It took a few more wrong turns, but Terry managed to find his way to the southern gate out of town. He’d started to get the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched about halfway there. In his old, sane, boring life, he would have dismissed that as rampant paranoia. In Chinese Period Drama Hell, he just took that intuition as a gospel truth. The problem was that he couldn’t, despite putting some real effort into it, figure out who was watching him or from where. Something he realized he should have expected. Anytime someone figures out that they’re being watched in any of those books or manga or anime he’d consumed over the years, they can never spot the culprit at first because that was just the rule. So, he just went back to walking. Whoever it was would either reveal themselves before he got to the gate, or they would tail him out of town. It was usually a bad thing, either way.
On the upside, that Adventurer’s Guild badge he’d totally failed to earn through merit was solid gold at the gate. He just flashed it at the guards, and they let him through. One of them even wished him good luck. Since he didn’t want to seem unnecessarily suspicious, he just walked down the road at what he hoped looked like a reasonable pace. He was a little disappointed that the feeling of being watched didn’t disappear, but he couldn’t muster up much surprise. He figured it was even odds that some church people had decided, correctly, that he was the guilty party and were going to try to bury him in a shallow grave somewhere. Of course, they wouldn’t want to be seen ambushing him because that would be suspicious as hell. No, he figured that they’d wait until he a good way down the road and ambush him there. Nice and clean and sans any inconvenient witnesses.
That was why he was studying the truly crappy map he was starting to think he’d overpaid for. The map was very short on details and had no scale references. He glared at the general blankness that indicated the wooded areas to either side of the road. I’m surprised it doesn’t say ‘here there be monsters,’ he mentally griped. God, I miss the map feature on my phone. About the only useful thing he got from the map was that the road did not, in fact, follow a straight line. It eventually curved off to what he was interpreting as the southeast before it intersected with another town. He studied the map, then the position of the sun in the sky, and determined that he could probably get to that town if he cut cross-country through the woods. Of course, there probably were monsters in those woods just waiting to eat him and anyone else stupid enough to go traipsing through them. The one teensy silver lining to hideous, human-consuming hellspawn in the woods was that anyone stupid enough to follow him out there would be in just as much danger as he was.
In the end, he decided that he’d rather fight with monsters than with other human beings. If nothing else, it felt less morally problematic. No matter how often Terry repeated rule number two to himself, he had a lot of doubts about his ability to take another person’s life in cold blood. He hadn’t had a lot of time to think about what was right or wrong when he’d fought those bandits. He’d just reacted, which meant that the other-knowledge had largely reacted. Limiting the amount of human-on-human violence would also let him avoid turning over control to other-Terry. He hoped it would, at any rate. By contrast, Hollywood, manga, and anime had prepared him pretty well for the idea of killing monsters and demons. It was almost a moral imperative and didn’t seem to carry the same mental baggage for him. So, it was with that in mind that once the town walls were more or less out of sight that he dashed off the road and into the woods.
He didn’t run because running in untamed woods was a great way to break an ankle or get bitten by a snake. He did have a lot of practice at moving over rough terrain, though, so he expected he was making much better time than anyone would expect. It wasn’t a home-field advantage, but it felt a heck of a lot more familiar than the dusty track that served as a road. He also had the advantage of a much, much more robust body to work with. Despite that, he missed the thick, meaty treads on his hiking boots. He didn’t think he’d find a lot of rusty nails or loose metal floating around in the woods, but who the hell really knew what might have happened in these woods over the last thousand years or ten thousand years? For all he knew, this was the site of some ancient battle and there were actually thousands of rusty swords and spears just waiting to leap out and stab him. Granted, those sick soles on his hiking boots wouldn’t have stopped a sword, but it still would have made him feel better than the things he was wearing. He didn’t even know what to call them. They were more like sandals than shoes or boots, which meant he felt every last damn twig, branch, rock, and insect he stepped on.
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He was happy that the oppressive feeling of being observed fell away almost as soon as he’d entered the woods. I guess this is probably a forest, now that I think about it. Woods don’t stretch on for dozens of miles, do they? That presence of a hidden watcher was a constant irritation, like having a splinter that he couldn’t quite see, but felt every time he moved his hand just the right way. Having the sensation depart was akin to the relief of finally managing to luck his way into pulling the splinter after it was stuck in his palm all fucking day. That glorious sense of unburdening didn’t last very long. Within an hour, he was once again accosted by that awfully, slithering feeling of something eyeballing him from the shadows. He kept moving, trying to outpace whoever or whatever it was, but to no avail. It just worse the farther he went. Did I underestimate how determined they were going to be to gack me? Sighing and accepting the inevitable, he poked the other-knowledge. Hey, he told it. Wake up. There’s probably going to be some murder-y trouble in a minute.
Terry could swear he felt the other-knowledge yawn and sort of look around. It was incredibly creepy to feel that happening inside his own head when he wasn’t the one doing it. Still, it was what it was, and he had no idea how to make that other-knowledge go away. Even if he did know how, he wasn’t sure he’d dare to get rid of it. He suspected he’d already be dead without it and the murderhobo-y tendencies of other-Terry to lean on. Coming to a stop in a little clearing, he glared around into the forest around him. He was a little surprised to find he’d drawn a sword. He didn’t remember doing that, although he supposed it probably was a good idea in this screwed-up situation. He kept turning and glaring for most of five minutes growing tenser and tenser as the seconds ticked away. When he just couldn’t stand it anymore, he shouted.
“Come on, you bastards! Let’s get this party started!”
There were a few moments of silence, and then Terry heard some rustling. He whirled to face the direction the sound came from and the sword seemed to rise up defensively in front of him of its own volition. There was some more rustling before he watched an enormous chicken head poke its way between two trees. Oh, god damn it. Another chicken-lizard?! What the hell? Do I smell like chicken feed or something? Terry studied the huge head a little more closely and tilted his head to one side. There was a suspicious mark on the huge head. Are you shitting me? Is that the same chicken-lizard? Terry felt it as the other-knowledge, which had grown increasingly observant, immediately lost interest and seemed to go back to sleep. Shaking his head, Terry sheathed his sword and looked around for a loose rock. He found one and picked it up.
“Shoo!” he yelled at the cock-a-whatever while shaking the rock at it in a vaguely threatening way. “Shoo! I said shoo!”
The chicken-lizard’s head dropped down in what could only be described as a pathetic expression of sadness. Terry lifted the rock to throw it at the absurd beast, but it just looked so pitiful that he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
“Go away!” Terry yelled at the stupid thing.
It shrank back at the loud words but didn’t actually retreat the way he expected it to. I don’t have the energy for this, thought Terry as he leaned his head back to glare at the sky.