Chapter 85: A Small World
Tyler walked through the trees of the monster zone, small leaves brushing against his armor with every step. He had passed a few hunters earlier, before crossing the river, and had found no monsters in the stretch of ground leading up to the water, which matched what he'd expected.
Most monsters that wandered close to the base got killed, cut down simply before they're near enough to reach. It made sense, then, that the deeper he pushed past the river, the more of them he'd find.
He had crossed the river only a few minutes before, his eyes fixed ahead of him, deep in thought. *I need more vials to hold more potions, so I need to find and kill more slimes, I need their cores to craft the bashing hammer. I wanna create a lot of them. They'll sell for a very high price.* He paused, looking right and left, trying to decide where he wanted to go.
*A weapon with a skill. I still wonder how people are going to react to that.* He imagined people swarming Hector's shop, copper and silver coins clutched in their hands, all of them muttering over each other at once, while Kai stood behind the counter with his hands raised and a nervous smile on his face. He shook the thought away and took a hard left.
He imagined another scenario, one where the people were still there but their faces had turned suspicious, demanding to know how he could even do something like that, insisting a skill like that had never appeared before. He blinked the thought away.
A hiss suddenly broke from the bushes to his left, and his adrenaline spiked as every muscle in his body went tight at once. A slither's head burst free of the leaves and shot toward him, closing the distance fast.
It looked to be as thick as his arm. Tyler threw his dagger down at it immediately, more strength behind the throw than he'd meant to put into it, and the blade caught the slither's head dead on.
It pulverized into pieces at the impact, a burst of dust thrown into the air, the low sound of it rolling out briefly through the trees around him before fading.
"Huh," Tyler muttered, crouching down to pick up the dagger. He kept his eyes on the dead creature a moment longer.
it was, as far as he could tell, the biggest slither he'd ever run into. The system panel materialized just above the corpse, hovering low, reading: [Slither: Level 20]
*So that's how big an E-rank Slither looks. Kind of scary,* he thought. He stood up straight, dagger still in hand, and as he kept staring down at the creature, his hair rose on end, a slow prickling crawl he couldn't shake off. He passed it smoothly and kept walking forward.
He paused. "Wait, I never actually extracted anything from a Slither before. Can I actually extract anything?" He walked back to the Slither, staring down at its dead, pulverized corpse, and muttered, "Extract."
The Slither shimmered a faint blue, and the glow stopped immediately. The corpse looked exactly as it had a moment before, and Tyler tilted his head in confusion. "Huh, did I even take anything?" He looked upward, and the system panel materialized. Scrolling mentally through the inventory, he found below one of the vials icon, read: [Slither Neurotoxin]
"Neurotoxin." He read the word out loud, his voice barely rising above a whisper, the syllables sitting strange and half-familiar on his tongue, as if he'd heard them once before, back in some science class when he was still in school.
Though the memory of exactly where refused to surface no matter how he reached for it. He opened his palm, and a faint light shimmered against his skin before collapsing inward, resolving into the small, solid weight of a vial settling into his hand.
He frowned, staring at the liquid inside, a thick, cream-white substance, sluggish and clinging faintly to the glass instead of moving freely. Curiosity pulling at him, a system panel appeared before him, the text reading: [A slither's neurotoxin. When this substance is injected into the target's body, they will feel no pain. However, the venom will continue to spread within the target's nervous system and is capable of killing them in seconds.]
*Wow, that sounds extremely dangerous. So these things are still this deadly?* he thought, the weight of the realization settling into him slowly. The vial shimmered once and disappeared back into his inventory.
*To think that these things, even at a low level, can have such a massive advantage. I'm lucky I never got bitten.*
He turned back around and kept going. *Now that I think about it, is the venom all the same? Is a level one slither's venom as strong as a level twenty's? They must be different somehow, right? I mean, these things aren't like regular snakes. And most logic around here works around levels in this world, so it might make sense.*
He walked on a short distance before stopping, sighing as his hands settled on his waist, and tilted his head back to scan the trees around him, searching for whichever stood tallest.
When he found it, he crossed the remaining distance and came to stand beneath it, craning his neck to take in its full height. The lowest branch wasn't low at all, it hung a few meters above his head, far out of easy reach.
Tyler bent his knees slightly, coiling the strength down through his legs, and drove himself upward with all the force he could put into the jump. The strength of his own legs caught him off guard, it launched him far higher than he'd braced for, the ground dropping away fast beneath him, and he shot past the branch almost before he'd registered closing the distance to it, the fabric of his leggings brushing briefly against the bark on the way up.
His momentum gave out somewhere above it, and gravity pulled him back down through the same space he'd just crossed; he threw his hand out and caught hold of the branch hard on the way past, his fingers closing tight around the wood.
A slight crack sounded somewhere within it, the branch flexing under the sudden weight before it held. *Woah, that was close,* he thought, and pulled himself up onto it with a slight groan, his arms straining to take his full weight. Once he'd found his footing, he launched himself onto the next branch and kept climbing.
The branches came easier after that, clustered close enough together that he barely had to reach between them, and he kept climbing higher and higher, until he finally broke through into open air at the top of the tree. Then he saw it, the vast expanse of the forest spread out beneath him, an endless green reaching out in every direction until it blurred into the horizon.
It never ceased to amaze him, and confuse him in the same breath, from up here he could make out where the monster zone came to an end, some distant line where the green broke off, and yet even with that boundary visible the whole of it still felt endless, far too large, somehow, for something that was only ever called a fractured monster zone.
