Chapter 442: Getting up to speed

“Excellent! The first matter is that of your personal symbol. Each Sentinel has their own distinct mark, as well as the unified symbol of the Sentinels. It helps us know who’s helping which Sentinel, a personalized banner if you will. Now, it’s almost entirely up to you. The rules are fairly basic. Don’t copy someone else’s sigil. That would entirely defeat the point! Don’t have a symbol that’s too large or complicated, that would make it impossible to quickly duplicate and remember, and please, don’t be too crude. A Sentinel who shall not be named wanted to use a pile of poop as their symbol.”

Arachne’s forehead scrunched up in consternation, remembering the event. The fact that they were unnamed suggested they were one of the current Sentinels… and it strangely gave me hope.

Hope that this was another group that was just as goofy in private, just as relaxed, that I could fit in with and feel at home with. Also, hope that the voice of sanity and reason prevailed at the top.

My mind immediately went to the obvious symbol for me to use.

“Night, if it’s alright with you, do you mind if I use the old Remus Sentinel badge as my symbol?”

He smiled warmly.

“As far as I am concerned, at this time, you have a far stronger claim on the badge and the symbol than I do, and there is no other who would contest you. Feel free.”

Arachne nodded eagerly.

“Yes! Perfect! Marvelous! That’s a beautiful symbol. Now, we’re going to have a large official ‘welcome back’ ceremony. The primary purpose is to get your face shown to most of the other Sentinels, Ranger Command, and a number of the Ranger teams that think they can make it to the event. Exactly what I wanted to do earlier, and almost realized too late that it would go wrong. Forgive me for that dear, I let myself get too excited.”

I nodded.

“That seems fine. Anything else?”

Arachne gave a dramatic sigh, and looked at Night. The two of them had perfect nonverbal communication over… a long marriage.

“There is a second, minor, unfortunate matter that you will need to attend to.” Night started to speak, and I craned my head back to look at him. “As time has gone by, the procedures and methods of communication have changed. You will need to relearn a new set of protocols, hand-signs, verbal signals, and expected behavior. It is unfortunate, but we have seen time and time again that Sentinels work together more often than expected, and if you find yourself needing to take command of a Ranger team, it would not do for you to misunderstand each other. Entirely separate, but just as critical, is we are proposing the War Sentinel designation for you, as that most closely fits your skill set, ability, and use. While it is rare for a War Sentinel to come from positions other than the Legions, it is not unheard of. There is a similar set of training that you will need to undertake such that you understand your role and responsibility when operating with a Legion.”

All of that sounded perfectly reasonable. I nodded.

“Got it. When are we doing this?”

“The Autumn Equinox is in sixteen days. I think that’s sufficiently auspicious for those who follow that sort of thing, while being enough time to communicate the event to the various Ranger teams, and allow enough time for them to return if they see fit. Does that work for you?”

I looked at Iona, who shrugged. Auri was pitching a silent fit on my shoulder, but that was more due to the delay on being admired than any real complaint.

“Yup, that works. What now?”

Arachne gave me a terrifying smile.

“Well! Now we work on bringing you up to speed on everything that you need to know before the event. Most of the Sentinel teams include a [Healer] or two, and if you’d be willing to give them some personalized instruction, that will help them level, possibly saving someone’s life. Lastly, it probably comes as no surprise to you that I’m one of the [Loremasters], although without the class, and Sentinel Devour will manage the general education, if you don’t mind?”

It’d be nice if Arachne did it all, but she was busy - she was the leader, and still running her absurd city-wide network, and I should start to get to know my other coworkers.

Plus, what reason did I have, if any, to object?

“Sure! When and where do we start?”

“Sentinel Devour can meet you at the entrance of Stormwatch Castle in an hour, and I’ll let the two of you know when I’m ready.”

I nodded.

“Alrighty!”

Iona split after a hearty round of congratulations, having paladin-y activities to do. Something about making a ton of sandwiches and delivering them to the elderly members of a temple. Hey, not every job was related to smiting evil - sometimes smiting a hungry belly was good enough.

I went back to Stormwatch Castle, and Sentinel Devour waved to me.

Tall with a mass of shockingly dark hair on his head, he was another vampire with a light tan as opposed to the pasty pale look most sported. I recognized him from the report I gave - he was the one with the raven-feather cloak, and he was wearing it now.

“Heeeeeeey!” He waved at me with two hands. “Over here!”

That was a much better introduction than a stuffy and formal event, and he was already giving off a woodsy, outdoorsy vibe. His personal symbol looked like a carnivorous jaw. I hurried over, Auri still on my shoulder.

“Devour?” I asked.

He briskly nodded.

“Yup! That’s me! But in a more casual setting, you can call me Nibble.”

My face must’ve shown what I thought of that, because he laughed at his own joke.

“Ha! Ah, the look on your face. Dawn, right?”

I smiled, and stuck out my hand.

“Yup! That’s me. I think I saw you during the report, yeah?”

