Truth felt a creeping shortness of breath. He was in the middle of a forest, on the side of a mountain, and he felt claustrophobic. Trapped on his little island of rock in a sea of horrors. Watching the little creeping worm things wriggle along the side of the rock. Some starting to creep up the rock, before sliding down again.

I’m just a part of the rock. I’m just a tree. Nothing to see here. I’m not even a bird. I am totally not worth noticing. There is no “I” here at all. There is just rocks and trees.

He focused hard on not breathing. He could hold his breath for ten minutes, easily. Longer, even. Tens of minutes, maybe. So he didn’t have to breathe now. He controlled every tiny muscle in his body. He could even stop his own heart if he had to. So he could be perfectly still. Perfectly still.

Truth forced his attention to little details. Was he radiating heat? Maybe? Probably? He did his best to seal all the heat inside himself. He could seal in cosmic energy, so he could seal in heat. It might hurt him, but he would live.

Anything with heat vision would see a lumpy shape move from thirty seven degrees down to the comfortable twenty one of the ambient air.

Scent? He had relied on the Blessing of the Silent Forest to let his scent blend in with the world around him. He leaned into that. Rather than trying to vanish entirely, he allowed himself to smell like the forest. He smelled like pine, and mountain air, and the early days of summer. Like a timeless moment, existing from before the advent of humanity on this world, or after it’s passing.

He didn’t stop his heart. He wasn’t sure he could keep his balance perched on the rock, and the little transparent threads were seething all around. He could force it to slow. Slower and slower. Forcing his body to calm down. The thing with the glaring eyes would tire soon enough, or simply go back to hiding. Either way, he would wait for the eyes to close.

The wind stirred the pines. No birds called, no animals rustled through the undergrowth. Even the insects had gone quiet and still. Whatever it was that hid here had driven them all away. Or destroyed them.

He didn’t wonder what it was. “He” did his best to forget that “he” even existed.

The alien eyes darted around. Interrogating everything. Examining every errant breeze. The w-shaped pupils shrank, or grew, or even elongated, seemingly turning the entirety of the eye into a hungry little mouth. Other than their jerky movements, there was no indication that anything unnatural was there at all. It was just a rock. Just another innocent part of an empty forest.

The line between predator and prey was thin. Quite often, it was a question of who pulled off the ambush best. The hidden monster slowly started to close its eyes again. Stillness returned to the forest.

Truth held his breath for as long as he could, but eventually, breath and consciousness both had to make their return. He let it come slowly, softly. No sudden gasps for air. Just gentle, small inhalations and exhalations with the stirring breeze.

He did not think for a single second that thing was asleep, or that it was any less attentive now that its eyes were closed. It was just hiding. Waiting for something to set foot in its trap.

Truth started carefully looking around. His first instinct was to use the trees, but presumably there was something nasty on or in the trees too. Anyone willing to stick whatever this was here was not going to just ignore the vertical side of things.

He carefully looked behind him. Did he see the transparent worm-things? Maybe. They were damn hard to see even for him. So maybe touching them wasn’t instant death, or perhaps they had to be activated by the eye-thing. They hadn’t triggered Incisive until he saw the eyes, but could be just alarmingly good stealth.

No, that wasn’t how Incisive worked. They weren’t a danger until the eye-thing was alerted. They were still active now. The eye-thing was shamming sleep. It knew something was out here.

Truth briefly wondered if he could kill it. Maybe? But so what if he did? The death of the guardian at the gate would alert everyone inside that there was an enemy. Worse, he would have alarmed them when he couldn’t even see the gate.

Starbrite really was very good at physical security. He would have to do this the tiring, energy expensive way. He looked at a nearby tree and got ready to jump. Incisive flared. Truth mentally sighed, and tried the next tree. And the next. And the next. The only tree that didn’t flair was six meters away. Even for him, from a standing start, that was… an ambitious jump.

He shifted to testing individual branches. The foresight portion of Incisive was the single most energy intensive part of the spell. Truth usually limited himself to a second’s warning or even less for that very reason. Forcing it to activate dozens of times in the space of a few minutes was exhausting.

Beat dying, though. He kept at it.

Fifteen exhausting minutes later, Truth had his route planned out. He leapt up and back, snagging an alarmingly thin tree branch. This let him swing, just barely, onto a thicker branch, which was admittedly in the wrong direction from his target tree, but was sturdy enough to let him make the big launch to a third tree with a higher branch.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

There were six tree branches in the end. None broke on him, but it was damn close. Truth sat on the “safe” tree and panted. He tried to do so silently. He had only traveled six meters from his starting point in a straight line. He estimated he had actually traversed forty. At least from here he got some elevation.

The forest floor didn’t look much different from thirty meters up. All the little wriggly horrors had vanished from his sight. Not that they weren’t there. Just that they blended perfectly from this high up.

There is a metaphor there. Truth thought. Can’t think for what, but something.

