Newly Summoned Demoness - Chapter 37 – Sharing Camp (Patreon)

The waystation was nearly identical to the first. The cavern it was attached to, however, was completely different. Elania looked down at the terrifyingly deep drop as the waterfall near the entryway tumbled into the darkness below. Her [Darkvision] just barely allowed her to make out the body of water at the bottom, large white sprays of foam lashing violently as more water poured into it.

The trek upward had taken two hours, a massive spiraling path around the main chamber that sometimes intersected. The waystation was at the very top, just under where the torrent of water flowed into the open air.

She made sure she wasn’t last in line when Taniel activated the barrier. The same familiar pop of her ears occurred as the barrier seemed to try to expel her, then gave up.

[WY#145 has accepted your unauthorized presence in order to rectify a security boundary.]

The number had gone down. If that hinted that they were getting closer, that was a hopeful sign… but also a stressful one. Reaching the city was almost as much a goal as a dread in her mind. Somehow, she doubted things would suddenly get better when she got there.

Elania glanced at Joren. She needed to somehow get more answers from him.

Taniel assigned her one of the side chambers, and this time she unpacked her stuff. It was a pitiful amount compared to the monks: her length of cloth that acted as her sleeping mat. A few rocks that she’d kept for no reason other than… well, she had forgotten they were in her robe, to be honest. Her pack had several holes in it now, plus three empty javelin loops.

Most importantly, her mana shard which she had managed not to drain any further. Keeping that power safe and ready to use was important if she ran into difficulties. As long as something didn’t kill her instantly, it was worth almost two full charges of her personal capacity.

If she had time, she could probably hunt enough to charge it further, too. Considering that she had needed less and less sleep, especially when near her maximum [Power] capacity, that seemed very possible.

Hunting, though, was what she had done on the last camp break, and she wanted to fix her outfit and gear this time. And ask questions. She’d missed her chance to ask them at the first waystation.

The novices all piled into a single room, while Taniel and Joren picked the one beside it. Hooks were hanging down from the entryway of each chamber, she realized, and one of the novices stood up and placed a large sheet, creating some privacy.

She glanced at her single piece of cloth. If she wanted, it would serve the same purpose, but then she wouldn’t have anything to sleep on. Before she made up her mind on whether to take more privacy or have a little comfort, she heard sobbing coming from the novice’s space.

That sort of explained their desire for privacy. A wave of sympathy filled her. They had lost Maurice and continued to run into monsters and nearly died. Whoever had sent them with Taniel and Joren was a criminal. The novices were obviously unready for the fight for survival that seemed to make up the Deep Caverns that Joren had called the region they were in.

Elania cracked her neck and then yawned. She hadn’t really slept since they had left. That was almost two days? A nap would do her good. She had no idea how effective the waystation’s protective field was, but it was a comforting shield, at least against any predators.

As soon as she laid down on her back, she was fast asleep.

Dreams assailed her constantly. Violent clashes with Rockbears and Razorscales dominated her attention, while the more laid-back hunt of [Ralfot] felt like a wistful memory. A pack of Darkwalkers found her and she hissed at them to leave her territory. Humans passed by while she watched silently from the shadows.

No traumatic moment stirred her awake, instead she found herself slowly drifting back to consciousness, a dull ache where she had laid on the stone. For once, she wasn’t covered in a sheen of sweat.

There was a rhythmic snoring coming from across the chamber, hinting that the monks were asleep. The remnants of a meal were piled beside the banked campfire, that only had a few glowing embers remaining. Stretching her legs, she stepped toward the exit, listening to the constant roar of the waterfall.

“Going somewhere, demon?” Taniel demanded.

She whirled to her right, not having seen the monk who had remained completely still in the corner beside the entryway. “Everyone else is asleep, and I just woke up.”

He frowned at her. “Go back to sleep. There’s still plenty of time until morning.”

“I can’t really do that. I don’t need that much sleep anymore. What about you? Don’t you need rest?” Elania asked.

“I’m on second watch,” he said.

She tilted her head. “Want me to do the watching for you?”

He scoffed immediately. “Like I’d trust you to do that. The whole point of the watch is to keep an eye on you.”

Elania rolled her eyes. Well, that made sense. If the barrier kept everything out, the only thing he’d be ‘watching’ for was her. Still, the lack of trust was palpable. “Fine. I can keep watch with you then. Do you mind if I ask some questions?”

He eyed her warily. “Yes. I do mind, actually.”

