Another crack split the air, beating back the drowsy fog around Alyssa's mind as she attempted yet again to sleep. Oliver had said he had everything under control, but he'd also spent the last however-many hours doing nothing but blowing up wand after wand. This last one had been bright enough that she had been able to see it even with her eyes closed, and she glared at the enchanter.
Wasn't he supposed to be good at this?
How long did it take me to light a fire again?
Well, that didn't matter, because now she had [Ignite], so she could light a fire whereever and whenever she had wood. But what definitely did matter was the way she was getting absolutely no sleep, and now that she was slightly more awake her body was saying it wanted both to use the bathroom and get some water. She was, fortunately, quite full – Henrietta had trivially caught a half-dozen fish and used her magic to clean them in minutes, then the two of them had cooked the catch over their fire.
It wasn't half bad. Just... forty-five percent bad.
Still, her body wasn't about to let her get back to almost-sleep while in this state, and that wasn't helped by the way Oliver seemed to be locked in a rap battle with himself, yapping in an incomprehensible string of Magespeech. If he was trying to argue the sticks into being a wand, he was apparently doing a bad job.
Not that she would interrupt him to tease him about it – even putting aside how much of a phenomenally bad idea it was to cut someone off while they were mid-cast – he got way too uppity over even the lightest teasing.
[Leafstep] was a tremendous help in not disturbing him, as even when not actually stepping on Wood, her foot was still supported by a combination of Air and Force magic, lessening the amount of weight she put on the ground.
After getting a solid drink of water from their trickling waterfall, Alyssa left out the front of the cave, ducking past the interwoven trees that made up their new front wall.
"Couldn't sleep?" Henrietta asked.
The Expedition veteran and leader had propped herself up against a conveniently-twisted branch sticking out of the leaning tree trunks, taking her turn to keep watch like a good leader would.
"Bathroom," Alyssa said as way of explanation, "And… Oliver."
"I probably should intervene, ensure he's getting rest," Henrietta noted, tapping her chin and giving Alyssa a knowing grin. Which obviously, she'd definitely dealt with annoyingly loud mage teammates before, so she got it. "We can survive a night or two without full wards, and sleep deprivation didn't help anyone… well, it helped Mark."
"Mark? Like Mark Lucid, Mark?" Alyssa instantly found something more pressing than her body's insistence. It wasn't like she didn't know stories about Henrietta's other Expedition, but hearing the stories directly from Henrietta would be something else.
"Yes, Mark Lucid," Henrietta chuckled. "But go, take care of yourself. There will be plenty of time for us to talk about my other Expedition in the time to come."
Alyssa didn't really want to go, but after a bit more prodding finally ceded to her body's demands. By the time she returned, Oliver had been persuaded to stop, and was instead meditating with his eyes closed against the cliff wall, muttering something to himself. As she headed inside, Henrietta handed her a strip of ink 'fabric,' slightly stretchy and, she realized, the right size for a blindfold.
Alyssa settled in for the long haul, trying to recapture her mostly-gone sense of comfort, and vaguely wished that Henrietta could magic up some beds, or at least a blanket or two for them. But she was already pushing her limits as it was, making clothes for all three of them and sending out however-many of the pseudowyverns looking for Clark and Jacob. The blindfold worked great, and was probably near the upper bound of how much random knickknackery she could reasonably make right now.
However, with the ever-present light no longer bothering her and the sounds of exploding sticks replaced with the sounds of trickling water and nature, Alyssa's hopes for a more comfortable bed didn't last long in the face of sheer exhaustion.
Alyssa woke up with a start, some enormous-sounding monster making its presence known in the deep forest, a roar that felt like it should shake the trees. Oliver was curled up asleep a few feet from her, not even stirring at the calamitous noise, but when she emerged from their base, she found Henrietta perched on a protruding branch, a good fifteen feet in the air.
"See anything?"
Henrietta looked down and gave a slight gesture of greeting before responding, "I don't."
"Are we worried about whatever that was?"
"Not yet," the Commander replied, casting her gaze back out over the untamed woodland, "But I think we've been lucky so far, and I don't like relying on luck."
Apparently content with whatever she'd seen, Henrietta nimbly leaped from the branch she was on to the stone wall, then back from the stone wall to the trees, which she subsequently strolled down casually.