He wondered how many monsters were truly living within this monster zone. He'd run into the same handful of them again and again over these past couple of times, and he wondered whether something different waited for him the deeper he pushed in. He found himself curious, too, whether the whole of that endless green below counted as a single fractured monster zone.
Or whether it was only some part of it.
These were the questions running through his head as he stood there taking it all in. He pulled his focus back and made himself look around properly this time, intent on pinpointing exactly where the monsters were. The trees grew too dense for that in most places, an unbroken storm of green crowding together and hiding the ground completely from where he stood.
But he could still make out some monsters through the gaps. Far off to his left, he spotted what looked like pixels near a cluster of slimes. Straight ahead of him, three Gloomfangs moved together, sniffing at the ground. To his furthest right, several hunters trudged along, sacks slung heavy over their shoulders.
He concluded they had to be herbs, and that the hunters were making their way back toward the base. He kept looking, and found a few more monsters scattered through the green below.
*Right. I've pinpointed where all the slimes are. I need to go for them first. And that's when I'll go to the Hexhorn territory with enough vials.*
He looked down at the ground from the height he'd climbed to, and for a moment it seemed like he could simply jump the whole way down, but the height caught up with him fast, and his heart started to slam against his ribs hard enough that he could feel it in his throat.
He couldn't be certain he'd walk away from a fall like that unhurt, even if he was confident enough it wouldn't kill him, in the end he decided against risking it.
Instead he dropped low onto the branch just beneath him, then pushed off again onto the next one down, and the next, and the next after that, each landing absorbed through his knees and carried straight into the next jump before his weight had even fully settled, until at last solid ground rose up to meet his feet.
He continued on, walking deeper into the monster zone, but his mind wasn't with his feet anymore, it had drifted somewhere else entirely. He remembered that dream.
The one he'd had right before James woke him, the one where his aunt had lost all her fingers. He remembered the terror of it, the sheer horror that had locked him in place while his uncle yelled at him, that violent voice alone enough to make him tremble every time he spoke, like a command he had no power to disobey and yet his body had stayed exactly where it was regardless, unable to move at all.
It had felt like he had no strength left in him to move, like something had rooted him to that spot.
*What the hell's up with these nightmares? Why the do I dream things like this?*
He remembered the last dream he'd had before this one, too his aunt again, and himself sitting in a room filled with infinite darkness. He frowned.
*It just doesn't make any sense. I don't even think about them. I don't want to think about them. But these stupid dreams are causing me to... Shit, dammit, I want to forget.*
***
Meanwhile, back at the base, Serena found herself staring at the woman with long, silver hair once more. The woman's gaze stayed fully concentrated on the quest flyers in her hands, reading over them with the same unhurried focus she always seemed to carry.
But nonetheless, she held an unmistakable, commanding presence about her, something in the set of her shoulders and the stillness of her focus that didn't feel threatening so much as it felt determined, almost as if she were the type of person who moved through the world absolutely certain of everything she did.
*Just who is she?* Serena thought. *This is the third time she's showing up here. I already told her we don't have any C-rank quests. I thought she'd leave, but looks like she's looking for another one.*
Rebecca redirected her piercing silver eyes toward Serena, and the weight of that gaze alone was enough to put her on edge.
"Is it true what happened here?" she asked.
"What?" Serena questioned, a bit confused.
Rebecca straightened where she stood. "Two days ago." The incident with Gary, Serena realized, that was what she meant. "Is it true or is it just a rumor?"
"Oh, you mean... yes. It is true," Serena nodded. "I saw it myself."
Rebecca's eyes narrowed. *Why does she want to know about this?* Serena thought to herself.
"The guy who beat him, do you know his name?"
"Um, no," Serena shook her head, lying.
"Really?" Rebecca said, her attention drifting back down to the quest flyers still in her hand.
"Yes."
"Ok, but is it true that he was a D-rank?"
"Well, I'm not really sure."
Rebecca looked at her again. "You work here, don't you?"
"Of course, but I meet a lot of hunters every day."
"Things like that don't happen every day now, do they?" Rebecca responded.
"Well, I'm really not sure if he was D-rank or not," Serena lied again, a hint of nervousness creeping into her voice.
She didn't even know herself why she kept lying, only that some instinct told her she should, something about the woman standing in front of her simply didn't sit right, a small, prickling wrongness she couldn't put a name to.
"All right, I'm taking this quest," she said, one finger tapping decisively against the flyer laid out in front of Serena.
Serena's eyes narrowed as she read the quest. "I'm sorry, but this quest isn't available right now. There aren't any Crimson Wolves at the moment."
"How so?" Rebecca asked.
"All of them were annihilated days ago," Serena told her.
Rebecca's eyes widened slightly in surprise, a genuine shift in her expression that Serena hadn't expected from someone who'd seemed so certain of herself up to that point.
"All right then." Rebecca turned her attention to the other quests spread across the counter. *Annihilated? Was it a guild?* Rebecca wondered, watching her. *Must have been a large party.*
Rebecca handed her the flyer for the other quest. Serena looked it over, and for a moment she opened her mouth as if to speak, then caught herself and held back. "All right, sign it," she said instead, passing Rebecca a quill pen.
Rebecca signed the quest, and Serena took it, opening the drawer behind the counter to put it away. She took the rest of the quests and filed them away in a separate drawer. She watched as Rebecca gathered her quiver, full of arrows, along with her bow, and made her way out of the tent.
Serena thought to herself, *so many people keep coming back without any Hexhorn hides again, all because of the Crimson Wolfs. Why didn't I just tell her?*
She paused for a moment. *But what does she want with him?* Then she gasped as a small thought hit her all at once. *Is she a guild member? If so, then Tyler's in deep trouble.*