by Pirateaba
Ceria eyed him while Gerial deliberately began fiddling with a blue potion he’d pulled from his pack.
“It’s worth repaying our debt to her, but its too bad we can’t stay in Liscor, Calruz. You know those new ruins are nearby. It might be worth getting the drop on the other adventuring teams and exploring it first.”
He shook his head.
“Not without a full-fighting party. There’s a reason none of the cowards around here have dared breach the upper levels yet. If we come back, it will be after we know what monsters have been sighted there and our wounded have recovered.”
“Practical, I suppose. I’m just surprised to hear that coming from you, Calruz.”
Calruz eyed Ceria irritably.
“Why? Because I am a Minotaur?”
Her gaze didn’t waver.
“Pretty much.”
He snorted and grinned.
“I’m no fool, and the Horns of Hammerad aren’t Gold-ranked just yet. We will wait. Now, let us follow the quick Ryoka Griffin.”
The female mage groaned as she climbed into the wagon.
“Another day and night of riding. Too bad we couldn’t stay at the inn.”
Calruz eyed the currently empty inn and shook his head.
“Bah, it doesn’t look that inviting anyways. Let’s go!”
The Horns of Hammerad set out, travelling down the central slope and for several miles until they found the main road. They kept going for an hour before Gerial raised his head and sniffed from the driver’s seat.
“…Does anyone smell smoke?”
—-
Ryoka ran. She ran through the grass and kicked off the ground. With every step she felt like she was being reborn. And she was running fast, perhaps faster than she’d ever run before. Her wings were back.
She crested a hill, stormed down it in half a second, and then hit the flat ground before another crest made her dig into the soft grass. The bumpy landscape of the area was perfect for muscle training, if she’d been so inclined. But as it was, Ryoka was just enjoying the feeling of running again.
She kept to the main road. Even with all the passion in her soul, Ryoka wasn’t about to risk running into whatever monsters Ceria had mentioned. She eyed the large, immobile rocks as she ran and wondered what was living underneath them.
At this time of day, the road was actually crowded with a few travelers. Ryoka either hadn’t seen them in her delirious ride to Liscor, or it had been too late at night/early in the morning. But now she saw merchants riding in armed caravans, farmers sitting on wagons, and even the lone traveler. Some were human. Most were not.
Giant lizards. Hairy dog-people. Ryoka would have stopped and stared—or discretely observed them, but the fire of running was burning her from the inside out. She ran at a good distance from the road as she flashed by the travelers. In turn, they stared at the human running by them with undisguised curiosity and amazement.
Merchants, traders, travelers, peddlers, caravan guards, farmers, and the occasional group of adventurers all travelled the road to Liscor. Oh, and one more group.
Guardsman.
Ryoka blitzed by a party of Gnolls who sniffed and turned their heads almost too late to see her go by when she saw the group of armed Drakes. They reacted to her presence by reaching for their weapons, but when they saw it was just a lone human they relaxed. All except for one, that was.
Her legs and body were still fine, but Ryoka was thinking of slowing down to conserve energy when she saw the blur move out of the group of guardsman and chase after her. She heard the whoops and cheers of the Drakes and realized one of them was trying to race her. Ryoka looked over her shoulder.
A green blur was charging after her. It was one of the guardsman, a big Drake with a spear on his back. Another one of the bone-head types who thought they could outrun her just to show off to her friends. She increased her pace. And…so did he.
He was fast. Ryoka sensed him behind her, and then he was right next to her. She gaped as he appeared by her side, giving her a smug grin. He was huge, and he was carrying a weapon and wearing armor, but he still was nearly as fast as she was. Nearly.
Her feet dug into the soft grass. Ryoka increased the tempo of her legs, and went into overdrive. The Drake blinked as she accelerated. He tried to speed up, and for a few seconds he managed to keep pace. But Ryoka had wings on her feet and this was her first run in nearly a week. He might as well have tried to catch the wind.
