Rondel was standing a hundred feet up, resting atop a gigantic branch of an even more gigantic tree, asking himself just how cold it was when one was this high up, on such a cold day in the winter, praying that the sun would shine onto him and relieve him from the ice that was probably building up atop his back.
After this he would take a good old warm bath, hearing the complaints of his comrades and colleagues as he hogged the bathroom for himself.
He grinned slightly.
Oh yes, that would be fun, if another one of the guys would not do it before him, they were always fighting over the room after all, just that most of them stopped before it went violent, they were mostly quite a bit worse than him at magic after all.
He silently laughed into his beard he had let grow a bit to keep him warm in the winter, something he had learned after he had turned thirty, still working in the lush green, as was normal until the day he would most likely die, perhaps of old age, perhaps by the hand of being killed by one of the many beasts in these forests or another.
Truly, when he had joined, he had been hazed, and he had been asking so many questions the captain had started giving him a nickname, that sadly stuck, he was open-mouth, because his mouth was always open and asking questions, despite it having been because he was completely fresh.
Back then he had been hazed, he had been the only one to really cook, clean, to keep the toilets clean especially, though he was still the main guy who did that, often punishing others for not cleaning them through small pranks.
Once, a few years ago, he had bought an alchemical tool, fuelled it with his magic from time to time, added an Ujotrian liquid, stored a sound spell inside, and he had made his greatest prank to date, almost driving Bensin, a good friend of his, his best friend even, mad.
Back then Julia, his wife by now, had called him mad, stomped out of the room, and then started laughing in another room where she thought he couldn't hear him, resulting in him also laughing aloud, and then, as they realized they could both hear each other, resulted in both of them just laughing together and gushing over the most evil idea he had ever had.
He had hidden the apparatus in the ceiling of Bensin's room, making it make a loud sound, slightly high-pitched sometimes, other times low-pitched, just a simple ping, like a watch that called them for work, sporadically from time to time.
But even more interesting was that he had made it so that it would only activate around Benisn, so most others had just thought he was insane as he started breaking his walls, the captain refusing to give him another room without real reasoning, even having stayed an entire day in there, just to prove there was nothing.
Though, by now, he had pretty much just started wholly ignoring it, not good by any means, since both the fun was vanishing, and he was unable to be awoken even by normal alarms now, a superpower, and the reason he was now called sleepy.
Sleepy and Open-mouth, he knew he had been the one to do this, that was for sure, and that was how their friendship truly began, as enemies that despised each other, but then they just became best friends, like many others.
Oh, their nicknames were bad, but all nicknames were like that in the end...
On the trees there were Rat, because he was greyish, small and liked cheese, there was smelly because he reeked of what Rondel believed to be corpses, there was techno, not because he was good with technology, but because he was bad with it, though Rondel had proposed the nickname of old-timer instead.
He laughed a lot into his mouth, imagining the face of Bensin back when he had found out who had done it all over again, reforming the fear of the others who had began treating the, back then, relative newbie, differently because of his sheer prowess when it came to pranks.
His magic was greater and more powerful than theirs, that they knew already, btu in the end he would break his oath and be punished for such violence, so they hadn't minded that, but pranks, those were even allowed in their rules, because the captain had found them to be funny, without real pain, and amusing to watch, so that was allowed, and even in that, he was the greatest foe they had seen yet.
Especially since he was good at using Ujotrian liquids, especially those that were capable of storing spells and magical circles and activating them from time to time, so he was just scary to them.. in a fun way, especially since he was also quite fun when they went out to eat in celebration of a big victory a few years ago.
It had been a wyrm on the lord-rank, and they had beaten it with a few hundred at the apex-rank, not by power but by strategy.
But that did remind him of why they were here right now, and he was not as amused as he was before anymore, his smile now fading, he was just having too much fun with his memories right now, but fading slightly, as he remembered the beast they were after today, a few hundred people with them, and him, someone who was already a lord but chose to remain a simple hunter, he wasn't the best at ordering others, he thought.
And yet, they were all scared, because they still weren't sure if it would turn out to be enough, enough to defeat an elder wyvern, a being rumoured to be multiple times as strong as a wyrm.
Though Rondel didn't know it a man named Cades had once succeeded in defeating a wyrm as well, miraculously, a being that had waited for the coming of a prophesized king not even understanding the prophecy in truth, and just like back then, with a being specialized in mass attacking, they would now succeed against a being specialized in fighting solo.