All five set off. Stamina had recovered. A few minutes later, everyone in the HUD had an unknown quest. The first peal of thunder sounded from the south. Trees with lush crowns and shapeless trunks grew on both sides of the well-trodden road. Fluttering fireflies showed the way. All five guests kept their ears open, and their fingers on the triggers. Ten minutes later, they were in a clearing. There, hunched plants with white withered flowers bent towards the wanderers. In the very center, there were white crosses made of two iron beams fused together. On the other side of the clearing, a creature appeared. Its skin tissue comprised tightly woven herbs and covered with green magical armor. Instead of a head, a helmet made of branches, through the holes in its visor, one eye glowed green, the other purple. In its hands, it held a shield and a spear stained with purple blood. The Forest Guardian?
“How to understand what it wants from us?” Latludious asked.
Ronnie took out the Barrett and headed forward. The others were watching his actions. He walked up to the first cross, bowed his head and pointed at it with his finger, and looked at the reaction of the monster. It did not move. The sniper paid tribute to each grave. The Forest Guardian stood rooted to the spot and watched.
“What’s going on?” Faolandan asked.
“We’re trying to understand what is happening in the head of this vegetarian salad,” Maenad replied.
“I hope there’s no wind,” Latludious said.
“I hope it’s not Caesar sauce.”
“How will we understand?” Faolandan asked.
“Just give Ronnie a chance,” Sitting Bull whined.
The forest guardian stuck the tip of the spear into the ground and put the shield next to the trunk of the sleeping Ent. The sniper followed his every action, and then noticed his left hand, struck by unnatural magic for these places. Black and purple color. A fleeting memory of where he had met such a thing popped into his head. Ronnie’s eyes darted around, and when they stopped, he exhaled and took the rifle off the safety and pulled the bolt and pointed the Barrett’s barrel with a silencer in the creature's direction.
Maenad reacted before the others and pointed the flamethrower at Ronnie’s back and shouted:
“Don’t even think…”
The sniper pulled the trigger, and the sound of a shot echoed like a whip. A second later, the forest guardian fell. A soul burst out of its body and thanked him with a nod of its head and flew away through the ground. In that place, a burdock bloomed, on which fireflies flew. A blinding flash. The entire group closed their eyes, and when they opened them, they saw a new cross.
“How did you understand?” Latludious asked.
Ronnie checked the amount of experience: 8%. He took out a scanning chip from his pocket and stuck it into the rotting body of the guard and asked:
“AI.”
“At your service.”
“Is the body infected with the same magic as the minions of the wild-boss from the Nepril Desert?”
“Analyzing…”
“Can you answer him already?” Maenad shouted. “What is this stupid habit of yours to stay silent?”
“The analysis is completed. You are correct, Ronnie.”
Ronnie opened the bestiary, found the creature he killed in the desert. AI named it TagFindar. To the left of the 3d image was written the race: Orc. The monster’s parameters were highlighted on the sides. From below - skills.
“AI. Can representatives of the Orc race live in these forests?”
“Based on the available information, there is a small probability.”
“How many percent?”
“About five.”
“Based on what?”
“You are the first and the last to meet a creature infected with the same magic as the minions of Tagfindar in these lands. No matter how many players have passed through the paths of this forest, no one has ever met anything like this before.”
“So they came here recently…”
“Or a long time ago, but no one has met them before.”
“Hence the five percent.”
“That’s right.”
Ronnie felt someone squeeze his shoulder hard and put his knee on his leg, and put the muzzle of a machine gun to his head.
“Will you fucking answer?” Faolandan asked.
Ronnie got up and turned to him and said,
“Point the gun, then shoot. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and learn to wait.”
Latludious approached the withering body of the forest guard and used the spell “analysis” and told the others:
“The body of this monster seems to have been infected by dark magic. As my AI informed me, the forest brotherhood does not kill its own. They asked us to do this. But you, Ronnie, you guessed for other reasons, right?”
Ronnie saw an alert appear in the HUD:
The side quest is finished. Your reward is 48.665 CP + a virtual loot box.
“I’ve seen this magic before,” he replied after a brief delay. “I think it captures consciousness and makes the creature submit its will to the master. But I observed the final version. Apparently, the curse doesn’t activate immediately.”
“In that case, the question arises: if the curse does not kill, then why are there so many graves here?”
“How would I know that? Maybe your AI is wrong, or maybe the forest brotherhood is practicing suicide.”
Maenad came up to Ronnie and punched him in the shoulder and said:
“Why do you solve issues with violence? Maybe Latludious could heal it. No one allowed you to kill a conscious monster.”
He turned to her and answered:
“Do you really think the druids and ents of the ancient forest wouldn’t heal it themselves if they could?”