How fast was she going? Ryoka saw the travelers on the road blur, and then disappear with each step. She was in a completely different world of her own now, and even the insanely fast Drake couldn’t keep up. This was her world, a world few people would ever know.
People are awesome. For a second Ryoka wished her iPhone was working so she could listen to some music or record herself running for one of the compilation videos on Youtube. But then she left those thoughts behind. She ran.
The guardsman fell behind. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep up with her. Ryoka turned her head and flashed him a smile for a good race. He desperately pumped his arms and his legs, but his weird speed was no match for her. And his posture was terrible.
She heard him call out after her, but Ryoka had hit the zone and she couldn’t be stopped. She ran on, and smiled into the breeze. The feeling was back. She was back.
She was free.
—-
Relc gave up running when the human female was over a hundred feet ahead of him. Disgusted, he ground to a stop, tearing up the grass with the force of his momentum. A nearby caravan of human traders stared in amazement at him, but that was only because they were far too late to admire the runner still sprinting in the distance.
Frustrated, Relc pulled his spear out and stabbed the ground. This was a first. He’d never—well, seldom ever been outrun. And never by a human. He stared at Ryoka’s tiny back with a hint of admiration in his eyes.
Then he turned and began trudging back to the group of guardsmen he’d left. They were several miles away. Relc grumbled about the inconvenience, conveniently forgetting he’d been the one to challenge Ryoka to a race. He took one more glance into the distance, but couldn’t see Ryoka’s figure anymore.
“Humans. Huh. I wonder if Erin knows her?”
—-
Somewhere around the same time, Erin wasn’t shopping. Nor was she in Liscor. In fact, she’d left the city several hours ago. Right now, she was lost.
Not completely lost. She knew where Liscor was – roughly. She could follow the mountain range to get to it, and therefore back to her inn. So she wasn’t lost in the grand scale of things.
But on a closer, localized level she was very lost. In fact, Erin would go as far as to say she was completely lost.
She’d left the Wandering Inn behind with her supplies and then…
It was like stepping into a maze, but instead of the walls being vertical, they were all horizontal. Erin frowned. Did that make sense?
The hills and valleys of the grasslands were nearly indistinguishable from the flat ground at a distance, and the uniform long grass made things worse. Erin had to navigate using what little landmarks she could see by.
For instance, there were helpful rocks in the distance…except they occasionally moved around and getting close to one was a bad idea. And there were patches of red and white flowers that Erin saw now and then, but she had a bad feeling about them.
“[Dangersense].”
At least, it was probably that. It could just be a random bad feeling, but that was pretty much the same thing when you got down to it. Either way, Erin had decided not to try and smell the pretty flowers.
She looked around as she walked through the grasslands. This was amazing. In more than one sense. For one thing, she’d just spotted a road a few miles to the left. A road. She had no idea Liscor even had a road!
Well, that probably wasn’t that big a surprise. But Erin had just realized how narrow her little world had been. She’d pr
actically lived only in her inn and occasionally in Liscor, without exploring any other direction. And why?
Oh yeah, because of the monsters. Well…there weren’t any she could see. Erin wasn’t too far away from the main road, and Selys had said that was the safest area. She’d made Erin promise to stay close to the area the Watch patrolled.
But now Erin had found a forest, and she was going to explore it. Because it was a forest. Literally the only trees Erin had found aside from the blue fruit trees. But these looked like proper trees…except they were missing all their leaves.
This could have something to do with the season. Apparently, it was around fall, closing in on winter. Erin hadn’t believed it, but Selys had assured her it was true. Apparently the mountains made it so that the seasons didn’t hit the area around Liscor as hard or something.
“Or maybe this is like Florida, or California. No snow, no searing heat. That’d be nice.”
Erin muttered to herself as she approached the dry-looking trees. It was a lovely forest, and not too far away from her inn. Only…forty minutes if she walked straight? Okay, that was a good distance, but only because Erin was on foot.