Alyssa's jaw dropped, "I thought you were a scribe! How much Dexterity do you have?"
"[Master Inkscribe] provides ten with its base stats," Henrietta replied with a bit of a smug grin, "Unspecialized, too."
"And that's… a scribe class?" Alyssa was still somewhat in disbelief.
"It was a major reason for why I chose it," Henrietta chuckled, then extended an arm out, letting an inkling Alyssa hadn't noticed land on it.
"I got a returner while the two of you were asleep. I want you to follow it to wherever it goes. It should lead you to either Jacob or Clark. Or I suppose, it could be another human. But I doubt that. It would in many ways be preferable, though." Henrietta frowned, which Alyssa entirely understood.
"Yeah," she nodded, relieved to be getting moving again. She always preferred scouting to mere wilderness survival, and getting more people around camp would only be good. For many reasons, really. "I should eat something first, then I'll be on my way."
Their fire was still going strong, as Oliver had been super insistent on keeping it going and it wasn't worth the argument to save just a bit of wood – deadwood suitable for firewood was astonishingly abundant – so it didn't take long to cook up a few more fish. Though unseasoned, spit-roasted fish was already starting to get really old, it was edible and not gag-worthy, so it still ranked above a lot of the meals she'd had to eat during training.
Oliver was still asleep when she was finally ready to take off, only for the inkling to immediately fly straight up, leading her up the enormous cliff.
"Uhhh… Commander? I can't fly yet."
"I can take you to the top, if you want."
"And you're sending me why, exactly? After all, you can fly." As she said it, Alyssa tensed in preparation for the impending rebuttal.
Henrietta looked at Alyssa a bit skeptically, "Do you not want to go?"
"Well, I do. I was just surprised."
"My flight isn't good at endurance, and I need to land often. More often, when carrying a heavy load. But even in a best-case situation, I have to land to rest every ten minutes, so while I'm more nimble over short distances… you're the one with the class for it. And, if I do all the jobs that require rapid movement over rough terrain, your [Leafstep] won't level."
"I wasn't expecting an explanation, to be honest." 'Because I outrank you' was the most common reason given for orders for warden-types.
"I want to be better than them. We'll be here for a while, and Expeditions require us all to be at our best. I want you to understand why I'm having you do something, not just do it without question. Unless we're in a time-critical situation, I want you to be learning. Understood?"
"Yes, Commander," Alyssa acknowledged.
"Good. Now, let's go. Raise your arms."
Alyssa lifted her elbows, giving an easy enough time for Henrietta to summon and wrap the tooth-tongue's tongue around her torso. Like the cloth she'd made for them, it didn't feel wet, just cool, and very strong despite ostensibly looking more like a three-dimensional drawing of a tongue than even a tongue made out of ink.
Henrietta was fairly obviously struggling as the two of them rose into the sky, her wings beating so fast they practically hummed, but the two of them made it to the top just fine, albeit with a few breaks in the middle. Finally, they set down on the clifftop next to a few particularly tenacious trees sticking out over the edge. They got away from the immediate edge, and Henrietta sat down to catch her breath.
"Will you have any troubles getting back down?" Henrietta asked, once she'd found her voice.
Alyssa looked over the edge, gauging the craggy cliff below, and shook her head. "All the places we stopped are close enough together that [Leafstep] can get me down safely. It's still level one, so I probably trust it to absorb... a thirty foot fall before I start to feel anything?"
"Good. If you manage to find another way down, of course use that. The inkling will always know where I am, you can use it to find your way back if you get lost."
"I won't get lost," Alyssa replied, earning herself a skeptical look, but she was serious. One skill she was confident of was her ability to feel her own mana, basically no matter what class she had. If she had any Wood-based class, she could easily retrace her steps in this thick of a forest. Heck, feeling where she'd been recently was basically the only time the Air part of her mana sense did anything.
"If you're certain."
Alyssa didn't really know how to respond to that, but Henrietta shooed her from her seat on the ground. "Go on. No need to wait here for me."
Right!
Alyssa grabbed her spear – which was basically just a larger claw from the tooth-tongue stuck on the end of a stick – and leaped to her feet. "Yes Commander. Okay little inkling, which way?"
