Jean was alone again close to where he had started. It had been a week in this world and Jean was already a different person. He looked like another man with all of his hair being nothing more than fresh stubble. His clothes were made from simple linen underneath and stitched full leather over the top. He felt like a rich-hippy-hunter in the woods, with his high-quality clothes, and no shoes.
The ground felt soft underfoot, so Jean let out his foot claws to grip the ground. Testing, he hopped a few times and managed a standing backflip.
José would be so jealous. My years of setting up parkour obstacle courses in the backyard weren’t a waste at all.
Now that Jean was alone, he spun around, kicking off trees, and rolling through the air. His new iron rank body was pushing him to do far more than he had ever been able to do in his backyard. Jean moved about until he was out of breath.
Jean looked up and around the trees, trying to find an ash squirrel, and unsurprisingly, he found none. He started to jog in the direction he thought the field of death was, trying to retrace his steps.
Jean’s jog felt aimless as he could not see very far through the trees, so he started to extend his aura out as far as he could to feel for a squirrel. He had gotten to the point where he could engage his cleansing and discordant aurae at will, but Jean had been letting his cleansing aura out freely. He felt the bugs and tiny birds about, but they didn’t mind his presence. Worms and centipedes even crawled in his direction when he got close to them.
It felt nice to Jean to be able to help everything around him for a hundred yards, cleansing tiny bits of impurity or poison in the bellies of ants.
Jean pondered if the trees around him were larger than the redwoods in the National park back home. It would take at least five people to wrap their arms around the smallest of the trees around him.
Hours passed. Jean hadn’t found any clearings in the forest so far. He could not find much of anything at all but seemingly nonmagical bugs, and a few unique birds that moved too quickly for comfort, carrying large branches triple their size.
Jean had been walking for a while when he finally felt something on the edge of his aura range. His eyes hadn’t seen anything yet, but he thought he felt an absence of magic about a hundred yards away.
Jean retracted his aura, trying to hide from any magical senses, and crept forward. He moved slowly until he reached the area where he thought he felt something.
“Nothing,” Jean said while looking around at the thousands of hundred-foot pines around him.
As if Jean’s words were a cue, a long hiss echoed through the forest. Jean spun around trying to tell what direction he heard the hiss come from.
Jean felt a prickle down his spine, knowing that he was being watched. He backed up slowly, trying not to make a sound.
Beside him, a pine tree started to fall.
Jean turned from the tree’s trajectory, but as the tree fell, it looked as if the whole tree was bending and falling straight down into a coil around Jean.
Jean had to grip the ground with a burst of speed to push himself out of the way of the winding tree slamming down in front of him.
Confusion and fear consumed Jean as the tree captured him inside a coil of the layered trunk.
It dawned on Jean what he was seeing. It was a snake.
The snake must have been standing straight up and disguised itself as a pine tree. Or perhaps it was a tree acting like a snake, a pine snake. A spank?
Jean couldn’t do anything as the coil of snake grew higher and higher as the rest of the tree coiled over him. He looked toward the top skinnier part of the tree, trying to find a head, but it just looked like the top of a tree.
The snake finished its coiling with only a tiny gap of light coming in through the top of the wood-like dome.
If the head wasn’t at the pot of the coil…
Jean spun around peering through the darkness, only able to see the dark ten-foot-thick tree trunk surrounding him.
Everything was still and silent. Jean’s pounding heart was the only thing that he could hear. Jean couldn’t even feel the spank’s aura. His magical senses told him that he was still standing alone in the forest. Disturbed, Jean remembered that there were monsters with a level of intelligence and magical creatures that were fully sentient.
Jean’s only hope was for Gabe to come to save him or for this to be a friendly creature, and not a monster.
Since I can’t do anything about Gabe, the best I can do is this…
Jean let out his cleansing aura to wash over the snake. Hopefully, it could sense his intent to help the woodland creature.
As Jean waited for something to happen, he felt a tickling along his back and neck. Jean looked behind himself and saw a head much taller than he was, a few feet from his face. The spank’s tongue smelled Jean’s body.
Jean spoke with his voice shaking, “Hey, buddy, you are quite the stealthy guy, aren’t you?”
“Yessssss,” the creature said.
It was dark, and the pine-like skin was a perfect camouflage. But its eyes were a smooth yellow and jasper green, each two feet wide. The beam of light coming from the top of its coiled body reflected on its eyes, transfixed on Jean.
“You ssmellss nices,” the snake hissed.
