Oliver staggered behind his two companions as he simultaneously tried to keep up with their break-lung speed and breathe quietly enough that the Aelin wouldn't blame him for scaring away their prey. Emma was the swiftest member of their group, if only barely and because of her craft, next came Aelin, he was only slightly slower than Emma. The reason for that slight advantage in speed Emma held was due to him taking a more varied approach to stat allocation, as he claimed that a hunter needed to have at least four of the seven stats available at a somewhat equal level. He refused to say which of the seven stats he thought were necessary, but Oliver was sure Aelin would be willing to share once he decided how to put his stats.

Oliver did not actually need Aelin to do so, as it was quite clear which attributes he thought necessary, and which he was more than willing to leave behind like an antelope flock left their weakest to the maws of the lions. But it would be quite nice if Aelin started to trust him enough to tell him that he focused on strength, dexterity, perception, and wisdom or intelligence, although which one of the two he wasn’t sure.

“Hey, could- could we take a break s- soon?” Oliver panted from where he stood behind the others, hands on his knees as the implosion of his lungs pulled the rest of his body towards them.

“Oh, sorry Oliver, I keep forgetting that I need to stop moving at full speed, since, well, full speed for me is what, sprinting for you?” Emma asked, a slightly teasing smile on her lips as she stopped to wait for Oliver.

“I would like you to remember that this is not, in fact, a full sprint for me. For whom I was before the system? Yes, yes it would be, but for the current me? No, this is more like a hard run, where I try to keep up with people walking twice my speed, so it is only bordering on a full sprint” Oliver said with a smile as sat down to catch his breath.

“Then why not, I don’t know, use some of those five stat points you have to upgrade any one of your physical stats? They all give some amount of stamina, and then we could actually walk for more than half an hour” Aelin drawled as he looked out over the forest for any sign of the fall-leaf fox we were hunting on his behest.

“Well, I would honestly like to do so, but then I came to the startling realization that if I did, I would rob you of the chance to mock me for my physical prowess and if you had to move on from my physique to my personality? Well, I don’t think my feeble optimistic mind could carry the burden of knowing that I had failed the great hunter Aelin on a personal and a physical level”

“you’ve already done both”

“Aelin, stop telling him how to build his character, it’s bad form and will get you thrown out if you ever make it to civilized society,” Emma said, smiling, but with a touch of sternness “And Oliver, why is it that you won’t use any of your points?”

“I have thought it over thoroughly, and I have come to the conclusion that I know nothing beyond dubious hypotheses, built on a network of imaginary systems which may or may not have a slight insight into the system, but probably not. Now, the problem is not that I think I will somehow make a mistake so grand that I will ruin myself and all my descendants until the one world is nothing but ash, any build must be feasible with enough hard work” Aelin snorted in derision “but, I would rather not be forced down a path I did not choose, you know?” Oliver smiled as he stretched his arms above his head and rose to his feet.

The three of them walked up their branch which was as wide as a car was for a short while longer, the others in the lead as Oliver panted along behind them, before jumping down to a wider branch that went underneath theirs. After travelling downwards along that branch for a while, they climbed to another that went over the branch they were currently on and followed that one upwards. These three-dimensional zig-zag movements were the only way they had found to traverse the branches of the ever-fall forest.

Oliver honestly thought it was quite fun right after they took a break, when he could walk and enjoy the majesty of the forest in silence, without dying on the inside as his lungs eagerly tried to collapse. Oliver didn’t choose said silence, but silence had been a clear condition for Aelin abandoning his project while the strips of bark he had cut off soaked in a pool near their temporary camp to go hunting with them. Oliver was quite certain that Aelin himself would have insisted on a hunt had Emma and he not, the basis of his belief being that they had absolutely no food. But, on the other hand, Oliver was also quite certain that Aelin was right if it came to hunting and wilderness survival, so he simply accepted with a smile.

“So then, what kind of wizard do you want to be? I mean, you said you didn’t want to go down a path you didn’t choose, but what path will you pick?” Emma asked from where she stood above the two others.

Oliver lay on the bark, as he panted, waiting for his lungs to stop panicking so he could answer her question. As he lay there, he stared up at the whirling leaves as the sun lit them from behind, its rays making it seem as though they were lit from within, like shards of the sun’s fire, crystalized and falling to the world far below. It was a bit strange how many leaves there were, actually, until he realised that it was because of the pocket of empty space in the canopy above where they were, with the thin branches of other trees growing at the edges of the hole.

