Further tightening his grip on the last elite satyr's neck, Deacon dug his back deeper into the damp, rocky mud while the elite satyr writhed above him, hooves kicking and scraping uselessly against the ground as its fingers clawed at his forearms in a futile attempt to escape.
The satyr attempted to manipulate the swamp flora, but being this far out from the solid and sturdy terrain of the mountain, all it could conjure were soft, half-formed tendrils of reed, vine, and weeds that barely coiled around Deacon's ribs before tearing apart under his movements. Roots, thorns, or hardened branches would have been dangerous to deal with, but vines and swamp weeds posed as much threat as wet rope, especially considering that satyr's focus was strained under Deacon's chokehold on him.
The satyr's eyes bulged as it choked, its nature magic flaring wild and unfocused from panic rather than control. Thin strands of moss and root rose from the mud in a desperate attempt to reach Deacon's face; toward his eyes, ears, and nose, but each attempt only resulted in Deacon tightening the chokehold, collapsing the satyr's airway little by little. Their tumble down the rocky slope had already disoriented the creature, and the soft mud flats offered nothing sturdy for it to draw on.
Deacon exhaled through his nose, unimpressed and already bored with the struggle. He'd wanted to see just how much his raw strength and endurance had improved after eating the Apple of Iðunn, and at this point, he'd seen enough – he was able to tank a tumble down a 300-meter mountain slope with only a bruise or two to show for it.
Shifting his grip slightly and applying only a fraction more force to his arms, he gave a sharp twist accompanied by a muted crack. The satyr's neck gave out, and its body went limp beneath him.
*[Satyr – Elite Lv 17] has been slain – XP has been given.*
Deacon released the chokehold he had on the now corpse and pushed it off his torso.
While Blood Sense was still active, and as soon as the satyr's blood began fading to a darker red, signifying the death of its owner, he caught the motion of a red humanoid silhouette descending from above.
He glanced up, eyes still faintly glowing red, and saw Sam floating down toward him, staring at him with a look halfway between disbelief and irritation.
"What?" Deacon asked, wiping a streak of mud and pebbles from beneath his chin as he stood, his armor coated in splattered mud from his tumble.
"You do realize I was literal seconds away from just sniping him, right?" Sam said flatly as he was descending.
"The Satyrs were mine to kill first and foremost… And I wanted to test my strength." Deacon shrugged, rolling his shoulder once before grabbing the satyr corpse by the horn and dragging it up from the mud. "I wanted to see how much my stats actually improved, considering the massive stat boosts I got."
"Damn, you don't even look that winded from falling that high," Sam remarked as he touched down beside Deacon, watching him shove the elite satyr corpse into his Spatial Sling Bag like it was nothing more than a sack of laundry.
"I got a couple nicks here and there, so I'm not untouched," Deacon replied with a shrug. "And I tumbled more than I fell. Makes sense, I tanked it though; after eating the Apple of Iðunn, I gained, what, ten levels' worth of stats and then some."
"You lucky bastard," Sam muttered before immediately pinching his nose and mocking Deacon in a nasally voice. "'I just tumbled down a mountain, meh, meh, ten levels of stats, meh meh. My race is bullshit. Boo hoo.'"
"Yeah, you're tellin' me," Deacon snorted as the two of them began trudging deeper into the swamp, brown water reaching up to their shins and filling their noses with the smell of rotten eggs and damp wood.
Sam let out a slow exhale through his nose as he continued with his rant. "You're lucky satyrs don't have hard-root control or nature manipulation in swamps or you'd be walking around with roots in the holes where your eyes, nose, and ears are."
"Relax," Deacon said, slinging the body over his shoulder. "If he had a real threat to throw at me, I would've snapped his neck faster than it could even actually put up a fight... Guess that means I should try and find something a lot tougher to figure out how much I've gotten or if the apple gave me some other hidden ability."
"That's… not the point," Sam muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Whatever. Just remind me to never let you 'test' anything near me ever again."
Deacon only smirked before glancing northwest toward a thick patch of gloomy-looking red maples. "Well, satyrs are done, so that means we can head for the hags and nixies next before we meet up with everyone else."
"You know," Sam said as he started trudging beside him through the mud, "there were easier ways to test your newfound strength and checking for potential abilities that didn't involve wrestling a satyr off a mountain and tumbling into a swamp."
Deacon scoffed under his breath. "Yeah, but this was faster."
"Still," Deacon said, steering the conversation back to the Jötnar. "The only downside is that I can't find shit about it. For all that power, there's not a single damn mention of a Jötunn anywhere."
"Same," Sam admitted, brows furrowed. "I've read through House libraries, noble archives, academy records, and even cross-referenced tomes in other noble estates. I've seen races mentioned in Earth Mythos, Extinct races like the panda and Qilin, and demi-races of all known races. But I don't recall ever seeing the word Jötunn. Not even once."
"I didn't even know I wasn't human until the day I received my Class and began climbing the Tower," Deacon muttered. "Then suddenly I'm told I'm some race called a Jötunn, and the plans I had for the build I wanted when I reached Tier 2 went to shit. And I can't even research what advantages my race has or pull up references from any great climbers, because somehow, in the entire Tower — spanning over three hundred years of history, there's zero record of my race? That's some grade A bullshit right there."
"Meaning that something happened in the Tower," Sam said to him – something that he agreed wholeheartedly.
It was too convenient otherwise.
