"God, I'm loving that fire magic already." Sky said as she sheathed her dark iron longsword into a metal sheath that hung from a leather belt. She looked at the two of us with a smile and slowly walked over to where we were standing.
However, as she began walking over, I lowered my sword to my side, not sheathing it whilst keeping a strong grip around it. Although I knew it was Sky and was well aware that she had just helped us, her being there put me on edge. After the two years of being in Aincrad surviving monsters and players, she had chosen the one race that was built specifically to kill players.
Sky looked down at my sword and stopped moving. She sent a glare towards me and casually rested her left hand on the pommel of her own sword. "Why the hostility, I just helped with killing those things and we're not exactly strangers?" She asked in an offended tone, although by the irritated look on her face I could see that she was ready for a fight should I attack her.
"Why did you chose one of the races specifically for killing players?" I answered her question as though it were an insult in itself. "We literally spent two years fighting and surviving the Pk'ers and now you join a race specifically built for them." I practically spat this last part. I could see literally no reason as to why she would want to be part of a race specifically for killers.
"Wow, do you really think that Andrew, do you honestly think that I've forgotten those years already?" She shot back at me, her tone getting angrier by the word. "I am perfectly aware that we spent two years fighting people like the coffins, good god we almost all died to them, Andrew and Oliver did lose their lives to those murderers. Do you really think that I want to become one of them, even if there is no real threat of death?" She was practically shouting at me now and raised her arms up waiting for me to do something.
"Why else would you chose to become one of them? In this world they're simply killers, there's nothing good about being one of them." I fired back with anger at her sheer ignorant and quick tempered manner. "There was nine races in total, why did you pick the murderers out of them all?"
"Good God do I need to lay this out so simply for you. You've been playing games for long enough I'd hope, you know how a party structure should work. You chose a mainly magic using race in the Undine and Aurora has a ranged class with the Sylphs. If we're going up against some heavy enemies we need a tank or high DPS character to keep us alive. I didn't chose the Salamanders so that I could go and kill people! I chose it so that we can actually go and save Steven." She retorted with an anger I had never heard from her before.
My hand tightened around the handle of my sword once again at the mention of Steven and I opened my mouth to continue arguing against Sky, however from behind me Aurora shouted louder than I had ever heard her, "Stop arguing! Seriously it really doesn't matter what race you are!" her words were filled with a careless anger which quickly put me and Sky both on the back foot. "Now, if you've stopped acting like children, something's happening at that massive tree over there." She said this with exasperation and pointed up through the forest canopy and up to an enormous white tree which seemed to scrape the edge of the sky.
From down here all I could see was a large white pillar that rose up from the horizon, forming the titanic trunk of the tree, above the trunk was a vast sea of dark green leaves that spread out in a spiral from the centre of the tree. The tree on its own was easily the biggest thing that I could see, as its height easily surpassed that of the mountains that seemed to be spread out around the tree. However the canopy of green leaves started to give off a faint light.
Initially it seemed that the entire tree was being covered in a gentle yellow light, however after a few seconds I could see that each of the many many leaves had started to glow, getting brighter and brighter after every second. The light given off by the leaves illuminated the pure white trunk of the tree, clearly showing how the trunk was made up of a number of large, interwoven, spiral sections of the white wood.
Suddenly the light dimmed slightly, before exploding outwards in a blinding burst of the yellow light and I was forced to shield my eyes due to the intensity of the light. The glare took a few seconds to dissipate, but when I looked back at the tree nothing seemed out of place, the leaves were green again and the tree was plunged back into the darkness of the night. However hundreds of small orbs of the yellow light were shooting off and away from the tree, leaving a glowing yellow trail of fire through the dark sky.
In the distance I saw some of the orbs stop moving and simply drop down from the sky and plummet towards the ground. Not long after seeing these falling orbs the ground shook violently and I could hear the sound of huge explosions across the land. The orbs of light were falling like meteors, but seemed to have much more speed and strength behind them, considering how high they had fallen from.
The shakes had knocked me slightly off my footing, making me crouch down to stop myself from falling over. As the initial shocks passed and further shock waves moved through the ground I looked back up into the sky to see one of the orbs of brilliant light speeding down in our direction. I tried standing up so that I could try running away to avoid being hit by it, but the constant shaking of the ground stopped me from even getting up to my feet. Beside me both Aurora and Sky were crouching down to the ground as I was and both of them were staring at the orb that roughly was headed for us.
Luckily the orb of burning light soared over the trees above us, scorching the upper leaves as it passed and giving off a shock wave that completely knocked me to the ground. With any balance that I had lost, I pushed my head down to the ground and placed my hands over it to protect it from the imminent blast and whatever debris may fly off from the explosion.
A few seconds after it had passed over us I heard a sound that sounded as if the earth itself was being ripped apart from the centre, and the earthquake launched me from the ground and a few metres into the air. I hit the ground with a hard thud, my ears ringing loudly and my eyes tightly shut from the outside world. It seemingly took a minute for my ears to go back to normal, but when they did all of the explosions had subsided and the shaking of the ground had completely subsided.
I slowly opened my eyes to the dirt floor beneath me and pushed myself up to my feet. But I was completely off balance and I staggered over to a tree which I leaned up against, in order to wait for my balance and footing to return. In front of me Aurora pushed herself up from the ground and stood up, leaning on her bow, while Sky knelt on the floor supported by her sword, which had the tip dug deep into the ground.
I looked up from my feet and looked into the forest, roughly into the direction that the orb of light had fallen next to us. In the distance I could see the faint glowing of fires and molten rocks beginning to cool in the night air. While looking over a the fires I saw a huge shadow move out from the crater at a rapid pace. The second I saw the shadow I could hear trees splintering and shattering to pieces as whatever the shadow was, it was smashing its way through the trees towards us.
To my side Aurora, who seemed to be reorientated, shot an arrow that was covered in a white light towards the shadow. The arrow hit the shadow and illuminated its entire shape for us to see what had crept out from the crater. The shadow turned out to be of a large snake like monster that had two scythes on the side of its head, it had a single eye which was covered with a glowing green visor and nearly the entirety of its body was covered in what looked like metal scales.
This monster was very familiar and seeing it here shocked me and terrified me with just the sight of it speeding towards us. I rushed to pick my sword. which had been flung from my grip as the orb had landed, up from the ground and readied it as fast as I could. From our past encounter with the monster I knew that conventional weapons weren't going to harm it, but in this circumstance there was little else I could do as the GeoCrawler, spotted us and charged for us.