Despite their words, I knew Lulu and Angel were tempted to stay in Eden. It made sense. They'd been stuck in the Jungle a long time. They were both starved for sane human company. Me, though, I was pretty sure I’d never been sane to begin with. This place didn’t feel like a refuge to me. It felt like a trap waiting to close.

A weight lifted from my shoulders once we passed through the heavily guarded gates of Eden, out into the dripping, croaking jungle. Knee-high mist hung over the ground, thick as cream. Now we had the map, Elijah didn't bother to blindfold Angel. There wasn't much point now that we knew the general location of the encampment. His only job was to make sure we actually left.

"Do you really think we made the right choice?" Angel voiced, once I assured her we were out of human earshot.

"A hundred percent," I said. "The Maroons have the right idea, but until they get out of their heads and start taking risks, they’re stuck where they are. We need to move forward."

"What are they supposed to do, though? You saw the size of Fortuna. It's a huge city, not just some little camp fort. Somehow, we have to get through two city walls without calling the entire Centurions Legion down on us, THEN fight Rachini. And after that, we still aren't done. We have to get to the Gate of Ascension, which is in the end-game zone on the other side of the island."

I yawned. "Sounds like a problem for future Noodles."

Angel made a strangled sound of irritation. "You're impossible."

“Me? I’m the opposite of impossible. I think we’ll kill it.” I bounded up over a series of boulders, using the tentacles for balance. “What do we get out of worrying?”

Angel started to sign one-handed, but then grimaced and paused, fingers twitching uncertainly.

“A false sense of control, is what,” I finished. “We can’t control the future, kid, so you might as well relax. Focus on the next breath, the next step.”

Angel thought about it, then drew a deep breath. “You’re right.”

“Always. Speaking of that… what do you think about setting up a hidden base? We find a nice site, build what we need to craft weapons and shit. Then we start thinking about the next Daeva. What do you know about Karkinos?”

"Well..." Angel trailed off for a minute. "He's a crab. But he's also the Daeva of Fire-in-Earth or something like that. Not sure how that works, but my guess is that he’s a defensive-type enemy."

"Spicy crab. Sounds delicious." I hupped as I scrambled a fallen log, bounding down into a gully. The terrain was getting rougher, and we were headed up-hill. "Say, does this island have cows?"

"Uhh... not domesticated ones. Bison, maybe, or buffalo. Why?"

"Cream to make butter. Because I need butter for the giant crab."

***

With Angel directing, I ran a good fifty kilometers before I needed to slow down. None of us talked that whole time, busy thinking about our own shit. Still, I noticed Angel was getting better at riding. Not that she’d been bad before, but I didn’t move like a horse. She'd stopped trying to sit on my back like it was a Western saddle, and was now starting to trust Lulu more: leaning forward and gripping with her knees like someone riding a motorcycle. It made running and climbing a lot easier.

"So, after reading through the documentation… Karkinos' dungeon is known as the Demise. It’s to the north-east of here, on the southern side of the volcano in a region known as the Fossil Springs," Angel signed, walking along beside me so that I could see her as I recharged my stamina at a slow walk. "The Warfront - the line between the Pigs and the Centurions - kind of looks a bit like the wiggly line down the middle of a yin-yang symbol. It's right on the boundary, where the Pigs-held territory forms a salient into the territory of the Centurions."

"Right. 'Fossil Springs' implies tar. Maybe oil. And speaking of that, what did you make of the news from Eisenblatter?"

“I think it means the Pigs upper ranks are hoarding their oil for some reason,” Angel replied. “Either they’re creating artificial scarcity to ramp up tension in their own ranks - which will cause more drama for the cameras - or they’re planning something big that needs a lot of oil.”

“Maybe both,” I said. “What could they do with it, given the limits on the level of tech in the Jungle?”

“All sorts of things. They can make pitch, for siege engine use, or use it to craft ammunition and guns if they have enough iron. It’s also used to make A-tier armors. We might be able to learn more about what’s going on when we assault the Demise. The Hell Pigs built a fortified village around it, Oil Town Seven.”

