I was relieved to find everyone present when we finally made it back to the clearing where we’d left the wounded. Dale and Sheryl were conferring over a sack full of apples, Hana was awake and checking the wounded with Jason trailing after her like a lost puppy, and Bob was sitting under a tree with a smug-looking dryad in his lap.
Earl looked up from his conversation with another dryad as we approached, and gave me a nod. “Good work, buddy. Ready to go?”
“Just about. How’d Bob get out?”
“Oh, little Axil here made a move on me not long after you left. I set her straight, and then had her introduce me to the neighbors. They’re going to behave themselves now. Isn’t that right, Axil?”
He put a proprietary hand on the dryad’s shoulder, and she leaned into the touch with a happy smile. “Yes, sir. We’ll be good.”
Jenny stared at the buxom brunette. “Wow. How did you get her acting like that with just, um, what you told us you can do?”
“Shoot, that ain’t hard,” Earl said. “You just gotta know what a woman wants, and let her know what she needs to do to get it.”
“Dryads don’t seem to be very complicated,” I agreed. “How are the kids doing?”
He shook his head. “Them folks have more drama than my granny’s soaps. Near as I can figure, Sheryl’s got a crush on Dale that he’s too blind to notice, Hana’s got a thing for Sheryl that she’s pretending she don’t know about because she thinks she’s straight, and Jason’s carrying a torch for Hana. Plus Dale was only in charge because he’s the dungeon master in their gaming group, and now most of the guys are having second thoughts about that. Half of them are more worried about keeping their parents in the dark than they are about getting back to town alive, and the girls are all up in arms about the dryad seduction thing.”
I sighed. “Typical. Well, you work with what you have. Let’s see if we can get this circus back to the road before it gets completely dark.”
It was already twilight, with an overcast sky promising rain sometime soon. I could just imagine what a disaster the trip back would turn into if we waited much longer. So I walked into the middle of the clearing, and called for attention.
“Alright, everyone, listen up. We need to get back to the road ASAP, so let’s get organized and get going. Hana, how are the wounded doing?”
“Sheryl’s fine now,” the tiny Asian girl replied. “You guys did good work on her leg, so thanks for that. I think Anthony’s good for a short walk, but he shouldn’t try fighting anything. Greg and Jimmy are stable now, but they aren’t going anywhere tonight.”
“My parents are going to freak if I don’t come home tonight,” Greg complained.
“Couldn’t we make stretchers or something?” Jimmy asked. The big guy was still to hurt to move much, but at least he was awake now.
“What happens when we get attacked again, and have to drop you to fight?” Jason pointed out. “Sounds like a good way to get someone killed.”
Dale sighed, and stood up. “Yeah, that’s not going to work. Tom, Earl, are you guys sure it’s safe to leave them with the dryads?”
“We were just testing you, dummy,” Beri protested. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. We’ll take good care of them, I promise.”
“I think they’re being honest about that,” I agreed. “They were all made by a System goddess who wants to set herself up as the patron of monster hunters. So they’re more or less on our side, they just have some odd ideas about how to show it because they’re not human.”
“Lady Shaylis is on the side of humans,” Beri agreed.
“Then there’s really only one way to do this,” Dale said. “As banged up as we are there’s no way to hide everything, and besides the town needs to know about this place. Those magic apples could save a lot of lives, and if the dryads are on our side we need to be working with them. So Greg, Jimmy, we’re going to have to leave you guys here for tonight. We’ll tell your folks you’re alright, and get with the sheriff about coming back for you.”
“Well, if I gotta be laid up at least the nurses are cute,” Jimmy commented.
“I am not looking forward to telling mom about this,” Hana grumbled.
“I can already hear the lecture on being responsible,” Sheryl agreed. “But I don’t see how we can get out of it. Dale’s right, we have to tell people about the grove, and that means telling them how we found it.”
“Be sure and mention Lady Shaylis too,” Beri put in. “Goddess of agriculture, hunting and life that isn’t monsters. The more people know about her the more she can do to help.”
“We’ll spread the word,” I assured her. “Dale, it looks like you guys collected a fair number of those apples.”
He nodded. “We’ve got two of these sacks, with maybe a couple dozen in each. I was thinking we’d split them, since you guys bailed us out here.”
“I think I can fit one of those in my pack,” Earl said. “I collected some berries, too.”
I’d discretely collected a pocket full of those myself, because an enterprising guy can think of all sorts of uses for magical mood-altering berries. But their properties all seemed focused on bedroom activities, so I wasn’t going to mention them.
“Sounds like a plan. Now, let’s talk marching order.”
This was a much bigger group than the one we’d started out with, and of course the Dragonslayers had their own ideas about how to do things. But no one wanted to delay our departure with an extended debate, so we worked out a rough plan and got moving.
