Chapter 15

I pulled myself sitting upright and squinted around the room; the tree-man’s body was right where we’d left it, but the other bodies were gone. The chest lay open, with no sign of loot anywhere nearby. When I tried to stand, I felt a weight in my lap, and glanced down to see one of the fragments tucked between my belt and my robe. There was something odd about the chest, and it took me a couple of moments to stand up and walk closer before I realized what it was.

Scrawled into the side of the chest, clearly cut into it with a dagger, was the word ‘Sorry’. Grumbling, I opened my pouch and checked to make sure I still had my fragments, adding the second piece to the same pouch. At least she left me that, I mused, staring down at the hastily carved words. I walked around the room, seeing the drag marks where the bodies had been taken toward the door, and down the stairs. When I walked to the balcony to peer out, I could see a small bonfire where the three bodies were burning, barely recognizable amidst the flames. Try as I might, I could spot no sign of the woman who had helped me, or any idea where she might’ve gone. I felt seriously sore from the mixture of magical healing and sleeping on the stony floor, and stretched out my muscles trying to work out the stiffness. It felt nice to take my time getting ready, looking out over the forest. I could see the path that I had taken to get here – hard to miss given that patches of it still burned – and I could see the other three standing towers, able to pick out from the angles where the one was that no longer stood. The thing that confused me, though, was that all of the towers were the same height. The first one I’d entered had been five floors; this one had been seven. I peered up and down my own tower curiously, and then shrugged helplessly; not enough information. I wondered if it was like a famous blue time-travelling Police box; bigger on the inside. Drinking in the calm of the night, I finally took the time to review my notifications in detail, including the updated Quest information.

[Congratulations! You have completed the second of the Greenwarden’s Towers! Seek out the others to complete the set and awaken the Forest’s Guardian.]

[Clear the towers. Progress: 3/5. Rewards based on individual contribution.]

I stared at the notification in puzzlement. Three out of five? But I’d only done two. I paused to think on it for a moment, realizing that maybe it wasn’t only my progress it counted. That meant someone else was also clearing towers, and I’d have bet money that it was that hammer-wielding man competing with me. I drew out the two fragments, looking at them curiously. Their edges didn’t quite match up, and I assumed that they just weren’t adjacent pieces. Seeing how they looked together, though, I could see that there was some kind of shape that would be at the center once it was fully reassembled. Cliché as it was, it looked like it was a tree, judging by the splaying branches on one and the spreading roots on the other. It made sense considering it was for something called a ‘Greenwarden’, but the whole thing felt too much like a videogame. I shook my head, moving to tuck the pieces away, when I felt something on the back of my newest fragment. I turned it over, peering at the knife-marks on the back, a message that had been left. It was a series of concentric rings with a dot at the center, and I realized, after a moment, that it was a target. This thing makes me a target, I figured out, and laughed. She had wanted the loot, but not the responsibility of carrying one of the fragments that might get her in trouble.

I turned my gaze to the next tower along the edge of the circle, figuring that one was my best bet. If it was the hammer-man who was clearing towers, he would’ve had to go straight across to get to this one from the previous tower, so it was probably farther down his list. I gathered myself, preparing to go, before I remembered the upstairs accommodations. I hustled up the stairs and pushed my way into the room, frowning at the chaos within. Someone had ransacked the room and clearly stolen anything of great value, even going so far as to steal the pillows and the thick blanket. I laughed at the idea of the woman running through the forest with a pillow and blanket over her shoulder, fighting monsters and napping in an ornate blanket afterward.

She had been gorgeous, despite the fact that she’d seemed so terrified of the creature, and the determination on her face had somehow made her even more attractive. I shook my head to banish those thoughts, burying my curiosity about her smile beneath my plans to take the next tower. My plan of just assaulting the towers hadn’t failed yet, but I realized I perhaps should be taking a more measured approach; I had a feeling the number of floors was a mechanic and not a bug, and suspected that the next tower might be even taller.

