Up in their waiting room,the System imprint and Berrigious watched the party’s progress intently. Both of them sat back in their conjured chairs of mana, and sipped from pitchers of highly expensive void grape wine. Void grapes were a special species of grape that had been bred in order to survive in the space between the stars and as a result, they had a unique flavor that some found enjoyable, but others despised. Of course, there was the added benefit that it was fatal to those under E rank, but Berrigious thought that was a marvelous side effect that meant that only those who deserved to drink it could. Of course, he definitely deserved to drink such a potent brew. It was enough to even make him slightly tipsy, but his companion was barely affected. Berrigious sighed and cleansed the alcohol from his system before turning to his ally.
“Look, there's no fun in it if you don't even bother to pretend that you’re enjoying it.”
“I don’t understand. Why would people want to have their functions inhibited? I need to be in top condition to be able to complete my tasks.”
Berrigious resigned himself to the fact that the System imprint would never understand and instead he watched the battles below more intently.
“Well, they found the first trace of the monster. I wonder what they are going to think when they finally encounter the beast for themselves. I went to so much trouble to find that thing, even though it is barely peak F Rank at best. It's not my fault that the species is endangered.” It was probably in fact partially his fault that it was endangered, but such concerns did not even begin to form in the mind of Berrigious. He was right in everything that he did, so there was no room for mistakes. If worst came to worst, he could just blame someone else anyway.
Berrigious fondly remembered finding such a vicious beast on the moons of Albus IV ten thousand years ago and breeding them up into the creatures that they were today. Through recursive genetics he had ensured that they were the pinnacle of their genus and as a result, he ran a profitable side business of supplying guards for tinpot dictators and other people in need of a sentinel that never tired. It was a unique cross breed between a tree and an octopus that looked somewhat like a gigantic woody squid. Its tentacles were far more dangerous than any living octopus and it produced a potent toxin within its many glands that it secreted from its pores. Upon being grabbed by one of those tentacles, a weaker being would instantly die. This specimen was only F Rank, but Berrigious had bred the species up to the top of D Rank, the most that he was willing to go, both because of monetary constraints and because of personal danger. It would not do to have a creature that was more powerful than himself roaming his lands, would it now?
The System imprint had been quite impressed upon seeing the creature when Berrigious had shown it the monster a few days ago and it had added a few enhancements of its own to make sure that it was extremely deadly. This event would cause the cream of the crop to rise to the top of the humans, and the weak would be the fuel for their ascension. If all went well, Berrigious’ little project would be even more powerful after this. As he dreamt of his future glory, the System imprint stiffened.
“What?” Berrigious asked, curious about what could cause such a thing to feel fear. “Did your master return?”
The imprint looked at him with thinly veiled annoyance.
“No, just a little problem down below. I dealt with it. Your little conversation had distracted me, and I was forced to expend much of my reserves to alter the flow of causality, erasing the event from existence. What it was does not concern you.”
Berrigious let out a breath, but let the imprint play its little games. None of them concerned his end goal anyway.
Sam hopped down from the Bear’s back and walked over to one of the corpses. It was unlikely that he could glean anything useful from it beyond what he had already seen, but there was no telling what someone with enhanced senses could find out. It took a moment, but he smelt a sharp, acrid scent coming from one of the wounds. He bent down and looked inside it, seeing a pool of smoking green liquid. It ate away at the skin around it, and it seemed to be turning what remained of it into a strange brown substance. Sam picked up a stick and prodded it, finding that it was hard to the touch. He initially thought that it was a discolored bone, but after seeing that it had ridges in it, he realized that it was bark.
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“That’s strange,” he said, to nobody in particular. Of course, everyone else crowded around to see what he had found. Eduardo was the first to ask.
“What did you find on that body? Is it a clue to what the monster who killed them is?” The man said with an attempt to look even closer. Sam nodded.
“Something like that, only it doesn't make sense… The skin around this pool of poison is turning slowly into wood. Nothing that I’ve ever heard of can do that, although the Multiverse is a much larger place that I can say to understand, so there are probably quite a few things that can do this. The boss monster must have some sort of wood related abilities, perhaps even being a tree itself. Maybe it's some sort of Ent, only I don’t think that this one is like Treebeard.” The reference rolled off everyone back except for Reaper who chuckled.
Upon receiving flat stares from the others, he mouthed “What? and then fell silent. Sam withdrew from the corpse, suddenly sickened from being near such a perversion of nature.
"See if any of you can find out more about the poison. I’m going to look at the other bodies.” Sam walked around the clearing and saw a few more bodies that were further into decay than the one that he had studied. Next to one of them, an unidentifiable brown mass of wood lay on the ground. Sam thought that it might be a tree root, but it was too wide and there were no trees nearby. He crouched down next to it and began to see, to his horror, that it was the remains of a human. The poison had completely transformed this corpse into a pile of wood and the features were barely recognizable. Sam saw a nose poking out of the top half of the wood that he had originally thought to be a twig. There was something deeply disturbing about all of this and the setting made it so much worse. Berrigious was probably laughing at them from wherever he was, the sick bastard.
Sam went back to the others and saw one of them vomiting on the ground. He hurried over and forced his way into the group to see what was up. The woman, whose name Sam had never found out, was doubled over and retching up the remainder of her last meal on the ground. Sam opened his mouth to ask what was up, but Reaper pointed to something on the ground before he could say anything. A grotesquely long finger twitched on the ground, the end made out of wood. It was extremely thin and it looked like a spider leg, if it was made out of human flesh. Reaper waited until the woman had recovered and then began to explain.
“We dipped a twig into the poison for a few seconds and then waited to see if anything happened. After a minute, it started to turn into this. Whatever that poison is, it is definitely not natural. Well, knowing the System, it probably is, but what I mean is that it’s disgusting. It seemed to be able to turn wood into flesh and flesh into wood. We’re dealing with something evil here. It’s like something that you would find in a horror movie. Anyway, did you find anything over there?”
Sam nodded.
“The poison compounds over time. There was a corpse over there that had completely turned to wood and it was barely recognizable as a person anymore. The only thing that tipped me off was the nose. It was too short and wide to be a branch and it had strange holes in it.”
The others walked away from the corpse and followed Sam as he made his way off into the woods. As they, perhaps unwisely, continued towards the center of the forest, they encountered more of the transmuted bodies lying on the sides of the trees. Some of them had begun to fuse with the wood of the trees, creating strange sculptures that created ominous shadows on the darkness of the forest. Sam gritted his teeth and ignored them, but his companions were not as stoic. The woman seemed to be almost traumatized by the entire thing and Reaper looked uneasy. Eduardo had a grimace on his face, but he oddly seemed quite a home here. Sam was curious if the man had actually been a real exorcist before the System’s arrival. He was sure that there were demons now, but had there really been before? In any case, the man had seen some twisted things during his time in the Vatican. Sometimes, humans could be more evil than any monster.
A metallic clanging noise echoed down through the trees ahead, punctuated by a loud roar that sounded identical to the one from earlier, except a bit quieter and without the addition of aura. They were almost there.