Mitzi and Alan called an end to the break, and the group began to move forward.
As the Fisher Expeditionary Force finally advanced beyond the borders of the Fisher Kingdom, they could sense as the aura of the Fisher King himself faded away with a sudden sensation that reminded Mitzi of a change in air pressure.
I can almost feel my ears pop, she thought. It’s like we’ve been in James’s territory forever. Somehow, the air outside has turned a little strange. Hasn’t it?
But “strange” didn’t quite cover it.
Mitzi searched her mind for the right word. Was it scary? It certainly felt less secure out here. The world outside is unsettled, she decided. Unpredictable.
The only trace of James’s presence remaining was in the floating shadows of the wyverns that moved along with the crowd now that they had stepped out of the jungle’s thick canopy cover.
Those monsters would hopefully provide some protection, but it was not the same as walking around in the Fisher Kingdom. Mitzi determined that she would need to pay more attention to her surroundings now. She looked around and took careful appraisal of the environment. They had stepped out of the jungle, but the new territory they found themselves in was far from bereft of trees.
Rather, the Expeditionary Force had simply shifted from a tropical setting to a pine forest.
The soil was slightly sandy and somewhat dry. It grew scattered but thick tufts of grass. There were crunchy bits of pine needle scattered randomly about.
But the dominant feature of the new environment was the pine trees. The pines towered over everything, extending to around two hundred feet tall, topped with dense crowns of needles that cast large chunks of their surroundings into thick shadow. The trees looked thicker and taller than Mitzi remembered any local trees having been before the System, though the sight of the thick, scaly, reddish-brown bark felt familiar.
The System probably super-sized the trees, just like the animals.
There was a distant sound floating through the air, but Mitzi’s conscious mind barely noted it. She was more focused on the titanic trees.
Mitzi wondered for a moment if the plants were intelligent, as many of the animals seemed to be now—but she quickly dismissed the thought as silly. She had seen talking wolves, a talking bat, an incessantly talking squirrel, a talking alligator, and a talking mole, but never a talking tree.
“Everyone try to stay together in the well-lighted places!” Alan yelled, breaking Mitzi’s focus on the pines. “We don’t know what sort of creatures live in this place. Use the buddy system.”
Mitzi self-consciously pulled closer to her husband. He put his arm around her shoulders, and for a few minutes, the whole group simply advanced into the pine forest in near silence. Mitzi had enough time simply quietly observing her surroundings to note that one of the Electricity Commission members appeared to be drawing a map—or something that would later be composited into a map.
The world has changed so much that we need new maps, she thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if this area specifically has shifted again by the time we return—perhaps so drastically that his notes on this place will be useless.
Mitzi said nothing, however. It was a good way for the young man to keep busy, whether it would ultimately be useful to the group or not.
As they stepped further into the pine forest, Mitzi began to hear a sound of drumming. It had been too distant and indistinct for her to really notice it before, but now it grew more defined. She and Alan exchanged a look as soon as the noise became clear.
“What do you suppose that is?” he asked quietly.
“It sounds like drumming,” she said uncertainly. “I can’t imagine it’s the ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ though.”
Alan chuckled. “No, I think not. Maybe—”
“Wait!” Mitzi squeezed his arm and stood stock-still for a moment, mouth slightly agape. “No, I think I know what it is now. I’ve just never heard so many at once before.” Even in their current circumstances, she felt a sense of wonder at this new world they were mapping.
The tapping sound was more than one drummer; that was clear by this point.
“Well?” Alan asked.
“Woodpeckers,” she said, swallowing.
Probably monstrous woodpeckers that eat human flesh. She didn’t need to vocalize that thought. She saw it on Alan’s face.
“Maybe I should take a few of the Expeditionary Force members and see what’s ahead,” he said slowly. “If we can spot where the monsters are—”
“Don’t you dare, Alan,” Mitzi said in a low voice. “You are not leaving me behind if you go anywhere, certainly not to go and take a look at some feral woodpeckers. There’s no point in scouting, anyway.”
“No point in scouting?” Alan asked, raising an eyebrow.
“We didn’t feel something like James when we entered this area,” Mitzi said. “The territory owner’s aura. If there was something terribly monstrous here, it would have a presence like James, right?”
