Myles’ POV
The reason Myles had readily agreed to doing the trip to the Bridge today was because he wanted to take his mind off his problems. Or, more accurately, problem. Singular.
And well, the young man had to admit that it was certainly working, because the last thing on his mind right then was the unsettling amount of reverence the Seena gave him. Actually, his current circumstances were working so well in getting his mind off the problem that Myles was really beginning to suspect that he just might be willing to trade his current predicament for his old, safer troubles.
“Gah!” Myles screamed as he dodged the branch that had been thrown at his head at speeds that, before the System, would have been sure to take his head off, and even now leave him with multiple broken bones, at best. “That was way too close.”
Their opponent was the Mighty Joe Young. Or rather his smaller, but somehow tougher, angrier, and don’t forget uglier cousin.
Almost as though it could hear Myles’ thoughts, the almost 11 feet tall ape shrieked in bloodcurdling rage, its exposed dagger-long fangs simply adding to the effect.
The animal charged him, but Atakarr quickly moved in on its blind spot, and she must have been using [Swift Strike] because her arms practically blurred as she stabbed her weapon into the monkey’s side repeatedly. The animal screamed again, in pain this time, and then swiped at Atakarr, who quickly blocked with her spear, though the force of the blow still sent her flying.
On the bright side, Manna’s spears were holding up magnificently.
The few seconds Atakarr’s distraction bought Myles was all the time he needed to fling his spear with all his might at one of the ape’s eyes.
It was a very near thing, even with [Snipe] at level 20, but Myles hit his mark, and the raging ape fell down dead almost instantly.
As soon as the animal went down, Myles rushed to Atakarr where she was slumped before the tree that she’d slammed into. “Atakarr,” Myles called as he crouched beside her, worry gnawing at his heart.
She groaned. “Ow!” She said with feeling, and Myles chuckled in relief. “Please tell me that thing’s dead.”
“Yeah, it is,” Myles said as he helped Atakarr pull herself up into a sitting position. “Are you okay? Does anything feel broken?”
Atakarr inhaled deeply and held it for several seconds before releasing it slowly. “No, nothing.” She said. “Where’s my spear?”
Myles spotted it some distance away and went to get it, and by the time he came back, Atakarr had already used [Harvest] on the ape and was putting choice parts of its meat into her inventory. He looked around on the ground for his spear, but he couldn’t find it, so he hung on to Atakarr’s since she seemed to have already taken his for herself.
“Isn’t your inventory getting full by now?” Myles asked curiously, this was the second animal they’d killed after all.
Atakarr shook her head. “Not even halfway.”
Myles made a sound of understanding. He supposed that made sense, Atakarr had been rather picky with meat since they left.
As Myles watched Atakarr ‘bag’ what, not two minutes ago, had been a fierce predator intent on their demise, he couldn’t help but wonder. “You’ve never seen this type of animal before either, have you?”
“No.”
Myles looked up, just managing to spot the island above through the network of still, leafless branches above them. “We’re not even halfway to the Bridge yet,” Myles said, almost thinking out loud. “What could possibly be going on up there that would be making so many of them come down here?”
“I don’t know,” Atakarr answered, rinsing off her bloody hands with water from her inventory as she rose. “Whatever’s happening though, I’m just glad it started after you showed up.”
Her comment confused Myles for a second before realisation dawned. ‘Yeah,’ he thought, ‘this would have been very bad without the System.’
So far, despite that hunting parties tended to avoid the Bridge and the area around it, Cott and Dadaan had still run into one of these creatures some days ago, and it had only been their System skills that had saved their lives.
“Come on,” Atakarr said. “We still have some ground to cover.”
Myles followed behind her, spear held at the ready.
*****
Two more beasts had fallen to their spears by the time Myles and Atakarr made it to the Bridge, which, despite that he still couldn’t see it too well yet, was even more majestic up close than it had looked from a distance.
