The first to go on were new rags. Numb fingers would be a quick path to a long fall, so I’d need to do the utmost to protect them from the cold. I took the time to go through Garrett’s clothes again, ripping up any wool I could find for my hand wraps. Wool was a wonderfully practical material, and there was a true wealth of it here.

By the time I was done the backs of my hands bulged out like clamshells with all the crap wrapped around them, and my feet weren’t much better, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I could only layer so much insulation over my fingers before killing any hope of climbing and I had to compensate for that somewhere. At least the feet were a bit easier.

Luckily I could leave my claws entirely uncovered, sticking out past the wrapped cloth and providing a solid gripping surface. Without that, this might not be possible at all.

But I had more than makeshift gloves up my sleeves. I had my own body. I braced my spear at an angle likely to impale any opportunistic predators swooping in and went through the now familiar motions of sinking into a trance. Familiar or not, it was still far from easy. Maybe one day I ought to make a Skill for it, like with [Soul Sense]? It was definitely easier now than it had been before though. I’d wait and see how smooth I could make it with practice before I invested more into it.

With my trance I focused in on my hands and began my adjustments. Temporary ones again, like I had before my last climb. I wasn’t planning on anything permanent until I had a lot longer to measure the effects of my last one. Rather than mess with blood production or chemical levels I dilated the blood vessels in my hand before replicating the process in the other, followed by both feet.

I immediately felt a flush spread beneath my garments as the rush of increased blood flow brought new heat to my fingers. Between that and the new insulation they were getting pretty hot and itchy. Tragically, that particular problem would get worse before it got better.

I allowed myself the luxury of another deep breath before shifting focus to my core. Not my metaphysical core, though the soul would play its part in this. No, I was literally mucking about with my internal organs, particularly the stomach. I bumped up the speed of my metabolism, letting everything function that little bit faster. Including, most critically, excess heat production.

I began rolling up my rope, failed to fit the bulky mass through the opening of a pouch, and resorted to feeding it in hand over hand. That’d be a tangled mess to clean out later.

I sighed and stood up. I could try to find something waterproof in Garrett’s clothes, but I wasn’t sure it was worth it. With this kind of continuous exposure the water was bound to soak through anyway, and wool was a damn good insulator even when wet. That was why it was worth wearing in the first place.

Stars know I wouldn’t touch the itchy crap otherwise.

I threw back a handful of my nuts and dried berries and stepped up to the wall of water. Time to get down to business.

I reached through the curtain of water to anchor my claws on the bark beneath, then brought up my feet to find their own purchase. I held position for a second, letting the water push back against me as I squinted through the spray around my fingers, but my grip stayed strong.

I reached up around the waterfall before plunging back into it, securing a higher grip. I followed suit with my other limbs, and just like that I was headed up.

The spray clearly gave away my position, but with my increased metabolism pumping out nervous energy it wasn’t long before I was enveloped in a deeper darkness. That was enough to soothe my fears, if only a little. Given the difficulty of the current, I doubted I had to deal with any arboreal predators anyway. Only the flying ones would be of any threat, and the chameleon-owls weren’t the night hunters their mundane cousins were.

That left the flitting shadows, unknown and mysterious, as the only plausible threat left. And nothing is quite so hauntingly terrifying as the unknown. What were they? Dark ravens? A new breed of owl? Ancient war drakes, left abandoned through the ages?

At least my own internal fearmongering kept my heart racing, and providing ample warmth to my extremities. Too much even. I could feel the shivering sink down into my bones as what little heat I had leeched out into my fingers.

Fucking hells.

I grunted and picked up the pace, heaving myself up by handholds as soon as my fingers found them. My eyes I left out entirely. Squinting until I could make out the fuzzy shadows of the bark beneath the water wasn’t something I had time for anymore. The technique was better anyway, touch told me far more than sight ever could.

As my newfound speed raised up greater spray around me I had another purpose for sight; watching those dark blips above. An amateur might assume it’d be harder to pick them out now that I was further into the shadow, but any experienced skulker could tell you that it was easier to see in the dark when you were enveloped in it yourself.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Still, easier did not mean easy, and few things were easy when you were climbing at your limit. I could make out the leathery flaps of their wings, but little else. There weren’t all that many of them, which was encouraging.

Unless that just meant there were dozens more yet unse— No! I wasn’t going down that rabbit hole, there was enough in the air already, I couldn’t afford to play three-dimensional chess against my own paranoia.

I focused on the climb, only sending occasional glances to ward off the risk of swooping danger. I could feel the warmth of exercise radiating out from my muscles through the rest of my body, but the familiar burn was largely absent.

Wonderful. Felt kind of weird to say without sarcasm, but I’d take it.

With every change I’d been through it wasn’t simple to pinpoint my new endurance. In the end, I could only assume my red blood had finally built up enough to be good for more than hunger. Then again, that relied on my Stats to be worthwhile in the first place…

Regardless of its source, my endurance didn’t have the decency to be infinite. I still got tired, if slower than before.

Slow enough to outpace the water beating down on me. The deluge only thinned as I went higher, wearing me down less with every reaching grasp. But that didn’t do anything to erase what had come before, and my remaining strength waned with each passing second.