Alan rubbed his chin. “Right, maybe we should just keep walking straight through,” he said. “They might not be aggressive, and if there’s no Ruler, we might be okay even if they are.”
“I think so,” Mitzi said optimistically.
Her husband raised his voice and called out another command to the group. “It sounds like it’s woodpeckers in the trees out there, so keep your eyes peeled for birds on the sides. We have no reason to think they’re aggressive yet, so don’t be the first to start a fight. We don’t know if we’re outnumbered, and we’re in their territory. We’re the trespassers.”
There were murmurs of understanding from those around them, and the group packed a bit closer together.
As they marched further into the pine forest, the sound of the drumbeat intensified until it felt like the drummers were right on top of them. Then Mitzi saw the first woodpecker.
It was around two feet tall—larger than any woodpecker she had ever seen in her life. Almost as large as an eagle, cloaked in black and brown plumage mottled with white spots. Its head featured black and white racing stripes. The creature was tapping a slow, gentle beat onto one of the titanic pine trees.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Mitzi saw its head turn slightly toward the group, and the woodpecker then altered the tempo of its drumbeat. The tapping stepped up, moving just a little faster, and Mitzi heard what sounded like answering taps from deeper in the forest. It made her slightly nervous. The creature wasn’t moving in their direction, but it was communicating. How many of these monsters would there be?
Did woodpeckers always come with such deadly equipment? That beak looked like it could easily be used to peck out someone’s eyes or throat, not just drill a hole in a tree.
“I think it’s warning the rest of them,” she whispered in Alan’s direction.
“That’s just fine,” Alan replied in a calming tone. “We come in peace. I don’t think the fact that we’re crossing needs to be a secret. With these things floating in the sky, we were never going to be able to hide our presence anyway.”
Despite his reassuring words, he also tightened his grip around her shoulders slightly. Whatever Alan said, he was at least a little nervous too.
As they crossed the forest, it was impossible to miss the sound of drumming slowly intensifying. The number of woodpeckers banging away at the trees around them gradually increased, too.
Was this a mistake? Mitzi wondered. If we can’t even make it through someplace that doesn’t have a Ruler to defend it, how will we ever get anywhere?
By this point, the slight edge of anxiety had infected everyone around Alan and Mitzi. The Warrior and Rogue types had begun loosening their weapons in their sheaths. The Mages were quietly chanting to themselves, keeping their Mana at the ready in case the group were to suddenly come under attack.
It wasn’t until the group stepped into a small clearing that Mitzi felt certain they were in trouble, though.
The trees at the edges of the clearing appeared almost to be growing feathers, they were so thickly covered in woodpeckers. There had to have been hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all pecking away. The sound as the group stepped into the open space was almost deafening, and after a moment’s hesitation, Mitzi gave in to her instinct and covered her ears.
As more and more of the group members covered their ears, the Fisher Expeditionary Force gradually came to a stop. Everyone looked at everyone else. No one could hear what anyone was saying, and the sense of cohesion that had held the group since Alan began issuing his orders seemed to have been broken.
Then the cacophony came to a sudden stop.
Mitzi turned from looking at the group to face the woodpeckers again. She noticed more details now. Some of them had a small, red stripe on their head, while others did not have that small marking as far as she could see.
The birds all opened their wings in unison, and Mitzi had to wonder if they had telepathic powers. Then the woodpeckers took flight in a massive, collective movement that removed all doubt. The species had some non-verbal means of communication.
She focused on a random bird and used Identify.
Red-Cockaded Woodpecker, Lv. 7 (Female)
As she got the species name and the individual’s level, the specimen she had focused on was swept away from her field of view in a massive flood of flapping wings and black, white, and brown feathers. The birds were moving as one, so close that they looked like a single organism—if that organism was large and supple enough to make a wave out of its own body.
With the relative quiet of the flight—it sounded like a number of large, industrial fans running at once, but it was practically silent compared to the birds’ pecking—it was possible to speak again, and Alan began clearing his throat beside Mitzi. She could not imagine what he would say to the mass of feathers and muscle that floated through the air before them, but anything would be better than just standing back and watching the woodpeckers continue to writhe in the air. Inaction would lead to violence here.