Too exact and too thorough, like someone or some group erased all mentions of them.
Knowledge in the Tower didn't just vanish, especially after the development of the CFMT Towers and the millions of people who used it.
As the thought settled in, Sam raised a hand and wordlessly unleashed a barrage of Manabolts on their two o'clock. The swamp water erupted in blue flashes as the bolts ripped through the first wave of nixies that silently rose from the water and slinked towards the both of them.
The creatures looked like some unholy mix between a bright blue frog and a floating jellyfish that was a meter tall in length, their semi-transparent tendrils dangling beneath gelatinous bodies that hovered just inches above the swamp surface. Their bulbous yellow eyes blinked sideways as their tendrils propelled them in erratic, jerking motions towards them.
As soon as the last bolt punched clean through their soft bodies, Sam flicked his fingers and sent a net of thin mana strings across the swamp surface, dragging the floating corpses together towards Deacon. Falling into habitual motion, Deacon stabbed through each torso with a knife, and pulled out the slick, marble-like Nixie cores one by one before passing them back to Sam, who dropped them into his Spatial Satchel.
"My father told me Jötnar were a hunted race," Deacon said, resuming the conversation without missing a beat. "He said I should be careful while climbing and that if my identity were to be known, then I would be hunted down."
"Which would mean—"
"—something happened long ago that caused the entire history and knowledge about the race of Jötnar to be erased and possibly eradicated," Sam finished.
"But why?" Deacon pressed. "And how? If it was just killing a couple groups of Jötnar, fine – shit happens in the Tower, and a couple of bad Jötnar probably did something to deserve it like that bastard with the lifespan-stealing artifact. But what would justify a purge that removed every trace, every scrap of a race? And how could that be possible without some traces being left behind?"
Silence settled between them, broken only by the wet squelching of their boots in the mud and the low hum of swamp insects as they entered a grotto of twisted, red-barked maples draped in drooping moss. The branches arched overhead, blocking most of the sunlight and forcing Deacon to conjure several small tufts of Ignis that floated around them to provide light.
As they moved deeper into the grotto, both remained alert — Sam spreading out his Mana Sensing abilities to locate any shift in the mana nearby while Deacon had Blood Sense active and surveyed everything around them, even going so far as to catalogue the insects that buzzed nearby.
The two only came to a sudden stop as they caught sight of the noses and ears being hung and strung about on some of the trees leading to the left with ropes of brown, blonde, and black colored hair.
Giving each other a knowing glance, the two of them made a left turn and crept towards the section of the swamp that the hags had transformed into their home.
As they trekked onward, the laughter grew louder; hacking, wet, broken giggles layered over one another like a choir of dying throats, until the trees opened into a clearing of thirteen raised huts standing on crooked, damp stilts above the murky swamp water. The structures were old and half-rotten, but each one released faint streams of vapor through a hole in its roof, and from the windowless gaps Deacon could hear the bubbling of cauldrons and the clinking of glass.
The hags were brewing something.
"What's the plan?" Sam whispered, staying low behind a moss-covered trunk as the two of them ducked out of sight.
Deacon narrowed his eyes, taking stock of the layout. The huts were spread unevenly, some connected by crude plank bridges, others isolated. Attacking with fire would be useless in this kind of damp terrain, and sneaking hut-to-hut would be incredibly risky due to the squelching of his boots in the mud.
He weighed options for only a few seconds before turning to Sam.
"How strong are your Wind Arrows in terms of penetration? And what's your max range?"
"I can hit the furthest hut no problem," Sam murmured back. "And if I can get enough time to charge up my arrows, I can punch through the wood no problem. If I can get sight of them, it would be doable."
"Good," Deacon nodded. "Then here's what we do. I'll mark each hag's head position outside their huts with solidified mana orbs. The moment I'm done, you fire. If somehow a couple of them survive, then we'll just take them out without concern of making noise."
"You got a spell to do that from the spellbook?" Sam asked under his breath.
"Yeah, I got lucky," Deacon mumbled as he gathered in his eyes and pushed Blood Sense to its limit. As he strained his focus, he zeroed in on the life signatures inside each hut and realized that there were nine hags in total, and each in their own huts.
Nine small, solid-blue orbs of compressed mana floated up from his palm and drifted silently into the village, aligning themselves with the height and position of each hag's skull from behind the wood of the huts — moving until they hovered, perfectly in parallel with the heads of each of the hags they shadowed.
The moment the ninth orb reached the last hag's hut and hovered behind the wooden wall, lined up with her head, Sam began conjuring Wind Arrows. He packed each spell construct with dense wind mana – modifying their thin forms into long, spear-shaped bolts and thickening them until each one matched the width of his forearm. Once compacted, he shaped them for piercing, minimizing drag, and sharpening their tips to needle points.
Letting out a slow exhale, Sam fired all nine modified Wind Arrows, simultaneously activating his newly acquired wind spell that doubled their speed. In the blink of an eye, the nine projectiles punched through the hut walls and through the hags' skulls.
Not a second after their launch, nine notifications greeted them.
*[Hag – Lv 17] has been slain – Partial XP has been given.*
***
*[Hag – Elite Lv 18] has been slain – Partial XP has been given.*
"Ah fuck," Deacon suddenly muttered after he deactivated Blood Sense, and a realization hit him as he saw the splashbacks of the Wind Arrows tear a hole through the heads of the hags. "The tongues…"