After some discussions amongst themselves, only the brothers decided to stay at the walled town, everyone else followed Bethany and Audrey. Arinya still lived in the walled town with her family and servants, she would join them for training in the morning. As soon as they left the safe zone barrier, they noticed Beau became a different person, his carefree and casual attitude was gone and replaced by a hyper awareness and serious demeanor that made Audrey feel like an unprofessional slacker. The change was so sudden and shocking that Audrey and Bethany almost tripped and fell, the battle torn ground didn't help either.
As they approached the crater, Beau and Chris started asking questions about the place and how its magic worked, while Lucy was as quiet as before but as they got closer she seemed to get more and more nervous. Audrey and Bethany were ignoring the questions and just talking about how much they missed their moss beds. As they walked around it toward the entrance, Audrey began really looking at the village with magic sense. She could tell that it was a much more substantial place than it was before perhaps having three times as much magic into everything than before.
When they reached the entrance, Bethany said, "Here is the entrance, get any closer than I am now and the defenses will activate if you aren't allowed in."
"What will happen if they activate?" Chris asked.
Bethany looked at Audrey, who sighed and squinted at the entrance. "I have no idea, this place has changed since I was here last. You see that up there?" she asked while pointing up at the sky above them. There were what looked like lightning bugs flashing their lights above them, thousands of them. They had all seen the lights as they got closer but no one commented on them. "Those lights are a result of massive amounts of magic and volcanic ash being turned into something useful for this place and brought into the ground. I don't think it will kill you, but it won't let you in, or maybe it will, up to you guys when to try it, but you will have to at some point if you want to join us on a more permanent basis."
"Can I try now?" Lucy asked in a shy voice.
"Sure, but we aren't…" Bethany trailed off as Lucy took careful steps forward. "Best not to have any aggressive emotions or thoughts right now."
Lucy made it to the center of the entrance with nothing happening, but as soon as she tried to go further, roots came up out of the ground around her. They didn't stab her or hit her, instead they picked her up softly and set her down three feet outside the gate. Bethany and Audrey were completely shocked at the gentleness of how it reacted, almost as if it didn't want to hurt her.
"Ugh, this is stupid, "Chris said in a huff, "so much for defenses, this place is a wuss." She strode forward with confidence and anger. This time, as soon as she reached the center of the entrance roots shot out like spears into her kneecaps and out the back of her legs. Everyone froze at the entirely different response, including Chris who was in shock at how fast and violent the roots moved to stop her. After a second of silence the roots wrapped around her legs and threw Chris back twenty feet to land in a heap screaming in pain.
Tara heard the screaming and came running out toward the entrance, but stopped near the fountain when she saw Bethany and Audrey out there with some new faces. She put her hand in the water and flung some out to create her water golem and sent it out to stand just inside the entrance. She still thought the little thing was adorable so she had it dance for the recruits when it got there. Bethany rolled her eyes at it and Audrey just started laughing hysterically. Lucy looked incredibly confused and Beau looked up at it from where he was holding Chris and smiled.
Beau was not someone who was a stranger to violence, he grew up in a trailer park in West Virginia with his mother and her string of boyfriends, each one more of a loser than the last. There wasn't much to do in a coal mining town with one of the last remaining coal mines in the state other than be a general nuisance to everyone. He got into fights and committed petty crimes like vandalism and destruction of property. He never got caught until he met Chris, a genuine thief, they got busted stealing chemicals from the mining company. Chris took the blame and saved him from getting anything on his record.
What made Beau happy in this moment was this group's reaction to the display of violence. They didn't flinch, they didn't show concern, it didn't seem to affect them at all. He had seen this before, other criminal elements who were easy with violence, but were loyal to a group, they were gang members. This is what he was hoping to find, people who would kill for each other, because he knew this new world was going to get violent without the pressure of the monster horde events hanging over their heads. The new social structure was going to have to start all over with tribes, which were basically gangs and the only gangs that would make it through this were the ones who knew how to survive.
"What are you smiling at, asshole?" Chris yelled.
"What? That little water golem is adorable," Beau responded.
Chris tilted her head up to look at it, "Really? I have holes where my kneecaps should be and you are smiling at a dancing water midget?"
"Alright, only one more person to try," Bethany said and gestured to the entrance while smirking at Beau.
"Don't do it, it's some kind of trick," Chris yelled. "These bastards brought us here to play a sick joke on us, their evil."
After she said that, the water golem ran up to them and wagged its finger at her. It then turned around and bubbled some air out of its butt that sounded more like hot tub jets than a fart.
Chris' face turned red with anger, "See!"
Beau hid his face with his hands to avoid letting Chris see him laughing. "I'll just give it a quick try and then I'll carry you back to the walled town." Beau said and stood up, he then walked casually toward the entrance and the water golem walked next to him. When he got to the center he took a slow step past it and when his foot hit the ground a single root came up. The root grew into a hand and waved, then held up one finger and wagged it in front of him. Beau smiled and put out his hand for a handshake and at first the root recoiled away and became sharp. After a couple seconds it reformed into a hand and shook Beau's hand.
This surprised everyone since this was way more sentience than any of them were expecting. Beau smiled even bigger and turned around, walking back to Chris.
