Chapter 97

Luke backed away from the tree slowly while Zea scrambled to stay low on all fours as she fled its reach. Twice more, branches that had just been normal, bark-covered limbs suddenly sprouted razor thorns and became as flexible as willow switches. They slashed through the air at him, but weren’t fast enough to tag Luke.

If the situation had been less bizarre, or if he’d had a better grasp of their capabilities, he might have swatted the attacks away. Visions of the branches grabbing hold of the mace and him being forced to fight a tree to hold onto it danced through his mind though, and since he had no idea how much strength a living tree might have, he didn’t trust himself to win that one.

So he put his agility to work making sure the tree didn’t touch him in the first place. It honestly wasn’t even close, once he’d gotten over his initial surprise at having a branch come to life and attack him in the first place. Between the raw stat and his multiple skills designed to help him predict and react to attacks, Luke felt comfortable saying he could have kept out of the reach of four or five branches.

He could have, but he didn’t, because that would just be stupidly tempting fate. Even he wasn’t that dumb.

“Oh shit! We’ve got company,” Zea said from up ahead.

Luke risked a glance to the side and saw a single squirrel folk crouched on a branch over the trail they were on, though calling it a trail was being generous. It had a hand raised and was waving it around while it stared down at the two trespassers.

“What… what is it doing?” Luke asked.

Then it chucked what Luke was pretty sure was a God damn acorn at him, which exploded mid-air into a blast wave of pure force and acorn-shell-shrapnel. Luke was shoved straight down into the dirt, hard enough that he left an imprint. Even before he hit the ground, he could see the two whip-like branches diving in for him, so he was already flinging himself to one side.

The first branch missed, instead scoring a slash through the dirt that was at least an inch wide and several inches deep. It would have flayed a normal person’s skin open down to the bone, no question. The second branch struck him square in the shoulder, and that was when he really internalized exactly how tough 36 stamina had made him.

The branch struck him, and it bent. The razer-sharp thorns torn through the leather plate and his shirt beneath, caught on his skin, and he felt one of the thorns break off in his skin, then the others all ripped past him. He wasn’t even bleeding. Luke glanced down at the ‘wound,’ picked out the thorn that had gotten stuck, and saw nothing but whole, healthy, pink skin through the tear the branch had made in his armor.

“Okay fucker, if you’re going to start ruining my clothes, I’m going to get pissed off,” he told the squirrel.

Zea had been on the other side of the acorn when it blew up, and she was farther away than he was. She’d still been pushed to the dirt, but it had ironically thrown her out of the reach of the tree and at first glance, she seemed unharmed. Luke bounded past her, moving as quickly as he could through the underbrush and in a few cases just crashing right through it. He planted both feet solidly on the ground, flexed his legs, and jumped straight up into the air.

Branches came to life and wove themselves between Luke and the squirrel. Quicker than he would have thought possible, there was a solid, impassable wall of living wood protecting the little shithead from him, but Luke wasn’t about to let that slow him down. He charged up a [Power Strike]as he ascended to the squirrel’s position and brought the mace around in a two-handed overhead swing that struck the wall squarely.

Branches exploded inward, showering the shocked squirrel with wood. It let out some sort of high-pitched, terrified squeak and tried to fling itself backwards, but Luke was through the new hole in the wall before it could get away. He grabbed a handful of its chest and hauled it back through the gap, then dropped down to the ground.

The squirrel hit first, having been thrown straight down while they both fell, and Luke’s foot landed on its skull as it was bouncing back up. Chunks of shattered bone and brain matter splattered everywhere, and the kill notification sounded in his mind.

[You have slain Drop Squirrel Druid (lvl 23). 553 XP awarded.]
[This creature has slain 128 other creatures.]
[Total kills for this type of creature: 35.]
[Highest level kill: 23.]

“Come on, we need to go,” Luke said, rushing over to Zea to help her back up.

“What the fuck was that?”

“A fucking problem, is what. That wall wasn’t natural. We need to get the hell out of Dodge before another one shows up.”

“Get out of… what?”

“Never mind. Earth expression. I’ll explain it later.”

He hustled Zea north at maximum speed. “That was the strongest one yet,” he said, “and it could use magic. The system notification said it was a druid.”

She regarded him blankly, then said, “What’s a druid?”

Luke pulled up short and gave her an incredulous stare. “You don’t know? This is your world.”

“Do you know every job your world has to offer off the top of your head?”

“Er, no, but like… this one is kind of famous, at least back on Earth.”

“I thought you said there was no magic on Earth.”

“No, but we have stories with magic. Druids are like, uh, nature priests or something. They can make plants grow or do weird shit. They can do stuff with animals too. So being balls deep in the middle of this forest with the capital of squirrel civilization just a few miles away isn’t exactly a great place to fight them.”