For a moment, I even entertained the idea of asking for help, seeing if there might be anyone else willing to group up to try and clear the tower. After all, without the woman there, I would’ve died during that fight; of course, I might’ve approached the fight more carefully if I hadn’t been lured in by the screaming, but hypotheticals had a bad habit of not mattering once you had already picked a course of action.

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I did some stretches as I thought on the last few days. Of course she was crying; her friends had just died gruesomely and were being reanimated to fight against her. In truth, I was surprised it wasn’t affecting me more. I mean, it had hit me a bit when I realized one of the earlier puppets was a coworker of mine, but aside from that, I’d actually killed people. While I had hesitated, it hadn’t stopped me from putting an end to them once they became a threat to me. Maybe I was the weird one for not being curled up in a hallway somewhere crying.

I poked at the idea a bit, realizing that at least some of my callousness came from my Shepherd’s attention, ensuring that death held less fear for me than failure. A part of me suspected that there was something more at work; the System wouldn’t be very effective at motivating people if all they did was mope and cry, right? Perhaps along with everything else it was doing, all the reality-warping powers it clearly had, meddling with our minds wasn’t far out of its’ wheelhouse.

Troubled by that thought, I nonetheless descended the tower, carefully checking for enemies or obstacles along the way. Once I made it out without issue, I took off at an angle to my right, headed toward the next tower along the line. The sky above me was darkening as I moved, sunlight slowly dipping below the horizon until the only illumination was the pair of moons, one full and one waxing, that hung overhead in very different places in the sky.

I shook off the confusion that struck me, staring up at an entirely alien sky, and realizing that the stars hadn’t changed; my view of them had, so little light radiating from the world that I could see them stretching off to infinity. To my heightened perception, I could even spot a handful of objects slowly drifting across the sky, only visible by the reflection of sunlight they caught from over the horizon, setting them twinkling in the darkness; they were too high up to be birds, and almost seemed like satellites except for the lack of any lights marking out their edges, only the sun’s glimmer over the horizon catching them enough to make them shine like water droplets.

My reverie clung to me like a film as I kept walking, trying to slow down and pay better attention to my surroundings. It was tempting to just start burning it like I’d done the prior two times, but I figured that if anyone else knew about the towers and wanted to find me, they wouldn’t struggle to do so; the enormous charred trail left plenty of evidence behind. They could probably piece together where I was going, considering I’d kept to going around the outside edge of the circle of towers, but I didn’t want to give away any more information than I had to.

This trip was much more eventful without the fire warding off or killing anything that got close to me; most of the threats were pretty minor, excluding the giant boar that had exploded out of the underbrush and almost threw me into a tree. I had tricked it into ramming into another tree, then poured fire into it while it was stunned, putting an end to that porcine menace.

Try as I might, I couldn’t quite seem to get the knack of conjuring another one of those immensely destructive fireballs, though I’d swear I knew how. Every time I tried, it burst in my hands, or immediately after releasing them. At one point I’d accidentally made it into a flamethrower, but the stream of fire was unpredictable and ended up singeing the ends of my robes. It's a good thing they’re self-repairing, I mused, watching the scorched ends knitting.

Finally, I drew close to the tower, but the doors were shut fast before me, the ironwork looking entirely untouched. The doors split at a touch, slowly creaking inward, and revealing an empty first floor, just as the others had been. As I stepped inside, however, something changed abruptly; the torches on the walls blazed brighter, illuminating the grey stone around me. I looked around in confusion, trying to figure out what had changed, when I felt the pressure of a notification.

[Clear the towers. Progress: 4/5. Rewards based on individual contribution.]

Damnit, I swore to myself. That means he’s probably on his way here. I stepped back outside, conjuring my flames, reaching out my hands as if calling them to me.

While I didn’t think I could take him in a straight matchup, nothing said I had to fight fair.

When the doors slid shut behind me, it closed out the smoky hellscape I’d left in my wake, the entire forest around the tower burning. It would give away my trail, certainly… but anyone who came close would either have to brave the lethal flames, or wait outside until they died down.

Either way, I was winning.