Over the next several hours, I practiced throwing and recalling my hatchets. The forest didn’t change much, so I couldn’t tell if I was heading deeper into the center or closer to the edge. I ate a rahico fruit then starting using Intuit on every seed and bush I spotted, checking for edibles to forage.
I picked a bunch of mushrooms with the delicious-sounding name of ’lamb’s ear fungus’ and thought about my Boons. I hadn’t really considered adding to them, not after that increase to Domain, but I wondered what Intuit might offer at a higher level. Or what about Treasure or Support?
I hated to waste points without knowing what I’d receive, but other than my gem, those were my most ‘magical’ abilities. I could imagine an archmage with a whole armory in his personal domain. A cocked ballista, ready to fire at point-blank range. Smoke bombs and ... and maybe bomb bombs. Or boiling oil or acid that I could summon directly onto my enemies.
Which was pretty vicious, but when I thought about ‘enemies,’ I saw those gemmed warriors who’d killed Oksar. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind applying boiling oil to Tiral-ur the crachen and Foh the infenti.
Anyone else, maybe I’d just summon a sleeping potion.
Or what if I added points to Intuit, and starting seeing more useful information about people and things? Like secrets and weaknesses. One look at a merchant and I’d know the combination to his safe. One look at a duke and I’d know his most compromising shame. That might be far more powerful than any combat skill.
The Boon of Treasure felt obvious. If I added points, I’d find more or better beads. Which sounded a little boring, yet if life on Earth had taught me one thing, it was that being wealthy enough was a superpower. Move thousands of people around with a wave of your hand! Chop mountains in half! So boring or not ... Treasure struck me as powerful.
Support, on the other hand, I had no clue. Which made it weirdly appealing.
Still, I’d wait until I knew a little more about my situation before I experimented. Quest or not, I needed to find people. To talk to people. To leave the forest and get my bearings--without getting killed. And yeah, a warm meal sounded pretty damn good.
* * *
As evening approached, I started looking for a place to spend the night. I’d learned to enjoy the nighttime forest during my stay with Oksar, but he’d had a ward. All I had was a narcoleptic spider-spirit, and I didn’t want to wake up with a glass boa wrapped around my neck.
She made a mental noise like: Mmm?
“Well, that’s reassuring,” I said.
So I kept walking, kept looking for a safe spot. After another hour or so, I investigated like my tenth fallen tree. That one, luckily, had a sort of enclosed cave-like hole at the roots. The very bottom was muddy and gross, so I packed it with dead branches, then sliced a bunch of living branches, heavy with leaves, off of the surrounding trees. A few I chopped from high up, after throwing my hatchets. Hitting a target almost directly overhead was tough, but the fact that I retrieved my weapons by turning them to smoke made practice easy.
When the layers looked pretty thick, I stepped into the hole, making branches crackle and snap underfoot, tamping everything down. Finally, I added armloads of ferns and fallen leaves into a sort of spiky, twiggy mattress. Yet when I curled into place, my little bed felt surprisingly comfortable. Well, without my toughened skin it would’ve been torture, but with my toughened skin it felt like a slightly-lumpy futon.
The fallen tree lay on a steep diagonal, its upper branches snagged into other trees. After tamping down my bed by rolling back and forth, I walked up the tree like a balance beam then straddled the trunk and looked across the darkening forest. I considered climbing all the way into the canopy the next morning. Apparently the branches knitted so tightly together up there that you could walk to the end of the forest without touching the ground.
Except that was also where most of the predators lived. And I wanted to leave the forest, not explore it. So I climbed back down and uprooted a half-dozen bushes. I placed them in front of my little cave, to warn me in case anything came by for a nibble in the night. Then I curled up on my bed of branches and slept.
* * *
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
I traveled for two days like that. Throwing my hatchets, crunching leaves under my bare feet, singing half-remembered songs from Earth. You ever walked through a forest in a different dimension trying to belt out the words to Bohemian Rhapsody? Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s as embarrassing as it sounds. My voice is fine if I accompany myself with a guitar, but not so great a cappella.
I ate any foraged nuts and mushrooms that Intuit assured me were edible. They said you could live for weeks without food, but damn, I was getting hungry. At least I had plenty of fresh water.
On the second day, I caught sight of a glass boa slithering through the undergrowth. I’d expected a serpent the size of an anorexic dragon, but it was more like a crocodile with four sets of legs, except twenty feet long. And glassy-smooth.
It wasn’t even slightly transparent, which annoyed me a little.
