And (N)one Shall Remain

The path that Esperanza and the rest of her group took as they traveled westwards in the human kingdom’s territory was not one that most travelers would have even considered. Part of it was because a large part of Alissa’s group could not afford to be seen by the humans, lest it would incite panic and intensive searches for demon infiltrators and the like. 

 

Because of that, they avoided the main roads, or other such well-trodden paths, and mostly traveled in the depths of the forests which were inhabited by dangerous wild beasts. Of course, with their level of power, the wild beasts posed no danger to them for the most part and in fact actively fled upon noticing their presence. Esperanza was none too shy to blare her own presence out since it helped them progress through the forest faster.

 

For the most part, they were able to avoid the major roads that way, and thus kept themselves away from the eyes of other travelers. Their passage went unnoticed, the increase in wild beast activity taken in stride by the locals as something that happened from time to time to begin with, with none of them the wiser of the true cause behind the most recent ones.

 

After around a week’s travel, however, Esperanza’s group decided to go through a dungeon instead, since something that Alissa confessed to her during their talks had bothered her. It was the fact that there were quite a few people against whom her group still stood practically no chance against should they be unlucky enough to run into them, so she thought that they should take the opportunity to improve their strength if they could do so.

 

The dungeon in question was one that encompassed a dense forest, which was quite convenient for Esperanza’s purposes. While the human kingdom regulated the use of their dungeons, that was mostly done with the ones that had an easily controllable entrance point. The open ones like the fields and forests were nearly impossible to regulate the same way, and were generally free for anyone daring enough to use.

 

At most, people who went into such dungeons would report their use to local officials in the nearest town, if they were the rule-abiding type. Otherwise it was just too difficult to monitor and regulate such dungeons, and the kingdom had long given up on such an endeavor. 

 

Of course, there were other signs that a group might be headed to such a dungeon that could be easily noticed, like for example the sudden presence of groups of high level combatants in otherwise peaceful towns. There were typically little to no reasons for such groups to head to such places unless they were headed to the dungeon, since the towns were rather out of the way of the main roads.

 

Since there happened to be a dungeon where the creatures within were in the fifties to seventies in level right along their westward path, Esperanza felt that it would be a waste if they did not make use of the opportunity to increase their power a little bit. Such dungeons regenerated quickly anyway, and if someone noticed the carnage, they would probably just attribute it to some people who hunted there illegally, which was far from an uncommon occurrence at such places.

 

The creatures that inhabit the dungeon were some odd amalgam of reptiles and primates, the creatures each possessing four arm-like limbs that they used to traverse the canopy of the dense forest along with their long tails. It was a physical form more similar to that of apes than anything, yet the scaled creatures were clearly reptiles.

 

Their bodies grew up to six or seven feet long – at least the ones Esperanza’s group had run into – with their tails nearly just as long, and the creatures were very agile in their home ground, the forest. They made for some decent challenges for the [Progenies of Yore] who were less physically inclined, and the higher level ones even posed some threat to the stronger ones like Val-Kas’j and Tiesya.

 

Of course, the group mostly only sent out part of their fighting force to engage the creatures in combat, while the rest stayed close to the five infiltrators from Zikeal to keep them safe as they were less capable of fighting. From time to time, though, when they could isolate a lower level creature, Tiara, Kurt, and Leo often took the chance to participate as well to train their fighting skills.

 

It also gave the group their first true chance to gain some levels since they entered the human kingdom, as the dungeon’s creatures were at a high enough level to give them some proper experience. The experience needed to increase their levels kept rising as their levels increased, which was something Ani and the other fourth tier veterans confirmed as well. It was only due to the blessings – their classes needed less experience to level up – they had that Esperanza and the [Progenies of Yore] managed to level up so fast.

 

Apparently it was something shared by the [Heroes] and their companions, according to Alissa. It made some sense, as otherwise it would take too long for the [Heroes] to be powerful enough to be useful in the wars they were summoned into.

 

“Are you not partaking in the hunt, Exalted One?” asked Tiesya as she landed nimbly on the ground, having just finished hunting down one of the higher level creatures. She was one of the few who could match the creatures’ agility in the forest and actively hunted them, while most of the rest adopted a more wait and counter style to deal with the nimble creatures.

