I stood alone in the creepy, pitch-black forest, the curling mist illuminated only by the egg I was holding in my hands, as I stared at the tablet hovering stationary in the air.

Assignment Received... Difficulty E-… Time Limit: 4 days, 8 hours, 30 minutes.

Make your way into Everwood City, locate the creator of the Grand Harvest Body Refining Pill and ensure another cannot be created.

Good Luck, Alex. Make me look good.

Bonus Reward: Do Not Kill the creator, or allow his death within the Time Limit.

Assignment Received... Difficulty B+... Time Limit: Before Death

Return to the world I put you on, idiot.

Bonus Reward: Do Not Die.

My first – still incomplete – quest was rated as E Minus in difficulty, and I had almost died several times trying to accomplish it. My new, slightly more insulting quest was rated at B Plus. That was not good.

There was also the fact that I was apparently on another world, rather than elsewhere on the world I had started on.

I glanced around, staring into the depths of the forest, or at least as far as the light from the egg carried. The ground was covered in dead leaves and that was about it – there did not seem to be any rocks or branches, and there was no undergrowth at all. The trees themselves seemed to be black, or as close to it that it made no difference in the dark. They were also huge. Every single example of the towering wooden behemoths I could make out in the gloom would put any redwood I had seen to shame.

I moved over to one of the vast trunks, egg tucked under one arm and ran my hand across the bark. It was almost painfully cold to the touch, rough like sharkskin and scaled like a cherry black cherry tree.

There was a strange stillness in the air, a quiet I found disturbing, though I could not place why exactly. I looked stared in the direction the figure in grey had gone, straining to hear a whisper of his hollow laughter, but everything was silent.

Frowning, I placed the egg gently on the ground and clapped; the sound seemed muffled in the dim, absorbed somehow by the trees around me.

I shivered against the rolling cold of the pervasive mist and looked at the phoenix egg – the cure for so many people, including my own teacher.

“I... don’t think I should be using you as a torch,” I informed the egg. I searched about for a moment, looking for something I could use for a torch before I remembered that I still had a bunch of clothes that did not fit my stored in a ring.

First, I pulled out the silvery mace I had appropriated from the Risen Throne armoury – it was about two feet long with a flanged head and would make a great base for a torch, with the added benefit that I could hit things with it. Next, I pulled out a shirt and tied it in a bunch around the head of the mace.

Grinning at my improvised creation, I crouched and held the cloth of the shirt against the egg – nothing happened. It was at that moment that I recalled that the flames had not burned me while I was holding it.

“Great job, Alex. Steller. Fucking idiot...” I thought about trying to light it using my Focus for a moment, but thought better of it when I considered the fact that it was made of metal. I could place it on the ground, but I did not want to set the whole place on fire – the floor was an unbroken mat of tinder, after all.

Sighing, I put the mace back into a ring, not wanting to get the cloth damp in the omnipresent fog.

“Come on, Alex – think! I could rub wood together, if I had wood... I don’t have any wood. I could chop some off a tree. But it would be green... I could use the leaves and some hair maybe as tinder, and light the torch that way.”

I did not really want to damage a tree for no reason, seemed kind of like a dick move, but I was pretty desperate for light and I would really like to put the egg safely into storage.

Shrugging in resignation, I pulled out the axe I had taken – it was not a wood axe, but I thought it unlikely it would not get the job done. Tightening both of my hands about the grip, I took a wider stance and brought the axe back, and over, tightening my body as I pulled my hand down the shaft, the head aimed at the tree at a shallow angle.

There was a clang that rang out dully in the forest, subdued even with the amount of force I had used. A shock of vibration stung my palms and my forearms hurt with the effort, but I had still failed to cut a large enough chunk from the colossal tree. I had, in fact, failed to cut the tree – period. I stared hard at the point the axe had impacted, even bringing my face close to it – there was no mark at all.

Blinking, I looked at the axe in my hands, shocked to find the shaft bent just below the blade, causing the beard to jut out like an ice axe, rather than a war axe.

As I stood looking at the implement in my hands disbelievingly, a shiver ran though the ground, like a tiny quake. Nervous, I picked up the egg and glanced around me – I had played enough games and read enough books in my life that I knew something bad was likely about to happen.

In the distance, seemingly unaffected by the oppressive silence of the forest, a strange animalistic voice began to sing. The voice held a vibratory quality, like a Mongolian throat-singer turned up to 11 and with added reverb.

More voices joined it, a rising chorus of almost discordant harmonies, building in all directions and interposed by a single, perfectly pure voice serving as a counterpoint.

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I caught movement, out of the corner of my eye and I turned to find figures approaching me out of the gloom. They were short and lithe, almost skeletally thin and their skin was as pale as freshly exposed bone. Speaking of bone, they seemed to be wearing them as decoration – I recognised what looked like a human femur tied to one leg, over strips of thin leather.

They were close enough by then that I could make out their faces, open wide as the song rose out of them – I saw multiple rows of sharp teeth and pointed ears beneath white hair decorated with teeth. I recognised them – had seen them before when browsing races all those days before. I had thought they were elves at first, but they had a different name. Devourers. At the time I had wondered what they had to be like to earn such a name, but there and then, staring them in the face I thought I had a pretty good idea.

In their hands, they held long knives of jagged bone, stained black on bright white.

I stepped back, glancing around and ready to run, but they were crowding towards me from every direction now, their gazes wide, staring and hungry.

Heart pounding, I decided I was probably going to need to fight – I would need to do so by the light of my Focus because otherwise I risked blasting my prize to pieces. Swallowing past a suddenly dry throat, I pushed the egg into my ring, thankful that it fit with all the crap I had in there at that moment. The forest was impenetrably dark now with no hint of light from any direction and I heard the rushed sound of bare feet on dead leaves coming my way.