Latludious used a light spell and tried to cleanse the guardian’s body of the taint, but the infection did not succumb. Then he tried to heat the affected area to a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius, but the damage did not decrease by a millimeter. The magician tried for a couple of minutes to resist dark magic, but the attempts were unsuccessful. He got up and said:
“Ronnie, you were right now, but in the future you should discuss your actions with your comrades, even if you don’t take them for such. If you’d made a mistake a couple of minutes ago, we wouldn’t have made it out of the woods. There’s nothing else for us to do here. Let’s move on.”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“Did you hear him?” Faolandan asked Ronnie. “You should be quieter than the grass.”
Ronnie smiled and slung his rifle over his back and replied:
“If you don’t like something, then hide in a corner like a little boy and start crying for your commander. I signed a contract with him. And there was no point in obeying every order and discussing your actions. But, there was a clause that said we may kill monsters and not pass by them. I don’t care about Maenad’s worldview and what she thinks, just like yours. Apart from me and Latludious, there are no irreplaceable people here.”
“It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand,” said the Sitting Bull lying in the grass.
“On whose fucking side are you, eh?” Maenad shouted at him.
“All plants, ordinary and magical, are our brothers and sisters. They’re talking to us, and if we listen, we can hear them.”
Faolandan walked up to Ronnie and spat at his feet. Maenad pulled him by the shoulder and said:
“He’s not worth it.”
Faolandan turned to Sitting Bull and said:
“I won’t carry you anymore.”
Maenad squatted down in front of the wounded Indian, took off her hood, exposing her burned face and added:
“Sometimes pain sobers the mind.”
Latludious exhaled and thought that it would be nice to have a calming spell or something in his arsenal.
For the next hour, they climbed to the top of the mountain, insignificant and tiny in the face of the monumental landscape of nature. No one said a word. The harmony of the forest froze in immobility. There was a serene calmness in the area, in which the elusive sound of falling leaves could barely be heard. The path, surrounded by impenetrable wilds, ended before the entrance to the cave. The group stopped.
“Is it a big tunnel, or a hidden dungeon with monsters?” Maenad asked.
Sitting bull sat down on a small rock, took out a pipe and lit it. Ronnie leaned against a tree. He looked askance at the black hole in the mountain and felt how its darkness was eating at him, and there in the womb of this ominous murk, one of his unpleasant memories was revived from the ashes. He was standing in front of a similar place on Mars as a part of the Interplanetary tactical anti-pirate squad (ITIPS). Mountains, ruby sand, brownish-red rocks, pale yellow mountains and rough, rocky peaks surrounded them on all sides. Tyriel released miniature drones with thermal imagers forward and a minute later, they burst in one by one. That was the first time Blake saw what a cornered man was capable of...
“The last thing we need is a battle,” Faolandan said.
Latludious looked at him and asked:
“If I understand you correctly, between the impenetrable wilds at the top of the mountain, where you can die from any landslide, rockfall, or poisonous plant and unpredictable monsters, you choose the former?”
Faolandan did not answer.
“Then it’s decided. Let’s go.”
Sitting Bull was the last to enter. He looked at Ronnie, who continued to stand by the tree, but his consciousness was somewhere far away from them. He walked up to him, slapped him lightly on the cheek. The sniper’s eyes darted. He shook his head and heard:
“Come on.”
The tunnel, surrounded by blocks of impressive size sticking to each other, decreased with every new yard passed. Ten minutes later, the players continued to move on the courts, like a group of faceless miners. Turns replaced each other. On the way, there were small Tuiakhalizi plants with a green stem bent twice and a yellow spiked flower. Darkness enveloped the wanderers from all sides. The sounds of the forest stayed behind. There was only the rustling of stones under their feet.
The unknown road stretched to infinity. If it wasn’t for the in-game interface, they would have lost track of time long ago. Everyone was tense, ready to fight back in case of an ambush. However, they did not meet any resistance. At the next turn, they found themselves in a deep grotto, dark, as if under the lid of a closed coffin. The sphere illuminated the empty space. No pictures, no books, nothing. The grave had been dug up, and instead of the body, mountain water was now flowing into the clay pit. Barahu ran there to quench its thirst, but Faolandan stopped it in time, and gave it a drink from his flask, saying:
“Don’t, the water may be poisoned.”
Terrible humidity and dampness stood inside the room. Green moss covered everything. Latludious noticed a small depression inside one wall. He went there and noticed under a stone a small wax candle and a burgundy silk ribbon with strange and partially erased symbols. The magician left everything in its place and said:
“Let’s not linger here.”
All five went on into another narrow passage, hoping this claustrophobic nightmare would end. No one agreed to stop for a break after the next three hours. They walked like clockwork robots. Sitting Bull felt the worst of all. His legs could not support him any longer, and he fell. For half a minute, he examined the rough stone ceiling above him until Latludious cast a spell and gravity magic dragged his body along the ground like a broken transport without wheels on a tow rope. Maenad took pity on him and injected a fresh dose of restorative medicine, followed by painkillers.