Zea started to say something, but stopped to curse as her pack got caught on a branch. With a jerk, she pulled it free, then started swearing. “Damnit, tore the stitching on the strap. Going to have to fix that later before it comes off completely.”

“Later,” Luke said absently while he watched the tree branches behind them. It could be just the wind moving them, or they could be preparing to attack again. He didn’t see any squirrels, but there were plenty of blind spots that no amount of perception was going to allow him to peer through. His other senses weren’t reporting anything either, but if the squirrels could use magic, he wasn’t willing to commit to trusting his ears and nose to keep them safe.

It was a good thing he didn’t either, because not two minutes later he felt something grab his foot. Roots complete with their own thorns were snaking their way around his ankle, at least five or six individual strands. Luke jerked his foot free, or rather, he ripped several feet of roots straight out of the ground before they finally snapped. He glanced over at Zea to make sure she was alright, only to see her dealing with a similar problem.

Instead of using pure strength, she’d brandished the ever-sharp alchemical blade he’d given her and sliced her way free. That was admittedly a far more elegant solution than what he’d come up with, but it had the same basic flaw his own tactic did: it addressed the immediate problem of being ensnared without doing anything to help them locate the source.

Squirrel folk came hurtling through the branches above, three of them at least, by his count, and leaped at him, spears held in one hand and some sort of smaller, double-ended javelin in the other. They threw them while they fell, two at Luke and one at Zea, and though he blocked them with little enough effort, they served their purposes as distractions.

The first squirrel hit Luke dead center with his spear. It snapped with a resounding crack after puncturing his armor and digging a gouge into his chest, and then Luke’s hand snapped out to grab it. He jerked it into the way of the other squirrel, who had to abort its attack as it collided with its companion and they both slammed into the ground.

The third squirrel went for Zea, but she was quick and armed. Its spear went over her shoulder and her knife sliced open its belly, causing it to cry out in pain. Luke grinned fiercely at the sight; his girl was a hell of a scrapper. She had things handled, so he focused on his own pair. They weren’t just going to lay around the ground, tangled up.

For the moment, though, they were. And that was just the perfect opportunity to end this quickly. [Power Strike] slammed down on them so hard that the squirrel on top was actually ripped in two and the one below it was pulverized. A quick two-note ding sounded, and he turned to help Zea.

His help wasn’t necessary. While it was true that he did most of the fighting, and that she tried to keep herself at range to snipe at monsters, that wasn’t due to some lack of skill. The truth was that Luke’s ability to recover from injuries was vastly superior to Zea’s, and thus the risk of getting in the range of snapping claws or teeth was a lot lower for him.

It took her all of five seconds to put that mutant squirrel down. She was vicious about it too, stabbing it in the stomach twice, then driving her knee up into the wounds to send paralyzing waves of pain radiating out through its entire body before finally slitting its throat and kicking the corpse backwards.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

She flashed him a wicked grin and gestured towards his crotch with the bloody knife. “Just don’t let me catch your eyes wandering.”

“Oh I don’t know. These squirrels, the fur on them, it’s so sexy, you know?”

Zea snorted and looked down at the corpse. “Damn, still no loot though. Unless you want the sticks?”

Their spears, such as they were, were about four feet long, smooth and straight shafts of wood that had actually been sanded smooth, with the ends ground down into tips and then hardened. All things considered, he supposed they weren’t bad weapons, but there was no comparison to his own mace.

“I do not, no. Do you?”

“Not if I have to carry them. They’re not worth anything.”

“Leave them then. Let’s get out of here before more of them show up. They’re obviously aware of where we are, so I’d say our best bet is speed and distance. I don’t know if it applies here, but squirrels are day-time animals where I’m from, and I’m worried that in an hour, the night shift is going to clock out and we’re going to have ten times as many of them on our asses.”

Zea gave the trees an uneasy glance, then gestured towards the roots still clinging to Luke’s boot. “There’s another one of those druids out there somewhere. They didn’t stick around to support their skirmishers though.”

“Yeah, and they are probably going to try to fuck us over again, but I figure we’re getting farther from the home tree with every step now. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll leave us alone once they see that we’re leaving their territory.”

Zea snorted. “You ever been lucky?”

“Once or twice,” he said with a smile. “Met this feisty little thing once who rocked my world.”

“Not like that, you ass.”

The smile faded away and he sighed. “Yeah, I know. Nothing we can do but get going. I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Let me at least cut these off your foot first.”

Soon enough, they were moving again. Half an hour later, he saw the sky starting to lighten up. By his best guess, they had a few miles of squirrel territory left to cross. “Things are going to get worse now,” he said grimly. “Best be ready."