 

“These ones are too low in level for me to gain useful experience from,” replied Esperanza. Out of her original group – that was, herself, the [Progenies of Yore], and Iryl – she was the one with the highest level, so she needed targets of higher levels to gain appreciable experience from. The penalty for killing things too far below her own level practically made such creatures useless for her at the current stage. “You all can still gain decent experience from them, so you should get as much as you can.”

 

“Understood, Exalted One. Thank you for your care,” replied Tiesya with a slight bow. The group was well aware that Esperanza would have the easiest time navigating the forest canopy with her amorphous form. She did it more than often enough during their escape from Navef that the [Progenies of Yore] would not forget it. At the moment, however, there was indeed little to none for her to benefit from the creatures, so she left them to the lower leveled members of her group.

 

The first couple of days of their passage through the dungeon went relatively uneventfully. The hunt was fruitful, with some of the [Progenies of Yore] even gaining levels out of it. There were a couple creatures along the way that Esperanza could have gotten some decent experience from, but she left them to the kids, as she felt that the level of the creatures they faced should grow higher the deeper they went into the dungeon.

 

There would be enough for her when they got to that point.

 

It was during their third day in the dungeon that the group halted in its tracks because they ran into an unexpected discovery. Before them were the corpses of a group of the ape-lizard things, already dead for a while by the time the group found them. 

 

At first, they thought it might be the doing of other creatures in the dungeon. Open dungeons like the one they were in generally formed its own ecosystem, so it wasn’t odd for there to be more than one kind of monster in it, like they had seen in the Arachnoid dungeon back then, near Agur-Bas. Closer inspection showed that it was not likely the case, however.

 

The dead creatures showed wounds that were likely caused by spears and swords and the like, and a few further away still had a few broken arrows stuck in their corpses. While some monsters do use weapons and equipment, such creatures were typically only found in the more contained dungeons, not in open dungeons like these.

 

As such, the discovery led to the conclusion that the group was likely not alone in the dungeon, and there was likely a human party somewhere in there with them. 

 

From the direction they guessed the human party took after observing the traces of the battle and the tracks left behind, it was clear that said party was headed towards the center of the forest as well, so they risked running into the party by accident if they headed there as well. It was a potential problem Esperanza didn’t really like, so she decided to take matters into her own hands and bid the group to stand by while she would trail and scout out said human party to see what sort of action they should take against them, if any.

 

Esperanza swiftly shifted to a shapeless mass with long, tentacular limbs extending from the center of her form which allowed her to swiftly move through the treetops. She also kept her [Veil of Entropy] active and hid her aura as best she could, with the hope that anyone that even noticed some movement amongst the treetops would likely attribute it to just another of the ape-lizard things.

 

Both to her delight and consternation, it had not taken her too long – maybe a couple hours away from where they found the corpses – before she discovered the party that was in them with the dungeon. Her consternation was partly due to the identity of said party. The way they dressed themselves made it all too obvious that they were affiliated with the temple.

 

Alissa had asked her to spare what humans she could, but the temple – and the people affiliated with them – had been pointedly excluded from that request, both because Alissa herself held no high regard for said temple after what she had seen, and because she was aware that the temple and Oldies were pretty much mortal enemies.

 

Esperanza herself had no personal qualms with this group of temple guards – which was what they were from the snippets she heard of their conversation, a group of temple guards accompanied by a few priests on a leveling expedition – but neither did she sympathize with them. Doubly so when she caught them discussing the situation at the front and the [Heroes] and how it was their “holy duty” to make some more achievements that would make it so that the [Heroes] would not be able to overshadow the temple in the eyes of the populace.

 

The way they also praised the girl who saved the fort with her life for taking the limelight off the [Heroes] in particular disturbed her to no end, and right then and there, she made her own judgment that these people would be better off never leaving the forest.

 

There were too many of them – Esperanza counted twenty-four temple guards and six priests – for her to take on her own, though, given that most of them were in the high third tiers and a couple were even in their fourth tiers. She could probably do it on her own, but it was a touch risky, and besides, the rest of her group would likely appreciate the experience anyway.

 

With that in mind, Esperanza left the group of temple guards and priests without them even noticing her presence and rushed back towards where her group was waiting. The priests were a few hours ahead of them – since she could move much faster through the forest compared to most everyone else – but they could likely catch up to them within a day or two, without their prey noticing them, if all went well.

 

It was time to remind the humans – even if none of them would likely ever know the truth of what happened in the forest – that they were not the only hunters around.