Ran’s attempt at a reply immediately turned to a scream as three of the hydra snakes lunged forward and latched onto his arm, but he recovered quickly. He had his soulsword out and ran it through two of the snakes in a single swift motion, then snapped them off it to the ground.

The third snake tried again, twisting its body to coil around Ran’s arm tightly. His armor absorbed the bites, none of the snakes piercing through into his body. Which was fortunate, hydra snake venom was not a nice thing to deal with. Jair could counteract its deadly properties, but its painful and hallucinogenic ones couldn’t be so easily averted. The western beastkin clans named them ‘nightmare serpents’ for good reason.

Ran slammed his arm into the nearest tree several times, until the snake’s coil loosened just enough for him to snap it to the ground.

“Don’t let them surround you.” Jair had his hands full keeping himself alive, unable to come to his friend’s aid.

He kept retreating, stabbing, slashing, retreating, but this particular hydra-snake nest was larger than most he’d encountered. Since most of their powers came through that connection, the larger the nest the more dangerous it was.

Already, those he’d beheaded were beginning to reshape themselves, the severed end closing over and bulging out to form another, slightly shorter snake.

Only the one he’d successfully sliced in four pieces lay still, none of the independent pieces able to sustain a full regrowth, but even those could become full snakes in time if the nest wasn’t fully dispersed. It would take days rather than moments, but hydra snakes were insidious and cunning.

This rapid regeneration made their blood one of the more valuable ingredients available, but their intelligence and mental connection made farming it in any controlled way all but impossible.

If he were with Aethron, he’d have been receiving a lecture on the best way to control the battle, but any level of ‘control’ would rely on spells he didn’t have available right now.

He snapped out bladed discs of ice from his wand, cutting through the snakes as fast as they came, but Ran wasn’t trained in jungle combat. They weren’t a perfect unit, and he couldn’t watch Ran’s back and his own at the same time.

Something bit down on his ankle with enough force to bend the thin metal of his armor, venom hissing as it began to eat through the material. He stomped down and the snake’s skull crunched audibly, but that would only slow it down for a little while.

Jair kicked the limp body away, no time to properly slice it up with a dozen others coming at him.

Their regeneration was fueled by their shared manabody, a single connective mass that linked every hydra snake within the nest to every other. As long as the nest maintained enough generation and intake to outweigh the damage taken to its individual members, it could continue to regrow indefinitely.

Once you wore down that shared mana pool, however, they’d become merely fast-healing, not near-instantaneously. They could recover in hours, not seconds, and once you killed a snake without sufficient mana in the collective nest to reanimate it, it would be abandoned to true death.

Fighting hydra-snakes was therefore an endurance test. They’d wear down with enough time as long as you kept killing them, but so would you.

“Nothing’s working!” Ran shouted over the hissing and crunching and rustling and snapping.

“Retreat. This nest is too big for us.” Jair hated to admit defeat, but he’d never seen a hydra snake nest this big before. He’d have hesitated to tackle it even with his full spell complement, let alone with only a bland sword and his emergency constructs.

Unfortunately, retreating was easier said than done. They’d been surrounded, outnumbered, and even slicing their way through snake after snake wasn’t fast enough to get clear. Their armor wasn’t built to withstand such extremes, the repeated attacks of the hydra snakes leaving larger and larger holes. It was only a matter of time before they bit through entirely.

Jair hissed in pain as fangs pierced his shoulder. He snatched the snake free with one hand and snapped its head into the nearest tree as he ran, but there was another already dropping down from above, ready to monopolize on the distraction, and another lunged at his ankles from below.

Ran screamed, long and tremulous, and then they were falling through time.

"Aaah!" Ran shouted as he tripped, crashing into the ground with a thud.

Jair spun, eyes scanning the surrounding forest as he tried to place them. That was one problem with the Oriad... a lot of it looked quite similar. Without any major landmarks in view, he couldn't tell where they were or what direction they needed to be going to get to... where were they heading?

Ran picked himself up, brushing away bits of moss, decayed wood, and insects. He looked around at the silent forest as well. "Well, at least it's not Astralla. I'm starting to see why you're so glad to be away from there."

Jair felt uneasy. Something wasn’t right.

His chest hurt. He looked down, finding his armor dented and the construct beneath drawing heavily on his fully-depleted manabody.

Oh.

"Run."

He grabbed Ran's arm, tugging him into a ragged sprint.

"What's—why?"

"Vylix. This was when we were running from the vylix."

A snarl from behind, accompanied by something small screeching in pain before being cut off, proved his words.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Ran sped up. "I think I'd have preferred Astralla!"

Jair worked to rebuild his mental map as they moved, though the necessity of fleeing for their lives made it difficult.

Finally, he recognized a particular ravine, orienting himself. "This way. No need to check the local spot this time, we already know he isn't here so we can head straight for the transit platform."

Ran nodded, saving his breath for running. Physically, both were exhausted, wearing out fast.

The vylix caught up with them a few minutes after they shifted course, the lack of pure desperation from their first loop allowing the massive scaled feline to gain on them.

Jair had nothing left but sheer physical strength, and not a lot of that. His manabody remained fully drained with keeping his chest wound from becoming fatal, the construct doing its work reluctantly but efficiently enough.

He instinctively tried to activate his soulspell to revert them out before they had to deal with the inevitable outcome of this particular encounter, but instead was treated to a front-row experience of being violently devoured.

