Symon died. He was crossing the street at 33rd & Market when, without warning, there was a loud bang and suddenly up was down and down was up. He ragdolled through the air, limbs freely floating around him, like a puppet who's strings had been cut.

As he landed, his head hit the asphalt. Hard. His consciousness faded, receding into a black void of nothingness as the last active neurons in his mind slowed to an unresponsive crawl. The constant stimuli of senses from his body dulled until they were merely a memory. Just before the curtains closed, a last gasp of neurons firing in desperation kept thinking the same thing.

I wish I could have written my story.

Time of death: 10:47 P.M. Saturday February 29th, 2020

The end.

Except it wasn't. Thought and language decayed, drifting away outside perception, withering away into distant and vague notions of a forgotten realm of experience. But a fundamental state of existence remained. Pure. Uncontaminated by the human condition. Visible now, only because of the complete erasure of any distractions. Slowly, more and more of this new reality entered his perception, unravelling into higher spatial and temporal dimensions than the four he knew.

Symon peered inside, his mind's eye falling through a cloud of energy. As he ventured further and further into its depths, it slowly condensed, first coalescing into thin tendrils, then winding into strings and rivers. At its core, it made a dense weave which slowed his descent before crystalizing into an unshakeable monolith which even his ethereal form could not pass. It was a grand and unknowable formation, a structure of such sophistication that it could only be experienced, and never fully understood.

How long he spent in this reality, he couldn't say. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Years? Time and space twisted into and around each other here. They were tangled so tightly that to try to separate them was impossible.

Then, in an instant, he was back, the blinding radiance of consciousness rushing into him. It was a violent tidal wave that consumed the void; a collision between realities, between an ethereal world and a physical one, and for a brief instant, Symon existed with a foot in each. In the periphery of his perception a new world loomed over him, dwarfing the one he'd just discovered. In an epiphany that lasted only a moment, he understood what he was seeing; it was his own soul becoming engulfed in a new reality.

Suddenly, he was all at once surrounded by a cold and damp darkness. A violent storm of human senses tore through his brain, cracking through his mind like lightning, and scrambling any coherent thought before it could focus. Instead, only the primal instinct for survival dominated, taking hold quickly, and leaving room for nothing else.

Symon gasped for breath, but managed to take in less than a whisper, as though he were breathing through a straw the width of a thumbtack. His lungs sputtered as the dark and damp enclosure pressed in further, not yielding an inch back, no matter how much he struggled.

He didn't know what had happened, or why, or how, but that wasn't on his mind. All that mattered now was the earthen tomb surrounding him. He was buried, and that drove his mind and body into a panicked frenzy. He set to work quickly, wriggling through the dirt like an earthworm, shifting every which way to put the soil above him below. He tore away at the dirt with his hands, lacerations decorating them as he dug through the small stones blocking his path.

Along the way Symon ran out of air. He died. He was certain of it. He knew the feeling well; it was etched into his mind. Though this time, he remained grounded in reality, stuck to this body and this mind. Stuck desperately tearing away at the soil suffocating him. Instead of passing away into that other world, he pulled on it, pulling it to him, taking from it an unknown power that coursed through the very fiber it was made of. It was energy in its purest sense, mutable to any form he needed of it. He called on it to keep him alive, and it did, but it was running out of energy fast.

At last, Symon's hand broke through, just when he was consuming the last drop of energy. A moment later his head poked through. He was out.

For a brief moment Symon felt relief as he gasped in the fresh air and life returned to his body. Relief which was quickly swept away by a painful reality. It felt as if every bone was broken, every inch of skin burned and torn. Only one eye provided a sorry excuse for any vision, and he was vaguely aware that it wasn't fully set in its socket.

He was a walking corpse. One mutilated beyond recognition. His skin was charred black, living flesh only visible through deep cracks that patterned his skin where blood and puss leaked out. In the middle of his chest was a softball sized hole where he could see a mangled heart more spasming than beating. Dried blood liquified all around it, flowing in, before being sputtered out in a red mist.

Symon fell over sideways. He tried to catch himself but the bones in his outstretched arm crumbled as they made contact with the ground. Soon enough, he lost consciousness. Shock was a mercy that soothed his misery.

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Alicia loathed traveling through the Vencian jungle. She hated the ruthless and rugged terrain. She hated the hurricanes, and the thunderstorms, and the unending rain. She hated the mud and the poisonous plants, and the constant darkness cast by the thick canopy overhead. What Alicia hated most of all however, were the insects which incessantly buzzed in her ears and attacked every bit of exposed skin.

A slap sounded out as she swatted a mosquito on her cheek. She channeled her mana into the blood. Feeling it easily succumb and burn before her. Weak. Terribly weak. Was it a good or bad sign that there were no signs of any monsters nearby?

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The pit in her stomach which had been with her since dawn got only ever worse.

“Gods I hate this jungle. You know, I searched for a guardian team in Vencia specifically to avoid this sort of place.” Alicia said.

She spoke to the member of her Guardian team she was travelling with, Badar. He was the only scout who remained in their party after they’d decided to move on to dungeon questing. Hopefully, he too would decide to leave once they reached Tarrin Town.