I pushed through, climbing ever higher. By the time the current no longer had the might to bear me down I’d spent so long climbing that I could already feel the shallow layer of bruise across my forearms beginning to form.

But I was through the worst of it. I could finally raise my head without worrying about taking a bucket’s worth of water to the face, which had profound effects on my awareness. Not only my own really, the lack of telltale spray would make it far harder to see me.

A dozen yards above the waterline, I finally allowed myself to rest. Now, resting on a near vertical is something that most would call impossible, but that was the sign of someone who hadn’t truly tried. I slipped one hand into a crack in the bark and rotated it. Leaning backward, my wrist bones caught against the sides and locked me in. Like an idiot with his hand stuck in a jar, I was secure.

Precarious in theory, but firm in application. My wrist was physically too wide to leave the crevice without turning vertical and my weight wasn’t about to provide rotational force by itself. I was free to relax my muscles and let my tendons and ligaments bear the stress instead.

Even better, the spear strapped across my back pointed out against the dark sky, warding off any danger and securing me for long enough to return my metabolism to its normal levels, along with all the other temporary changes. I couldn’t run about with constantly dilated blood vessels, lest I bleed out from some tiny nick on my finger.

I also took the opportunity to reach into my food pouch and refuel. The handfuls of dried nuts and berries were first, but that alone wouldn’t cut it here. I dug a little deeper and pulled out some of the best food I had access too: a biscuit with meat jammed into it to form a dense premade sandwich.

Stars, it was delicious. The biscuit was denser than bakery bread, but it still had whatever human witchcraft they used to poof it up and add some fluff. I don’t know how that worked, but it was delightful. Goblin bread was much cruder. The only break from the monotony flat goblin hardtack was whatever bugs had been on hand to fill out the dough. This, on the other hand, had salted meat as its infill, adding the savoury taste of salt to the mix.

Ah, this was the life.

I smacked my lips and shifted my focus, and my weight, to resume the climb. The brief rest was hardly the same as sleep, but it gave me a moment to breathe and that was all I needed. I got a grip with my right hand and rotated my left out of it’s nook. A tad sore, but none the worse for wear.

I rubbed out the soreness and reached upwards. I made quick progress without the water to obstruct me, but I was still a good way from the branch. Maybe half an hour’s climb, if I kept up the pace.

I had no intention of doing that, so probably more like an hour and a half. I’d be slowing as I approached it, readying myself for the inevitable threats above. Unfortunately this was looking to be one of the most dangerous parts of my climb even without any living threats, so I could hardly afford to me lax about them.

From my current position it was perfectly clear that the waterfall split off evenly on both sides. The walls of mist spraying off the turbulent water turned the once open sky into a tunnel, with the only hint of light reflecting off the distant canopy and the junction of trunk and branch a gaping hole of darkness.

Joke’s on them, I liked tunnels just fine. With both eyes open wide and Senses as my highest stat the branch underside was beginning to come into resolution for me. Not only were the ridges of bark visible, but the furry shapes moving among them as well. They moved with an odd gait, but when I started to spot more than a few simply hanging still I clocked them as the very same shadows I’d seen flitting above before.

Bats. Of an equally monstrous size to the chameleon-owls, yes, but still bats. Not something I was worried about, but not something I trusted either. Most bats didn’t hunt the way owls did, but even if these ones did, I’d hear them coming from a mile away.

I more important concern was how I’d actually make it to the other side, but I could think of a few ways.

Zero easy ways, tragically.

Inconveniently, none of them were the kind of thing I could test from down here either. I’d need to get close enough for a good look before I could figure out how practical this might be.

Nothing interrupted me for the rest of my climb, even when I grew close enough to make out more than just bats on the underside of the branch. The bats would occasionally fly off to the side and circle out of view over the branch, which meant they likely fed on the other side of the branch. A stroke of fortune, at least for the moment. I might well be telling a different tale when I reached their hunting grounds myself.

The new creatures were of more immediate concern. I could only catch glimpses of them, as they were not only far smaller than bats, but weaved in and out of grooves in the bark. They were only visible for intermittent moments and that slowed my recognition, but only by so much.

They were ants. Not the most threatening of creatures, in fact a metaphor for helplessness, but the rules were different here. When I used the distant texture of the bark around them as a rough gauge of their size, it was more an act of confirmation than curiosity.

Yeah, the fuckers were way bigger than they had any right to be. Not much smaller than I was, and while a slight size advantage for once might be nice, there was no way in hell that was enough to get me in a fight with an ant. Even the mundane versions were used to tangling with creatures dozens of times their size.

The monstrous kind ought to be fighting dragons, not goblins.

When I made it up to the crook of the branch, I was finally forced to face the decision I’d been avoiding. With the water cascading down on either side of the branch there would be no more climbing. Not here.

Not unless I traveled far enough along the branch’s underside to get past the waterfall and then circled back around to travel along the top. At that point I could head back to the trunk, only to reach the same damn waterfall blocking my path again.

Alternatively, I could head in the opposite direction. Abandon the trunk, and keep moving along the branch as it moved outwards hoping that it curved up enough to reach the next branch.

Neither option was particularly appealing, but only one involved walking into another fucking waterfall, so I’d go with the one that wasn’t that, I guess.