Broken Lands

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

It started off so well, too. Sophia was completely surprised and welcoming. Sure, she scolded him, but Leo expected that. He’d expected more, and might have gotten it if the lightning bird hadn’t interrupted.

Leo enjoyed that a lot. That was exactly how it was supposed to go. He got to hear all sorts of stories, which mostly told him how many more there had to be. His sister had found a universe with Archons, and that wasn’t a small thing. They had their own history and might even have come from Leo’s home universe in the first place, which was weird but neat.

He was included, as much as he could be. Sure, he only had the story of how he took over Xavier’s ritual and tore a hole through the Origin … well, a couple of holes through the barriers, really … then fell on his nose in front of Sophia. He didn’t admit he fell on his snout, and Sophia didn’t call him on it, but he did. Far more importantly, the colorful message that popped up and told him he’d completed a Feat and been granted an Innate Communication Ability he didn’t need because everyone just spoke Suras was the same as one Sophia got when she arrived.

It felt like he belonged. That was how it was supposed to go.

Then came this morning. Sophia told him he couldn’t go with her, that it wasn’t safe, but Leo did what he always did when he was told that: he pretended to accept it and really ignored it. He was just accompanying them to the door, wasn’t he? And when he stepped through the doorway, it would be too late to send him back. They’d have to take him with them.

It didn’t always work, but it usually did. It wasn’t like there was going to be anything that could threaten him, after all. Sophia would take care of everything and he’d be able to watch. He might be able to alter things a bit, too. His Path wasn’t available right now, or at least the Voice wasn’t talking to him, but it was a new Path so it didn’t really do much for him anyway. His natural ability to Change things if he concentrated enough on what he wanted and gave it enough mana would still work.

Only he bounced off a barrier that he couldn’t tell was there when he tried to lead the way into the “space between the Branches.” That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Worse, there was nothing there to change because there was nothing there. It was a disconcerting feeling, but what it meant was even worse: it meant he’d completely misunderstood what he was looking at. He had to have at least some idea what he was changing to affect anything. It should have worked; he could see the space. The fact that it didn’t meant the space wasn’t really real. Somehow.

As Sophia and her team moved past Leo and told him to have a good day like a child, he tried again. This time, he approached it like it was a dungeon. Dungeons were slippery, especially the ones with instances, because they overlapped.

He was going to enter the space between the Branches and it was going to let him get to something interesting inside the World Tree.

With that in mind, Leo tried again. This time, the opening let him through. It took a ton of his mana to make it happen, but he was inside.

It was the absolute plainest passageway Leo had ever seen, nothing more than a wooden tunnel that led in only one direction: ahead. The walls were wood, the floor was wood, and even the ceiling was wood. It was a nice golden brown, but the same color on all of the surfaces was boring, even with the swirls and knots of darker color. Light came from nowhere, in addition to the light that came from the opening behind Leo.

Leo couldn’t see or hear his sister; she must have gotten well ahead of him while he was trying to get inside the passage. He hurried forward, following the single path as it curved to the left and then down, then right and down again. The down-slopes were surprisingly steep but manageable, even without flying.

The passageway ended in an irregular opening. It was a triangle, more or less, but it was made by a pair of large vines or branches that seemed to grow along the edges of the exit.

And it was definitely an exit.

Leo stepped out of the opening into an early morning fog and looked around with wonder. This was not what he expected, not after the answers the lightning-bird gave Sophia the previous night. He was supposed to either be inside a stone temple or underwater, and this definitely wasn’t that.

This was a forest, but what a forest. It was lush and green, completely filled with plants of all sorts. A few of them were flowering, but most were simply different shades of green. It was also hellaciously humid and rather warm, warm enough that the for was almost like steam instead of ordinary cool fog.

Oh, of course! They were supposed to be near water; this had to be a rainforest!

Leo had never been to a rainforest before. Did rainforests have steam fogs? Probably not, but this was a magical rainforest! It was going to be so much fun to explore with …

Wait. Where was Sophia?

“Sophia?” Leo called out with a mounting sense of unease. Sure, he stopped for a bit to change the archway to let him in, but it wasn’t that long and they weren’t hurrying while he was, once he got inside, but he hadn’t seen or heard anything from her or any of the others since they stepped into the passageway. He also hadn’t seen the door they talked about using the key on; in fact, there was no door.

Instancing. That had to be it. He’d thought of the entrance being like a dungeon with instancing and dropped himself into a different instance!