She bit her lip, suppressing her annoyance. No matter how much he didn’t like her, it didn’t feel like anything she had done warranted his behavior toward her. It felt very unfair.

Not wanting to stick around someone who hated her guts, she changed her plans. “I’m going to go collect some wood and work on my crafting, then.”

Taniel shrugged, looking away from her. “Suit yourself.”

Ugh. She wanted to slap him silly, but that wouldn’t solve anything. Deciding to be the bigger person, she walked away and through the barrier. A cool tingling enveloped her skin, then dissipated once she was fully on the other side. Tracking indicated that there weren’t any creatures that had passed by other than them, so that hinted at a bit of safety.

Backtracking for a bit, she headed down the spiral and into the previous large cavern. [Tower-Caps] and other flora greeted her with their vibrant hues, and she immediately took her little knife and began to scrap off some new shafts for javelin making.

Gathering logs didn’t seem workable without an axe, but she had a full bundle of about thirty sticks by the time she was done. They would make good kindling. Taniel was still awake when she returned, propped up against the wall, watching her every move.

She set the bundle of wood down by the rest of it and selected out her favored shafts so she could begin to carve them into javelins. Halfway through the set of a dozen, she got a rank up.

[You have gained a rank in Basic Handcrafting!]

The next six came out as [Basic Javelin] complete with no ‘makeshift’ modified! A smile creeped onto her face. Across the chamber, Taniel grunted.

“Did you just level up your crafting skill?” he asked.

Elania nodded. “I just got [Basic Handcrafting] to Rank D.”

“I’m surprised you managed to do that by making something so simple,” he commented.

Sensing a gap in his permanently-angry wall, she decided to ask a skill-related question. “How does upgrading skills work? It let me change my [Survival Crafting] Rank C into [Basic Handcrafting] Rank E, but I’m not 100% sure why or how it worked.”

He eyed her for a minute before responding. “Some skills are better than others, but related. The upgraded skill usually accounts for the capabilities of the previous one while being more effective or allowing new things. Skills don’t translate 1:1 for everyone. They are more based on your personal experience and capabilities.”

He looked away and continued. “A swordsman who has mastered his [Swordsmanship] skill who expands his capabilities with new weapons might upgrade to [Martial Handling] which encompasses more weapons…but taking that path won’t change the fact that he’ll keep the benefits from [Swordsmanship] and be better with the sword than everything else.”

Elania blinked, soaking that knowledge in, but couldn’t help but feel shocked. It was probably the most words Taniel had ever spoken to her, and without the constant glaring.

“Thank you for explaining to me,” she said.

He grunted and avoided looking at her.

A sigh escaped her. Small progress was at least progress, right? Looking at her new javelins, she took the nine worst ones and set them against the wall. Maybe someone would find them useful if they used the waystation someday. Or maybe they’d turn them to kindling. It didn’t really matter. She took the three she kept and put them in her chamber.

Next up was the sorry state of her outfit. The tears from the [Razorscale] claws and holes from the [Rockbear] shrapnel needed fixed. She had enough material to do so, but not the right tools. She popped her head out and looked at Taniel.

“I need to fix my outfit. Do you have a sewing kit with a needle and some thread?” she asked.

He looked at her, and his perpetual frown reappeared. “No.”

She raised an eyebrow. “No, you don’t have a sewing kit? Or… No, you won’t share it?”

His glare deepened. “I have one, but you can’t have it.”

“I don’t need it forever.” Elania said. She stepped out, then tugged at her outfit, displaying the holes. “I just need to fix my clothes a bit. It got shredded some.”

He stared at her silently.

“Won’t you have some mercy? What if we meet someone along the way? They’ll look at poor Elania the Demon with her deteriorating outfit, her tits hanging out, and point and go ‘Look at those Conclave Monks, forcing that poor demon to go around half-naked with them!’ or something!”

The glare disappeared into one of confusion. “That would never happen.”

“Fine. Fine. No repairs then.” Elania responded. She began to pull her clothes off.

She almost had the robe over her head when he began to stutter. “Wh...what are you doing? Don’t take off your clothes!”

Pausing, she let it down enough so she could look at him. “I’m just speeding up the process. Running around naked will let me keep my outfit intact until I can repair it, right?”

He let out something that sounded like a curse as he stood up. Going over to his chamber, he brought out a wooden box. Cracking open the lid, he showed her several sets of needles and a few spindles of colored thread. It was perfect.