What Myles had all this time thought was a single root was in fact dozens, probably hundreds, all interwoven as they ran down from on high to twist and weave around the branches and stems of the stone trees below.
The ground was covered with shed bark, and Atakarr knelt to pick one up. She rubbed her thumb on it, sniffed it, and then took a small bite. She seemed to like it. “So this is wood,” she said.
Myles knelt beside her, picking up a piece too. “More or less,” he said. “This is called bark though. It’s usually the stem and branches that are called wood. I think.”
Atakarr put some of the bark she could easily reach into her inventory then rose, looking into the trees above. “Well, this is it,” she said.
Myles nodded, looking up too, [8th Sense] informing him of numerous signs of life; the stone trees around him reading as the cold, barely-there signatures the skill had become able to pick up sometime around level 15, while the more conventional wooden roots entwined with them gave off a more vibrant but somehow slow feeling. Finally, around the edges of the skill’s range, were moving signatures that felt vaguely similar to people; critters.
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The presence of animals was a very big change that had occurred as they got closer to the Bridge.
They were mostly small ones that could—and did—hide in the trees, and none that Myles had been able to recognize so far. Fortunately, they didn’t seem dangerous, generally ignoring him and Atakarr, causing the two of them to ignore the animals in turn.
Myles just hoped that it would continue to be so now that he and Atakarr were going to be entering what was essentially the animal’s territory.
“So, do we just start climbing anywhere or...”
Atakarr shrugged. “I suppose here is as good as anywhere else. But we should be careful though, [Parkour] is a good skill but we’re going into these animals’ natural habitat, chances are they can out-climb us easily. It’ll be best to move slow and carefully.”
“So, just like always?”
Atakarr smiled. “Yes, just like always.”
The climb was easier than Myles had expected. Turns out between [Parkour] at level 15 and [Physique] at level 47, climbing a tree was hardly challenging for Myles.
Of course, the fact that he and Atakarr were going slowly helped a lot too. And that, coupled with the speed with which the signatures [8th Sense] was picking up zipped through the trees, helped to remind him to stay cautious and not get cocky.
Not that he would have let himself get careless even if he had no reminders. The number of times he’d almost died in this bloody forest were reminder enough.
The higher they went, the more the stone branches thinned out as the roots thickened, until at some point that was difficult to judge, there was nothing but the thick roots descending from above around them.
Myles took a moment to appreciate the Bridge in its majesty, especially considering that it was quite literally hanging across space. He tried to imagine how this would look from a distance; he would be no more than a speck, easily lost on the vast Bridge that must have been thicker around than the apartment building he used to live in back on Earth.
Earth. Huh, it had been some time since he’d thought of it. And while he certainly still missed it (especially the commodities that came with modern life), he couldn’t deny that he was beginning to succumb to the spirit of adventure that—what was it called again? Right, Ahunna—seemed to draw out of him. Or maybe that had more to do with the woman climbing beside him, he mused.
Meh. Whatever, or whoever, it was that was making him willing to go climbing up a bridge of entwined giant roots connecting one floating island to the next, the point was that somewhere along the line, Myles had begun to enjoy his time here.
And he realised that he was beginning to look forward to seeing more of this crazy, new world.
With how thick the roots were, there was enough space within that, when Myles and Atakarr inevitably worked their way in, the Bridge felt like a world all its own.
A dark, scary, vertical world that smelled heavily of plants and looked partial to hammocks, but a world all the same.
Since it had gotten too dark to see properly, Myles and Atakarr both pulled out light-rocks to light their way. These were special ones that Myles had turned into necklaces beforehand with strips of cloth from his shirt (which he had finally had to let go of, since it was starting to glow from all the washing, leaving him in just his worn jeans and failing sneakers now), so that both their hands could be free.
“So are we going all the way to the top?” Myles asked after about a minute of silent climbing. He didn’t really have anything against it, if it was Atakarr’s plan, he was mostly just asking out of idle curiosity.