Holding onto the edges of my mind against onrushing panic with only the greatest of effort, I Focused, hoping then would be the time I would make a breakthrough in my control.

The forest was illuminated once more, the shrieking of air torn by lightning echoing out amidst the crescendo of the Devourers, the blue-white light painting the living wave in stark shades, a hellish contrast to the black trees.

Dropping the axe I did not know how to use, I stepped into that onrushing wave, eyes every bit as wide as those of my opponents, my teeth clenched and exposed as I lashed out at the first of them to reach me.

It was like punching wood, though thankfully not like punching the local trees. As the world slowed about me, my body and mind sped along by the rushing lines of power within me, my first connected with the point of their jaw and there was a flash and they were sent back into their fellows, a line of light drawn between us.

My first opponent’s friends paid them no heed, steeping over and around them as they fell, arms reaching for me like some nightmare of a zombie invasion.

I lashed about myself, left and right, blows striking hard flesh with as much power as I could put behind them in the rapidly shrinking oasis of my personal space.

There was little room for finesse in the chaotic melee; I met grasping hands with firsts and flicking bone knives with elbows, smashing slender noses with sharp headbutts, my lightning lashing out recklessly and leashed to my will by grim certainty: If I lost control as I had before, I would die.

It could not last, of course. Within minutes I was pressed in on all sides, immobilised by the pressure of the multitudes, and even though my Focus surged between them, body to body and carried by touch, they endured, the surging power of nature’s wrath diluted by sheer numbers.

I was pulled from my feet and pressed to the dead ground of the stygian forest, pain hot and sharp and tearing ripping a scream out of me, my breath short and ragged.

They were eating me, they were eating me, they were eating meeeeaaaaaaahhh!

I lost control.

Lightning like a pillar of fracturing light flared out of me. Fuelled by a primal, atavistic terror and horror, it ripped itself free of me, uncaring of such weak things as numbers or of pitiable reason, tossing my devourers aside like dust before a hurricane as it arced between the vast trees and screamed my defiance. The world went white and the cadence of the crowding figures was cut – shredded to tatters like the bodies of those closest to me.

*

***

*

I came to in darkness, though it was not the darkness of the forest as I recognised it. I scrambled to my feat, panic and adrenaline demanding I get off the ground. My body hurt. I looked down at myself, seeing enormous tears all over my new clothing, stained black and red in the dim light. Every part of me hurt to move, either burned, blistered or bitten as I was.

Fires burned on the first floor, smouldering bodies burned and twisted almost beyond recognition and piles of leaves alight, though it did not seem to be spreading. An almost sweet smell hung in the air, accompanied by acrid smell of burnt hair and the earth smell of burn leaves.

There were hundreds of bodies, though only those closest to me seemed to have received the worst of it, and I felt weak. I felt weaker than I had since that first day I had arrived. Looking inside my centre, I was shocked to see my soul sea was all but empty, reduced in size to a small silver-gold puddle. No trace of Praxis remained in me; I had used it all.

I spotted my axe under a couple of prone forms and I stumbled over to pull it out, unreasonably glad to be holding a weapon.

Blood was still running down my body, dripping from hands and clothing, I could feel. It was truly a wonder I was able to stand and I attributed it to a mixture of my Lesser Regeneration and the power of the ren, whose body I had taken as my own.

I went to look into a ring for a healing pill, however I did not seem to have enough Experience to accomplish even such a small take.

Shivering, I decided to check the bodies – I had my doubts that people wearing poorly cured skins, teeth and bones would have any alchemical medicine, but it was worth check – or at least, it would have been if I had not heard something rising in the distance.

Dread sunk its claws into me as I heard singing in the distance, picking up once more in every direction. On the ground, bodies began to stir and I stumbled back into the tree, my head shaking back and forth in denial of reality.

I could not fight, I had nothing left and I was far more injured than when I started. I could not run, tee sound was all around me once more, that single pure voice angry and feral in the distant night.

I turned to the tree, looking for hand-holds on the wide trunk, but though the bark was scaled and pitted, there was no way for me to get a grip upon its massive bulk.

I glanced at my axe, and at the bent shaft and it occurred to my gibbering mind that I could use it to climb.

Placing the jutting point against the bark, I pulled myself up – it was agonising, but the impossibly tough tree held my weight. I tried to leap up, to catch a higher hold with the axe but I had no success. Frantically, I patted myself down, hoping to find something, anything that could help. At my hip, under my robe, I felt a dagger – Walker's dagger.

I remembered taking it from my ring back in the lab, hoping to call my mentor, but I had stuck it in my belt after my arrival and forgotten about it.

I pulled the long, slender blade free and placed it against the black wood and attempted to pull myself up with it – the blade sank into the tree.

“Son of a bitch! Where were you when I was trying to make a torch? Still in my belt, I guess...” A shiver ran through the ground once more, and the approaching sang increased its tempo.

Terrified and unwilling to be eaten, I pulled the dagger free, turned it to be horizontal, and using both it and the bent axe I began to climb, every arm length a burning, tortuous agony.

The fires were fading now and I could hear the song approaching the base of my tree – I hoped the bastards below could not climb and pushed myself through the pain. It was hard, but I had been through worse.

I have no idea how high the tree was, I climbed for what seemed like hours, sweat mixing with my flowing blood and dripping off of me, a mocking tease for the still audible army far below.

Eventually, I found branches and what seemed to be the top of the giant tree’s trunk – I pulled myself up, exhausted and chest heaving, pulling in the cold air like a desperate bellows.

I crawled away from the trees edge, finding a hollow in the rough bark and without thought or intent, I slept.