He vigorously shook my head.

“Oh yeah! Good stuff! I got a pair of levels, good stuff! It’ll be a while before I see that next magical ding.”

He sighed dramatically.

“Wait as long as you can before you let them turn you. Get as many levels under your belt as possible.”

I winked at him.

“Already seized it on my own, no need to worry about that!”

“No shit?” He said, gesturing into the castle. “Wanna tell me about it?”

His eyes opened wide at that, and he slapped a hand over his mouth.

“Wait, nope, never mind, don’t tell me a thing about it. I don’t want to know.”

“Brrrpt!” Auri finally found her voice again - I was starting to wonder if I’d misnamed her Stentor.

“Auri says hello.”

Devour beamed at Auri.

“Hello to you too! You are just the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, you know that!”

“Brrrpt!!” Auri had a new MFSE - Most Favorite Sentinel EVER.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

We continued walking through the halls of the castle, Devour clearly knowing where he was going and most people making way for the Sentinel.

“Now, I dunno how close you are to Arachne and all this cloak-and-dagger stuff she’s got going on, but me? I’m a simple man.”

I wanted to snort in disbelief and call bullshit - no Sentinel was ‘simple’, not even Brawling who worked hard at cultivating such an image. But this wasn’t the time and the place, and I wasn’t going to judge people today on the standards of the past.

“Yeah?” I asked, encouraging him to go on.

“See, I figure it’s no coincidence that she asked me to team up with you. Did she tell you my skillset?”

I shook my head.

“Nope. I didn’t think that was something we did?”

“Ah, right, from another time, another place. That’s going to take some getting used to, although your accent makes it obvious.”

I didn’t have an accent! HE had an accent!

“But to answer your question, nope! Anyway, long and short of it is - I’m a [Devourer] and a [Shapeshifter]. I get stronger every time I hunt, kill, and eat a monster, and I’m not talking pure levels here. I’ve got skills that literally improve my stats, and it lets me take on some of their skills. The other half of it is using their skins to make cloaks, letting me transform. Now, don’t get the wrong idea here. I’m not interested in using the [Devourer] half of my skills. But little Auri there? If she’d lend me a few feathers, I could make a phoenix cape. That would be something. Which is why I figure Arachne asked me to teach you the basics, bring you up to speed. She figures we spend time, we like each other, Auri’s willing to give me a few feathers. But all this back-alley skulking and manipulation and shit isn’t for me, so I figured I’d tell you straight, so you didn’t feel like I’ve done you wrong. Sounds good?”

I didn’t need to say anything, I just let Auri speak for herself.

“Brrrpt! Brrpt, BRPT brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpt? Brrrpt!”

“As long as it doesn’t make her ugly, she’s fine with that. Auri would like you to pay her back in kind though.”

“Yeah? Anything for the pretty little bird.” Devour said. I looked at Auri.

“Well?” I prompted.

“BRRPT!” She demanded.

I facepalmed.

“Noooo… you can’t ask for that.” I protested.

Auri did her best impression of folding her wings.

“Brpt.” She insisted.

I was dying of secondhand cringe and embarrassment.

“Don’t judge me. This is all Auri. She wants a parade.” I translated.

Way to go and make a good first impression Auri.

Devour laughed.

“A parade!? I don’t think I can do that. But what do you say to an exhibition match in the Colosseum? Or I can ask Spark if he’d like to take you with him when he does one of his chariot races. The man’s a fan favorite! You get more people turning out to see him than for the latest Triumph!”

Auri thought for a moment, her beak going back and forth.

“Brrrpt!” She agreed.

“Yup, that works for her.”

“Excellent! We’re here, take a seat.”

Devour indicated a small room, with a table and some chairs.

“I swear the castle breeds these rooms like rabbits.” He said as he sat down. “Can never find the same room twice, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the castle was alive, shifting the rooms around. Sometimes, at night, you can hear the grinding of masonry, and the faint echoes of the Punics.”

“Brrrrpt…” Auri shivered, scared of the ghosts haunting the castle.

I gave him a flat look. I believed in a lot of crazy things, but ghost stories? Come on, that was one too far.

He caught the look I was giving him and laughed.

“Alright, alright, you got me! There’s no moving castle, it’s just an annoying layout. Before we begin, got any questions for me?”

“I do! Crimson Eyes, Sundown, Claws In? Do those phrases mean anything to you?” I was remembering the encounter I had with the Rangers on the way over.

Devour nodded.

“Codewords! Yes, we use them to quickly and openly communicate information to each other in the field. Each one has a set of words or phrases, and we need to situationally figure out what part is important. Crimson Eyes is a caution, lookout, moderate danger word. Sundown’s a big one. That’s disaster, major event, major warning, everything’s gone to shit. Claws In is almost self-explanatory. That’s no violent actions. The direct counterpart to that is, of course, Fangs Out, which is violence recommended, required, or imminent. Oh! Do you need to take notes or anything?”

I shook my head.