Atakarr was about to respond when she sniffed, and her ears twitched. She stopped, as did Myles, who watched her perplexed as she inhaled deeply, her head turning as she looked around for the source of whatever she smelt.
Myles, who couldn’t smell anything interesting enough to warrant such interest, asked. “What is it? What do you smell?”
“I don’t know, but... I think it’s food.”
“Food?”
Atakarr nodded, before veering off after whatever she’d smelt, and Myles had little choice but to follow.
It didn’t take too long before Myles perceived it too, a citrus-y scent that was very pleasant, but not half as mouth-watering as Atakarr was making it seem.
Although, on second thought, he hadn’t gone most of his life only eating uncooked meat so he wasn’t really in a position to judge.
They soon found the source, at the outside edge of the Bridge on the opposite side from where they’d climbed. And like Myles had suspected (though he had seriously doubted he would turn out to be right), it was a fruit tree, and a rather sizable one too.
How a fruit tree had gotten there, and how it was growing out of the root of another plant, Myles did not know and did not want to break his brain trying to figure it out.
Ahunna was an insane place; that was one of its positive traits. Hopefully.
The fruits of the tree looked, interestingly enough, like bananas; long and vaguely C-shaped. He doubted they were bananas though, since they were blue, and Myles was pretty sure Earth had no blue bananas.
But then again, Earth had no giant chameleons either.
Myles and Atakarr approached the tree, not bothering to be overly cautious since [8th Sense] registered no life signatures around it. Not to mention it was hanging over empty space so if there was anything to see, they would spot it pretty easily.
The tree grew horizontally, perpendicular to the thick root its own roots were attached to, and Myles was slightly hesitant to walk onto its trunk, in case it couldn’t take their weight and sent them plummeting down to infinity and beyond.
Atakarr did not seem to share his worry though, because she casually walked onto the dark trunk and to the branches with their reddish-brown leaves, and plucked the nearest fruit she could reach, of which there were very many.
She bit into it and a long, sensual sound that for a second had Myles thinking other thoughts emanated from her throat.
“Myles, you have to try this,” Atakarr said, then took another bite. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
‘Well, that’s not exactly a high bar,’ Myles thought, but he walked forward all the same, rather eager to get his first taste of alien food. Somehow he felt like meat didn’t really count.
Atakarr handed him one of the fruits and Myles gently pressed it between his fingers; it was soft, much like a banana. But unless Atakarr had very interesting taste buds, it clearly did not need to be peeled, unlike bananas did.
He bit into the fruit, and the amount of juice that gushed into his mouth took him by surprise and he coughed as some of it went the wrong way.
“You don’t like it?” Atakarr asked.
“No, no, it’s good. It just had more juice than I was expecting is all.”
Atakarr made a sound of understanding as she plucked another from the multitude of fruits available and practically swallowed it whole, then she reached for more and began to fill up her inventory.
Myles helped, taking the opportunity to voice something that he’d noticed all this time but hadn’t really paid much attention to. “Say, Atakarr. Doesn’t this tree feel weird somehow? To [8th Sense], I mean. Almost like the tree’s... alive, maybe.”
Atakarr nodded. “I think it’s because it’s food,” she said.
“Ah. Yeah, I suppose that could be—”
The tree rumbled.
“Atakarr, I don’t think it’s because it’s food.”
Faster than either could react, two branches wrapped around their waists and flung them off.
Myles did not even have time to scream, could barely even process what had just happened; one moment he’d been standing on that trunk over there, and in the next he was hurtling through the air to his certain death.
Or not.
Fortunately, the tree had thrown them (and how weird was that sentence?) towards the Bridge, instead of away, so Myles and Atakarr were just able to stop their most perilous descents by stabbing their spears into whatever available surface they could reach and cling to them for dear life.
The tree, having gotten rid of its trespassers, settled back down to look innocuous once again.
Myles stared at Atakarr where she hung, eyes wide. “Maybe we should head back down,” he suggested.
Atakarr seemed only too eager to agree.