Mitsi was out ahead of the main group as a scout, just like before. Our front line was Tyler, a big black guy in an odd combination of chain mail and sports padding, and Jenny, both equipped with boar spears. Dale and Sheryl came next, then Jason, Hana and I, then Anthony and Bob, with Earl and Shasa bringing up the rear. That gave us an animal-person’s enhanced senses at each end of the line, which would hopefully minimize the risk of an ambush.
As the light faded my worries about that slowly grew. Some parts of the jungle were relatively open, with visibility for ten or fifteen yards in all directions. But there were a lot of natural choke points, where we had to go single file between tangles of underbrush and patches of impassible terrain.
“I should have spent more on mana recovery,” Hana muttered as we walked. “I’m going to be useless when we get attacked.”
“I went heavy on mana regen, so I’ve got enough back for a couple of spells,” I told her, careful to keep my voice down. “You any good with that pistol?”
She huffed. “For all the good it does me. Sheryl’s been teaching me to shoot for a few months now, and she says I’m decent. But this little .22 is useless. The big monsters just shrug it off, and the small ones are so fast I can’t hit them.”
“I’ve got your back, Hana,” Anthony reassured her. “This here 12-gauge gets the job done.”
“Duck behind me if you need to,” I added. “I’ve got armor. Have you guys been buying up your physical stats and aura?”
Hana nodded. “Yeah, my aura’s getting pretty strong. I just hate how helpless I feel every time something attacks us. I tried borrowing a .45 from one of the boys, but it was just too big for my hands.”
That was certainly a problem. Automatic pistols normally put the magazine inside the grip, which means if you’re firing large-caliber rounds you need big hands to hold your weapon properly. Rifles didn’t have that specific problem, but let’s face it. No one designs large-caliber weapons to be used by a girl who’s maybe 4’10” and a hundred pounds soaking wet. Even if she’d bought her strength up, the ergonomics would be an ongoing challenge.
“Maybe consult with Pete, at the gun store?” I mused. “I know there are a lot of smaller weapons designed for concealed carry, and they’re not all 9mm. Or you could just use a few points to make yourself bigger.”
“This seems like a bad time to have to replace my whole wardrobe,” she retorted. “I’ve made enough changes as it is. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I should be volunteering at the hospital, where it’s safe.”
Like anywhere is actually safe anymore. But I let the conversation drop, and went back to watching my flank.
Well, mostly. I was also observing the Dragonslayers. This was my first chance to get a close look at what successful adventuring types outside my own team were doing with their points, and I was curious. It was obvious they were getting mostly physical points with a light sprinkle of the other types, just like we were. As a result the boys were all noticeably taller and buffer than the first time I’d seen them, and didn’t seem nearly as exhausted as you’d expect after the day they’d been through. Even Anthony wasn’t slowing us down, even though I knew he wasn’t completely healed.
But I couldn’t help noticing that Hana and Sheryl were both a lot more attractive than I remembered. Back at the gun store Sheryl had been a leggy tomboy with a moderately cute face. Now she could be a cover model for a fitness magazine. I hadn’t paid as much attention to Hana, but the way her clothes strained to contain her bust and hips made it obvious that her build had changed since she’d bought them.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
It probably wasn’t a big investment. Just the side effects of massively boosting their general health and fitness, plus a point or two of cosmetic changes. But it was kind of amusing to realize that every single woman I’d met who had the points had put some into appearance. I could make a snide remark about human nature there, but on reflection I realized it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. Like it or not an attractive woman has more social influence than a plain one, and men will jump to protect her that much faster.
Besides, I suspected most of the men had made some discrete downstairs improvements as well. It just wasn’t as obvious with us, because no one was going to drop their pants in public. Still, at this rate it wouldn’t be long before you could pick the monster hunters out of a crowd at a glance. Just look for the hulking he-men and Amazonian supermodels, and that would be 95% of us.
Jason was an odd exception. The skinny mage looked about the same as the first time we’d met, aside from maybe being a little less skinny. Was he intentionally avoiding cosmetic effects? Why would anyone do that? Physical buffs were actually more expensive if you didn’t want them to change your physique.
Then again, I could think of a few reasons someone might go that route. Maybe he didn’t like jocks, and didn’t want to turn into one. Maybe he had some big plan for his build, and he was putting all his points in something else at this stage. Or maybe he’d made the same observation I had, and decided it was worth a little inefficiency to be able to blend into a crowd and look normal.
People are always so complicated. I was going to have my hands full trying to keep a good team together, wasn’t I?
The shadows grew as we moved deeper into the woods, pooling in the underbrush and spreading beneath the trees. We were making good time, but the light was fading fast. I pulled up my System map to check our progress, and fiddled with the settings until I got it to display as a little floating window in the upper-right area of my field of vision, like the mini-map in a computer game. There, that would hopefully keep me from getting lost in the dark.