“Well, I'm not quite certain, I know that I wish to be able to use magic for fireballs and lightning bolts, but raw damage seems ever so slightly... boring, or rather, it doesn’t seem all that attractive to simply be the incarnation of annihilation and rain spells upon my enemies and whatnot, you know? I would much rather sacrifice half of said destructive power if it let me make something grand, something that could help people in ways other than melting their problems into slag and ash” Oliver said, a wistful expression resting upon his exhausted face as he lay beneath the sun’s rays “Actually, I take that back, if no one needed my power, I would give every spec of it to build something... wonderous”

Silence descended upon their little resting place as Aelin sat next to Oliver, or rather, knelt, supposedly looking for tracks in the bark, even though Oliver was sure that even Aelin was starting to feel the tiredness he felt. Aelin rose to his feet and started looking to either side of their branch for Animals on a lower branch to ambush from above. Oliver was sure that even Aelin was starting to feel the slight twinge of the shadow of the hint of the edge of the tiredness he felt.

Aelin stopped looking at their surroundings after a moment of silence, his expression pinched as he looked between Oliver and Emma. His gaze finally settled onto Emma as she gave him a warning look before he slowly shook his head and turned back to Oliver.

“That... is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. What? You would become a completely defenceless maker of grand artefacts?”

“Aelin, stop it, there is no reason to do this”

“He needs to understand that the world won’t bend over backwards to help people just because they want it to do so”

“You’ve already tried to tell him that, I’ve tried to tell him that once, many, many people have tried to tell him that, and it doesn’t work. I don’t disagree with your point, I just know that its meaningless to try to convince him” Emma said, the same frustration she always had in her voice when this argument came up clear to Oliver’s ears as he simply listened, tired of hearing the same thing once more.

“Then maybe the problem is that you haven’t tried hard enough” Aelin snarled, causing Emma to roll her eyes in exasperation, cross her arms, and turn to look at the branch ahead.

Oliver sighed. He knew where this conversation would lead. He knew what caused this argument. He knew that both Aelin and Emma were not frustrated with each other so much as they were frustrated with him. He didn’t enjoy it when his friends eventually realized that he, in their eyes, needed to change, because it would always end not only his friendship with them but also Emma’s when she tried to arbitrate. He would have simply had the fights on his own, but Emma would never let someone she cared about face anything alone, not even when it would probably help the situation. And so, here he was once again, at an impasse that would only last for so long before Aelin brought his threat to life and left. Aelin needed him to change, and he couldn’t... he just couldn’t stop hoping that things would end well even in the darkest times, or they wouldn’t end well.

“Oliver, while making yourself into a highly valued maker of artefacts sounds like a fantastic way to get kidnapped, enslaved, or betrayed, I don’t think that is what your goal is. Being valued for something you can do won’t make you free, it will make you a tool for someone else. If you want to ever be truly free, you need power to ensure that no one will ever be able to take your freedom from you” Aelin said, frustration, determination, and anger laced into his voice, even if the anger did not seem to be directed at Oliver exactly.

“Or, instead of power so great that even those I call friends will be too scared to defy me, I could simply have friends” Oliver said, as he propped himself up on his arms before he leaned back and stared up at the space bereft of branches which started right above them, continuing on for some distance before filling with branches once again.

“Did you not hear what I said about betrayal? Everyone has a price. Something they want more than they want you, something you might have that they will kill you for”

“Aelin...” Both of them turned their heads in surprise to look at where Emma spoke from “if you live constantly looking at your friends' hands for hidden knives when they try to touch you, expecting betrayal at every turn, thinking about when your friends will finally come to the point where they want something you have more than they want you in their lives... what kind of life is that?” Emma asked, her tone soft and caring, the same one she used with her brothers when they were scared from one of their parents’ fights, and she looked Aelin in the eyes calmly as he glared back.

“One where you won’t get betrayed twice” he bit out before he stalked further down their branch.

“huh” Oliver said, looking after Aelin.

“What?” Emma asked.

“Well, to be quite honest, I would have thought I would finally have the chance to actually hear his footsteps” Oliver said, smiling slightly.

