The following week was spent getting any work done between storms that rolled through the area. Axel helped where he could to harvest the beasts brought in quicker and with Aria scouted out beasts to hunt every day. Most days, it was just a couple of Gin to add to the cooking pot, but his group did take down two more groups of Duradons with much better teamwork than the last time.

  Each pack was only around twelve in number and seemed to be splinter groups of other larger packs that were too large, thus forcing out weaker ones. This did help with getting more cores to speed up his group’s growth. Pearl and Larimar even helped with another lone Quake, which seemed to have been hurt in a likely mating challenge, adding a total of six of the beasts taken during the hunt with the group's teamwork much better than their first Quake kill.

  With the help of Aria, Axel also found and hunted three packs of Zips to add to the larder of this trip. The fights with the Zips only added about four Zips per pack as they scattered quickly, but that was twelve more cores, though all of them were low novice, which could still be used but were less effective. The last thing Axel did during that week was to find that Jareth carried several tomes of beasts which helped him with market evaluation, though they did also have other useful information such as a name for the beast that Axel fought.

  This beast was named Emberclaw, and they were known for the oil that their body produced that could not be extinguished by water; water would only make the fire worse somehow. Their hides were very fire-resistant up to levels that it would take an Expert who focused on fire abilities to hurt it with a flame attack on a very young one of this species. This beast was born around Novice End, and examples had grown in the wild to the level of Grandmaster in potency. These were very prized beasts for the people who lived on the plains for their hide and oil, along with being a common beast for a tamer.

  Axel also found from talks with Roran and Jareth that beast taming was very rare in the jungles, except for the Storm Drake knights, but on the plains, it was much more common. This in part had to do with how common the crimson with this ability was in the cities of the plains. After Novice, the evolution of crimson changed drastically from city to city, with each gaining more powers that were only found in their city. Axel knew some of this as that was why a Flame Seeker was a thing, but he always assumed that there were common power sets that happened in all cities.

  This became less true the higher the tier you went, as many cities shared abilities at Adept. For example, the summoning of beasts was in about four different cities according to Roran that had this power in their Adept trial, and three were in the plains while one was in Stormwatch. But every city’s crimson that could give an Expert power was completely different from the others. Axel began to lament that his time in the library was cut so short by his situation as he guessed he could have come by this knowledge much sooner and more completely than by what he was learning now.

  The jungle was also starting to react to their presence with prey and predators changing patterns, which meant that it was time to move on as it was getting increasingly dangerous to even scout. Axel saw that the Quakes were moving in larger groups now, and other Thunderers in the area likely noticed the one missing from its territory and were slowly encroaching into it from the new territorial markings he had seen. Even the numerous smaller packs of Duradons were a sign that the local packs were becoming more territorial and reducing any weakness in the pack.

  On the first fully clear day of the week, Jareth called everyone to gather around the campfire and began to address them.

  “Everyone, this has been a very successful venture with everyone completing a cycle and gaining valuable meat, hide, and bones that should more than pay for the trip,” Jareth said with a hearty laugh at the end. “We will be heading out today as we have finished harvesting all the beasts, and our scouts say the other beasts are changing their movement patterns, making any other hunting more risky and less profitable. Get your things packed up and be ready to move out within the hour!”

  Everyone broke up after that and began to clean the camp of any of their presence, such as filling the latrine, picking up any trash, and putting down scent cleansers to clear away the last of the group’s presence. Jareth then had the twins, Pearl and Larimar, drying the ground ahead while Sky repacked the earth to make it easier for the wagon to get out of the valley. Aria was again on scouting duty to check the path from the air, but Roran was trailing the wagon on Star.

  Speaking of Star, she had made a huge transformation over the two weeks of the trip, gaining both muscle mass and her wings looked like a normal Storm Drake’s, not the malformed ones she had when Axel first met her and Roran. Also, her scales had a very healthy gleam to them that Axel could almost feel her health radiate. There was more intelligence and looks of wonder in those reptilian eyes than the ones that had the look of a beast just holding on to survival before when Roran joined his group or during the night he first saw Star.

  As Axel sat in the wagon as it rolled along, he leaned over to Lyra and asked, “How are Star’s chances of ever flying, do you think?”

  “Pretty high from what the Goddess has shown me,” Lyra said after a bit of thought. “It will mostly depend on her if she wants to or not now. She has lived her whole life grounded while most of her kind are in the air weeks to months after birth.”

  “Well, you did a good job with helping her,” Axel praised his friend, then leaned back and closed his eyes. “All we can do is let her do what the Goddess has planned and let nature take its course.”

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  As Axel rested his eyes, he worked on his mental training technique that he had been neglecting of late, going over all the recent hunts, the fight against the ‘bandits,’ and reviewing everything he could about what had been happening recently. Ever since his fight with Cade, things had been getting strange to Axel as his life was not going anywhere near where he had planned it. Axel also felt a resonance with Aria’s words a few days ago as it did feel like they were being moved around by unseen forces to a purpose he could not figure out.

  Of the ones he could see a little of, there was Finn and his new guards. This seemed off to Axel before as Finn had a disruption weapon, something that only the Harmonizers would be able to access, and then he had hired people unknown to the other villagers as more protection. There were also the bounty hunters drawn by the bounty placed on Axel’s head that seemed to hem Axel in but did not seem to overwhelm him.

