As the afternoon rolled on, so did the unseen storm beyond the canopy. The downpour still hadn't come, but the canopy was still left dripping from a steady rain and occasional thunder still rumbled in the skies.
After warning the nearby scouts about the monster they had encountered in the thicket, which Iris had taken to calling the crybaby, Iris and Victoria had split up to cover more ground and warn as many fighters as they could find. The fighters were much easier to locate than scouts, usually walking on the ground in full view and often making plenty of unnecessary noise, so Iris was able to rapidly locate stragglers before eventually finding the main group and making her way up the chain of somewhat evenly spaced adventurers.
She noticed along the way that many adventurers seemed to have completely disregarded the Dreamweaver's instructions and rules, and had broken ranks with their respective categories to reform their parties. Some still stayed within the expedition's formation, while others broke off entirely and pushed out into the woods on their own. She guessed this had to do with the pursuit of glory or pride in being the first to discover the web or slay a dangerous monster, but she considered that pursuit misguided and dangerous.
She stopped warning adventurers when she encountered multiple fighters in a row who had already been warned by another scout, and then returned to her general area of responsibility within the formation to continue the search. It was difficult to keep with the formation perfectly, as all parts were in constant movement and there were precious few landmarks in the dense woods, so instead she relied on general approximations of distance and using familiar faces as mobile landmarks to orient and place herself in the formation. She didn't immediately seek to reconnect with Victoria, however, instead feeling confident enough to go on her own for a while.
As she ran and blipped through the woods, she briefly landed on a root that tensed and twisted beneath her foot as she kicked off. She blipped extra far, then spun around to investigate. It was fair to call it a giant snake, as it was still the second largest snake she had ever seen, but it was much smaller than the one she had fought with Eli on her first night watch shift. It was certainly large enough to swallow her whole, but perhaps only barely, and she imagined it would struggle with broader shouldered prey like Titus. Its scales were brown with a repeating dark green triangular pattern along its length, and it quickly slithered up a trunk towards the canopy.
Iris watched it curiously for a moment with a hand on her hip, "alright, I guess I don't want trouble if you don't."
She blipped away. Another chunk of time went by, and she began to worry about how long the day's operation was meant to go on. At this rate, if they didn't turn back soon they'd end finishing at least part of the trek home in the dark, for which she was still woefully unprepared. She reasoned that stealth wouldn't be as important on the way back, and it wouldn't be that big of a deal if she lit a torch at that point, but then worried that would embarrass her in front of the other scouts.
There was a gust of wind as someone flew past her from the left, kicking off trunks and roots to fling themselves through the woods in a blur. She stopped to call out a complaint that they almost ran into her, but they were already gone before she could. While she was looking out after them, she noticed a squirrel running across the branches overhead -- a squirrel wearing tiny leather armor. She tilted her head in curiosity, then blipped after it.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The squirrel was fast, and kept Iris at a healthy distance even as she ran and blipped. She perhaps could have caught up if she'd sprinted and approached the limits of her mana, but she wasn't actually trying to catch the squirrel. She just wanted to know where everyone was heading in such a hurry -- and more importantly, to keep up if they were running from something.
After several minutes of the high-speed pace, the squirrel stopped on a branch. Every breath that Iris let out at this point was heavy, but her next one sounded more like a sigh than the others. She blipped three more times and landed on the branch beside the squirrel with critically low mana and burning lungs. The squirrel looked at her like she'd just barged into a quiet tavern, crying and shouting.
"Sorry," Iris heaved, "still working-- on the cardio--"
With a puff of smoke, the squirrel transformed into a woman. She was a pale-skinned human, had a large amount of thick brown hair rolled and pinned into a messy bun, and wore black robes beneath a full-sized, human version of the squirrel's armor. The expression she gave Iris was critical, but not unkind.
"Are you alright?" the woman asked. Her voice was low and husky, and her demeanor casual.
"Yeah," Iris said with a final gasp for air before trying to play it cool. She held out a hand for the other girl to shake, "I'm Iris."
She hesitantly shook Iris's hand, "I'm Whirl."
Iris laughed, "your name's Whirl and you--" she stopped at the tired, unhappy expression that was already crossing Whirl's face, "what's everyone running towards?" she asked instead.
Whirl turned her head to look in the direction they'd been moving, and Iris followed suit. Her eyes widened as they fell on the dense, white webs that stretched out from the darkness and clung to trunks like horizontal pillars. Connecting the pillars were dense walls of finer web that spanned between the trees at haphazard angles, often twisting and overlapping each other in a frantic, senseless manner. The webs spread from the root-covered ground to the dense canopy overhead, and continued on in either direction for as far as Iris could see between the trunks. The webs were glistening with captured droplets of water, and the gaps between the webs were filled with a deep, eerie darkness like caves pockmarking the face of a cliff.
"Whoa," Iris said errantly.
"Yep," Whirl said.
Iris watched as a few figures gathered on the ground just on the edge of the wall of webs, craning their necks like they were looking up at a fortress wall they intended to scale. Then, one of them dashed away in a blur -- through a gap in the webs and into the darkness beyond.
"Where are they going?" Iris asked in a panic, instinctively jolting like she might chase after the stranger.
"They're going for glory," Whirl said, standing up straight and stretching an arm overhead, "they say there's always a few. Not our problem."
"Should we tell someone?" Iris asked, looking out with worry as another scout entered the webs.
"I'm sure someone will snitch to Ranger Kerrick," Whirl replied, stretching her other arm, "but no, it shouldn't be either of us. It won't matter anyway, we're not going after them."
"What do you mean? We can't just let them go in there alone! They'll die!"
"Yeah, well," Whirl dusted her hands together casually, "rules exist for a reason and all that. If you wanna help them, say a prayer."
Whirl disappeared into a cloud of smoke, and out of it came an armored squirrel that skittered between Iris's feet and further up into the canopy. Iris tried to keep her eyes on the squirrel, but quickly lost track of it. She surveyed her surroundings, taking note of multiple other scouts spread throughout the woods around her, most were people she had encountered before who were easier to spot now that she knew their gimmicks. It quickly became clear that all the scouts -- at least on this side of the expedition -- were converging, and Iris decided she'd best find Victoria.