Opening the door to the Ravenlight Party's room with his elbow and pushing it open with a nudge of his boot, Deacon stepped inside with his head down, one hand carrying a crinkling bag of flavored ice pops and another even larger bag containing ice cream tubs, two of which were mint chocolate – the exact ones Esmerelda and Jass wanted, much to the disgust of everyone else in their team.
However, before he could announce the arrival of himself and the ice cream he bought, as he raised his head, the sight that greeted him froze him mid-step, just before he could close the door behind him.
Esmerelda sat in the far corner, perched on a chair with arms crossed and facing the wall with a burger floating in front of her, and doing figure eights. Sam, a couple of meters by her, had his nose buried so deep into a book that the world could've ended around him and he wouldn't notice – though what did stand out was his hair, neon green as if someone dunked his head into a bucket of toxic green slime.
Bonehead, for some reason, was leaping up and down on his bed and clawing at his own detached left arm that hung lazily off the chandelier like some grotesque ornament.
How did…? Deacon thought to himself in confusion before his eyes moved onto the last member of the Ravenlight Party.
Jass looked the most at ease as she was sprawled across her bed with legs dangling off the side, scrolling lazily through her manaphone with a smirk tugging her lips.
The only thing that didn't belong was the completely annihilated bedside stand beside her. The wood of the bedstand was reduced to splinters, the hotel phone was crushed, and the mana crystal lamp was reduced to fragments.
That's gonna be a pricey repair fee they'll have to cover, Deacon mused to himself as he looked around at his Party members once again, as he could now see that it was not just the desk stand; everything that wasn't a table, bed, or window was thrown about or in pieces.
"…Hello?" Deacon said slowly, easing the door behind him shut with his leg hooking around the door, eyes flicking over the scene as though he had walked into the aftermath of a battlefield instead of his own Party's room. He set the bag down on the desk near the entrance, the sound of ice shifting inside sharp in the silence. "What the hell happened here while I was gone?"
"Nothing," they all said perfectly in sync.
Deacon raised a brow. "…O-kay."
…Why am I the only normal one here in this group?
Deciding to put this scene in front of him, past him, he reached into the ice pops bag and pulled out a lime-flavored ice pop. He cracked it clean in two with a sharp snap, the frozen sound echoing through the room. One half he unceremoniously dropped into a chilled cup on the desk, letting it clink against the glass and ice.
And to say everyone, except for Deacon, in that moment, turned into vultures eyeing dead prey would be an understatement as all four heads snapped toward him at once.
Sam's book shut with a loud clap, his green hair practically glowing as he lunged off the couch. Jass tossed her manaphone onto the mattress and was on her feet in an instant, her earlier relaxed expression gone, replaced with laser focus. Esmerelda practically shot up from her chair like a predator. And even Bonehead abandoned his hopeless quest of trying to reach for his arm hanging on the chandelier, and instead leaped off his bed and towards the desk.
In the span of a few seconds, the desk holding the ice cream and ice pops was mobbed – Deacon barely had enough time to get out of their way with the chilled cup holding the other half of his lime-flavored ice pop in hand.
***
After everyone had stuffed themselves with ice cream and ice pops, and the worst of the chaos had been swept under the rug – or more accurately shoved under the beds and stacked into one pathetic corner of the room – they all finally settled down and got to work on their preparation plans for War of Kingdoms Linked Quest.
The five of them sat cross-legged on the rug in the middle of the room in a loose circle and began looking through the ritual notes Deacon had written down, the analyzed properties of the ritual circles Sam had recorded, and the heavily detailed list of ingredients needed for the rituals – along with all the possible combinations, the properties those ingredients carried, the effects they could produce when combined as written, and potential ways they might be improved.
Deacon, with Bonehead's journal in hand, looked entirely lost in thought as his eyes scanned over the spidery scrawl that Bonehead called handwriting, analyzing the hundreds of shorthand notes about the ingredients and how they should be combined and prepared for the rituals that he'd written down from the book.
At the same time, his gaze kept darting sideways to the sheets of parchment Sam had filled with meticulous notes on the ritual circles. Sam had even written commentary in the margins, small reminders about rune flow and mana balancing, things Deacon didn't fully understand but filed away anyway.
"So," Deacon said, his voice through the quiet crinkling of parchments that were echoing within the room as everyone had their noses buried into the ritual notes that he, Sam, and Bonehead had written.
Deacon lowered Bonehead's journal and rested his chin against his left fist on his knee, while his right hand tapped his index finger against his left temple in a quick, restless rhythm. His eyes swept across the group before locking onto Bonehead. "You guys are telling me the Lesser Heart-Fire ritual is actually safe enough to try?"
"We believe so – I mean, according to what we've read, it's the easiest one to perform with supposedly zero side effects," Bonehead answered in between audible crunches as he chewed through what was left of his grape-flavored ice pop.
The ice pop in question was an undead-specific brand, dull and dark gray in color, that Deacon had snagged from the convenience store. It was supposedly grape flavored—though since he wasn't undead, he couldn't be sure. For the living, the taste was closer to gravel and dirt. Tiny flecks of frost clung to his teeth when he spoke again.