“Th-thanks,” Jean stuttered.
The snake turned its head sideways and opened its maw.
It doesn’t have fangs. Was Jean’s thought as the snake slowly swallowed him whole.
Jean was pressed on all sides. He let out his claws to try to tear into the snake's innards, but the claws didn’t even bother the beast.
Jean’s breath was going out, but there was nothing to breathe in inside the snake’s throat.
Without warning, Jean was falling from the sky above the tree line. He gasped only enough to let out a scream. Panic held his mind until he fell below the tree line and got whipped by a tree branch.
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Jean plucked his sky chair from his inventory, which softly arrested his fall thirty feet from the ground.
He breathed heavily for a few seconds, trying to catch his breath and make sense of what happened.
A teleportation ability has been used on you by Gabe Eldenson.
Relief passed over Jean at the mention of Gabe, “Thanks Transcendent Conscious. By the way, do you know what that snake was?”
Pine Strangler. It is one of the few local Magical Creatures. Status: Endangered.
Jean thought the information was more specific than what he would normally get from his ability but put it out of his mind for the moment.
“Where is Gabe?” Jean asked his Transcendent Conscious. But it didn’t respond. Frustrated, Jean peered over the edge of his chair figuring out how to get down.
He created a thin cloud fifteen feet below himself and pocketed his chair into his inventory. He fell the fifteen feet landing on the cloud, it dipped five feet, and Jean rolled off and landed on the ground feet first with a thud. Satisfied, Jean sent out his aura and stared into the forest looking for a battle taking place.
He could not see anything or sense any aurae, but he thought he heard something. He ran in that direction for thirty seconds before his aura picked up Gabe’s aura. As he got within eyesight he wondered what sort of situation he was walking into.
Gabe stood in front of the Pine Strangler yelling, “You can’t just eat people!”
“He was ssmelling sso nice,” the snake hissed at Gabe.
Gabe rose his arms, “But that doesn’t matter! You can’t just eat people! You know the treaty. You are mandated…”
The snake made a sniff with its tongue and then turned to face Jean. A breath later the snake moved more than fifty yards to lay inches in front of Jean.
Gabe moved just as quickly and stood between the snake and Jean.
“Relaxss. I promise I won’t eat it.” The snake hissed at Gabe while eyeing Jean. “What if I just use him as a diadem?”
“Why would you do that? Would he just sit on top of your head for the rest of his life?!” Gabe fumed while trying to reason with the beast.
“Yess. He will be like an informal familiar,” it said.
Jean watched the back-and-forth conversation while the snake was eyeing him like a plaything, or a piece of clothing. “Don’t I get a say in whether I dedicate my life to sitting on a snake's head or not?”
The arguing pair both looked at him and simultaneously said, “No,” “Yess.” Then continued to glare at each other.
Jean decided that it would be best if he got himself out of between these monsters, so he retracted his aura as much as he could and started to walk backward.
Gabe and the Pine Strangler kept arguing, “He would make me ssmell sso good though.”
“That’s not a good enough reason to kidnap a child!”
“You humanss take creaturess’ children all the time…”
When Jean got out of immediate eyesight, he turned and ran. He tried to go directly away for several minutes and then changed his course. He tried to cover his tracks a little bit by conjuring a few clouds to jump on. He found that if he did it right, he could use the momentum from running to carry through to the cloud he jumped on, moving twenty feet before slowing enough to not be worth it, speed or mana-usage wise.
Jean kept running through the woods for an undetermined amount of time before he got hungry and ate a spirit coin. He thought he could reasonably be safe from the snake's senses but Jean knew that a gold rank creature could be strong beyond his scope of imagination. So, Jean kept his aura retracted and decided not to use any ability that used his aura.
He looked up past the forested treeline to find the sun and noticed that it was a little bit past midday. To his surprise, in his sungazing, he found a little friend staring down at him.
The little creature had four legs, a head, and a tail. But it was not an animal Jean recognized. It had amber fur, much like the ash squirrel, but it looked like a marsupial. The strange part of the foreign animal was that its belly looked like a sunflower, pollen and all.
Jean tilted his head to the side, trying to orient himself to see the animal better.
To Jean’s surprise, the animal let go of the tree and began to fall from the fifty-foot height. But as it fell, it grew astronomically. By the time the flowered marsupial landed it was at least twenty-five feet tall.
It landed on its feet with a boom.
It grunted and took a step forward.