It was level seven, which annoyed me even more. I was only level six, so I braced for a fight.
On the other hand, Oksar had told me that many wild animals had a keen sense of their place in the hierarchy of eat-or-be-eaten. He’d said that often--not always, but often--creatures would leave you alone if you didn’t look like easy pickings. Most non-warriors wouldn’t last long in the forest, assailed on all sides by hungry animals, but Oksar managed pretty well because most daylight, forest-floor animals hesitated to attack him. “Too little meat on my bones, given the risk.” And his ward kept the majority of aggressive beasts away at night.
So I stood tall, hatchets ready, waiting for the glass boa to attack.
Instead, the glossy-gator simply humped away. No easy pickings here, apparently, which made me feel pretty damn smug.
Still, I kept my eyes--all of my eyes--peeled for mandrills, for two reasons. One, because they were as tough as dire pumas, and often attacked in groups of three to ten. I didn’t want to try my luck against a whole pack of angry gorillas, especially not if they ambushed me. And two, because six-armed apes kind of blew my mind. I mean, they’d skipped four arms and gone directly to six?
That I just had to see.
I didn’t, though. I didn’t spot a single one. Which was probably a good thing, considering the whole ‘angry troupe of monstrous apes’ thing. Though maybe they’d believe that humans were great apes, too. We could’ve bonded.
What I did see was a moose-looking animal with a mossy greenish coat and bladed antlers that swiveled like a fucking blender and a mouth like a baleen whale. A Level 5 Wapti.
“Hey!” I called, because I was bored and hungry for meat. “You a carnivore? Come have a bite.”
The wapti looked at me for a second, then bounded away through the trees.
“Or that,” I said.
* * *
That night, I woke on my makeshift bed in sudden, gasping terror.
Crooked branches pointed at my eyes with killing intent.
Leaves fluttered in the midnight breeze, and each one was a blade at my jugular.
The interwoven branches of the canopy beyond them trapped me like a fish in a poison net.
I couldn’t inhale, I couldn’t move. Death sniffed my face. I couldn’t see anything, but I felt its hot panting breath.
Panic paralyzed me.
I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to die, not like this. I wanted to ... beg. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to beg for my life, but I couldn’t even do that.
Fear impaled me to the forest floor like a pin through a butterfly.
And I felt something watching from beyond the canopy, beyond the clouds.
The gaze of a terrible power passed over me.
INTUIT: ANGUISH HORROR LEVEL RAVENOUS PREDATOR FLEE-RUN-ESCAPE LEVEL 88 SURRENDER PLAGUE WEEP-BEG-KNEEL LEVEL 88 HOPELESS LOSS AGONY
My mind stopped. My words stopped. Instead, images arose:
A creature the size of a five-story building loomed over a a town on the coast of a sunlit island. The creature was bony and bipedal and so skeletal that it was riddled with interior hollows. Spaces opened inside, like inhuman chest cavities and pelvises, some as big as caves. In places I could see through the creature’s rib cage to the sea beyond, except those weren’t ribs, they flexed and accordioned and twisted above the creature’s legs. Too many legs. Ten legs, or twenty. So very much not bipedal. Two primary ‘thigh-bones’ branched into dozens of jagged calves and even more feet. Or roots. Sharp roots that stabbed through the buildings of the coastal city, that smashed into the panicked, fleeing crowd, leaving bloodied, sobbing bodies behind.
The creature’s arms branched, too, all seven of its arms, each one thicker than a subway car. Flaps of rotting skin or mouldering tissue shed from the creature and fell to the ground, and when the chunks landed with a splat they condensed into nightmare cockroaches that swarmed the people and tore them apart.
The creature had no face, no head, no eyes, no mouth.
The creature killed what it touched. It slaughtered and shifted and--
And a dozen--two dozen--people fought back. Gemmed people. Gifted. Some attacked from rooftops, some stood in destroyed streets trying to protect civilians, a few even battled from within the bony creature’s body, balanced in the branching legs or inside the open chest.
White fire burned from the gemmed, and gleaming blades flashed. Rings of magic chopped through the creature’s rooted feet and a giant eagle-thing dropped a payload on the creature’s headless shoulders. Five or six figures hacked at the creature from within, until the wounds they opened gushed with fluids that formed into smaller monsters that struck back at them.
The creature roared in hunger and pleasure, and continued to rampage.
Hundreds of people died. Maybe thousands.
Then the image--or maybe the ‘memory’ or the ‘vision’--faded and I returned to my makeshift bed in the forest, trembling and weak and overwhelmed.
Princess told me.