"Well, that was unexpected," said Bethany.
"I'll see you tomorrow morning," Beau said and walked toward the safe zone with Chris in his arms.
Lucy bowed to the three women and followed behind Beau, as usual her facial expression was blank. However, with Audrey's magic sense, she could feel that after what had happened, Lucy was starting to feel some hope and relief. The three of them went into Eli's room and sat at the table, Audrey pulled out some tea and bread that she had bought from the system store and they ate while they filled Tara in on the recruits. Bethany mostly wanted to talk about Beau and how important she thought that it was that he be recruited, but Tara wanted to talk about the brothers. She really wanted to know how similar their nodes and abilities were. Audrey didn't know why but Bethany put it together quickly, she was trying to figure out how similar families were to each other when it comes to power.
After their talk which ended up not going anywhere, Bethany and Audrey went to their huts and Tara took a nap in Eli's bed. All three of them woke up before dawn and met at the fountain. They didn't say anything to each other, just looked around and at each other in a surreal way, as if for the first time realizing that waking up in a magical village was their life now. The huts and main building were getting more and more intricate and decorated as time went on. It started as just stone and plants, but now there were flower beds around the doors to each building, and a stone walkway connected them together with the endless fountain as the centerpiece.
The stone walls of each place was just blank stone, but now, in the predawn haze before the sun came up, glowing runes could be seen covering each surface. There were single, large runes at first but even while they were watching, the runes got smaller to make room for more runes. Audrey was in constant surprise at how complicated the magic was getting, it didn't even make sense to her anymore. She could feel Eli's intent under it all, but it wasn't a clear intent, like the magic was given general instructions and as more power was gathered it was using more complicated solutions.
Tara left and went to hunt in the woods just as she did every morning, even though she had to travel for hours before she found anything that would challenge her. Bethany and Audrey went to the meeting spot just as the sun was starting to rise over the eastern horizon. Lucy was already there, sitting and meditating when they walked up, she didn't respond or acknowledge that someone was there, so they left her alone. A few minutes later when the sun rose up enough to shine on the ground where they were standing, the other four showed up.
"Alright everyone is here, Audrey here will be teaching you magic, and I will be teaching team combat. Tara, who some of you met last night, will be teaching individual combat. We are not experts but we have each fought over a thousand monsters so far and have been given a small amount of guidance from Lord Ash."
"When do we get to meet him?" Lucy asked.
"Whenever he gets back from the erupting volcano, I imagine that he will return a great deal stronger than the last time we saw him." Audrey said.
"Feel free to reserve judgement on our group until you meet him, but I'm sure you will want to join after you do, he is quite impressive and a good man," Said Bethany. "I bet he is having the time of his life fighting a volcano to get stronger."
************
Eli was not having a good time, he has been soaking up magic from the eruption for four days now and it was not showing any hints of slowing down. The part that was bothering him was that his interaction with the magic felt like it was helping since he was absorbing some of it, but to do so he had to cause damage. The magic was fire, air, earth, and chaos in a volatile mixture, the chaos magic was especially causing problems agitating the other components. To separate the chaos magic he had to call to it with his chaos magic, using small bits of it to agitate the chaos magic which separated it and then he could draw it in.
The magic he drew in wasn't all chaos so he was using the leftovers to push his body and soul to leveling, which is what was causing him trouble at the moment. With his chaos node getting close to planet level, and his body and soul getting close to leveling to three, his mind was not able to keep track of so many things at once. He was losing progress on his improvements and on the volcano because he just couldn't keep it together. Finally on the fourth day of working on this and after a full day of a basic stalemate with the volcano, he had to make a choice on what to improve.
If he focused on the node it would help with the volcano but it would set him back in the other areas. Without knowing how much damage the volcano would cause if he let it get worse, he withdrew most of his focus on his body and soul improvements and just focused on his node. Drawing more and more magic from the eruption, it was starting to show signs of calming down but there just wasn't an end to the magic it was producing. The problem was one of scale, he just wasn't able to affect it enough to get it to a point where it would be affected enough to make a real difference. The chaos magic he was absorbing and holding in his node was volatile by its nature and didn't want to be controlled.
As if it was becoming a pattern for him, Eli made a drastic choice and decided to push his willpower beyond what he thought was possible. Before he started his plan he had an idle thought about if he was becoming a masochist, but he shook those thoughts away and forced his mind to focus. Then he reached out with his will and began to draw in all the magic, only separating the chaos magic out after it was inside him, which was much easier to do than when it was outside his body. The magic he wasn't using he let flow out of himself, which split his flesh open and scraped holes in his soul.
The pain was so intense that he almost blacked out at first, but he was able to keep pushing. Eli clenched his jaw so hard he was cracking his teeth and his muscles were so tense that he could feel tendons tearing. The damage would heal and then he would do it all over again, in some cases bones would break or crack and then heal. Blood was pooling around him and boiling from the intensity of magic and the heat from the volcano. He wasn't sure how long he was going to need to keep this up but after the first hour, he was able to separate a piece of his mind away from the pain enough to monitor himself and keep everything going smoothly. With no end in sight, he braced himself and kept pushing on, he was going to save everyone from this volcano or die trying.