“Oil Town Seven. Sounds scenic.”

"Right?" Angel laughed. "Oil Town Seven camps the main entry to Karkinos' lair. But that doesn't necessarily mean that entrance is the ONLY entry into the dungeon. Just the only entry that a human without the right Legions can use to access the caverns. According to the notes from Merc, the daeva is deep underground."

I rumbled aloud in agreement, earning a curious coo from Lulu. "Yeah. The City of the Apes had a funnel to the boss arena, but I circumvented that funnel entirely. A human couldn't have gotten in and out the way I did. Not without some Mission Impossible-style equipment."

"Right. And because there are no flying mounts and a very limited selection of good climbing Legions in the Jungle, it's likely that there's a way in that doesn't involve going through the middle of the camp and breaking into that fortress. All we have to do is distract the town and pull the Pigs away from all the entries. Somehow. Which is, umm... going to take a lot of work, because Merc's notes estimate there's around a hundred Hell Pigs and an unknown number of slave laborers."

That was a lot of angry bacon. My tail swished as I paced alongside Angel, turning the problem over in my head for a few minutes. "Could stage a slave revolt, maybe?”

“Maybe. But how?”

“Beats me.” No brilliant ideas came to mind, so I rumbled and dropped my head to sniff at the ground. “Anyway, let's think about that once we’ve built a home base and gotten the lay of the land. Any ideas about where you want to set up camp?"

"It needs to be somewhere out of the way, but not too far out of the way. Hidden, but accessible. And preferably near resources. Water is the most important." Angel's expression grew distant as she scoured the map. "I'm thinking the Primordial Forest somewhere."

I brought up my copy of the map to see what she was talking about. The Primordial Forest was the area adjacent to the Fossil Springs, where the south-eastern slope of the volcano created a marshy basin against the coast. The biome crawled with huge, dangerous dinosaurs, poisonous plants. According to the map, there was was next to no dry land: that, combined with near-constant rain and trees too large to cut with primitive tools meant that building roads through it was next to impossible. The Centurions had six outposts scattered through the forest and ran ranger patrols, but it was mostly unsettled. Supply roads routed around the perimeter of the forest to avoid the rough, swampy terrain.

"You think we'll find a decent hiding place there?" I was already thinking ahead to the kind of security we'd need if the Centurions found us. "We need heavy concealment if we're going to make it, that close to Oil Town and Fortuna."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Angel nodded. "You're able to climb the trees, right? We can build up in the crown... high enough, and we'll be basically invisible from above or below. I'll make traps, too."

It was one of those things we weren't going to know until we got there and made an assessment. When my stamina was back to full, Lulu assumed her vest form around my torso. I started off at a loping run once Angel was saddled back up, following a placemarker icon on my mini-map. Like a GPS, it crafted a trail through the wilderness, allowing me to follow the trail of least resistance as we made our way around the volcano to the east at a steady clip.

Getting to our promised land was a solid day and night of running. Angel and Lulu spent the night in a small lean-to, the three of us catching what sleep we could in shifts while listening to the distant sounds of tribal warfare to our twelve o'clock - some clash between guilds on the warfront. The terrain shifted wildly through the journey, from rocky temperate jungle, to blasted volcanic meadows populated with brontosaurs, to towers of black pumice rising out of the earth like the fingers of Hell. Petroleum-scented winds blowing from the Fossil Springs to our north drenched us; we spent a couple of hours in a fox hole hiding from Centurions patrols. On the afternoon of the second day, we passed the threshold of the Primordial Forest, skittering down sloping hills into a boggy, croaking marshland populated by huge twisted trees. They grew right out of the bioluminescent water like giant bonsai, corkscrewing and curling in on themselves. The largest had fat, bulbous trunks as big around as a small house, with arcing roots big enough for me to walk along.