Now if only we could avoid any really serious encounters. A few murder squirrels or giant wasps wouldn’t be much trouble, but with our magical healing so depleted a larger animal was a serious threat. Let alone a whole pack of them, like the giant boar the Dragonslayers had fought.
What if they were between us and the road, waiting to ambush us?
That was an uncomfortable thought. I wasn’t sure how smart those crows were, or how much influence they actually had over the other monsters. But if they figured out that humans used vehicles for transportation, keeping us away from the road was an obvious tactic.
I was distracted from my thoughts when the group stumbled to a halt.
“What’s up?” I whispered to Jason, unable to see the front of our line of march.
“Not sure,” he whispered back. “Everyone just stopped. Guess the catgirl saw something?”
I turned to peer into the twilight gloom. There was just enough of a breeze to set the branches overhead swaying, and make it hard to pick out any other movement. I readied my rifle, and listened intently.
Whispers among my companions.
Bob’s foot crushing a twig.
Leaves rustling.
Crickets. Distant bird calls. Creaking branches.
A cat’s yowl split the air, coming from somewhere in the trees up ahead.
“Shit! Mitsi’s in trouble,” Jenny hissed, and scrambled up the side of the nearest tree like a ninja. She vanished into the overhead gloom in the blink of an eye. Everyone else looked around uncertainly, trying to decide what to do.
“Stick together, and advance towards the fight,” I ordered.
“Right, let’s go!” Dale added, and we moved.
The angry cat noises continued, and it was only a few moments before I could see what was happening. Mitsi was up on a tree branch with a dead crow in one hand, trying to fend off a swarm of mosquitoes the size of her head. They darted around her, swaying and bobbing erratically before darting in to strike. One had already latched on to her back, steadily draining her blood, and another landed on her butt as I watched.
Jenny was trying to help her, but there were enough mosquitoes to surround her as well. My battle babe was balanced on a branch with a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, but she was having trouble getting a clean shot at anything.
“You’re up, Sheryl,” Dale called urgently.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sherly replied, sounding almost bored. She raised her rifle, and I had a split second to worry about her hitting one of the girls.
Then the mosquitoes started exploding.
It was the most incredible feat of marksmanship I’d ever seen. She barely even seemed to aim, but every round scored a perfect hit despite the enemy’s erratic movements. In the space of a few seconds she blew most of the creepy little menaces out of the air, and then paused to wait for a clear shot at the handful of survivors.
With the distractions dealt with Jenny moved up to kill the ones that were feeding on Mitsi with her knife. The rest of the monsters dispersed, flying off into the darkness.
“Woah,” Bob said. “That was awesome. Wait, why’d you let the last ones go?”
“Conserving ammo. I only had ten mags of 5.56 when we started this trip, and I’m down to four.”
“Good call,” I said, before raising my voice. “Mitsi, do you need healing?”
The catgirl gave me a surprised look, and nodded. She brushed her cheek against Jenny, and said something I couldn’t hear from the ground. Then she stuck the dead bird in her mouth, and clambered down the tree trunk.
“I’m bleeding a lot, and there’s something stuck in my back,” she complained as she hurried up to me. “Can you fix it, Tom?”
“Yeah, let me take a look,” I said. “Guys, everyone stay put and keep watch.”
There was a mosquito proboscis stuck in Mitsi’s back, which must have broken off when Jenny killed the thing. I extracted it, and noticed that both her wounds were bleeding a lot more heavily than they should be.
Hana put her hand on Mitsi’s shoulder, and frowned. “There’s an anticoagulant in the wounds. They’re not going to stop bleeding until she’s… um. Can you neutralize it? I know how, but I’m not sure I have enough mana.”
I poked a little with the anti-bleeding application of my healing, and frowned. It should have instantly stopped the bleeding, but something was interfering with it. If I tried to close the wounds Mitsi would probably just end up with a serious case of internal bleeding.
“I’ve got points I haven’t spent,” I told her. “Walk me through buying the right medical spell, and then I’ll do the healing.”
Good thing I’d kept a couple of magic points available. I burned one picking up the Cure Poison spell Hana pointed me to, and frowned at the feedback I got when trying to apply it. Just like the physical healing, it wasn’t nearly as point-and-click as the spells in an RPG. I had to know what I was trying to fix, and biochemistry was a lot harder to understand than physical injuries.
“This feels like it needs more of an investment than my other spells,” I said.
“Yeah, I had to spend some extra points on it before I could rely on it to work right,” Hana confirmed. “But I can talk you through it, as long as your diagnostic spell is good enough to see the problem. To me it looks like a purple mist in the tissue around the wounds.”
“I’m not getting anything that distinct. Just a vague sense of wrongness.”