Emma smacked his arm lightly, but he paid it no mind. He was honestly confused, because Aelin was most definitely stomping, and as far as he could tell, there was no such things as passive boosts, at least none you could get from skills, as you had to actively use them for them to take effect. He glanced down at the bark beneath their feet, as though they somehow knew the answer, which they, surprisingly, did, in the form of a thick leaf covering. The leaves were supple and fresh, not crisping like autumn leaves usually would, and the rustle they did produce was masked in the constant swish and rustle of the other leaves all around them.

“Hey! You've become twice as strong as you once were, while I have only become half again as durable as I were before. It is also worth remembering that mine is a far lower bar to clear, so you need to be careful with your playful hits” Oliver called after Emma as she walked After Aelin, distracting himself as he concluded that the prickling in the back of his mind was nothing.

“Well, I suppose I deserve some punishment for fighting with Aelin so soon after we... well we didn’t resolve our conflict, so I suppose ‘so soon after we swept it under the rug’ is more accurate” Oliver chuckled thoughtfully to himself before he ran to catch up with his friends. As he started running, he prepared himself psychologically for the next session of his lungs attempting their own little scientific experiment, namely attempting to compress into a black hole.

Then he froze, as he finally realized what the creeping dread at the edge of his mind was, what the subconscious part of his brain had been screaming at the conscious part of his brain to notice and figure out, causing his fixation on the leaves and the empty space. The empty space where there should have been branches was filled once, there was no such thing as unused space in the ever-fall forest, but it wasn’t, there were no branches. That wouldn’t have been an issue if there was a crater, a place where a branch had been torn out on one of the other branches, but there wasn’t, there was only whole bark, and even if there had been, the other branches were too far away. No, the branch which used to occupy that space had to have come from theirs, a branch going almost directly upwards, and spreading out to fill all of the space.

But there was no crater. Even right underneath the middle of the empty space, there was only mahogany bark peeking through the leaf covering. In fact, it was the only place where bark peeks through. Almost as if something beneath the leaves regularly came up through them and disturbed the covering. The last piece of the puzzle was something he had seen on his very first day in the ever-fall forest. An astonishing creature he had only seen from afar, it looked to be a blend between a bear and a sloth, except approaching the size of a mammoth. It was huge in every sense of the word, even as he saw it practically melt into a hole on a branch, its fur camouflaging with the bark, all except the edges. Edges they couldn’t see, because of the leaf carpet.

“AELIN! STOP!” Oliver called immediately, but he could see that it was too late, Aelin would step on it in mere moments, and he would be ambushed with no chance of defending himself.

Oliver glanced down at the satchel on his hip, considering throwing the rocks inside, but knowing he could not throw far enough. His mind raced for ideas as Emma looked at him in confusion and Aelin prepared to take the last couple of steps before he would turn to look at him. Everything seemed to happen at a crawl as Oliver tried to think of any way to save Aelin. Oliver finally realized that the only way for his throw to have the power to reach the beast before Aelin did was if he spun around and used the momentum of the spin to throw. But to actually hit with that kind of toss, even if only to hit something as wide as a mammoth, he would need to be more… dexterous.

Oliver wrenched up his status and poured all five of his attribute points into dexterity even as he simultaneously tore his satchel off his shoulder, housing his non-functional computer and two remaining rocks, and started to spin around with them stretched out as far as he could. The swish of the air around him and sudden wave of power coursing through his body both went ignored as he focused wholly on his throw. He completed one full rotation before letting go on the second turn, watching the satchel fly through the air as it skirted over Aelin’s head to land just beyond where he stood.

There was a pause as Aelin turned around.

“so, because I point out a fact you cannot accept, you resort to throwing things at me from behind and using cheap tricks to make me stand still?” Aelin growled, staring at Oliver with anger and something deeper, something akin to a bitter confirmation that Aelin was right about something.

Then, a roar rang out behind Aelin, his snarl freezing as his head and torso snapped to look behind him as the snarling creature seemingly appeared right behind him.

The creature was gargantuan and furious to have been cheated from its meal, snarling as it looked upon Aelin with ravenous hunger and fury. Its teeth were sharp as needles and its fangs like the claws of a dinosaur, its legs were long as it rose to stand above them, its torso like that of two bears and its front legs crowned with claws, long and curved, meant for climbing and gouging the flesh of its prey.

It glared at them with colossal black eyes, each the size of teacups.

“I don’t want to be ‘that guy’ but I feel it necessary to point out that if it weren’t for my intelligence and wisdom attributes, we never would have seen this thing before it killed one of us, so I would appreciate it if we didn’t complain about my build in the future”