"Well... I see how the place got its name," I remarked to Angel, briskly trotting along the length of one root, then leaping to the next. "Pretty fucking primordial."

"Yeah." Angel signed one-handed, her rifle braced against the other thigh. She was nervous, legs tense against my flanks. I was glad she couldn’t hear the distant and not-so distant roars of dinosaurs echoing through the giant trees. "I don't know about this, Noodles. Maybe I was wrong. There are allosaurus here. They hunt in packs, three or four at a time..."

"Don't sweat it. I’ll eat ‘em for lunch." This place felt surprisingly natural to me. Maybe Reapers were found in biomes like this one. "Besides, we wanted a place where people don't go, right? Judging by the fact I can't see or smell a single damn Centurion here, seems like it might have been the right call."

"Ooh!" Lulu made a small sound of determined agreement as she oozed off my body, landing in the water with a small 'plop'. She also seemed strangely at home here, swimming like a giant, faintly glowing jellyfish through the water beside and below us as I bounced from tree to tree.

"Yeah, but building a treehouse is going to be difficult. The crowns are thinner than I'd hoped for." Angel paused signing to shield her eyes and search the canopy above. “And this glowing blue stuff means everything is underlit. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to build in these.”

She had a point. Unlike the dense tropical trees in the rainforest biome, the trees here formed a flat, coral-like canopy overhead. The enormous spread of each tree touched the others around it, forming a lacy pattern of light and shadow.

“Might be right,” I thought back, dropping the tip of my muzzle to look around for Lulu. Right, left, down… but there was no cute blue blob anywhere to be seen. “Uh, where’s Lulu?”

Angel blinked a couple of times, and dropped her hand to peer at the water before signing. “No idea. Can’t you feel where she is? She wears your collar.”

Oh, right. The touchy-feely Legion bond stuff. I concentrated for a moment, until I felt Lulu’s emotions. “She’s uh… excited about something. Somewhere.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pale blue glow emerge from under the submerged roots of one of the trees. Lulu, who rapidly swam for us and burst out of the water to land with a wet ‘splat’ on the root ahead of me. She began to dance up and down, wildly waving her psuedopods. “Oooo! Ooo!”

“What is it, Lulu? Did you find the terrorists? Did Timmy fall down the well?” I swiveled my head toward her as Angel watched the antics, bemused.

“Oowoo!” Lulu hopped over to me, merging herself around my leg, and began to tug.

“Stay low and… hang on a second, will you, Angel? She wants to show me something.” Resignedly, I followed Lulu as she dove back into the bog and propelled herself through the murk, diving at the base of the tree that she’d emerged from. Drawing a deep breath, I plunged in behind her.

The Limne was easy enough to follow, swimming down a deep, wide, weed-choked passage, which bent up in a U-curve toward a pale green light above. When my head broke the surface, it was into a small - for me - cave held together with hundreds of pale roots. They formed a short tunnel that ended in what looked like a steep ledge. Lulu bounced up and down on the edge of it, pointing wildly.

“I’m coming, I’m coming… jeez.” I padded over to her, glancing around at the glowing roots. Lulu scooted to the side as I reached her position and peered over the edge into… “Woah.”

There was a whole-ass cavern underneath this tree. The roots fanned out like an upside-down basket, with only a few actually crossing the vault of empty space inside. The glow wasn't just from the roots, either. Crystals studded the walls and ceiling of the cave, like the inside of a geode. They radiated the same soft greenish-white light as the roots.

"Holy crap. Good find, Lulu." I leaped forward, landing in the ankle-deep ooze with a splash, and trotted over to an outcrop of crystal to sniff at it. The light was coming from the biofilm that grew on the surface and in the cracks of each crystal spike - some kind of bioluminescent bacteria. "The air smells pretty damn fresh. Those roots must be bringing oxygen down here. We aren't going to catch some horrible disease from this glowing shit though, are we? Seems like the sort of thing this game would do to us."

