We were always in pairs, and conveniently, I never ended up with Ticks.

I’d never seen the ‘Lady Sage’ that we were supposed to be protecting, not even once. Supposedly, she’d snuck out during the night to do her business, but I never saw her or heard her, and I was pretty good at keeping watch. At least, I hoped. I never brought it up with Shave or the others, because I didn’t want them to think I was shirking my duties.

In the mornings, the other Dupes always woke sooner than the mercenaries and Lady Sage, so we trained as much as we could while one of us prepared breakfast. I got plenty of splinters in my hands, but I didn’t want to fall behind. Hell, I was still catching up.

Likewise, I figured I needed to work on other skills, too. I had to be close to getting novice [Spearmanship] with how much I’d been practicing, but I was going to need other skills if I wanted a proper merge. However that worked.

When it came to breakfast, I always tried to help with cutting. Knifework had to be useful. I tried to help with gathering food, and in the afternoons, I practically begged Shave to take me hunting with him. He finally agreed.

I wasn’t sure which of those skills I was going to get first, and I wasn’t too concerned. As long as I got something.

On the third day, Shave let me take hold of the hunting bow he’d brought with him. “Try taking a shot,” he said.

It was a longbow with a tight string, and it took a lot more effort to draw back the arrow than I initially expected. Shave gave me corrections on where to put my fingers, how to hold the arrow, and how my stance should be. I fired a shot, aiming at a tree right in front of us, but the arrow went wide and whistled away into the woods.

A half hour later, after stopping every few minutes to practice shooting, we found a deer. It was almost a regular deer, except its antlers were covered in fluffy dandelion seeds. It was growing them.

“Snowhead deer,” Shave whispered. “Take the shot.”

I held the bow still. He was trusting me with dinner?

At least Ticks wasn’t here to be mad if I failed. I took a deep breath, lined up the shot, then focussed solely on the deer. I was about to release the arrow, but…

But it flinched. It hopped to the side, bounding over a fallen aspen log. There had once been a copse of trees here. Shave and I ducked down more, hiding in the tall grass.

“Don’t focus on just the deer,” Shave said. “You have to worry about more than just it.”

“I’m not sure if I’m meant to be an archer,” I replied.

“No one’s meant for anything. It’s what you choose to do that matters.”

“Funny, coming from a Dupe.”

“No, lad,” Shave countered. “Just because we were designed as soldiers doesn’t mean that’s all we are. We may have a class assigned to us, but the wonderful thing about the System is that your class can evolve.”

“If you improve your tier enough, right?”

“Something to work toward.”

“But isn’t it at Silver where I get a class evolution?”

“Something to dream about, then.”

I took a deep breath, then stood up slowly again, looking over the grass. This time, I took a wider range of focus, thinking about where I wanted the arrow to go, where the wind blew. Instead of just keeping a close eye on the deer and letting everything else fade, I considered the wind, how it made the grass ripple. I tried to keep everything as sharp as I could in my mind with the limitations of my eyes. Everything had to be in frame, not just my target.

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A gust was coming. The deer always moved when a gust of wind made the grass behind it ripple.

So I aimed in front of the deer, where I knew it would run. As soon as the wind rippled over the plain, I loosed the arrow. It thudded into the deer’s shoulder, crippling it, and we ran over. Shave drove his spear into its neck and put it out of its misery.

I handed him back the bow and said, “I was aiming for its eye.”

“You’re lucky you hit it at all. That arrow wouldn’t have hit at all if the deer hadn’t moved.”

I grinned. “Or I anticipated the movement.”

Shave only raised his eyebrows.

“So…” I asked. “Do snowhead deer drop Presences?”

“Sometimes. But not often, and we need to get back to the wagon. It’s not worth the effort, seeing how this deer would’ve been no better than a copper. Even if you got a presence for it, it would only be a tiny fraction of a tier worth of Presence.”

“I see…” I said.