  Why would Finn only put up a bounty that would draw in Novice tier opponents if what he wanted was Axel dead? Axel knew for a fact that Finn should have the money to draw in Adept bounty hunters, or maybe he did, and the stronger ones were stopped. Images of a man frozen in an alley and another found dead in another came to Axel’s mind as he thought.

  The second was his benefactor Jareth, who had seemingly gone out of his way to help Axel and Aria. Axel liked the man, but even with how helpful and affable he was to Axel, Axel could feel something was wrong with everything around the man. His nieces were interesting, but again his mind went to the man frozen in the alley and how the pair worked together.

  The last was more of a feeling, but he felt there was another force out there but had no proof to point to besides... Axel’s head throbbed with a headache as his mind tried to go down the path of Cade’s death. Axel fought through the mental pain that seemed to intensify as he fought it, and he would swear that his memories were trying to change in his mental palace.

  Axel brought up his mental palace in his mind’s eye, and it was a mess. Black corrupt vines wrapped and were trying to break the room that held the memories within. The black vines also seemed to reach into the new rooms made since the day of the duel, becoming thicker and each room speared with the pulsing vines. The only thing that seemed to stop them was another set of red vines slowly eating at the black and fighting them off.

  Then a soft sweet voice came from the side of the mind palace, “Aww, you came to visit me?”

  Axel turned, and to the side sat a circular cage of strange glowing ribbons, each covered in intricate patterns like circuits that glowed silver in color. The cage looked perfect but for what looked like a repaired crack where a tiny bit of red leaked out and led to the mental palace. Inside the cage sat a humanoid being with no mouth, a gangly body with knees against its chest, and these legs had their arms wrapped around it as there was no other space.

  “I see that you have talent,” the being’s sweet and melodic voice filled the mental space. “Now you can see all the hard work I have done for you. Be thankful that I find this intruder distasteful as it is such a subtle thing but has no true skill. It can corrode the mind, but this can be healed, fixed, or even changed. The entity that did this has more power than skills.”

  “You are also bound to be mine, so I also need to keep my new home clean,” the creature finished with a sad sigh. “I was hoping to have this all clean before you had the mental ability to arrive here, but oh well.”

  ‘What is going on here?’ Axel thought in confusion. ‘I do not remember seeing something wrong before, but this has gotten so much worse. I also don’t remember seeing this cage in my mental world.’

  “Just a little bit of mental corruption is all that is happening,” the entity said and chuckled. “It is very crude work, and its skills are so heavy-handed. As for your second question, I have always been here, but you have only cracked my seal recently.”

  “So have you thought about my offer more?” The being turned its head and asked while the red ate more and more of the black in Axel’s mental world. At the rate this struggle was going, Axel could see in days the black would be gone and covered in red.

  ‘I still refuse,’ Axel said without hesitation. ‘Even if you did not torture me in that dream, I would never surrender to a crimson.’

  “Sad but expected,” the being’s voice was filled with a sad vibration that sent a shiver down Axel’s spine. “I will convince you that you don’t need the pain you live with, but that will still take some time, but time we have in spades.”

  ‘What’s a spade?’ was the only thought that went through Axel’s mind when the pain returned.

  “Oh, sorry about that, but as long as you are not bound to me, there will be pain,” the entity said in a voice tinged with sadness. “But you will be free of this in time, sooner if you use my powers, but like most of your kind, you fear, so don’t stress too much. Also, you should leave soon as the people around you are noticing something wrong.”

  Axel’s view of his mental world cracked like a pane of glass and shattered into a million pieces, returning Axel to his body. After returning, Axel’s view was filled with Sky’s large eyes right in his face, looking at him intensely. Axel had to admit that it was a little disconcerting thing to see as he opened his eyes, but he could tell by how she held her body low on her legs she was worried about something, likely him given this situation.

  ‘Oh, you’re back,’ Sky sent with a strong current of concern lacing her mental voice. ‘I could not feel your mind’s presence again, and I was worried about you.’

  ‘Was I away long?’ Axel asked while looking around, but the wagon was much like it was before he entered the mental world.

  ‘I noticed a few minutes ago, but as soon as I began to probe and could not reach you, you returned from that mental void,’ Sky told him while tilting her body slightly, her sign of confusion from what Axel knew of her.

  ‘That’s good, but please keep this between us for now as Aria needs to focus on the path and scouting, and this would distract her,’ Axel asked his companion. ‘I just found the Crimson that was sealed in me in my mental world doing something. I don’t know what, but something else that is not the Crimson seems to have tried to…’

  Before Axel could finish the sentence, his head felt like a spike was pounding into it. Sky winced back, seeming to feel some kind of feedback from whatever was happening.

  ‘I am not very skilled at the mental arts for my kind, but I will see what I can do to help,’ Sky stated, then cut the link before moving to the front of the wagon.

  All Axel could think about through the pain in his head was thankfully that Sky wanted to help and would not worry the others for now. Axel knew this would come back to bite him, but it was all he could think about at the time. At this moment, there was a screech of several Storm Drakes overhead, heralding yet another issue that was going to arrive.