Bog Standard Isekai

In front, Lurilan used the walking stick he’d made, poking the ground in front of them as they walked, even though it was obvious that the ground on their path was solid. Or was it obvious? They were worried the Phasmid had messed with the terrain.

He strained his eyes, looking everywhere, trying to see some sign of an illusion.

Hogg put a hand on his shoulder. “It may be the case that you’ve gotten pretty good at spotting illusions, after watching those undead for so long. Maybe you’d be able to spot the monster before any of us. Give us an early warning, yeah?”

“That’s right,” said Brin, standing up a bit straighter.

“Do us a favor and… don’t,” said Hogg.

“Wh–”

Hogg cut him off with a subtle shake of his head.

What was the point of having a special superpower if he wasn’t supposed to use it? But even if he was allowed to, there wasn’t anything he could point out. The empty bog was empty. It was quiet, too. Too quiet? That was the cliche in movies and fantasy novels; it always got really quiet right before the ambush. Did that happen in real life? Nature was supposed to be quiet. That’s why people liked it.

The Heroes didn’t run, but they walked quickly, so he had to trot to keep pace. Soon he was breathing heavily, taking in huge lungfuls of stale air. Sweat came off him in streams; it was hot now that they were out of the shade of the trees.

Brin scanned the area, desperately searching for some sign of whatever had the Heroes on alert. He noticed the others weren’t doing the same. Lumina, Hogg, and Galan all walked with their eyes forward, a bored expression on their faces. The only sign something was wrong came from Lurilan, who stabbed his staff into the ground again and again.

Brin focused on it, and that’s where he saw his first sign of illusion. Lurilan’s staff sunk a foot into what looked to be dry ground, and came away muddy. Focusing on the ground there, he saw that it was an illusion. Following the trail, he could see that much of the landscape around them was fake. Twisting lines and trails of fake terrain snaked around them, hemming them in. Lurilan wasn’t guiding them away from it, quite the contrary, he led them to the thickest spots.

Maybe the Heroes weren’t looking around because somehow they knew that they couldn’t trust what they saw. Or maybe it was because they didn’t want to give the Phasmid any sign that they knew it was close.

After all, how do you hunt an invisible monster? Easier if you can convince it to hunt you.

Near the center of the clearing, they stopped.

Lumina said, “Now?” Her hand went to a side pocket on her cloak, then she mimicked opening a bottle.

“Let’s wait a bit,” said Lurilan.

“That’s fine then,” said Hogg, so loudly that Brin jumped. “We’ll take a break. Little Brin here looks like he could use it. You were asking about the Bog, right? We can talk more about that.”

Hogg was stage-talking, his voice much louder than it should’ve been. It probably carried all the way across the bog and into the forest. He also had a look of open, genuine friendliness that Brin frankly found unnerving.

But he wasn’t an idiot, so he played along. “That’s right. You were saying there are bogs like this all over? I’d always wondered why we lived in Travin’s Bog when we were clearly in the middle of the forest. And I’d always assumed that Travin was the town’s founder or something, but you made it sound like the name existed before the town.”

“That’s right,” said Hogg. “They were named after the original explorers. Just divvied them up and named them after themselves, one by one. Only they weren’t so much explorers, I guess, as refugees, I think. Oh, maybe Lumina should explain it.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Lumina, as if startled from a trance. “You see, when Ithmall fell, and that’s a gross oversimplification of course, the fall of an empire isn’t one event, but rather a loosely connected string of events, where one can definitely say it happened, but to point to any one even and say exactly when it happened is difficult. Fruitless, in the eyes of most real historians. The specific event I refer to is the sacking of the northern defender cities by the Huhul barbarians, no offense Galan.”

“None taken. We were quite barbaric in those days,” said Galan, who had taken to pacing around idly while the rest chatted.

“After the cities were sacked, many refugees fled north and west, to what was then called the Blighted Lands. They found that the poison had long since dispersed. The poison, of course, being– Well perhaps I should tell the story of Nhamanshal, which we now call the Burrow Kingdom…”

Knowing history and being a good story-teller were vastly different skill sets, and Lumina clearly only had one of them. Her voice quickly became background noise as Brin tried to figure out where the Phasmid was, without looking like he was looking.

“...destroyed utterly, and only the catacombs remained, which is why we inaccurately call them Burrow Cities, because the burrows are all that they left behind. The poison– Oh, Galan. See there, a Phasmid. Kill it, if you please.”

“With pleasure,” said Galan.

Brin was embarrassed he hadn’t seen it first, but it was there.

A strange, brown something climbed out of the mud. It was long and thin, and at first he thought it was a worm, but it was too straight, not bending its spine at all. Then thin, spindly legs detached, six of them, all ending in sharp-looking two-pointed claws. He couldn’t see any eyes or mouth, just a head that ended in a sharp point. It looked like a fat, eight-foot long spear with six legs that were also spears.

It was also completely fake, but he figured the Heroes knew that already, so he kept his mouth shut.

Galan marched up to it, haughtily. There was an almost drunken sort of cockiness to his posture that was far different from his normal refined confidence. At the last second he dashed towards the monster and swung his mace in a downward arc.

He wasn’t exactly slow, but nothing like the blistering speed the [Knight] had displayed earlier. And he was clumsy. He seemed to get in his own way, awkward in his armor.

The Phasmid dodged easily, and Galan cursed.

He swung again and again, and the Phasmid dodged every strike. Galan grew increasingly agitated. Or pretended to. It was definitely a ruse, and Brin had to stop himself from smiling at the antics.

