Amber’s sojourn takes her on a winding path, circling back in on itself multiple times as she seeks honey as medication to aid in her recovery from a deadly wound, but she is not our focus today.
No, in fact there are others that wander The Ficklewood, ostensibly better prepared but certainly nowhere near as lucky.
Truthfully they aren’t doing a lot of wandering at the moment, in fact they’ve stopped moving all together.
Morale is dipping depressingly low within the adventurer’s camp; the force of men and a scant few women that moved into The Ficklewood with a cautious enthusiasm now sit scattered about the clearing.
The air is thick with foul smelling monster repellent smoke and a sort of quiet anxiety.
Within the command tent, Guildmaster Elcan Devsol twiddles at the collection of preventative charms on his neck and sighs before turning to Imir.
The scholar has been shuffling through old papers for almost half an hour now in search of information that he’s almost certain won’t be found; his friend has always leaned more towards thought than action, something that in the past has saved both of them but just as often caused trouble.
“Imir, you’re not going to find the answer in your notes; it’s pretty obvious by now that half of the field reports for the last fifty or more years have been forged.”
“Some of it could be useful, its my responsibility to figure out what’s true and what isn’t; I’m going to have to rewrite the guild records when we ge-”
“If Imir, If we get out; and right now I’d be more concerned with how we missed the fact that the [Winding Path] effect is this strong and how we can break out of it.”
Silence passes between them, disinformation is a dangerous thing for an adventurer and kills more surely than any monster.
The [Living Aegis] scowls and takes a pull of lukewarm wine and grips his hammer.
“I swear on this hammer that if I survive, I’ll beat every one of those liars to within an inch of their lives. Bastards, the lot of them.”
Despite his impassioned statement, Elcan soon fell silent again; he and Imir had been friends, allies, and even trusted party members since they were children and they’d faced terrible challenges, but none felt quite so helpless as this.
They’d been going in circles for a week and only just realized that their [Rangers] and [Scouts] didn’t have levels high enough to navigate the forest’s twisting landscape.
High concentrations of mana tend to distort things; space and time tangle and bend and wrap around one another in weird ways.
Normally someone sufficiently skilled at [Navigation] or [Pathfinding] could mitigate the effect for their party, but not one of their number could even with Lvl 6 Skills, just short of Heroic rank.
Even Imir’s [Path of Nature]1A [Druid] and [Ranger] ability that grants easier passage and familiarity with forest environments and [Imperial Measure]2An ability similar to [Estimation] but unique to the newly discovered [Natural Philosopher] class; it quickly provides the user with highly accurate numeric measures of distance, time, weight, and a number of other values abilities failed to overcome the twist in space and it wasn’t hard to see why; the sun had risen in the north that morning and it seemed to be trailing east as the day passed into afternoon.
“C’mon Imir, put down the books and really think about this with me will ya? I know how much you trust books, but sometimes they don’t have all the answers.”
Elcan rests his massive hand against the [Scholar]’s shoulder and gives him a gentle shake.
“I know you spent a long time in that university, but sometimes you’ve gotta go with your gut and I’ve always trusted your instincts more than any book; be honest, can you see a way out of this?”
Imir sighs as he finally closes the tome he’d been flipping through, gesturing for Elcan to hand him the wine skin before taking several heavy gulps.
The weedy man coughs a few times as the sting of alcohol burns his throat but gathers himself.
“Alright El, there is one option that’s just stupid enough to work.”
Elcan raises his eyebrows, “Alright, you’ve got my attention, what is it?”
“We need to pick a fight with something big… and win”
“How big are we talking?”
“A [Thorn Jaguar Matriarch] at least, but a [Blink Hog Alpha] or a [12 Point Ferrous Deer] would be better. We need to take one out and give our path finding teams the [Last Hit Bonus]; if they can level enough to get a new Skill or Ability or just gather enough points to purchase a new rank, they might be able to guide us out safely.”
“All we need to do is extinguish the monster repellent incense and let them come.”
Elcan pauses to consider this answer before he responds.
“You’re right,” he grins “That is stupid, lets do it.”
This really needs a cover, tons of people were sleepin on Tree of Aeons because it didn't have a cover, imagine how many are sleepin on this?
I've been meaning to put one together but I'm just so swamped with work! Should I throw up a placeholder until I can make a proper one?
@Roxyreads You could, I think it'll be a good idea.
Thanks for the micro chapter~!
No problem! Thanks for commenting consistently, even if I can't always find a lot of time to respond!