The other members of their party were clearly growing antsy. At any moment, Mages might start flinging magical attacks. They were all looking to Alan, but his eyes were focused on the threat in front of them.
He opened his mouth to speak, but another voice beat him to it.
“Humans.” The sound seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, as if rather than speaking from their mouths or vocal chords, the woodpeckers spoke with a single collective voice—a voice that emerged from an immaterial place. “Destroyers of the pine forests, ravagers of our natural home. What do you want here that you have not already taken?”
Eco-warrior birds, huh? Mitzi thought, slightly amused despite herself. The natural world had taken back the whole of Florida, from what she had seen. If they still had a grievance against humanity, it could only be about wrongs that were now long in the past.
“We are only passing through,” Alan called back immediately in a loud, firm voice. “We wish to cross your forest peacefully. We have no desire to take anything from here. We have not harmed a single living creature since we entered this place.”
“Hmm,” the disembodied voice growled. “The descension must deliberate. Please wait.”
They sound surprisingly cordial.
Despite the relative calm of the descension’s collective voice, the woodpeckers’ movements remained ominous—almost violent by virtue of the sheer mass of weight in each shift of their bodies, though the bird collective had not made any threatening movements.
As the descension deliberated, its members continued to fly through the air as a unified whole, flowing in a circle around the clearing the Expeditionary Force had stepped into—keeping them trapped there.
Christian Zito stepped up alongside Alan and leaned over to whisper in his ear.
“Should we keep our spells ready? What do we do when these things stop moving?”
“Don’t lower your guard,” Alan replied, “but don’t start anything either. Same instructions I gave earlier. Nothing has changed.”
Zito just nodded and stepped back among his group, where he started muttering quietly to the other Electricity Commission members.
Alan turned very deliberately away from Zito and his group and, out of their sight, scowled.
Mitzi could almost hear her husband thinking, Do they really think we can do anything against these numbers? They’d better not start something that the rest of us aren’t equipped to finish.
At last, and sooner than Mitzi had expected, the giant wheel of feathery bodies stopped in its rotation and held in place, still surrounding the clearing.
“What is the intention of those creatures?” the collective voice asked.
“Creatures?” Alan echoed.
A shadow fell over him and Mitzi at that moment, and other shadows moved over the ground occupied by the other Expeditionary Force members, before sliding off and circling around. The wyverns had reappeared—hidden for some time by the tree canopy of the jungle and then by the tree cover of the pine forest. They could make their presence felt much more easily in the wide open space of the clearing.
“Those creatures,” the woodpeckers’ voice said impatiently. Dozens of their bodies moved together to make an arrow shape, pointing at the wyverns.
“Oh, those,” Alan said, puffing out his chest. “They are here to assist our group in its defense. If we are attacked, they will fight for us.”
“We see,” said the descension. The voice sounded disappointed. “Leave our forest, then, and take your mongrel creatures with you. If you return, be prepared to present us with an offering for safe passage. Food for all of us would be in order.”
Mitzi raised an eyebrow and looked at Alan. Her husband wisely waited a moment before responding.
“Thank you for your promise of safe passage,” he said. “We will bear your words in mind and try not to trouble you again unless we can find no other route back to our place of origin.”
“Best of luck on your journey, then,” said the voice with considerably more warmth.
“Thank you,” Alan repeated, bowing his head slightly. He stepped forward, toward the wall of woodpecker bodies that blocked the exit to the clearing.
The rest of the group followed after him, and as they reached the woodpeckers, the birds parted for the Expeditionary Force, splitting into two walls of feathered bodies that hovered in the air, watching the Fisher Kingdom citizens as they walked.
Mitzi thought that she was the only one who saw Alan sweating. He found a good moment to wipe it away as unobtrusively as possible, so that no one else would see. And the two of them were at the front of the group.
She took his hand in hers, so that no one else would see that it was shaking slightly. His mind was probably thinking along the same track as hers.
Those were just a flock—or a descension, as they called themselves—of woodpeckers, and they seemed to only decide to let us go because they saw James’s monsters. What else are we going to run into on this journey? How will we survive?