Finally, he seemed to clip the illusory monster with the edge of the mace, and sent it flying, where it landed with a splash. An audible splash, though Brin knew that was fake.

Come to think of it, the flames on the undead army had sounded like fire as well. Illusion magic could do sound, too. Something to keep in mind.

Galan raised a fist in triumph, then turned around. “I got it!”

The Heroes gave him a half-hearted cheer, but even before they finished, Brin spotted motion from the ground. A Phasmid crawled up out of the water of a nearby pool. Another rose from the mud, a line of sod still clinging to its back. Three more rose from a nearby stream. More and more appeared from all around them, until dozens of the monsters surrounded them in a ring.

Of course, they were all fake.

“Now?” asked Lumina.

“Not yet,” said Lurilan.

Galan lashed out with his mace, but the tide of Phasmids avoided it, spilling around it like a rising tide.

They darted in out, sharp motions, never staying still, but never approaching quite close enough to give the Heroes a good shot.

Lurilan loosed an arrow, then another, but the Phasmids he was aiming at dodged them with supernatural reflexes.

“I thought those were expensive,” said Hogg. To all appearances, he was standing next to Lumina, guarding her, but that was just a fake copy.

Fake copies against fake copies; it was a confusing mess. Frustratingly, with this much illusion in the air Brin didn’t have any idea where the real ones were.

“I said they weren’t free,” said Lurilan.

“So how are we doing? Is it time yet?” asked Hogg.

“Maybe?” said Lurilan.

“Then let’s increase our chances,” said Hogg. With a shortsword in each hand, the fake Hogg charged into the mass of Phasmids. They retreated from him, many peeling off to encircle him just like they had the rest of the group.

He yelled in frustration, swinging at them, but none of his swings connected. Apparently, the Phasmid couldn’t tell he was a copy.

“Now!” shouted Lurilan, and everything happened at once.

Lumina grabbed a glowing blue glass bottle and shattered it against the ground. An explosion of mystical light burst from the flask, covering the area in a filmy glow.

Galan ran to Brin, shielding him.

All the Phasmids disappeared as soon as the blue light touched them. Hogg disappeared as well, only for the real Hogg to reappear right behind Lumina. He caught a Phasmid, the real one, in crossed shortswords, then sliced, cutting the Phasmid’s head clean off.

The two pieces of the beast fell to the ground, twitching.

“That wasn’t an illusion. We got it,” said Hogg.

“You’d think it would be smarter,” said Lurilan.

“Did it really think to take me out first? Did it truly believe it could? Ha!” said Lumina.

“I thought for sure it would go after Brin,” said Galan.

The ball of eerie blue light continued to expand. After twenty feet or so, the light slowed, and crept across the ground slowly, rearranging the landscape back to reality from the Phasmid’s illusion.

“What… what just happened?” asked Brin.

Hogg answerred. “Alright, now that we know it’s not listening in, we can explain. It’s rare for a beast to develop the intelligence necessary to understand human speech, but it’s not impossible, which is why we were being careful. So: Phasmid, illusion type. It hunts by… well, you saw it. There’s Classes that give people illusion powers, too. [Illusionist] is the main one. Time was, the [Illusionist] Class was respected almost as much as [Mage], and feared almost as much as [Witch]. Then about six hundred years ago, an [Alchemist] created a hard counter: The Eveladis. A magical potion that can reveal the truth and dispel all illusions. Nowadays Illusionists have to be sneakier; no one can suspect they’re looking at an illusion if you want it to work. Beasts didn’t get the memo, I guess. Heh.”

Hogg looked suddenly thoughtful as he eyed the expanding blue glow. It showed no sign of slowing down or weakening. “Remember this day, Brin. This is how [Illusionists] die.”

Brin looked at the twitching Phasmid and gulped. Hopefully he’d get a Class without such an obvious weakness. It was crazy that the thing was still moving. Was it still alive? That could be why its illusions were still holding until the expanding light of the Eveladis whisked it away.

“We should finish it off,” said Brin.

“I still say something’s wrong,” said Lurilan. “A Phasmid that high level should’ve been smarter than that. Why did it lure us out into an open plain?”

“Phasmids are at home in bogs,” said Hogg.

“Low-level ones are. This one should’ve stayed in the forest, where it could hide behind obstacles. The open plain put it at a keen disadvantage. If it isn’t smart by itself, the master controlling it should–”

“Did you see a notification? I don’t think it’s dead!” interrupted Brin.

The heroes all froze for an eternal moment, before Hogg said, “Burn me, he’s right.”

Hogg slammed Lurilan to the ground. At the same time, Galan lifted his shield, intercepting a storm of black arrows. Matching arrows stopped in the air, not being able to penetrate an invisible shield around Brin and Lumina.

Lumina muttered a word, and blades of air sliced the remains of the Phasmid into a hundred pieces.

The light of the Eveladis had already stripped away all illusion, so Brin should have noticed before: no blood. The Phasmid was undead.

Stumbling to his feet, Hogg was white-faced. “I just got the notification. It’s dead… only it says the level was seventy-three.”

Galan planted himself between the party and the direction the arrows had come from, shield forward. Lumina started chanting in her ear-hurty magical language.

Lurilan picked himself up and casually nocked an arrow. “If that’s the level of the pet, then what can we expect from the master?”

With the Phasmid dead, the last of its illusions faded away, like sand sliding off a piece of paper.

At the treeline, the light of day revealed a black army of the dead.