“Nuu-ooh!” Lulu bounded off the lip of the entry tunnel, hitting the mud with a loud SPLORCH.

“Home base, huh?” The muck wasn’t especially deep: I only sunk down to my ankles as I slogged through it. There was solid ground underneath - clay, it felt like. “What do you think? Bring Angel down here, and see what she says? I mean… Pigs aren’t gonna find us inside this place, that’s for sure.”

“Yuu!” Lulu pounced and blopped around cheerfully. She was exceedingly pleased with herself.

I turned and pounced back up to the entry cavern. Getting out was harder than getting in: I had to orient myself to dive down instead of trying to immediately swim up. There were smaller branch tunnels off to the sides, places where a human gladiator could easily get trapped and die. I emerged out into the dusk to find Angel sitting on top of one of the buttress roots above the sinkhole, her poncho’s mask pulled up, a gun resting over her lap. She looked down at me curiously.

“There’s a whole-ass cave down there,” I said. “Big enough for a house. If you think you can hold your breath, it’s not far.”

Angel’s brows furrowed. “Is it worth getting wet for?”

I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from blurting any one of six hundred dirty jokes that sprung fully-formed into my mind, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. “I don’t know how much structural and environmental shit factors into base building, so you tell me. What I do know is that no one will ever find us down there unless they literally see us swim into it. And even then.”

The girl stood and folded her rifle into her inventory. She slid down into the water paddled over to me, and climbed up. “Let’s go.”

Taking Angel down there was more nervewracking than I expected. Lulu could breathe underwater. I could hold my breath for at least ten minutes. But Angel? I had to fight the urge to rush, conscious of the fact the girl on my back was only human.

When we burst out of the water, she gasped for air. I took her to the ledge, waited until she had her breath back, then used my tentacles to climb down. Lulu was still frolicking in the mud, and cooed when she saw us.

“Sorry. Swam as fast as I could,” I thought to Angel. “So, what do you think?”

Angel’s eyes widened with wonder as she slipped off my back.

"I mean, it's boggy, but... if I build our house on stilts, we can make it work." She waded forward a bit, grimacing as the mud threatened to suck one of her boots off. Ankle deep for me was calf-deep for her. “Good find, Lulu.”

The Limne’s empathic smugness only grew.

“Think it’s safe?” I used a tentacle to tap one of the crystals.

“Structurally? Yeah. No problems.”

“No, I mean in terms of like… disease. Or radiation. The glowy crystals and shit.”

"Ohh. No, they're fine. I'm not getting any alerts. Wouldn’t want to roll around in the mud with a puncture wound, though."

"Welp. Home sweet home then, I guess." I turned back, twitching as a near-overwhelming urge to drop and wallow in the warm mud rolled over me. "Lulu gets the credit for finding it. No one'll even know we're here. It's perfect."

"Yuu!" Lulu jetted over to me, swarmed up my front legs to my back, then vaulted off me to dive into the mud.

Angel laughed. "As long as we don't make too much noise. Plus, I don’t think I can get down here myself. Not without an air bladder, at least."

“Can you make one of those? Because you should definitely make one of those.”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Good. Because I’m starting to like you. Would prefer you don’t drown trying to get into the house.” I turned back and sloshed back over to her. "So... what do you need to get started?”

“Wood,” Angel signed. “Lots and lots of wood and stone. I also need woody vines and thatch, which you can get from tall grasses. We passed a whole lot of that on the edge of the swamp.”

“Any specific kind of wood? Does it matter if it’s hard or soft?”

This time, Angel looked like might be the one about to crack the dirty joke. “Uhh… no. Not really, not at the level of building we have access to here. Our best bet is to track back into the rainforest a bit, and harvest mahogany. The kind of vines I need grows all over them.”

“Well, you leave that to me.” Resisting the urge to wallow in the mud like a hippo, I drew myself up and struck a proud and statuesque pose. “Magnanimous Treeslayer Noodles and Deputy Lumberjack Lulu are on the case.”