“Perfect memory skill.”

“Ah, perfect! This will be easy then. In no particular order, the rest of the codewords are…”

I met Arachne a few hours later in the castle’s grand library, my head still spinning from everything Devour tried to stuff into it. As nice and friendly as he was, the man was not a good [Teacher], and just went rambling through each segment as he thought of them. [Astral Archives] paired with [Hunger for Knowledge] made it easy to re-catalog and organize it all, but it could’ve been easier.

Auri went off to plot with her new MFSE, the two of them trying to figure out how she could give someone a feather. She was made entirely out of flames, which didn’t exactly scream ‘pluck here’.

Arachne wasn’t alone. Another woman, with half-black, half-white hair was with her, the two of them playing a complex boardgame, a stack of books next to them. I realized that it was literally just the three of us in the entire library, the place not having a single other soul present.

“Dawn! Welcome! So glad you could make it. This is War Sentinel Flood, who expressed an interest in learning the same things once she heard we had another [Loremaster] in the making. I’m sorry we’re not done, I thought this match would’ve wrapped up by the time you arrived.”

“It’s because someone’s not respecting the clock.” Flood grumbled as she moved another piece.

Arachne frowned at that, and knocked over three of her pieces.

“Well then! If you had simply mentioned it, I would’ve conceded earlier.”

Flood snorted.

“Right. Where do we start?” She asked.

Arachne knocked her knuckles on the stack of books next to her. I skimmed a few of the titles, seeing what I was in for.

The Eternal Night Rift and you: Where the crack in the world lies, and why you should ignore its whispers.

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

“Dawn, Flood, both of you are able to process multiple streams of information at the same time. Would you mind starting to read through the books while I lecture?”

We looked at each other, and Flood shrugged, grabbed eight books, opened them up and stacked them in front of her. I suspected she could’ve grabbed more if the pile wasn’t almost to her eyes already.

I didn’t move. She gave me a questioning look.

“I just need to be near a book to read it.” I explained as I split my mind into four, three to read the books, and one to pay attention to Arachne.

The woman in question gave me a brisk nod and started.

“We’re going to start with how we rate dangers. Scale is from white, which is harmless, going through the full class color spectrum, ending at black, which could literally rip the planet apart. Guardians obviously intervene on the higher end, and anything rated blue and above usually would have them showing up. With that said, figuring out what something is can be extremely tricky, and is more of an art than a science, a simple rule of thumb to help quickly communicate disaster levels.”

She paused, mostly for breaking the conversation up a bit. I had to imagine Flood could process information better than I could, and I was keeping up just fine.

“A fairly simple example would be a yellow-rated project Exterreri is running in the Sea of Stars. A Classer is convinced they’ve unlocked the secret to controlling Void magic, and naturally we don’t want that anywhere near anyone when that inevitably goes wrong and he blows himself and the island up. I’ll show you where it’s marked in a minute.”

I nodded. Made sense, and I was almost glad to see that city-shattering explosions rated near the middle of the scale… at the same time, I was a little terrified about anything above that.

Erasing an entire city in a heartbeat was yellow!?

“Now, moving on, before delving into the deeper mysteries.” Arachne said. “If you want to bow out after seeing the first real one, I won’t blame you. This isn’t an easy job.”

A map came from part of the library, carried on Arachne’s strings, while all the pieces of the boardgame were quickly and neatly put away.

A beautiful, high-detail map of the world - north continent included! - unfurled in front of us. There were no cities labeled, no borders, but there were thousands upon thousands of brightly colored groups of dots covering the map, some of them with extra annotations. More of them were in the northern continent than the southern, but it wasn’t terribly weighted one way or another.

“This map and what it details is a little hard to classify, due to the differing natures of what’s shown. Arguably, there’s a whole range of red to purple here, although individual locations aren’t categorized. Commit this map to memory, and never let another soul know you’ve seen it. Sanguino would get razed to the ground if certain powers knew we had it.”

Arachne paused for a long moment, to the point where it was getting awkward.

“Well? What are we waiting for?” Flood barked.

I was getting ‘grandmother that took no shit’ vibes off her, and I was all for it. Interestingly, I was pretty sure Arachne was older than she was. Immortality was weird.

Arachne simply gave Flood a flat look, the pause extending out more.

“Ah.” I said as I realized what was going on. I looked at the map again and shivered.

There was a single dot, a little isolated from the rest, in the mountains deep in the Silver horde. The dot had three sections like most of them - a black with silver sprinkles, black with red accents, and a rainbow segment.

Welp, the Silver Horde was already near the bottom of my to-visit list given how much they loved apples there. Now it was even less likely that I’d visit… but as my eyes roamed over the map, I realized that, ironically, might be one of the safer places.

“Every known lair, by element, and hatching status.” Arachne confirmed.

“I can say it, since you didn’t?” I asked. Flood’s eyes were slowly getting wider.

Arachne nodded.

“Dragons.” I whispered.

I was looking at a map of every single known dragon.