Chapter 63: Banned

Jaxir didn’t immediately leave the forest and march straight toward Glimmer Village. Instead, he circled along the tree line until he found one of the dirt roads feeding toward the gates, then waited for a group of players to pass before slipping into the loose stream behind them.

There wasn’t exactly a huge crowd traveling in either direction, but groups of four or five appeared every few minutes, enough that another lone player didn’t stand out much. More importantly, Jaxir had watched the village for almost forty minutes and hadn’t noticed any strange shift in traffic, no panicked players rushing out or guards sealing the entrance, so whatever had delayed Nick probably hadn’t shaken the entire settlement.

That didn’t mean Jaxir was going to stroll inside without thinking about it, though.

From everything he understood about Divinity, dying meant losing whatever you had on you, and that was a considerably uglier possibility now that the dormant Reflection of the Light was sitting in his inventory. Losing a pile of Vestigem Cards or some expensive equipment would already hurt, but losing a Goddess’s inheritance through his own stupidity would probably annoy him until the day he died for real.

Someone else might have looked at that risk and decided there was no reason to enter the village at all, especially when the System itself had already warned him away. Jaxir understood the logic, he just couldn’t seem to feel the fear that should have come with it.

His heart wasn’t hammering against his ribs and his thoughts weren’t searching frantically for excuses to turn around. The closer he walked toward Glimmer Village, the more he recognized something that had been missing from him for years, a quiet certainty that once he committed himself to something, everyone else could either move or become part of the problem.

This was the man he remembered being.

He had never thought of himself as fearless, and he certainly hadn’t been stupid enough to believe he couldn’t lose, but a small amount of confidence had always been enough to make him feel almost impossible to stop. Grief had buried that part of him beneath years of sitting alone in a dark room, yet every stupid decision he made in Divinity seemed to dig another piece of it back out.

Jaxir wasn’t there yet, but he would be eventually. One step after another was enough.

He continued moving with the players around him while paying more attention to their conversations than their faces, hoping someone might accidentally tell him what was happening inside the village. Most of what he heard was useless chatter about hunting grounds, equipment prices and a player apparently getting cheated in a Vestigem trade, exactly the kind of ordinary nonsense Jaxir wanted to hear.

Then he slowed near the roadside and crouched slightly as though he were adjusting his equipment.

A trio coming out of Glimmer Village passed close enough that their conversation carried clearly.

"I’m telling you, the whole thing was weird as hell," one of them complained. "We went in for two Uncommon pieces and the merchant started asking who we were buying for, where we’d come from, how long we’d been in town, all this shit like we were applying for citizenship."

The second player laughed without much humor. "I thought the bastard wasn’t going to sell them at all. Since when does buying beginner equipment come with an interrogation?"

Jaxir’s fingers stopped against the strap of his deck holder while the three continued down the road, their voices slowly fading behind him. A possibility took shape almost immediately, and the longer he sat with it, the less accidental those questions sounded.

Nick had entered Glimmer Village looking for six very specific Common and Uncommon pieces belonging to the three ancestral sets.

’Yeah. That’s probably not a coincidence.’

Jaxir rose and continued toward the gate, although now his attention shifted away from the players and toward the village defenses themselves. Glimmer Village only had one guard stationed at this entrance rather than the two he’d seen around Twinkle Village, while the group behind Jaxir was far enough away that he estimated they still had around three minutes before reaching him.

There weren’t any players immediately exiting either, which meant Jaxir had somehow managed to approach during a small gap in the traffic. If something went wrong, at least he wouldn’t have half a dozen strangers standing close enough to stab him in the back before he understood what was happening.

’Good timing.’

He let the group ahead disappear inside, then approached alone with his staff resting loosely against one shoulder. Asking the guard for permission seemed pointless when the Minor God of Gravity had already made his opinion rather clear, so Jaxir decided to see whether the village itself intended to enforce that opinion.

He walked straight toward the gate.

The guard’s head turned the instant Jaxir crossed the threshold, and something resembling a thin metal clipboard resting against his forearm began pulsing with pale light. Jaxir made it two steps into the village before the object brightened again, which was enough to tell him that sneaking past divine bureaucracy apparently wasn’t going to be that simple.

His gaze shifted toward the guard as information appeared.

―

Name: Marek Voss

Level: 15

Class: Melee

―

Jaxir sighed quietly. "Of course you’re Level 15."

Marek’s eyes narrowed as he looked between the glowing clipboard and Jaxir’s face, while his free hand immediately started moving toward the sword at his hip. "You are prohibited from entering Glimmer Village under divine decree—"

Jaxir didn’t wait for the rest.

His staff snapped forward as Cast formed at the tip, then Channel compressed more mana into the sphere until the light around it began to distort. There was no hesitation between the moment the spell finished taking shape and Jaxir releasing it directly toward Marek’s head.

BOOM.

[-15]

The blast caught the side of the guard’s face and knocked him several steps backward, more from surprise and force than any meaningful damage. Jaxir had already started moving before the number even appeared, his Weightless Boots reducing the burden on his body while he drove his physical stats into the ground and accelerated through the gate.

Someone shouted behind him, but Jaxir didn’t waste time figuring out who.

The first building ahead was a squat two-story structure made of timber and pale stone, with a loaded cart parked beside one wall. Jaxir planted a foot against the cart, launched himself upward, then used the reduced weight from his boots to carry the jump farther than his Body stats should normally have allowed.

His boots touched the sloped roof for less than a second before he pushed off again.

Jaxir cleared the entire building and dropped toward the alley behind it, robes snapping around his legs while several players below stared up at him. He hit the ground with his knees bent, absorbed the impact, then immediately continued deeper into the village before anyone had enough time to decide whether they should follow.

[-7]

Back at the entrance, Marek slowly regained his balance and pressed one hand against the side of his head.

The damage itself was almost insulting.

Fifteen points barely mattered to an NPC fifteen Levels deep, yet the players around continued staring toward the rooftop Jaxir had vanished over as though the number were the least confusing part of what had just happened.

Players attacked NPCs from time to time, even guards under the right circumstances, but there was usually a quest, a faction battle, or at least several minutes of escalating stupidity before things reached that point.

This man had calmly walked through the gate, been told he wasn’t allowed inside, and blasted Marek in the face before the warning was even finished.

The nearby players were beginning to talk among themselves as they looked between the guard and the rooftops.

"Was that some quest?"

"It has to be, right? Who the hell attacks a guard for no reason?"

"Maybe there’s a hidden faction thing."

Marek’s expression hardened when those voices reached him.

He flipped his palm and pulled a short black horn from his inventory, thin lines of pale gold running along its surface. The players closest to him fell quiet as soon as they recognized that whatever had just happened was apparently serious enough for the guard to use it.

Marek raised the horn and blew.

A low, heavy note rolled through Glimmer Village, carrying between the buildings with enough force that Jaxir heard it several streets away while running. He glanced back once without slowing, only for another sound to answer from somewhere near the center of the settlement.

DONG.

The bell was enormous.

Its first strike rolled through the village hard enough to make windows open and conversations stop, while NPCs turned toward the center as if they’d been trained to recognize that exact sound. Jaxir rounded another corner as a second chime followed, and this time he could already hear several sets of armored footsteps beginning to move somewhere in the distance.

"Well, damn."