He got his breath under control and slowly recovered his energy. It would take a very long time to passively refill, but every little bit would help. Besides, he certainly wasn’t rushing anywhere. He started picking apart the forest around him, trying to find any sign of an entrance or… anything, really.

Truth just sat in the tree for a while, looking around. There was nothing obvious in sight, no convenient trail or posted signs. His experience at Happori village strongly suggested the defenses would be deep and layered. Would it be better to come in through the lake at the top of the volcano? He had no reason to think that it would be any more accessible.

Truth frowned. If he was running a secret laboratory/research center/escape vehicle assembly site, would he build it under a tourist mountain? He had been puzzled about that for a while, because the answer was so obviously “No, not without a very, very good, very non-obvious, reason.”

You could say what you liked about Starbrite, but he wasn’t dumb. He kept very low key, worked through mind controlled agents, and had the material benefits of an entire world funneled up to him. So why stick the hidden base here?

And why did he choose to kidnap the Shattervoid girl, if he could have gotten a ride off world, cheap? That was another inexplicable thing that had been nagging at him. Five years. Truth had spent five years in the well. That was five years where the Shattervoid were still coming to this planet. Less and less often, but if it was urgent for him to escape, surely stealing one of their children was the absolute dumbest way to do it. So… why?

He kept having the feeling that he had seen lots of little pieces, but they actually formed a single picture. No idea what that picture looked like, just yet. But still, lots of little pieces. The shitty planet capping the growth potential of humanity. God’s indifference- reasons disputed. The Shattervoid and their girl. The mental block placed on humanity- source likewise unknown, but quite possibly the planet itself, again. The hyper-real nature of the System Astrologica.

And, why this was just occurring to him now he couldn’t say, but… what level was Starbrite when he came to this planet? Must have been pretty high. Level eight? Nine? He couldn’t possibly have been lower than Level Seven or he would have been exterminated before he had a chance to grow. He might keep very quiet, but there were some extremely motivated people looking for him.

And now he had built his little nest in a volcano that was a tourist attraction in two countries.

There was something there and he just wasn’t seeing it. No one else was seeing it either, which wasn’t reassuring. If they had seen it, they would presumably be doing something more drastic than fucking around playing spy games. The phrase “Strategic scale curses” came to mind, as did high tier summons.

But no. No, they just stuck a wannabe maintenance tech in a tree and called it a day. He glared at the mountain. There continued to be no big metal hatches sticking out of blindingly white concrete pads.

The wind stirred the needles, making the trees shiver and hiss. Nice afternoon, really. The gentle swaying of the branches was soothing. He needed soothing.

Truth felt defeated and angry. Defeated, because how was he supposed to search? And angry, because this was obviously, manifestly, dumb. Spell resistance notwithstanding, this was dumb. At the very least they should be able to tell him how to get into the base. But no. Even with all the “this cost a life” secrets on Merkovah’s information crystal the exact location of the entrances were not known.

The wind picked up a bit. It was gusting solidly now. Still nice, but now it was downright windy. His tree was swaying a bit. If anything, it made the forest even prettier to watch. Even if it looked like some of the trees just vanished, you knew it was a trick of the light. Your eyes deceiving-

Truth slowly blinked. He rotated his head and stared hard at a very particular pine tree. A strong gust blew again, and once again, the play of light and shadow-

No it fucking didn’t, that tree just vanished and something is trying to make me think it didin’t!

He glared at it, trying to force himself to see through the illusion. It occurred to him that, other than Obliteration, he didn’t have a good illusion cracking ability. And if he used Obliteration, they would definitely know he was here.

He did not want to play Forest Friends With Dr. Sun and his Neverending Needles. He would be quite happy if he never saw the good doctor ever again.

The glaring continued. He was trying to determine the shape of what he was looking at, but had to rely on things suddenly vanishing and his mind loudly informing him that everything was fine. The going was slow, and worse, it was inconsistent. The “invisible” part was in a consistent location, but appeared to be very irregularly shaped. He could spot some low ridges and a lumpy sort of central mass. He couldn’t connect it into any sort of coherent shape.

A gust of wind blew particularly hard, and a rotten tree limb fell onto one of the little ridges. Eyes opened in mid air. A few dozen, then hundreds. The invisible mass slipped into visibility for a moment.

Just a moment. And it was still too long.

It was a blob of some dark viscous fluid, unnamable organs bobbing inside of it. The w shaped pupils were not truly pupils or even part of real eyes. They emerged from pustules, the nauseating thing extended from its main body. The long ridges were likewise pseudopods, stretched wide across the forest floor. As one such pseudopod was hauled back into the main body, Truth saw that attached like millions of exposed capillaries were all the little glass worms. All part of the enormous thing, which covered ten square meters of the side of the mountain.

The rock covered with eyes he saw before wasn’t even a guard dog. It was one of the guard dog’s pups.