“You might need another point in your diagnostic spell,” she said. “I’m not sure what all affects what you see, but I know I’ve got four points in mine and every time I upgrade it I find more stuff I wasn’t getting before.”
“Great. Here goes my last magic point, then. Hmm. Alright, I think I see what you’re talking about now.”
It took a few minutes to cleanse Mitsi’s wounds, and get the blood to stop flowing. At least the little catgirl didn’t seem to be in immediate danger. She clearly had a good chunk of points in general health and durability, and while she might eventually bleed to death without treatment it would take a long time. She waited stoically while we worked, and then turned to brush us both with her cheek in the same gesture she’d used with Jenny.
“I’m glad we’re working together,” she said. “Getting hurt sucks, but at least you can fix it. Ready to keep going?”
“Are you sure you’re up to it?” I asked.
“No one else is quiet enough to be in front,” she replied. “I’ll manage. Only, if I spot another crow I’m going to leave it for Sheryl.”
“Good idea. Alright, let’s go.”
We gathered the mist balls left by the dead mosquitoes, which didn’t amount to much, and then set out for the road again. By now the last hints of sunlight were fading, and the wind was picking up.
Some minutes later Dale piped up. “Does anyone else’s phone have a signal? I was thinking about calling for more backup, but I’ve got no bars.”
Hana checked her phone, and frowned. “No luck. Don’t we have different providers? You’d think one of them would be working.”
“Unless the jungle does something to mess with phones,” Sheryl guessed. “Something hinky is going on with that. When we first got to the grove I was able to make calls, but I lost signal sometime after that fiasco with the boars. Right now I’ve still got nothing.”
Anthony sighed. “Sorry about that. I know, I messed up. I’ll be more careful from now on.”
Dale huffed in exasperation. “I should hope so. Tom, Earl, any luck?”
“No bars,” Earl said.
“Same here, but my GPS is working fine,” I said. “So it’s probably not radio interference. Maybe the cell phone tower is out?”
“Sounds like it,” Jenny agreed.
“Wait, how can GPS work but not the phone?” Anthony asked.
“Cell phones need a base station to talk to,” Bob cut in, sounding like a teacher’s pet showing off in class. “GPS talks directly to the satellites, so it will work anywhere you can see the sky,”
Was it worth pointing out that cell phones don’t actually talk to the GPS satellites, they just listen for signals from them? Nah, no need to be pedantic.
“Cell phone towers are pretty rugged, and I haven’t seen a lot of animals going around randomly attacking buildings,” Earl pointed out. “Seems a mite strange.”
“Maybe the power went out?” Hana suggested.
“Hasn’t been long enough,” Dale objected. “They have emergency generators, and enough fuel to last a day or two.”
“So it has to be some kind of sabotage,” I said. “Great.”
“Guess we’re on our own,” Dale agreed. “How much further?”
We’d already crossed the ridge line, so it was only a few hundred yards to the road. The chatter died away as we continued on down the slope, and the darkness became increasingly impenetrable. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I think the others were too.
Surely the crows would do something to stop us from escaping their territory. But what?
Did they have the boars waiting to ambush us before we could reach the road, with a horde of smaller monsters in support? Would they stick with harassing attacks, hoping to wear us down? Or maybe try to lull us into a false sense of security, and then strike when we arrived and were distracted with boarding our vehicles? Or maybe they’d come up with something completely different. I’d seen a million kinds of exotic monster in games, that could kill you in countless ways without ever giving you a chance to fight back. How many of them could actually exist, under the System’s rules?
The tension slowly rose as we worked our way down the hillside, and nothing happened. There were no raids or ambushes, no sign of observers trying to spy on us, no hint at all that we weren’t alone in these woods.
What were they waiting for?
Then we finally emerged from the trees, a few dozen yards up the road from where we parked. I looked up and down the right of way, searching for an ambush. But there was no sign of monsters here, either. Just the outlines of a line of trucks and vans, barely visible in the gloom.
Wait. Something didn’t look right.
“Oh, no,” Jenny groaned.
“Shit! My van,” Dale protested, rushing ahead for a closer look.
The uncertain discipline of our marching formation dissolved instantly, as most of the group followed him to the vehicles. Only Earl and Shasa remained behind with me.
“What’s going on?” Shasa asked, looking around curiously before focusing her attention back on our rear.
“Let’s find out,” Earl said, striding forward at a measured pace.
I followed, already dreading what I was going to find.
Earl’s truck was lying on its side, looking like a gang of giants had used it as a football. The windows were shattered, the wheels were shredded, and the whole body was scorched and dented. The vehicles the Dragonslayers had left here weren’t any better off. Something had torn the side door completely off of the van, and smashed it up badly. The other truck was a burned-out husk, like something had broken the gas tank open and ignited it.
As the last hint of daylight faded, I realized we weren’t going to be driving out of here.