Chapter 91

He took the lead, cautiously advancing, and Demi followed along behind him. He was tense, on high alert, and inevitably this feeling spilled out onto Demi, making her feel shy and nervous. She was almost tiptoeing as she followed closely behind him, watching his every physical cue as if waiting for a signal.

But the walk through the last of the thinning trees to the high road turned out to be surprisingly calm and quiet. It felt almost anticlimactic.

There were bramble and wild berry bushes among the thinning trees. Dewberries she thought. Some looked ripe enough to pick.

I ought to bring Glimmer down here at some point, but I can always pick a few and take them back to him, she decided.

The idea presented itself as a very wholesome activity that was bound to take her mind off the sting of Aelfric’s departure, at least a little bit. After she had waved and waved until he was no longer in sight, and then waited a few more minutes just for good measure, she could make her way back and pick some berries for her fine chicken companion, carrying them home in her apron.

(Of course, she could just put them in her inventory, but carrying them back in her apron seemed to be a wonderfully harvest-goddess-like thing to do, so she resolved to do it.)

And so at last they came out of the thinning woodland, and Aelfric took his first steps onto the smooth, hard stone of the high road.

A few steps behind him, Demi focused on her feet as she made her way through the bramble, lifting her skirts slightly to get clear. When she looked up, Aelfric had already stepped out onto the road, and her view of what lay before her was totally unobstructed.

At the moment Demi saw what lay across that road, she stopped, absolutely transfixed.

Directly across the road was another forest.

That it was a different biome than the dryad’s forest was immediately apparent. Demi had already learned that this world was divided into large field areas, and that each field had its own properties. Plants and creatures that were native to a particular field generally stayed inside that field, including the monsters that did not live in dungeons.

But this was not the real reason the forest on one side of the high road could be immediately visually differentiated from the forest on the other side of the road.

The forest on the other side of the road looked sick. It looked beyond sick. It looked twisted and diseased. It looked wrong. The bark of the trees that remained was black and ashy, as if they had stood through a horrifying forest fire and even now lingered only as standing corpses. They did retain some foliage, but it was also ashy, pale gray and papery. It looked as if it would dissolve into nothingness on first touch.

Otherwise, the forest was dominated by massive ferns covered in dangerous looking spines, thick vines that seemed to be strangling the plants that they were growing on, and giant, gruesome looking flowers in unnatural colors.

That was one of the most peculiar things about the forest: the colors. Much of it was gray and black, unsaturated and ashy. Then there were some grotesque and violently colored flowers and leaves that felt as if they would induce a headache if one stared at them for too long. But it was the other colors of that place which were most confusing and off-putting. Demi wasn’t sure she could even identify those colors. It seemed to be impossible to call them by name. They were pale, powdery and shimmering, as if the surfaces were moving, crawling back and forth, or swaying across the solid objects bathed in their color. She did not have the words for them. They were uncanny, and made her feel vaguely nauseous even looking at them, in a way that was wholly different from the eye-searing combinations of the grotesque flowers.

This is not a color story of this world, her instincts told her. This is something from far away, from the outside of the outside.

There was something else about that forest. It seemed to be perpetually cloaked in a foul-smelling fog that limited her ability to see more than a few feet into the trees.

And the plants themselves appeared to be moving.

There was a faint, whispering, crackling sound, the sort of thing that might have been produced by a stiff breeze, but the air was calm. The trees were moving on their own, faintly, their thin twigs undulating and straining outward.

It was all horrible, and she did not like it at all.

Demi had grown up at the eaves of an eldritch forest that sheltered giants and other unseen horrors, a place that terrified others, for good reason. She loved the Deep Wood. It felt like her own secret, special place.

But this was something else, something that she could not love.

This was the blightwood, and as she stared into it, dozens of red system messages appeared in her field of view.

Enemy of this Planet

And then the forest in front of her seemed to shiver, the whole thing undulating like a bowl of gelatin.

Aelfric immediately sidestepped directly in front of her. His bag was entirely gone and there was a glaive in his hand that had appeared out of the ether.

“Get back,” he said sharply. “Get back into the woods, back to your farm. GO NOW.”

There was a titanic sound, something like the slow, cavernous noise of an avalanche approaching from afar.

Aelfric was rapidly throwing back potions and swallowing pills. As he did, Demi watched the status effects pile up on him.

Mitigate Knockback

Reduce Pain by 50%

Immunity to Stun

Resist Poison

Resist Acid

Freewalker

Last Chance

Resist Instant Death

Speed Boost x 6

Dexterity Boost x 6

Strength Boost x 6

Constitution Boost x 6

Magic Damage Boost x 6

Magic Soak Boost x 6

Casting Speed Boost x 3

Harp Strings

Invert HP and MP

Multiply Critical Damage x 3

The list went on and on, scrolling past faster than she could read them.

But she did manage to read two of the final effects as he engaged his own skills.

Airstep

Shadowstep

And suddenly there were four long guns beside him, as if he had somehow shaken them from his cloak. They hung in the air near him, their barrels just above the ground, held in place by magic.

He drove the butt of his glaive into the ground and then pulled what Demi first assumed was a decorative hand guard. A part of the shaft of the glaive opened and Demi was startled to see Aelfric slotting small, jewel-tipped metal cylinders into the body of the glaive.