“Don’t use more than is needed,” he ordered.

She gave him a mocking salute. “Aye, aye, captain. No thread wasting shall occur.”

He looked more confused than angry, and she couldn’t help but feel a bit of mirth. Back in her room, she went to work making repairs. There were a lot more holes than she had realized. The claw marks required that she cut off some sheets from her makeshift bedroll, which was going to make it short enough that her feet would stick off from now on.

That didn’t really bother her. It was thin padding anyway.

By the time she was finished, the others had started to stir. They went in groups of two to relieve themselves outside, while Taniel began to set up some cold rations for what she assumed was breakfast. He nodded to her when she returned the kit and offered her a slice of hard bread.

Elania shook her head. “I’m good. I’d rather eat some beastie if we run into one.”

That was the wrong thing to say, apparently, according to the look on his face. He didn’t snap at her, though.

She retreated to her chamber and packed up her things. That only took a few minutes, and the others were still getting ready, so she tried to focus on the new skill the [Rockbear] had given her.

[Body Conditioning] Rank D sounded very cool, but also not very intuitive. She closed her eyes and tried to picture herself being tougher, like the [Rockbear] had been. Nothing really happened. Maybe it was a passive effect? She grabbed her knife and slid it against her thumb. It stung, and blood welled almost immediately.

Urgh, she hated not knowing things. Worse, she hated the feeling that she couldn’t ask because… well, letting someone know she had a specific skill might bite her in the ass later. What if the monks went hostile and, since they knew about the skill, they could negate it because they knew more?

She eyed the group; they were nearly ready. Companions she couldn’t fully trust. Suddenly all the RPG games she had played with party dynamics and the like seemed to have missed just how bad grouping up like this was.

“Elania, we are leaving,” Joren called.

She stood up and followed.

The next curve took them away from the waterfall chamber, on a gradual upward slope. With Joren awake, she had a new target to extract information from.

“What’s potency do? The number beside your level and race on the status screen,” Elania asked.

Joren looked back at her. “That’s your race and natural capability for learning new skills and ranking them up. A normal human tends to be around 250 point, while those with special ancestry might get as high as 1,000. Some races like elves might reach 2,000 or a little higher.”

Elania blinked. Hers was 9999+ so it wasn’t even giving her the full number. What the heck.

“What about…what about demons?” she asked.

Taniel snorted. “They have the same as their summoned race. Sad that you got a bad number?”

“I’m surprised that humans have such a low starting number. Doesn’t that mean they have a hard time getting skills? I feel like it should be reversed, with humans having a high number and elves lower because they live so much longer… wait, elves live longer, right?” Elania asked.

Joren looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “They live for several thousand years, yes. Why wouldn’t they learn faster? You don’t want to fuck around with an elf. They usually have dozens of skills in a wide variety of areas. It makes them very dangerous. One of the reasons they are disliked. Thankfully, they don’t enjoy visiting Neftasu and keep to the Overworld mostly.”

“Only one of the reasons? Why else aren’t they liked?” Elania asked.

“Well. They don’t have issues with eating people. It’s said humans taste good to them,” Taniel answered. “Something you probably have in common.”

Oh. They were those kind of elves. She ignored Taniel’s comment about her own preferences in favor of another question.

“If you have some skill you don’t understand or know about, is there a way to learn about it without having to find someone to teach you?” she asked.

Joren looked back at her again. “Other than trial and error? Not really, but if you have a skill, you should know how to use it alre—”

Taniel held up his fist. “Quiet!”

Everyone jolted to a halt. They were at the threshold to a new cavern, this one relatively shaded with a lack of [Glow-Moss] and other fungi. As she scanned the horizon of the cave, she spotted what had prompted Taniel’s caution.

“Can’t make it out in this light,” Joren complained.

“Don’t worry. I can see them. It is just a herd of Ralfots—”

Her words trailed off as she spotted something larger in the center of the herd. She’d dismissed it as a large rock, but then it moved, turning two large sheepy-bovine eyes toward them.

[Alpha Ralfot]

[You have gained a level in Identify!]

“—Alpha Ralfot!”

Curses erupted from the two senior monks while the novices began to back step the way they had come.

The large brute began to glow, pawing the ground and kicking up rocks that sent the herd fleeing in the other direction, a chorus of ‘Moobaaa” filling the caves.

“I see it,” Taniel confirmed.

How could he not with the fucking thing glowing like a spotlight?

It snorted, let out a bellow, and then charged.