Chapter One-Hundred-and-Thirty-Five
Although it was tough to make out the shape of the islands they sailed past and the others told him they ought to stop and check repeatedly, Adam kept driving their vessel west until he was sure that they’d reached the right place.
Something Adam had been curious about, concerning slugwhales and slug dragons, was the fact that they seemed to always stay around in places abandoned by humans. Iffen and Mast-Chewer both subsided within the ruins of large fortress islands, and the slugwhales he’d encountered alongside Emelia had followed a similar trend. He didn’t have any assurances that this theory was absolute, but he used it to guide them since he didn’t have a photographic memory and only possessed a vague idea of where exactly they were supposed to go. After all, their ship didn’t possess a compass.
“I think I see it,” Lasse yelled down from the crow’s nest.
Adam couldn’t sense anything in the distance, which he’d been able to with some of the other islands, since those had possessed man-eaters, pirates, and wildlife. Nevertheless, he felt certain that Lasse had spotted the right place, because when it came into view Adam saw that it had an abandoned village with buildings made of stone and wood. It looked to have been abandoned for a while, since moss and tall weeds grew everywhere.
Just to be sure, they circled the island before making landfall, and Lasse said he briefly spotted a creature within. He described it as a slime, which Adam supposed was close enough. Since he hadn’t seen a shell on it, Adam knew it was one of the hostile types.
If I remember correctly, Emelia said that the ones that have a shell are friendly unless they have children with them, the ones without a shell and soft spikes on their back are aggressively territorial of the islands they live on, and any which have ringed spots or glowing colours are toxic.
The island had a half-moon shape and the middle of it was crowded with buildings, while the rest was like a dense jungle. Since they didn’t want to be attacked as they moored the ship, but also didn’t want to trudge through the jungle, they ended up tethering their ship to the trees right on the border of the abandoned village inside the bay formed by its curved landmass.
“Should we leave someone to protect the ship?” Ellen asked.
Adam nodded. “That might be a good idea, since we’re not completely hidden here.”