The water was safe, but the land was not.
After the convicts had their fill of the boiled, cooled water, a strange lethargy settled over the camp. It was the exhaustion of the damned who had suddenly been given a reprieve. Alaric, however, did not sit. He stood at the edge of the basalt overhang, staring out into the swirling wall of the Muted Mist.
"General, we cannot stay huddled under this rock like rats," Alaric said, his eyes scanning the jagged horizon. "We need to know what we are sharing this island with. If we wait for the threats to come to us, we are already dead."
Kaelen grunted, pushing himself up from the stone. His heavy plate armor, once the pride of the Valerian military, looked dull and lifeless in the gray light. "The men can barely stand, Alaric. You want to go scouting in a place where a man can't see his own hand in front of his face?"
"I don't need to see through the mist to understand the geography," Alaric replied! "Look at the slope of the basalt. The way the condensation drips from the cliffs suggests a higher elevation to the North. If there is a plateau, there is a better vantage point. Sarah! Elian! You're with us!"
Elian, the disgraced Mage, looked horrified. "You want me to walk into that?! Without a Shield of Light? Without even a 'Farsight' enchantment?! It is suicide!"
"Then stay here and wait for something to eat you in your sleep," Alaric snapped! "Kaelen, lead the way."
The four of them moved out, leaving the 500 convicts huddled around the dying embers of the bow-drill fire. The landscape was a nightmare of obsidian shards and stunted, gray moss that felt like dry bone underfoot. The mist pressed against them, damp and cold, sticking to their skin like a second, unwanted layer of clothing.
"Quiet," Kaelen suddenly hissed, his hand snapping to the hilt of his sword.
He moved with the grace of a predator, despite the weight of his unpowered armor. He signaled for them to crouch behind a cluster of jagged rocks.
From the shifting curtains of the mist, a shape emerged. It was the Mist-Stalker they had heard earlier, but seeing it was far worse than hearing it. The creature was a twisted mockery of a wolf, but its limbs were too long, ending in multi-jointed claws that clicked rhythmically against the stone. Its skin was translucent and sickly, showing the dark, pulsing veins beneath.
The beast stopped, its snout twitching. It didn't have eyes; instead, it had rows of heat-sensitive pits along its jaw that glowed with a faint, predatory yellow light.
"It smells the mana," Elian whimpered, his teeth chattering. "Even the tiny bit left in my core... it's like a beacon to it!"
The Stalker lunged!
It was a blur of violet-gray flesh. Kaelen roared, drawing his massive claymore. Usually, the blade would erupt in a gout of blue flames that would cleave a beast in two before it could even land. But here, the steel remained dark.
Clang!
The creature's claws slammed against Kaelen's iron spaulder. The General groaned under the weight, his knees buckling. Without mana to enhance his strength, he was fighting with only his human muscles.
"Die, you filth!" Kaelen bellowed!
He swung the heavy blade in a brutal arc. The edge caught the Stalker in its midsection. On Earth, the force of such a blow would have severed the creature. But the Stalker's hide was unnaturally dense. The sword bit deep, but it didn't finish the job. The beast shrieked—a sound like metal grinding on metal—and lashed out, its claws leaving a deep furrow across Kaelen's chest plate.
Alaric watched, his mind racing. The creature has high tensile strength but low thermal resistance! Look at the way the blood smokes when it hits the cold rocks! Its internal body temperature is incredibly high to compensate for the mist!
Kaelen stepped inside the beast's guard, throwing his shoulder into its chest. He drove his dagger into the soft tissue beneath its jaw. The Stalker thrashed, its yellow pits dimming, before finally collapsing into a heap of twitching limbs.
Kaelen stood over it, panting heavily. He wiped black, viscous blood from his brow. "That... was a scout," he rasped, looking at Alaric. "A weak one. If a pack of those comes tonight, my sword will break before I kill the tenth one. We can't fight them like this, Alaric. Not without magic."
"Then we won't fight them with swords," Alaric said, kneeling by the carcass. He looked at the creature's claws—hard, sharp, and potentially filled with phosphorus or some other reactive element. "General, we need a defensible position. A place with narrow chokepoints where their numbers won't matter."
"There is a cave system further up the ridge," Sarah pointed out, her voice trembling. "I saw it while we were gathering wood. But... the mages say it smells of 'Old Death.' They were too afraid to go near it."
"Fear is a luxury we no longer have," Alaric said, standing up. "Kaelen, gather the men. We are moving to those caves. And Sarah, I need you to gather the fats from the ship's kitchen crates and those blackened claws. I'm going to show you how a 'Broken Prince' makes a fireball."