[Flametouched cackles as you light its beacon.]
Oops.
The forest may, perhaps, be on fire.
This is not at all my fault. Jess looks at me, slowly extinguishing the fireball in her hand. Okay, maybe I’d been feeding them with extra mana, effectively supercharging them. Maybe I’d been weakening the environment’s resistance to fire.
Maybe. Probably. Allegedly.
The forest smells of smoke and charred leaves, and we start to retreat. The plants here are hostile, and even the fallen leaves are sharp and hard, digging into the soles of my shoes like little pebbles. But they still crunch down into dried dust, fertilizing the angry undergrowth.
Vines reach for my feet, only to wilt away at the touch of my [Suppression]. Kuro eats bits of any of the stronger ones. Our guide, a tall minotaur named Bile, looks at the flames and slowly moves further away. “Now, usually,” he says, pushing a set of glasses further up his snout, “we don’t need to worry about fires since the forest works to extinguish them.”
He then glances at Jess. “Some pyromancers have ways to reduce that impact. In which case, the fires often attract more force to put them out, quickly. This will be resolved soon, but we should leave before we get caught in it,” he said.
With quick nods, everyone begins to shuffle away from the forest, even as bits of it light ablaze. I also withdraw my suppression, letting the plants resist the fire much better. Instantly, sap moves to smother the flames, and the variety of plants deposits different mechanisms to deal with the fire.
Some open up and froth with milky foam, others snuff out the fire by moving water through their roots and spraying it. It looks a little like multiple kinds of sprinkler systems going off at once. Already, though, we hear a distant howling. The smell of smoke must have attracted forest predators.
Even as we’re moving away, animals appear from the brushwork. There’s many of them, strong and weak, trickling into my sphere of observation. I brush my senses against them, and the moment they spot our group, they turn and howl.
The animals on this floor are strange, too. Most are, to some degree, nature aligned. The brutal, vicious kind of nature, emphasizing the circle of life. They did not hesitate to murder each other at all, and yet, they were able to cooperate. Strange, lupine figures, wreathed with intertwining vine and flesh. Monkeys that wore faces carved from living wood, and bears with their skin plated in barken armor.
There were more, of course. The jungle’s most insidious defenders were almost invisible. Venomous ants and centipedes, their colonies scurrying about beneath the thin coverings of leaves, always just a step away from being bitten and swarmed.
It’s an omnipresent network of life. Interconnected, and, to some degree, cooperative. A bird with a wooden beak shoots at me with a barrage of rocks. I [Suppress] its wings, making it tumble, slamming into the floor. I breathe, smelling the mix of smoke and forest air, full of decay and composting.
“Move,” Bile hissed, drawing his green cloak tighter, camouflaging into the forest. “We need to get out of here before a dryad finds us.”
[You have caught the Eye of the Earthmother.]
There is a rumbling in the ground as it shakes. Roots writhe like snakes, suddenly animated with life. I can feel the way that life floods the environment. A violent roil of vitality that smothers me, like the feeling of hot air and sticky sweat against my skin. It’s disgusting.
We run. We run as quickly as we can, moving far away. There’s howling and gnashing in the distant forest for a few more minutes, and by the time the smell of smoke fades away, the forest has gone back to silence. Through the distance, I catch a glimpse of writhing vines, and there is some noise of breaking bodies.
We pay it no mind, though. Instead, we find the first opportunity to hide it out.
Bile’s a hybrid. His job is being a survivalist, his class is an earth mage, and his innate skills were rogueish. That’s how he’s hidden from the guild, and that’s how he hides us from the forest.
One of his bunkers marks our escape. He lifts up the ground, an earthen staircase down into its dark depths, and once everyone is inside, he heads down the steps himself, his horns just barely fitting underneath the low ceilings.
With a soft thud, the earth closes up above us.
It’s quiet down here. That’s the strange part of it all. The forest is so chaotic, and yet so quiet. Deadly plants everywhere, murderous mushrooms, parasitic insects, venomous flora and fauna, and yet it’s quiet.
Down here, though? It’s even more silent than that. The only sound within the hovel is the soft thuds of movement up above, and our shallow breathing. Opal is covered in ichor and plantmatter, grinning brightly. Inu’s armor has rusted a little, hit by some sort of corrosive ability, so Bay is already working on restoring it.
Norman stays near the entrance, using his Skill to cloak it further, and I pump mana into a solid sphere that glows faintly, just bright enough that we can actually see. Amusing how we wanted to leave the first floor so much, and now we are back underground, hiding like tunnel rats. Perhaps, that is my true fate. It could be worse.
The movement above-ground comes closer. Thudding and slithering. Closer still. Then, right above us, it stops.
There’s a dull hiss, like a gigantic snake, kept apart from me by a few feet of earth. Then, Bile huffs, and grits his teeth with exertion. “Grrrr,” he snarls.
Above us, the earth bulges downward. Then it crashes inward. Serves me right for thinking it could be worse, I guess.
As a prize, I get the lovely experience of being buried alive.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter