Daniel stared at the young boy who'd just asked him to marry his sister and promptly asked the first question that popped into his mind.
"Is she hot?"
Pavel made an ehh motion with his hand, "Seven out of ten."
"Not bad," Daniel nodded, "how old is she?"
"She'll be turning twenty-one this Blood Moon."
"Alright," Daniel said, "now that the bare essentials are covered. Can you tell me why I should marry this sister of yours?"
The devilish grin that appeared on Pavel's face contrasted poorly with his age, "Because then my family will have two legends in it. None of the other houses will be bold enough to so much as look towards us after that."
"Don't you people have bigger problems outside the walls? Is playing politics really so important," Daniel asked.
"Politics? Important?" The boy burst out laughing.
"No, this isn't about politics. Anton already has claim to everything important in this city and I'm not foolish enough to try to wrench any of it from that monster's grip. Save for you of course. He can't exactly stand in the way of a marriage. True love is true love after all," Pavel said with a wink.
Daniel rolled his eyes, "Then what's in it for me?"
"Well for one, you'll have access to our coffers. One card hardly makes a deck, and a little birdie told me that you already have your eyes set on another."
Daniel stared down at the boy and let silence linger in the air. He wasn't acting like a child, despite looking no older than twelve. Which meant he was either an exceptionally gifted kid, or more likely he was being elevated by a card. Not that it really mattered.
'I should wait this out a little longer,' Daniel internally rationalized, 'hear out the offers that the other noble houses are probably going to throw my way, and then see what Anton thinks of all this.'
Despite the deafening silence Pavel seemed to be completely unaffected as he waited patiently for Daniel to speak.
"I'll need some time to think this over," Daniel finally said, "Now get out of my room. I need to get some sleep."
"As you wish. Just remember to think over my offer. You'll need somebody to watch your back should the walls ever fall and it's better to have family to watch over you rather than leaving your fate to nobody but yourself."
"Has the wall ever fallen?" Daniel asked.
Pavel didn't answer as he walked over to the window before glancing back over his shoulder and snapping his fingers. Immediately the light that Daniel had been unable to turn off cut out.
"Goodnight Daniel."
With that the boy seemed to dissolve into the darkness of the room, and in the next moment was gone.
===
The next morning Daniel and the rest of the group gathered down in the guildhall before making their way to something called a way-gate. It would, according to Gabriel, toss them outside the wall within in the general area of their mission.
Apparently it was a one-way trip. So despite shortening the length of the trek they'd need to complete by about half it still wasn't a perfect system. Getting back would still be a pain.
Daniel was donned in the new armor he'd bought the day prior, and surprisingly despite how it looked it wasn't very heavy. It was a muted brown color and made from ston-leather, which was apparently a kind of bipedal creature that wandered around outside the walls.
Jonathan had lent Daniel one of his old spears, but that didn't mean it was low quality. Its blade shimmered in the early morning light and the shaft of the weapon stretched almost the entire length of Daniel's body.
Not that he knew how to use it outside of getting a good foothold and poking whatever was in front of him really hard.
'I wasn't added to this group to fight,' Daniel reminded himself, 'I'm here because my card makes me a damn hard to kill scout.'
Before Daniel knew it he was standing in front of the warp-gate. It wasn't a large as he'd thought it would be. It was no larger than the door to an average house, and the rune etched metal surrounding it barely added to its mass. It wasn't on right now, or at least Daniel couldn't tell if it was. He could see straight through to the other side, and he was fairly confident that he was just looking at the buildings directly behind it.
Gabriel moved towards the warp-gate with confident movements formed by repetition and slid a small metal card into a slot in the machine before having it get spit back out into his hand as the portal began to power up.
Gabriel glanced over his shoulder towards Daniel, and surprisingly Daniel could spot a bit of concern in his eyes.