"But… the heart, being the central component of the ritual, can't just come from any random beast we rip it out of. It has to be from something that had high Vitality and/or Endurance for its level when it was alive."
Deacon's brows drew together as he shifted slightly and settled the journal down on the nearest patch of unoccupied floor in the middle of the circle they all formed. His fingertip kept drumming against his temple, thought it was faster now as the cogs in his head were whirring around. "And going off of that reasoning, would the obsidian shard required for the ritual need to be of high quality as well?" before then adding, "Tier 1 high quality obsidian, I mean."
"Yessir," Bonehead replied with a sharp nod, the frozen crystal crunching between his molars like gravel. "That would make the most amount of sense."
"Like boars, horses, tortoises, gorillas, and other creatures like them?" Deacon asked, his finger tapping the edge of Bonehead's journal absentmindedly as he thought through the implications.
"Yes," Jass said, finally turning her manaphone so he could see. The screen glowed in the dim light of the room, scrolling through a neat list of creatures around Berkhamsted Town. Each entry had a high-resolution photo beside it: wolves baring their teeth, armadillobears lumbering across the forest floor, gnolls crouched low in brush, and many other creatures with either high Vitality or Endurance for their level or both in the armadillobear's case.
"But we wouldn't be hunting down spriggans, satyrs, goblins, and the like," Jass continued, swiping through more images. "Their Vitality and Endurance stats are garbage for their level, since their stats are focused on Perception and/or Agility—with goblins being the worst of them. They'd probably give the ritual the worst possible buff effect, or might even cause it to backfire, given how far off their stats are from what the ritual requires."
"Makes sense," Deacon nodded as he stopped tapping the side of his head. His eyes flickered from Jass's screen to Bonehead's journal, mentally tallying the number of beasts they'd need. "We'll need at least fifteen of them, right? And, uh… they need to be fresh."
"Yes," Esmerelda cut in. "Considering our first attempts will fail as we are all doing this for the first time, fifteen seems about right."
She leaned forward slightly, tapping her finger on the rug for emphasis. "As such, it would be best to keep them alive and immobilized up until the apex of the ritual, as we still don't know if a non-fresh heart could cause complications to the ritual."
"Got it." Deacon nodded in agreement, just like in alchemy, most ingredients needed to be fresh in order for them to be used.
Esmerelda's eyes flickered, and then she snapped her fingers like a sudden lightning strike of thought. "We can only handle one at a time. So when we immobilize them, we cannot give them any cuts from which they can bleed out from. One wrong swing, one scrape… and the ritual could be ruined."
"So, stick to blunt weapons and/or blunt-based magical attacks," Deacon muttered, his mind flicking back to the blacksmith's window he'd passed on the way back from the CFMT Tower, where rows of hammers, clubs, weighted maces, crowbars, and other blunt weapons gleamed in the display cases.
"Where should we do the rituals?" Bonehead asked, snapping off another chunk of his grape-gray ice pop and crunching it between his teeth. The greyish frost clung to his jaw as he chewed, sending tiny flecks of frost scattering onto the rug. "'Cause I don't think Mrs. Gretchen would approve of us dragging in live creatures here and performing, not one, but at least five rituals."
"Yeah… she would have beat us senseless," Esmerelda added, with her arms crossed and leaning back slightly.
Sam, still hunched over a pile of parchment, finally lifted his gaze. "We'd have to do it in the forest, in a plains area… Preferably somewhere flat, with large stone slabs after we've cleaned and cleansed them. That would be perfect for the ritual, as far as I can tell – it's a nature-blood-based one, meaning that a forest would be a good place for it to be in."
"And if we're in the forest," he added, tapping a finger against the edge of a page, "we can dig small pits or enclosures for each of the creatures we capture. Which keeps them from waking up and attacking each other while the others are immobilized."
"Oh, right," Jass perked up suddenly, snapping her fingers with that same precise flick of thought she always had. "I got my Gouge Earth to Uncommon rarity, so I can create a crap load of pits without much drain on my reserves."
"Yeah, that would be helpful as hell," Deacon nodded, already envisioning the layout in his head. "My Gouge Earth is still at Initiate rarity, and I'm assuming we're gonna fail this ritual a crap load of times before we finally get it down, so we'll be relying on you to set up the pits, because I assume we're going to be failing a lot."
Bonehead tilted his head, finishing the last of his ice pop with a loud crunch. "Failing the first couple of times shouldn't be something we should be overly concerned about; we're doing something for the first time. As long as we all stick to the plan, it's just a matter of grinding until we nail it."
"Exactly," Esmerelda's eyes glinted as her lips tugged into a faint smirk. "And once we do nail it, we'll have a ritual that gives us an edge the other parties will never see coming. It'll be worth every bruise, every failed attempt, and every headache we're gonna get along the way."
Jass tapped her manaphone, scrolling through her notes, and nodded. "I've mapped out the forest near Berkhamsted. From what I can see, there are plenty of large flat stones, a good number of creatures around, and very little chance of anyone stumbling across us."
"It'll be a perfect place for us to perform our rituals."