The dome which had concealed the scarred battleground had diminished to the slightest of glowing outlines upon the ground around us. Askar the Risen had fallen, seemingly once again, in battle and had dropped a large amount of col, experience points and a few items. As the "Congratulations" panel appeared above the death point of the field boss and the victory panels appeared in front of us, I looked around us, noticing that all of the Skeletons which we had dragged over this direction had disappeared, the area was visibly brighter and had risen a few degrees in simulated temperature. The strangest thing however was the absence of the large Torii gate which I had disturbed, likely summoning the boss to the area in the first place.
"Anything rare drop?" Came the routine and standard question from Sky who was lazily flicking over the drops she had found with little interest. I looked back down at my panel to see that I had only been given some random saleable bones and pig iron ingots, nothing of any real use or interest causing me to close the panel down without care. It seemed that it was like this for each of us, Andrew closed his panel with a swift shake of the head while Aurora had her panel up against her inventory, which she was scrolling down, only to come out of it and shake her head too. A strong and likely unique field boss like this had failed to drop any rare or powerful items, this must have come from either extreme bad luck or the developers wanted to spite the players who were unlucky enough to trawl their selves through that battle for nothing.
After that I went back to looking at the place where the Torii gate had once stood, yet no signs of its existence remained, no stray pieces of wood, no markings or dug out areas on the ground, nothing. The forest had gone eerily quiet, more so than it had been before I had passed through the gate initially, apart from us no other signs of life could be seen or heard and the thick blackness of the forest, although brighter, prevented my tracking vision to penetrate through it. My eyes started to dart around in caution and my hand tightened around my new sword in wait for a surprise attack from somewhere around us in the dark.
When suddenly a bright light appeared in front of me, causing me to shout in shock and jump back to put my distance from whatever had appeared out of nowhere in front of me. I readied my sword hastily and sliced forward not waiting to see what it may have been due to the speed of which it had moved over too where I had jumped back too. However my sword slid through it, distorting the light slightly and forcing the thing back a few paces where it hung suspended in front of me, not moving or making a sound.
Seeing that it wasn't doing anything I removed my sword from the white rectangle of light which had appeared and looked at it in closer detail, looking to find out what it was exactly. "Invite : Aurora wishes to join your party" The bright light was a simple party request panel from Aurora, she had obviously sent the request without saying anything and so making the panel appear in front of me. I knew that in the real world I was prone to such things as jump scares and that I was able to scare myself through my own paranoia, but this was probably the worst time something like this had scared me in any game.
I took a few breaths, looking at the panel, and when I had calmed myself a bit I pressed the accept button and the panel once again disappeared. I slowly turned around to see the faces of the three who would have seen my freak out, one of them being the cause of it. Andrew was visibly on the brink of laughing, Aurora burst out in laughter as she saw my face while Sky stood there with a somewhat forced unimpressed look, yet I could easily see that she was holding a laugh back.
"I hate you lot." I say in a very flat and unemotional way, trying to make my annoyance and displeasure of what they had just done to me, even if it was unintentional, whilst still making it clear that I wasn't being wholly serious in what I was saying. At this both Andrew and Sky gave up in trying to hold anything back and like Aurora took a few minutes of laughing before they calmed down. Their laughing caused a large echo from our position, putting me once again on edge about a possible attack but I forced my attention on the three laughing in front of me, at me.
Once they had stopped laughing somewhat, taking a large number of deep breaths to calm themselves, I caught their attention with a slight wave. "Are you lot done for today?" I ask with a sigh, Sky and Andrew return with a nod while Aurora gives a thumbs up, still somewhere between hysterics and a state of calmness. I roll my eyes at the feeble response I got from the three of them, but continued on none the less, "So why were you two up here in the first place, as I know I was mapping out this area a day or so back."
Andrew was the one to reply to my question, knowing that Aurora was likely to start laughing once more, "Well the high ups at the front line committee thingy send people out to patrol areas that haven't been mapped yet. So as we're on patrol this week we went up to the temporary HQ place and they sent us out here as they had yet to get any map information from this area, which the guy seemed somewhat annoyed about. So we came down this path and got caught up with a rider and some normal soldiers, didn't take long really. But that gate..." He looked over to his side to point out the gate that was no longer there, he looked in confusion for a few seconds, but went back to speaking, "Well there was a gate there before hand. Anyway, a portal opened up in the gate and that boss charged out while we were sorting out some inventory things, Aurora sent the message at the start of it and it took you a while to arrive."
"Yeerr, that's probably because I didn't hand in my map details as I went back to my forge and got jumped on by someone who wanted to do a blacksmith duel, which I won of course." However it seemed that neither Andrew or Aurora was paying any attention to what I was saying as they were looking at their maps to see how much they had mapped out in their expedition, so I changed what I was saying, "So you want to get back to town, hand in the map data and take the rest of the day off back in Coral city." To this the three of them heard and quickly agreed to without any complaint.