[Mossbear: ₪₪₪₪ sigils]

The information from the Lattice hung in the forefront of my mind, as did the obviously male parts of the massive beast in front of my eyes.

'How can it be so huge?'

Seriously, how could any animal be that big? Not even elephants grew that size, at least as far as I knew. Granted, the closest I'd been to one was behind a fence in a zoo - no such luck here, though.

What I did get was a mind-freezing close-up encounter with the local fauna.

By the time I realized I shouldn't be standing there like a lump of wood, and my instincts started screaming at me to run, the mossbear had finished his business and turned to me. As the name suggested, it was a massive brown-furred bear with its back covered in moss. But what I found most unusual about the beast were the antlers on its head.

Of course, mine couldn't compare with those of the beast. What grew on my head was more akin to a pair of sprouting seedlings, while the male mossbear boasted the likes of which any stag would envy. The grooves on his antlers were deep, with a white coloring appearing here and there on the edges. Mine, by contrast, were dark green all over, with rough ridges at the roots on my head, no deep grooves, only a lighter emerald green at their tips.

There was no resemblance between the two I could find, yet I couldn't take my eyes off the male’s.

A mistake, a huge mistake.

Instead of being long gone, as my instincts were screaming at me, the beast’s might weighed down on my shoulders, rattling me to the core and rooting my feet to the ground. Not just some figure of speech, the moss shoots did actually wrap around my feet. A bold notion of answering him with a might of my own briefly crossed my mind, only for me to realize I'd have to turn into a beast to be able to use it. At that point, not in the least bit willing to go wild again, my instincts took a complete turn and forced me to drop to my knees with my tail tucked between my legs and my own piss dripping on it.

As if that wasn't enough, a submissive whimper escaped my lips.

Before this beast, I was nothing but prey, and to tell myself otherwise would be foolish. No matter how cumbersome the massive bear beast looked, there was no doubt, with my instincts, that I wouldn't run away from it even if I managed to free my legs from the mossy grip. No, it was either to bend down and hope that the male mossbear would find me uninteresting or become his breakfast.

And so, I waited, sweating from head to toe under the mossbear's might, once more having my fate held in the paws of another.

'Just kill me already . . . !' I screamed in my head, cursing my shitty luck, as the beast took its sweet time. It stared at me for a good minute before lowering its head, its warm, moss-smelling breath wafting over me, and sniffing me.

»Odd human female, familiar but twisted,« the male growled, disgust in his voice. »Reeking of blood, yet small, weak, and pathetic.«

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With that insult to my pride, the male turned and simply walked off into the forest. Watching him leave, however, made me question my eyes. Instead of the male having to forge his path through the trees, they seemed to have moved out of his way. Not to mention that the moment I took my eyes off him, I had trouble finding the massive mossbear again.

The way the male managed to blend into the forest was almost terrifying.

The same was true with the beast's further lack of interest in me. Well, rather than terrifying, I found it no less hurtful than its growls - but just as relieving. While a part of me wished the mossbear would put me out of my misery, I almost let out a loud sigh of relief when the male disappeared from my sight.

'Why do I cling so hard to life?' With tears in my eyes, I questioned myself while still slumped down despite no longer being held by moss shoots. 'Why can't I just let go?'

Of course, there was no one there to give me an answer. Even Sage, my tail I named after the ferret I got from my mom before she died, stayed as silent as ever. Her soft, if a bit poisonous, embrace, seconded by the [Indomitable Will], however, eventually calmed me down enough to get up off the moss and continue trying to survive yet another day.

─◇─◇─◇─

'The old man had guts.'

Seriously, I had to hand it to him. When he talked about the forest being dangerous, I assumed he meant something like wolves, or . . . or regular bears, not a fricking beast bigger than an elephant, with the might that, if I wasn't starving for water, would make me piss myself and the number of sigils I couldn't even see.

I had long since understood that the strange runes I saw instead of numbers, and in the case of the damn bug, even instead of its name, were something that, according to the Lattice, was beyond my power to know. In my early days, and I don't mean the time when I wasn't able to read anything just because I hadn’t reached the second circle of the [Eleaden Standard Language], I saw the details of all the slaves in the cellar with me in this way.

[Slave: ₪ sigils]

[Workhand: ₪ sigils]

Only a few, mostly the younger ones, had so few sigils I could see the numbers.

[Maid: 8 sigils]

[Cook: 24 sigils]

But as I grew as a Slave myself, much to my annoyance, of course, the meaningless runes turned into numbers. Albeit, knowing all that I still couldn't tell how strong the mossbear actually was. Given the number of my sigils and the four runes in the beast detail, there was no doubt that the male was strong - like really strong. Going by my instincts, I'd say the number of the beast's sigils was in the hundreds.

Annoyingly, that was all I could tell.

With nothing but the other slaves, the shitty bug with six runes, and my instincts to compare and go by, all I could come up with was a rough estimate. And well? I would say the beast was at least as strong as four hundred sigils, easily more.

Did the old man know?

Well, whether he knew or was in the same boat as me, the merchant simply had guts - or a screw loose.

Not that a girl running naked through the woods, with the threat of going feral at any moment looming over her head, was the best material to judge someone's sanity by. For all I knew, the mossbear could have been a common beast that every child in this world knew how to behave around. As the old man said, if undisturbed, you were in no danger. Or rather, I would say, if you knew your place.

Anyway, the old man wasn't making things up, and that earned him some points with me. On the other hand, the fact that someone with almost twenty sigils less on his array than me dared to travel regularly through this forest raised some red flags.

* 3rd glyph engraved on Thrifty Drinker (⦿)

Ah, speaking of the red flags, my skull tingled with a more pressing matter than the massive dwellers of this forest. For all the fright the encounter with the mossbear caused me, its piss was the only liquid I had come across in the forest so far. And though thirsty, I wasn't that desperate.

Well, at least, not yet.