What he said next shocked Daniel even more, "Daniel, I know that we've drilled it into your head just how dangerous the creatures outside the wall are, but keep in mind that they aren't going to be coordinated. They won't work together and above all they only have one card in each of their decks that will almost assuredly be of a lower quality than our own. It's dangerous out there, I won't lie to you, but the decks stacked heavily in our favor, remember that."
Daniel raised an eyebrow, "What's with the peptalk, oh magnanimous leader?"
"Please just take what I say to heart," Gabriel said before turning his attention back to the warp-gate and taking a step through.
===
Steph moved through the forest outside the wall like a predator. Or she would have if her team wasn't being hunted at the moment.
'It's nothing to worry about,' she thought, 'or at least it shouldn't be.'
The rest of the team wasn't far from her, she'd climbed up a nearby tree to get a good vantage point over the approaching battle.
'Calling this a battle would be stretching it though,' Steph thought as she leveled her bow, pulled back the string and activated her card.
Well Placed Shot
Immediately the breeze blowing across her skin halted, as did her companions down below her, but more importantly, so did the monsters hunting them. Everything held still where it'd been when the card had been activated. And then she activated another card.
Eye of Skylines
Everything in the frozen world became clearer, and Steph quickly found what had been hunting them.
Beneath the foliage not ten yards from Gabriel was a mournfoot with three more close behind it. They were large catlike creatures that had a nasty habit of attacking the legs of their victims in an attempt to immobilize them, before running off and hiding until their prey were sufficiently weakened.
Steph aimed her bow at the closest mournfoot, and only once her arrow struck true did time resume. The beast collapsed to the ground, and before the rest of its pack could realize what had happened Steph activated her card again.
Well Placed Shot
Time once again slowed to a crawl as Steph aimed and released another arrow at the next closest mournfoot, only sparing a moment to take note that Daniel was nowhere to be seen.
'At least he's quick to use his stealth card,' Steph thought. 'Maybe he'll actually survive to get that second card of his.'
Steph repeated the same process twice more before the monsters could even realize what was happening. The third beast fell just as easily as the first two, but the fourth gave trouble when it moved behind the corpse of the mournfoot that died before it. If it was on purpose or not Steph didn't know, but it was rather annoying.
A limitation of Well Placed Shot was that she couldn't move from her spot once she started using it. If she did it'd be put on a cooldown and that was the last thing she wanted at the moment.
Instead, she activated another card, Overpowering Arrow.
Steph's muscles strained as she pulled back the string of her bow. The tip of the arrow she'd knocked glowed a mixture of red and purple and in the next instant she let it fly.
The projectile soared through the air and pierced clean through the mournfoot corpse and the still living mournfoot behind it before finally burying itself into the dirt beneath it.
Steph waited a few more seconds to make sure that nothing else was currently hunting the group before climbing back down the tree as time began to flow normally. When she reached the forest floor Daniel had apparently deactivated his stealth card because she could see him clearly standing amongst the rest of the group.
"What did you say your cards were again?" Daniel asked Steph while staring at the dead mournfoots.
"Take a guess," Steph responded simply as she walked over and began digging her arrows out from the corpses, cutting their barbed tips free with a hunting knife.
A moment of silence passed before Daniel answered, "You can rapidly fire arrows and make them instantly hit their targets?"
Steph chuckled; he wasn't that far off. Though he was missing most of the lethality hidden in Well Placed Shot.
"Kind of, but not really, don't feel bad about getting it wrong though. Alot of the effects higher tier cards have can be extremely hard to pin down at a glance. Make sure to remember that. Never fully relying on knowledge that you only think you have. It can and will get you killed."
Daniel watched as the huntress retrieved her arrows and thought of his own card and how easily it could be misconstrued, "I'll remember that. Thank you, Steph."
At that moment Stanford walked up and put his arm around Daniel before leading him away from the huntress, "Listen, you need to stop flirting with her man. She'll rip your head off."
Daniel looked at Stanford with a confused expression but was unable to explain a thing before Gabriel yelled at the group to get a move on and cut the conversation short.