Zoe tried her best to guide her fall so that she would land in some nice, soft and comfy leafy foliage. Unfortunately, gliding through freefall turned out to actually be pretty difficult — especially when you were trying to hold on to a flailing hostage.

It only lasted several seconds. Zoe’s hopes rose as she saw that they were headed right for a particularly dense treetop, and then she and her hostage were both skewered through the abdomen by a branch.

The initial impact took away most of their momentum, but then they continued to slide downwards slowly. The pilot was on the bottom, and Zoe quickly realized that he was still alive. Well, he was squirming and shuddering, at the very least. For her part, Zoe was definitely aware that it was extremely painful, but she was also certain that she would be able to walk it off.

They finally stopped sliding. Deciding that enough was enough, Zoe groped around for some other branches to use as foot and hand holds. After getting some leverage, she used her free hands to claw away at the base of the branch. It was messy and took a good few seconds, but then the branch came free and she collapsed back into the rest of the canopy, the pilot now on top of her.

He was still struggling slightly, so Zoe helped him out by snapping his neck.

Now that he was still, she focused on getting herself off of the branch. It was a little tricky because the long part was now behind her, but it came out easily enough, leaving a massive, torn wound. She was a little surprised that it had managed to penetrate at all. But then looking closer, she realized it was right between where the plates of her chest and abdomen intersected, leaving a slight gap.

That’s a good thing to keep in mind. Definitely something someone could exploit in a fight.

She took her first bite of the corpse at the same time as she activating {Corrupt Wound}. The abilities began working immediately. The wound didn’t heal up completely, but the bleeding quickly stopped. This time, {Devour} didn’t grant any traits or essences or anything, but she did completely recover the mana cost of {Corrupt Wound}.

{You have leveled up! You are now level 32.}

The boom of a distant explosion reached her seconds after the level up notification appeared. Whipping her head around, Zoe realized that the direction that the sound had come from was the same direction as the ship had been headed. She couldn’t quite see the mountain through the dense leaves of the treetop, but she had no doubt that what she had just heard was the ship crashing.

At least several people had probably died, which would explain the seemingly random level. Does that count as a kill on my part? I mean, I guess I did cause the ship to crash in the first place, what with the cabin being all destroyed.

Shrugging, Zoe took another bite out of the corpse. She was now overloaded on mana again, though it was just by thirty-something points. Not nearly enough to be able to pull overpowered {Mana Manipulation} bullshit.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Her wound continued healing. It seemed that the healing capabilities of {Devour} were significantly greater than those of {Lesser Vampirism}. Which makes sense — it was LESSER vampirism, after all.

The pain was starting to receded slightly. Looking off in the direction of where she thought the crash was, Zoe wondered if she should go check it out. She quickly decided that she should. There probably wasn’t even any danger — everyone would either be dead or critically wounded. And even if they weren’t, she had shown that she was capable of handling them.

Also, their organization had tried to kidnap her. It was obvious that there was some larger organization they were involved with — after all, they had a base, and it was, what, site six or seven? She couldn’t quite remember, but it was something like that — which meant that there were at least half a dozen or so bases.

As Zoe began climbing down the tree, she thought back to what Captain Hart had said about the corruption in the river. He said it had appeared some time ago, but that they had never tracked it back to the source. Zoe had to wonder if whatever this organization was were responsible for it.

There wasn’t any one particular reason that came to mind for her to suspect that, but nevertheless she had a strong hunch. If these people are deeply involved in this corruption shit, then I want to find out as much as I can from them.

And once again, they had tried to capture her.

Before Zoe made it very far down, she realized she should probably bring the corpse along to keep healing. Sighing, she climbed back up and then tossed it down. Shimmying back down the tree herself, she made it to the forest floor.

…If it could even be called that.

There wasn’t exactly a definite floor, or ground, or whatever normal term you wanted to call it. Instead, it was just a continuous carpet of lumpy green. Her talons sunk deep into it, but she didn’t think they had even hit bottom. It was probably just a critical point of density she had reached that wouldn’t easily allow her to sink any further.

Trudging forward experimentally, Zoe found that the dense carpet of amorphous foliage was clingy and easily tangled. If she weren’t so strong, she probably would have been horribly ensnared already. Fortunately, her new body and traits allowed her to simply stomp forward and rip up whatever was in her way with her talons.

Nevertheless, it was still slow going.

Several minutes later, Zoe had completely devoured the corpse and fully healed… but she could still see the tree she had initially landed in. Growling in irritation, she trudged forward with renewed vigor.

I already hate this place.

Something dropped onto her back from above.

Zoe activated {Cleansing Hellfire} on instinct.

{Cleansing Hellfire has been corrupted into CORRUPTED SOULFIRE.}

{Corrupted Soulfire has leveled up! Corrupted Soulfire is now level 1.}

Whatever it was died immediately. Zoe knew this because she could feel its soul being extinguished and its mana entering her own spirit. {Spirit Enhancement} flared up completely automatically, enveloping the foreign mana and fragmented bits of spirit completely.

For a moment Zoe thought they were going to be absorbed. But then her own spirit spat it back out.

{Poor Quality spirit detected. Purging…}

Huh. Not exactly what she expected. But as Zoe opened her eyes and looked around, she saw that there were many other, golden eyes looking back at her.

{Entangling Sloth - 40}

Zoe rolled her eyes. Weak. But hey…

At the very least, they would make good training dummies to test out some of her new abilities.

As another sloth dropped down, Zoe grinned and prepared a {Corrupted Strike}.