D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

--- Kat ---

"In the end? The night didn't end up being so bad. Oh sure in the moment it was terrifying. Whole bunch of stuff that would dash in an around the trees, drawing your attention and ratcheting your paranoia up. Luckily with three mages we could keep a light spell going. Not the cheapest thing… but it's just a basic light, so it wasn't too bad," said Blue.

Lily wanted to interrupt and ask what that meant, especially because she didn't know how to cast a basic light spell and that seemed important… but Blue did ask not to interrupt and they'd already failed to follow request. Best not to push for magical knowledge right now. Perhaps after the story was done.

"Estelle and Skye were the main 'torchbearers' because theoretically I needed my mana to fight off anything we came across… but of course they couldn't burn too much either because if someone got hurt they'd need healing so, you know, it was a balance and Skye managed it surprisingly well. Nobody ever dropped below half mana, and I never dropped below two-thirds.

"Occasionally something would jump at us. Just to keep the tension up… but it was never anything dangerous. A few mortal bats here, a snake there. Things that might seem scary but we didn't even encounter a Rank 1 beast while the night was upon us. In the moment, not a single one of us noticed how strange that was.

I'd like to blame the pollen… but I'm not sure if I would've noticed had I been completely clearheaded.

"There wasn't even any traps," Blue suddenly shouted lashing out and blowing the water to the edges of the pool. As soon as she'd done it, Blue winced while blushing heavily. "Um… oops? Look it's sort of embarrassing to have missed that detail. Especially after we'd just been tricked into sleeping for who knows how long in the hot springs.

The fact that we were on edge and desperately looking for threats that weren't there? It sort of hurts my pride as an adventurer. Guess it just shows we had a long way to go…

"Anyway, what that means in practical terms is coming morning? We were absolutely wiped. The mental effort of regular spellcasting, even something cheap like 'Torchlight' was digging into us. Plus the constant alertness for the whole night and the lack of food. So we were about ready to collapse…

"When we came across a massive table of fresh food just laid out right then and there. Estelle bolted off towards it only be caught by Skye I was about to ask what was going on… then I saw the look on her face. Pity. It confused me long enough for her to say 'The hot springs were a trap, what is the bet the food is as well?' and god didn't it suck to hear that.

"We spent a full half an hour arguing about it. Worse, we could tell just based on the lack of animals and bugs attracted to the food… and the fact that it stayed fresh that Thyme shenanigans were going on. Eventually, we settled on eating one at a time. I had to go first, annoyingly enough, because if the food was poisoned or something they'd need to heal me,"

Blue let out a long sigh. "It WAS poisoned. Not badly, but it was all poisoned. Now luckily, Skye was able to notice and healed me up… and then we had another long debate about if it was worth eating poisonous food because they could heal through it. That took another good chunk of our time… but they went through with it in the end.

"Then there was ANOTHER debate about if we should wait for Skye and Estelle to regenerate mana or not. Now, this is the point where I started to get annoyed at Skye, but also majorly respect her. Like, we totally would've fallen apart without her leadership skills. In the end, she said we'd compromise. Wait till we had half our mana, and then head out,"

"So, yeah, we rested, ignored the smell of the food nearby, and eventually got back to things. It was traps and stuff again until we ran into another group of people, just two this time… and they didn't attack us! So more of the same really.

Walk, walk, walk, climb a bit, dodge some traps, freak out because a stick got snapped in the forest and you have no idea what's in there, but of course you DO NOT CHASE IT because stepping off the path is a dumb idea.

"Honestly that nearly caught us out more than once. Never Skye, and usually not Estelle but I guess I was on a sort of hair trigger at that point. I was so ready to charge off into the forest just to… do something else? I guess? I don't really know what I was thinking but I was scared and annoyed and not thinking straight. It's actually around now that we started to notice that something was wrong.

"Skye sat us down and cast a few more diagnostic spells… and nothing. Allegedly, but she did a few more mundane tests and worked out that we were all being impaired by something. We assumed, at that moment, it was from the food. We'd missed something and it was coming back to bite us… but we didn't even have an argument about it that time. We all knew there was no other choice.

"It was a false assumption of course, but we didn't know and it didn't really change anything… but it did make Skye decide to make things a bit safer. She asked me to pull off some vines and once we had enough she tied us all together. Now, there was a massive amount of slack. Easily enough to run through a trap or two without issues, but that was for the better.

"They were a bit heavy… but Skye convinced us that it was better. That the weight would help us remember. Help us stay focused. That every time we thought about doing something stupid, we could feel the tug of the rope and know that we had a goal, and we had to stick together.

"I'm butchering her speech a bit. It was super cool in the moment, but it's sort of fuzzy now… I guess that's because I was too busy being hyped up by Skye's vocal performance instead of actually paying attention to the words she was saying.

Oh I heard enough, but yeah definitely blanking on some parts and I doubt I could do it justice anyway… so yeah once that was settled back on the god damn road!"

"Nothing too specially happened for a while. More traps, more walking, even when the snow hit it wasn't all that different… for a bit at least. As it got darker and we climbed higher it started properly snowing. Not the worst thing in the world, made some of the agility traps a bit harder… until suddenly there's enough snow on the road to block it from view. That's where the problems started.

"At the start I just focused on moving a bit of snow out of the way. We didn't need it completely gone; it wasn't thick… just a thin coating that caused issues. We were mostly safe, the path didn't open up a bunch. There were usually trees or rocks nearby to keep us on tracks even without my efforts… but it was getting darker and it was taking more and more mana to keep all the snow off.

"There was one moment, where we crossed another team. They looked… awful frankly. It was another group of three and they had arrows still sticking into their limbs, bruises just about everywhere and looked about ready to collapse. At the same time, I didn't have much mana, and we didn't know if we could win that fight…

"Luckily they just passed us by. Despite the mana issue we looked to be in good shape even if we weren't. As the sun set though? We started to argue. It was clear what was happening. We were theoretically near the top… but we'd already pushed ourselves.

We'd been up since around midnight and we were getting tired. Ignorable, yes, but did we want to? Another night of jumping at shadows, while hungry once again?

"In the end, we got lucky. We decided to push on and not even an hour later we found a cave. A cave with an elevator. It shot us right to the top and dumped us with our teammates. Well, not everyone's teammates. Two people from Skye's team were there.

Nell was there for me, and Estelle had no one just yet… so I don't know if she made it, or heck if Skye's whole team made it in the end…

"But we got there. It wasn't as deadly as I might have feared but it was an endurance test that we faltered through more than once. It was… interesting. Not sure if I can say it was worth it considering we already failed huh?"