Jean tried to conjure some acidic clouds around him, and the area filled quickly. It didn’t obscure sight eye enough to hide Jean though.
As a response to Jean’s aggression, the Flowered Marsupial multiplied into six clones surrounding Jean. At once, they all took another step toward Jean.
How am I going to get out of this one, Gabe is Busy with the Spank. I’ve got to do something.
Jean let out his claws with a battle cry. At that moment, the Pine Strangler flashed into being in front of him. It’s coiling acting like a barricade against the flowered beast.
Jean heard some crashing happen outside of the strangler’s barrier. Jean pushed out his aura to try to perceive what was happening. All he could feel was Gabe’s aura moving around at incomprehensible speeds, smashing against what Jean guessed was the flowered marsupial.
“What’s that beast out there?”
It is a Gold Rank Monster, and a variant of a field bandicoot. Poison warning.
Jean realized that he was in extreme danger, but there was nothing that he could do. He let his acid cloud go, realizing that it wouldn’t do anything against the gold-rank entities around him.
He instead sat in a cross-legged position trying to consolidate his cleansing aura around himself, adding his Quiet Place ability.
If there’s nothing I can do in the fight, the best I could do is not die by breathing in a gold-rank poison in the air.
Jean did his best to concentrate but the force and magical weight of the aurae outside was oppressive. Jean kept his eyes closed and tried his best to focus on his aura and healing ability.
Once Jean was knocked over when the earth around him shook from an impact. Another minute later Jean felt a wave of aura so heavy that Jean instantly puked.
The fight must have lasted at least thirty minutes. Considering Jean was locked in a sealed coil of the Pine Strangler, A.K.A. a Spank, Jean was incredibly damaged from the fight occurring outside.
Gabe flash-stepped into the interior of the Spank looking sickly green and purple, covered in blood and wounds.
“Well that was a tough one,” Gabe said with his trademark smile. “How’re you doing?”
Jean couldn’t compare his internal pain and nausea with Gabe’s wounds, so he just nodded and said, “I’m good enough. Wanna sit by me and heal in my Quiet Place ability? You have to sit really close to me for it to work.”
“Yeah, sounds nice.” Gabe hobbled over in front of Jean with a dramatic display of his injuries. He sat knee to knee with Jean, starting to meditate himself. “Your abilities aren’t helping too much because of the rank disparity, but it at least feels nice.”
Jean said, “I’ve also got some iron rank healing potions if you want one.”
“It’s all good. Healing the hard way is better for our ability growth. And an iron rank potion wouldn’t be much better than water for me.” Gabe said while stretching his neck around.
Jean stared at Gabe as his wounds were visibly closing, and his skin’s color was ebbing back to a natural color in only a few minutes.
“So that healing is just natural for someone of your rank?” Jean asked in wonder.
“Well, I’m a bit special with my recovery rate, which is why I’m able to go on solo patrols reliably. But yeah, silver and gold rank is kinda a must in this world, kid.” Gabe bragged, but with his last words, there was more than a little sadness.
Jean thought about prying, but he hadn’t seen the sadness in Gabe before, so he didn’t want to cross any boundaries. Instead, he tried to encourage Gabe. “Well, I think your strength is admirable. And so is this Spank we are sitting inside.”
Gabe’s eyebrows shot up, “Spank?” He asked with mirth.
“Sorry, that’s what I named this Pine Strangler before I knew its real name,” Jean explained.
Gabe burst into laughter, “You here that Valderianous? He’s calling you Spank! YAHAHA!”
The snake’s head appeared out of the coil and brought its face near the sapiens. “Why sspank?” it questioned.
Jean was caught off guard by Gabe’s flippentness of the beast and its congeniality.
“Well, I just mixed the words pine and snake, and it just so happened to be… spank,” Jean said, trying to balance Gabe’s laughter, while Jean felt like his life was still in danger.
“Ss ss ss ss,” The snake laughed. “I undersstand the humor now. Ss ss ss.”
Jean felt like Valderianous was being sarcastic with its tone, but he thought he felt mirth in the snake’s aura, now that it wasn’t completely hidden from his senses.
Gabe explained that the area around them, outside of Valderianous’s protection, had a toxic pollen field, and it if Jean walked out there, he would likely immediately die. So they decided that he should try to take a nap while the field dissipated over the next couple of hours, with the condition that he leaned against the snake’s body to leave his smell on the snake.
Jean thought it was weird, but since he couldn’t argue, he agree and laid against the snake. Quickly enough sleep took him.