Chapter 78: The Adventurer 1
Negative emotions seemed to have vanished from Lucas’s heart. Despite having stepped into a true death trap, even the night when he was surrounded by that Silver-rank Viking and pirates hadn’t felt as perilous as this moment.
His injuries were more severe than back then. The only reason he’d lasted this long was because York’s healing potion was still working, continuously sustaining his battered body.
Yet strangely, he felt neither fear nor tension.
Tall Icelandic warriors wielding swords and shields encircled him. While night owls still circled overhead, the undead hellhounds had stopped pursuing.
Perhaps there was an agreement between the necromancers and the war band – each party confined to their respective territories unless granted permission to cross boundaries.
The soldiers slowly closed in, archers drawing their bows to aim at his limbs.
Though ordered to capture him alive, nothing stipulated keeping him unharmed. Against a professional warrior, these soldiers would likely cripple all four limbs and sever his tendons before feeling safe enough to transport him.
What expression should he wear facing this end?
Resentment?
Hatred?
Memories of a distant spring surfaced – recollections he’d resisted since adulthood.
In that long-ago springtime, he’d been a carefree boy whose world revolved between sheepfolds and fields, often returning home covered in mud during his leisure hours.
Uncurious about the wider world, easily pleased by buttered bread or finding a blooming tundra lily in the meadows.
Living alone after burying his grandmother beneath spring flowers with his own hands. Never knowing his parents, though occasionally reminiscing about when grandma was alive, he’d learned self-sufficiency.
Until that spring when the silver-haired elf arrived in the village.
Never had he seen such pointed ears or heard someone whose speech resembled song.
When the elf played the lute, the music intoxicated him.
All village children, not just Lucas, loved gathering around the elf to hear epic tales of heroes and grand adventures.
At each story’s climax or nadir, young Lucas’s emotions would soar or plummet with the narrative.
Children would grab sticks as swords, don pottery bowls as helmets, playing games where they pretended to be dwarves and knights, mages and priests, shouting childish attack names at play-villains or stationary logs.
Lucas did the same, carving himself a wooden sword and crafting crude wooden armor. Donning these rough creations, he’d stand tall on a lily-covered mound.
Gazing down at wind-dancing flowers, imagining them as cheering crowds.
Imagining himself returning from perilous quests after slaying dragons and rescuing princesses, solemnly raising his wooden sword while riding a white steed.
Those were likely his happiest, most innocent days.
He’d hurriedly clean the sheepfold, then rush to where the elf lodged, hoping to secure a front-row spot.
The world was so vast beyond fields and sheep pens – filled with wonders like dragons and demons, saints and kings, heroes and legends.
Enthralled by these tales, he began yearning for what lay beyond the village.
“Adventurer” – those three syllables enchanted him.
He asked the elf how to become one.
“Anyone can be an adventurer,” came the reply. “Just bring five silver coins to register at the Adventurers Guild.”
Five silver coins – he memorized that number.
Back then, he couldn’t fully grasp what five silver meant. In the village, barter outweighed monetary transactions except during rare merchant visits or trips to Bronte Village and Alvado.
But five coins could make him an adventurer.
He began saving earnestly, requesting payment in coin rather than cheese or bread for odd jobs.
At sixteen, he resolved to leave.
Packing his belongings, selling his sheep, locking his cottage door, he joined a merchant caravan to Alvado.
That sixteen-year-old brimmed with hope and determination.
Seventeen years later, the boy was gone, his vigor worn away.
Returning home, he reoccupied his childhood cottage with grandma.
His trusty spear found retirement on the wall, sometimes repurposed to poke fireplace embers.
Dreams of heroism no longer visited his sleep.
Rebuilding a sheepfold, tending new flocks, milking goats, occasionally telling stories to village children or guiding them on hunts through forests and wastelands.
He considered starting a family with neighbor Mary – a life his grandmother would’ve approved.
Among villagers, he boasted loudly of past exploits.
Only in solitary night hours by the hearth would he recall that lily-filled spring, gently oiling his spear’s tip.
Now, facing death, that sunny spring returned vividly – along with the elf’s question:
“Porter, why obsess over sword-seeking tales? Do you want to find one?”
“Of course!”
“And when you do, does the adventure end?”
“Never! That’d be boring! I’ll be a hero! A legendary hero!”
Lucas remembered his true motive for leaving – not wealth or jewels, but an epic adventure.
Finding a magic sword was meant to be the beginning.
Yet decades later, no glory or legendary blade had come.
Now dying, his hopes would perish alongside his weakness and inadequacy.
Still, he’d persist till the end.
Suddenly his body felt weightless, pain dulled as if his soul floated free.
Snapping the wooden arrow in his calf, he discarded its feathered shaft in snow.
Battered but unbowed, he rose again, raising his spear.
“Loose arrows!” an Icelandic knight commanded.
Archers drew simultaneously – yet Lucas perceived their bows’ rhythms.
Not just the bows, but the swords in Icelandic hands, their held shields too.
Every weapon and armor piece he’d tried and abandoned during seventeen adventuring years seemed to whisper to him now.
Most intensely, the Tania military spear in his grip.
Only now did he truly understand how to wield it.
The spear tip quivered as he thrust – deflecting all four arrows midair.
Despite grievous wounds and necromantic toxins coursing through him, he’d never felt lighter, as if his soul had been freed, the world rendered crystalline.
Against sword-wielding knights, he swung his spear with childlike abandon, its arcs resembling random lines children scratch in dirt with sticks.
Yet these clumsy motions disarmed four knights, sending swords and raven-emblazoned shields flying.