Leo glanced behind himself to confirm that the opening he came through was still there. He could go back. If he did, he probably wouldn’t be able to break into Sophia’s instance without her present. Now that he knew what his mistake was, he could probably fix it if she was there, but when he was alone he’d probably end up back in this one.

That was the decision Sophia wanted him to take, but it was also the boring choice. Leo didn’t jump through an unstable series of portals he created from his brother’s ritual to be bored. She seemed to think that going shopping would make up for it, but Leo had been shopping any number of times. It couldn’t possibly be as interesting as finally getting to delve with his sister.

Alone wasn’t going to be as much fun as he wanted, but it was still better than shopping. This might be a dungeon, which was definitely old hat to someone like Leo, but it was a different dungeon and that made it interesting. He reached for his knife and …

…uh, he wasn’t wearing his knife. In fact, he was wearing exactly none of his dungeon gear. He wouldn’t have been able to wear it and still fool Sophia that he wasn’t planning to come with her, but that wasn’t why he wasn’t wearing it. He’d forgotten to bring it with him when he altered Xavier’s ritual.

Okay. That was unfortunate, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have other ways to manage. He was a dragon! A rather small dragon, but still. A dragon.

Leo shifted his shape and felt immediate relief. His draconic form was much better suited to handling both heat and cold than his human shape. Dragons didn’t have sweat glands; instead, their bodies naturally used mana to regulate their temperature, including skin temperature. It was a sling mana drain, but he was ever so much more comfortable.

Hm. Maybe it was a bit more of a mana drain than he expected, especially after the amount he used to open the passageway. He was low and it wasn’t going to recover quickly. That was the biggest downside of his natural Affinity; unlike an arcane dragon, he didn’t recover mana all that quickly. He’d bet Sophia never really had to worry about how much mana she had. Xavier didn’t have to either.

Compared to other dragons, his mana recovery wasn’t terrible, but predicting how much mana he needed to accomplish things was still a work in progress. He usually had something of an idea, but some things just took more.

Well, fine; he’d just have to avoid using any other mana unless he really had to. Simple things like temperature control and flight were probably fine, while another big spell wasn’t.

Leo hopped up into the trees. It wasn’t really flying, more like … assisted jumping. It took less mana but still got him where he wanted to go. He wanted to get above the mist so that he could see what he was doing.

Motion to his left made Leo freeze. What was … snake! It was a large one, and it seemed to be pretending to be part of the foliage. Leo shifted his movement to the right to stay away from it. If it was venomous, he’d be fine; changing poison to be less toxic was actually pretty easy, though he did have to be careful of side effects from the change. Blowing up his leg from escaping gas was not a large improvement over snake venom. A constrictor, on the other hand, was actually dangerous and Leo was pretty sure that was a constrictor. He didn’t feel like killing a snake while it was wrapped around him.

Over the next couple of hours, Leo avoided a half-dozen more snakes, killed one, and saw three others killed by other animals. The bird made sense, as did the monkey, but the giant butterfly that killed and then carried off a snake that was more than seven feet long was a bit of a surprise. It was beautiful with stained glass wings but Leo made sure to give it all the room it wanted.

Leo was not hunting. He didn’t see much of a reason to, not when he just wanted to explore and the animals didn’t seem to react to him as an enemy. That made everything easier until something hit his side that he didn’t see coming.

Leo twisted just in time to see a javelin falling away from a deep scratch, maybe even a crack, in one of his scales.

Why was something attacking him? Had he wandered into a scenario where he’d have to fight without realizing it?

“I don’t think it’s second upgrade.” The voice came from the direction the spear was thrown from, but Leo hadn’t found the speaker yet. “It bounced off that lizard’s shield and a second upgrade weapon shouldn’t do that. In a base zone.”

“It’s gone through everything else I threw it at,” a second voice argued back. This one sounded female and Leo thought he’d found her. There was a woman standing with her hands on her hips. She was only a girl, really, younger than Leo himself. She had dark hair, almost black, that matched the odd cloak she wore perfectly.

When she shifted, he realized it wasn’t a cloak, not with those small claws. It was a pair of wings, closer to a bat’s wings than a bird’s. Nothing else about her looked like a bat; she looked like a black-haired muscular tomboy. She was fairly pale but heavy-set for the amount of muscle she had.

She was talking to a bird. No, a flying fish. It wasn’t the type of fish normally called a flying fish; instead, it looked like a large koi with the wings of a duck. Leo blinked, then looked again.

Yep, still a flying fish.