Hm. The brown wood of the trees was definitely brighter in color than the ones back in her home. They actually looked closer in color to how trees were drawn, not how they actually looked with all the dark bark, moss, and whatnot. Erin wanted to go closer, but then a bell went off in her head.
The [Dangersense]. It had been pulsing whenever Erin thought about going close to the flowers, but now it clearly and definitely rang out in her mind. It was like a bad feeling in her gut—except in her head. And it told Erin that she did not want to get closer to the trees.
Erin quickly stepped back. Something was wrong with the forest. But what? They were just trees. But was something living in the forest? In the trees?
Cautiously, Erin reached into the bag she was carrying with her. She’d brought a small rucksack loaded with a few essentials for a day-long exploration. It hadn’t been too expensive, and she had wanted to be prepared. It wasn’t as if she were completely reckless like Selys and Krshia clearly thought she was.
Erin rummaged with one hand as she kept an eye on the forest. It was hard to feel around in her bag without looking, especially because she wanted to keep a certain item in there from breaking. Where was it…?
She’d brought a flint and tinder, which she actually knew how to use in case she needed to make a torch. Not that she planned on exploring any caves, but it seemed like a practical choice. There were also bandages, but Erin didn’t want them. Her hand rummaged through the rucksack blindly.
She also had a long knife in a leather sheathe she’d bought from the Adventurer’s Guild. They sold a number of items for adventurers behind their counter, and once Selys realized Erin wasn’t going to be dissuaded, she’d insisted Erin take one.
And a healing potion, of course. It was expensive – nearly a gold coin even for a weak potion, but Erin would have bought one regardless of the price. She’d learned her lesson.
Something smooth. That was the hand mirror. Apparently, this was an adventurer’s tool to check for injuries like poison barbs or in case of Basilisk attacks. Erin had bought it because she really wanted one, but the thought of a grizzled warrior checking out his appearance was also pretty funny.
Erin had laughed, but then Selys had told her about how some bugs could sink into an adventurer’s skin and lay eggs that would hatch and eat them from inside out. That had been disgusting and made Erin feel like a jerk for laughing. But it still hadn’t stopped her from her exploring, especially after Selys admitted those insects didn’t live anywhere near Liscor.
Selys didn’t seem to get it. Come to that, Krshia didn’t really get it either. The Gnoll seemed to think Erin was trying to avenge Klbkch. She’d offered to come along to ‘hunt’ with Erin, but Erin had refused.
None of them really understood. They thought Erin was crazy and she probably was, but her reason made sense to Erin. This was something she had to do.
“I wish—”
Erin broke off and shook her head. What was she doing? Erin stared at the object she’d pulled out of her pack blankly. Oh, right.
She was holding a rock. In fairness, it was a nice rock. Rough around the edges, true, but a prime specimen of a rock nonetheless. Erin could hold this rock and know it was definitely made of stone. It was nicely heavy too, and it was her prime defense against anything.
Erin hefted it and squinted at the tree. Hm. She backed up until she was around fifty feet away. That seemed safe enough. Then she lifted the rock, took aim, and threw.
Erin had never played baseball as a kid. It was a boy’s game, at least where she’d grown up, and they were all jerks when it came to letting girls have a turn. But she’d played catch now and then, and there were plenty of baseball games on T.V. that she would occasionally watch. In short, Erin had a pretty good idea of how fast a baseball could be thrown.
The rock she tossed had about the same velocity as a fastball. Not a major-league fastball, the kind that could dent metal or kill people but—actually, this was a rock. It could totally kill people even at Erin’s slower velocity.
And it had perfect accuracy. Erin watched the rock she’d thrown strike one the tree dead center, hard enough to dent the bark. Another skill. [Unerring Throw]. With it Erin literally couldn’t miss.