Wasn't the first time, wouldn't be the last, but still not an experience he was eager to repeat.

Ran was already screaming as they returned to the forest ten minutes earlier, no need to trip over anything.

Jair didn't stop to speak, just grabbed Ran's arm and took off, adjusting their course from the outset this time. They could avoid the ravine, not losing those few seconds, and now there was a very visceral desperation to their movements.

They wouldn't slow down this time.

The vylix snarled from behind them. Neither slowed to look.

It took another half hour of frantic running before they finally cleared the area. This course adjustment also prevented the run-in with the blood-jackals entirely, which Jair wouldn't complain about. They were in no condition to fight that pack again, and he wasn't eager to test their luck just yet.

The Oriad was surprisingly dangerous when in such a weak condition. Or, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising... there was a reason normal people didn't casually wander around it, a reason Aethron was considered mad for making his home there.

Yeah... Jair had probably been treating it a bit lightly after his long familiarity.

He continued to avert any potential fights that could be diverted or avoided, and they reached the transit platform with plenty of time left in the day.

"Want to try and slip past the hydra snakes now," he asked as they charged the platform's crystal. "Or should we go rest in town first?"

Ran looked at him incredulously. "You're still bleeding everywhere. Is that even a question?"

"I've survived worse."

"That's—" Ran shook his head. "No, we're going back to town."

Aethron’s second hideout was underground. After skirting the area around the hydra-snake nest, giving it a very wide berth, they spent the rest of the trip avoiding any fight that might be a threat to them. They didn’t escape entirely unscathed, they did need to fight off one over-ambitious octide that erroneously thought it could eat them and stalked them relentlessly until Jair violently disabused it of that notion.

Seven hours later, they descended through a jagged ravine into a narrow crevice which came very near to being a tunnel from time to time.

“So, this next place we’ll need to be very stealthy,” Jair commented as they squeezed through a particularly tight crack. “Once we get underground it’ll open up, and that’s when we need to be absolutely silent. The luminous varblons may look like innocent glowing mushrooms, but if they think you’re alive they’ll immediately try to remedy that. Also, don’t touch the stalagmites, they bite.”

"I feel like I should at some point get used to how insane the places you like to visit are, but I keep being surprised."

"I know, brilliant, isn't it?"

“Not particularly.”

"You’ll appreciate it more when you see it. The trick is to crawl through very slowly so you don't catch their attention. They pay attention to wind currents and vibrations, so if you move quickly or walk upright, there's a much better chance that they are going to notice you, drop on your head, and try to eat you while suffocating you."

Ran swallowed and shrugged. “Right. Of course. Perfectly normal.”

“And beautiful. So don’t get too distracted. And I know they look soft, but you do not want to touch them. Not worth it.”

“Do I look like someone who’s going to go touching random things in a scary death cave?”

“Yeah, you do.”

Ran probably glared at him, but since they were in a very deep narrow ravine blocked from the sun Jair couldn’t be certain.

The rift opened up, not fully, just enough that they no longer had to squeeze through.

“Alright, from here we go slow.” Jair dropped to his stomach and began slowly squirming his way across the crevice. The dimness grew to full darkness as they entered the fully enclosed cave, which abruptly opened out into a broad ledge.

"Careful," Jair whispered. "There’s a step down when you reach me."

Ran acknowledged equally quietly.

They inched into the cavern. Soft glowing blobs of purple and teal lined the ceiling, some pulsing brighter and dimmer in rhythm, others flickering with lightning.

Mesmerizing.

The stalagmites were looming shadows in the dim illumination of the varblons overhead. Jair inched across the room, ignoring the lightshow overhead.

Thankfully, Ran followed his instructions with great attentiveness, and they reached the far side of the dangerous stretch safely.

Once inside the entry cavern, Jair felt around on the wall for the light construct, and pushed a bit of mana into it. The cavern came aglow, safely this time with magical light and not hungry blob monsters, revealing another cozy but austere home.

In this, instead of everything being made of wood, everything was carved from stone, but it contained the same basic amenities. The only difference was, the table and chair were a large block of stone with a smaller block beside it respectively, instead of being carved out of the wall. The room itself was much more spacious than the wooden hideout, even if the spaciousness made the lack of furnishings all the more obvious. The fire pit sat midway between the table and chair and the bed, providing both a place to cook and heating as necessary. The Oriad didn't usually get too cold at night, and the stone around them helped to insulate, but certain creatures had chilling effects on the weather.

"I'm quite hungry by now," Ran commented.

"I brought something," Jair replied. He carried his survival bag, a lesser version of what Aethron carried at all times, complete with dried food enough for a week and water flasks they had refilled at the stream. There was a well further in, but Jair wouldn't be rushing to pilfer Aethron’s supplies. They could refill from it before they left in the morning.

"Wait, we're staying here?"

Jair continued setting things out and unpacking for the evening. "Do you have a better option? From here on, we aren't going to have convenient transit points to go back home between."

Ran grudgingly acquiesced, and in a fit of generosity, Jair let him have the bed. Not that it was much different from the stone floor, but it might make a difference.

"I guess I need to get used to being uncomfortable," Ran commented.

"Yes, that is a good thing to be used to."

"Is this how it's going to be from now on?"

"Probably."

"I'm sure it’ll get easier, right?"

"Yeah. In some ways. In others, it's always going to be uncomfortable."

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