Badar wasn't a typical scout. Unlike most who joined the guild in his role, Badar chose to stick with it, making it his lifelong career. A decision which was well reflected in the seriousness of his equipment. From head to toe, everything was carefully selected for his exact needs and crafted from the highest quality materials he could practically get his hands on.

She was sure he would leave their party as soon as they reached Tarrin Town. Badar simply wasn’t equipped for dungeon delving. He would probably spend a bit of time there scouting for alternative entrances and escaped monsters and whatever else he could convince the local guild to pay him for, and then he’d be off to another city.

"Vencia is a strange place to look for work if you wanted to avoid the tropics." Badar answered.

"Yes well. I was young and foolish and dreamed of a cushy job escorting young lords and ladies of the academy." Alicia said with a hint of mockery.

She was the youngest of their party. A fact not lost to any in her company and one they'd never let her forget.

"You still are young and foolish." Badar said.

If they weren’t on a mission, she might trip him by raising a foothold of dirt, or perhaps casting a stiff breeze to knock him over. Instead, Alicia stopped and fixed him with a glare.

"Bold words coming from a man stuck in Heron class for two decades."

Badar chuckled. “You say that as if Heron class is bad place to be stuck."

"It's mediocre."

She caught a fidget in his brow, but he still chuckled. "Only you would say something like that." He sighed.

They continued walking for a few moments in silence before Badar spoke again.

"You know, when I was a green Delta-Class boy living on the Frontier and dreaming of a life as a Guardian, it wasn't the Nishina-Class legends who would save us from Ghouls and Centaurs, Sprites and Goblin hordes. No. Fourier-Class was our heroes. Gamma-class was our superstars. And Heron-Class our legends. I think Heron-Class is a fine place to retire."

"For you maybe." Alicia said.

Badar shrugged. "Well. I think you're too hard on yourself. Your peers have warped your sense of worth. You’re still head and shoulders above the rest of us.”

Alicia glanced at him for a moment but remained silent.

“Not much further now. Maybe another ten minutes of walking." Badar said.

"How the hell do you do that anyways?" Alicia asked. "It’s like you know the right way right from the start. Is it some spells in your googles? I can't see more than ten feet ahead with all this shit in the way."

Badar shook his head. “No. It's just experience. Oh sure, there are plenty of spells I could use for something like that. But it's not good to be too reliant on them. You learn the lay of the land naturally after you've travelled it enough. Would be a waste of mana to constantly cast spells just to find the way."

True to his estimation, ten minutes passed, and they reached a highpoint in the jungle. Even when the pathway there was well hidden by dense vegetation or seemed only accessible through narrow ledges on steep cliff faces, Badar seemed to naturally navigate through the quickest path the whole way.

For as unambitious as he was, Alicia at least respected his competency. In her experience, most scouts contributed little to their team's success, except in their deaths, in which case, their failure to return pointed to danger in whatever direction they'd last departed.

Badar consistently provided far more than that at least. From eliminating small nuisances along their path that would slow them down, to tracking old and weathered tracks, to poisoning beasts before the rest of the team even arrived. Between all the ways Badar saved them time along the way, their team could consistently complete missions and collect rewards twice as quickly as any of their peers.

It was clear as day that Badar was taking it easy. He could probably contend with scouts one or two ranks above him. Still, for as cost effective as that made him on their usual missions, Alicia suspected most of his merits would dry up in the environment of dungeon questing. His skillset simply wasn't conducive to helping in any way through narrow constrained passages.

The two of them stepped into well practiced routine. Alicia set up of web of defenses and detection arrays for any monsters that might show up from following their tracks, while Badar got to work climbing the tallest tree. With how dense the Vencian forest was, the rolling hills, and the dense mana obfuscation, there was little other way to navigate but to pop one's head above the canopy and hope to find one of the landmarks dotting the landscape.

It was seven minutes into his climb when Alicia first noticed something unusual. A strange noise, but one she was familiar with. It was a desperate gurgling noise. She'd heard it before when people suffocated to wounds that drowned their lungs in blood. What made it so strange was that it went on and on, and the person never seemed to die.

Ordinarily, she might leave the area of her defenses for a moment to investigate, but she was given pause by the sensation of an intense power thrumming though the air. It felt very much like the mana drain of channeling a spell, except instead draining into the spell, it was simply pulled outside of her and into the surroundings. Instinctively she knew what it was, she'd heard of it before, a ripple in the ambient mana. Though with how strong the sensation was, it was better called a wave than a ripple. Considering that she had no training or techniques for sensing such things, the source had to be unbelievably powerful.

Badar noticed it too. At once the noise of him carving out a purchase in the iron-clad bark of the giant redwood ceased. He looked down, and two of them locked eyes in silence, though Badar gave no signal for what it was nor what to do. They were in unfamiliar territory here.

Since dawn there had been a foreboding feeling that lurked between them. There was something wrong with the jungle. It had been too quiet. Ordinarily it was packed to the brim with wildlife and monsters. But not today. Today it was silent.

Several minutes later and Badar had descended the tree. "There's a clearing about half a mile that way." He said, pointing in the direction Alicia heard the sound of death come from.

"Shall we check it out?" Alicia asked.

Badar pondered it for a moment and nodded.