The rock fell to the ground. Erin watched the tree. The branches were shaking from the impact, but nothing else happened. Maybe there wasn’t anything living in trees after all. Or maybe it was hiding, or only lived in certain trees, or somewhere deeper in the forest. Or maybe—
Waitaminute. Erin froze. The branches were still quivering long after the impact. Why were they doing that? But the tree seemed to flex and—
Fireworks. Each branch and twig on the upper section of the tree instantly and spontaneously exploded outwards like a shrapnel bomb going off. Acorns, pieces of bark, and small bits of the branch fired outwards, thousands of bullets.
Erin dove to the ground as the deadly wooden hail rained around her. She was lucky. The explosion was far enough away that most of what hit her had lost its momentum. She felt bits of wood showering her as she covered her head with her hand. Only when she was quite, quite sure everything had stopped did Erin look up.
The tree was completely denuded of bark and most of its smaller branches. It stood among its fellows, the pale yellow-green-white of its trunk showing. Around it in a hundred meter radius, bits of the tree lay on the grass.
Shakily, Erin got to her feet. She felt something trickling down her face and touched at her cheek. Something—an acorn—had cut a shallow gash down her left cheek. She looked at the blood on her fingertips and tried not to throw up.
—-
It was only after she’d put at least a mile between her and the exploding trees that Erin stopped to call herself twenty kinds of stupid. Then she decided never to ever go near anything tree-related again without a flamethrower. Monsters were one thing, but this—
Erin sighed and sat down on a small hill. Well, that was probably why no one explored around this area. Exploding trees. Unless you were wearing armor—and even if you were—those things were deadly. She imagined what would happen if Rags and her Goblin friends tried to gather firewood from the trees and shuddered.
Curiously, her near-death experience left Erin ravenous. She opened her rucksack and fished around cautiously inside until she pulled something squishy out. She unwrapped the wax paper and revealed a slightly squashed sandwich. Apparently, Drakes weren’t too keen on bread – they had a very meaty, fishy, and sometimes insect-y diet, but Gnolls ate the stuff.
This particular sandwich had mustard, or something sweet that tasted vaguely like it, cheese, and a lot of meat. Erin devoured it and then wished she hadn’t eaten so quickly. She clutched at her stomach and then she saw the spider.
“Oh god.”
It was a large spider. A large—no, huge sp
ider. And it had—
“Oh gods. Is that armor?”
Maybe it wasn’t armor. Maybe it was. But the silver and black pattern on the spider’s back made the thick layer of…carapace look even more sinister than it was. It looked like armor, especially in the way the plating covered the giant spider’s legs and the top of its body. Erin was pretty sure it was armor.
Click.
The spider clicked its mandibles together as it approached Erin. She froze up, but then grabbed her rucksack and scrambled away. The spider scuttled faster, and Erin backed up even faster.
She turned and ran. That was, until Erin’s [Dangersense] went off like alarm bells. She stopped in place. What was—
It was nearly too late. Erin was just about to take another step when she noticed the odd way the ground seemed flimsy in front of her feet. She took a look behind her – the armored spider was still a ways away. She kicked at the ground, and it collapsed.
A huge pit opened up in the ground in front of Erin. The fake earth—in fact, some kind of green amalgamate of dead grass and sticks fell down and Erin stared down into the face of hell. A nest full of spiders. And eggs.
They were everywhere, tiny spiders, big spiders, and eggs. So many white egg sacs that lay on the ground and walls of the massive cavern like obscene fungi. And as the trap ground fell in, they all surged into frantic motion.
Spiders began scurrying all over the huge nest, scurrying all over each other as they searched for the prey that had fallen into their nest. Meanwhile the prey standing at the edge of the nest backed away in horror.
It was only when she heard the scuttling of the other armored spider that Erin remembered it was behind her. She turned, screamed, and ran around the edge of the pit. It followed her but interestingly, the other spiders in the cavern below didn’t. They were still mindlessly swarming around the ground, protecting the eggs and searching for something to eat. But the large one was still hunting her.
She ran. It followed. Slowly, quietly. Even after Erin had run several hundred meters she could turn around and still see it approaching. And then she realized it wasn’t going to stop. It was a premonition. The spider was going to follow her until she stopped.