When the exhausting stage of the journey was over, one by one, they went to the top of the hill and set up camp. Sitting Bull went offline, leaving his character for an hour-long meditation. Ronnie laid out his things by the tree and leaned on the trunk and looked, without taking his eyes off, at the endless green hills stretching to the horizon. The sun’s rays no longer penetrated through the thickness of cumulonimbus clouds. Grayness and gloom covered the horizon.
Ronnie looked at the inaccessible top of a bare stone mountain in the east, from which waterfalls flowed and rustled in thin streams. There, the bones and skull of a snake-like dragon protruded, plastered with stone, like plasticine. Upon closer examination, it turned out that the creature had no wings. The size was staggering. By the eye, the dragon was one and a half times the length of the one they had to fight in the air. Then he raised the binoculars to examine the ridge of the mountain. There, among the protruding spears of stone peaks, a statue of a man in a black and purple hoodie and a scythe in his hand caught his eye. Ronnie increased the magnification of the binoculars to the maximum and, upon closer examination, noticed a player wearing a red scarf around his neck, a helmet with a single dragon skull, with the addition of twisted horns like a mountain goat, on which hung wooden plaques similar to amulets from evil spirits. Gray armor with purple veins protected most of the torso and legs, and white rags fluttered in the wind on top of them. He was sitting, leaning on his snaith and stretching his legs forward.
Ronnie approached Latludious and told him what he saw. The magician examined both the statue and the bones, but did not find the mysterious player.
“Fuck. What kind of place is this...” he said. “Are you sure you saw a player? It doesn’t look like it’s that easy to get to the top.”
“My eyes have not failed me yet.”
“Do you think someone is watching us?”
“No. He just rested.”
“Rested and disappeared a minute later? Don’t you find that strange?”
“I find it super fucking strange.”
Latludious spent another minute examining those places through the eyepiece of the binoculars, peering at every suspicious black dot or mountain flaw, but he found nothing similar to the player. When the magician gave up trying to see anything there, he looked at Ronnie and asked in a low voice:
“Could he have infected the Forest Guard? Judging by the description of his armor, he fits.”
“I don’t know.”
“If it’s really a player, then you should have seen his nickname and level.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Then I’ll bet it’s a humanoid monster.”
Ronnie understood exactly who he meant and answered:
“Like the Doppelganger?”
“Yeah. Looks like there are a lot of them on Thalack.”
Ronnie turned back and looked at his teammates’ tents.
“We can’t handle such creatures.”
“Let’s hope that you saw him for the first and last time,” Latludious paused for a moment, took a deep breath and continued, “it’s better for no one to know about this.”
“Do you want his appearance to be a surprise for the others?”
“I don’t want to bother anyone unnecessarily.”
Ronnie spat and said:
“It’s your business.”
Sitting Bull returned to the game twenty minutes later than scheduled. They set off, exhausted. An hour later, little Glinwilenth followed them - kind forest animals with the wings of a moth, the body of a lion and blue bulging eyes. Now and then they jumped on someone’s shoulder, rubbed their faces against their neck and jumped off. The players, except for Maenad, ignored them. Then the animals switched to Barahu and jumped on it, like on a trampoline. The wolfhound bared its teeth and barked and tried to drive away the troublemakers, but they easily coped with it.
“Judging by the map of the area, the road will take another seven or eight hours. The next halt is the last. We’ll go to a rest stop until morning and then we’ll be on our way again.”
They came out on a fresh path trodden by someone or something. From time to time, the group either went up or down the steep slopes. Sometimes it was necessary to overcome deep ravines with the help of magic. When dusk descended on the Elgoreombdon forest, Faolandan noticed how huge dormels gave way to ordinary linrava with white low trunks, small black spots and thin twigs.
Latludious said it was time to look for a safe place to set up camp. Everyone agreed, but did not want to split up for the sake of searching. In one day, dirt and sweat had become a familiar smell that did not cause hostility. They walked and looked around, leaving a smelly trail behind them. Ronnie saw the fading yellow sunlight seeping through the trees. Together with the moon rising in the darkness, a whitish mist covered the ground. Faolandan stopped and said he saw a clearing and asked the others to follow him. When all five of them made their way through the thick branches of the tossgamp bushes, they saw an open space covered with low green grass. At three o’clock there was a low stone from the center of which spring water flowed down, coloring it in a copper color. Latludious looked at Ronnie with excitement on his face, who shrugged in response.
“It’s a good place,” Maenad said, and patted Faolandan on the back.
While the players were setting up camp, Ronnie went to the stone and used a filter and filled a canteen. The others did the same a minute later. Then Latludious told everyone to go to bed and return to the game with the onset of the first rays of the sun.