The construct flitted off into the forest, with Alyssa close behind, swiftly leaving the cliff and her commander behind.
The top of this particular… mountain, maybe? She didn't really understand the geography of the area. The top of the cliff was a bit less heavily-wooded than the forest below, but Alyssa, finally not waiting for anyone super slow – Oliver – was so fast that she often found herself waiting on the inkling, rather than the other way around.
She vaulted through the air, her [Leafstep] propelling her off a fallen log and over a small creek, landing on a mossy rock on the far side without so much as slipping. However, she did slip when the inkling suddenly banked and started flying upstream rather than to the other side as she'd expected. She didn't land too hard, thanks to a combination of [Leafstep] and catching herself with the aid of her spear, but she did get quite the shock up her spine as a result of her unplanned moment sitting.
Something that looked like a brown-furred snake coiled up on a rock next to her, regarding Alyssa with something resembling skepticism.
"Not one word to anyone," she warned it, then continued her run up the stream. Her skill really showed its value as she darted up loose rocks, giving her firm footing even on precariously-perched stones.
Dexterity only helped you with your personal bodily control, especially balance and fine motion. It didn't help any more than surface-level for rapid terrain movement, because sometimes it didn't matter how good your balance was if you accidentally stepped in a hole, or a branch broke underneath your weight. You'd need a skill – or some weird mix of Resistance or Strength and a ton of Aura – to keep yourself always having solid footing through stats alone.
A level 1 [Leafstep] wouldn't let her run across treetops, but it did make sure that loose rocks didn't immediately skitter out of the way as she tried to put any amount of pressure against them. Often just as relevantly, it made it way less likely for her to slip on any moss or loose leaves or branches. It may not have required a Wood-based surface, but it worked way better on them.
Even without leveling in mind, she would much rather have a good, useful skill than devote a ton of stat points into something that just didn't matter, anyway. Balance was so much better than specialization, and ten points in Dexterity as a base stat was such overkill. Four Dexterity was plenty for her purposes, because unlike whatever [Master Inkscribe] gave, she had a balanced body, with three or four in all five non-Aura physical stats. As it should be.
A small waterfall was coming up, and Alyssa moved closer to the edge of the creek, avoiding any rocks that might have been rendered extra slippery by the small spray being kicked up. She did so with ease, bounding between the stones and a twisted tree trunk to land atop the slight rise, only to skid to a halt as she came face-to-face with a wall of feathers she'd previously thought was just a rock.
It took everything she had to not crash headlong into the massive creature, her arms flailing and accidentally smacking the beast before her with her spear. Moving six limbs each the size of Alyssa's torso with frightening grace, it turned to face her, and Alyssa found herself looking eye-to-eye with it.
The first thing she saw were the metal – specifically greened copper – ridges around its head, which despite the fact the thing was easily twice as tall as Alyssa at the shoulder, its face was literally at head height. Pupil-less amber eyes over a snout that could best be described as a horse head crossed with a turtle stared into her soul, a drooping nose hanging off the side of the mouth. However, the entire face, droopy nose and all, were slightly recessed behind the copper ridges, making it look like it was wearing a helmet.
I'll call you a droopnose, Alyssa mutely thought as she backpedaled.
The droopnose seemed disinclined to let her escape, and though she jumped down the ten-ish feet to the ground beneath the waterfall, it followed right behind. In desperation, she struck out with her spear. Her instinctive strike ended up being remarkably accurate, and it struck the droopnose right in the eye, sneaking past the helmet-like protrusion with the surety of balanced stats and eliciting a bellow of pain so loud it caused some smaller pebbles to fall.
It shook its head violently, breaking the stick in half as it wrenched the spear from Alyssa's hands and flung half of it into the undergrowth nearby. The other half stayed lodged in the creature's face, and Alyssa wasted no time in jumping back over the creek and back up the waterfall as the droopnose recovered.
It got her a lot less time than she had hoped, and while she couldn't look behind her, the sound the massive beast made while it charged after her was unmistakable. She had maybe a few hundred feet of lead, but that was rapidly vanishing.
With the added pressure of a very angry creature chasing after her, the enjoyable stretching of her legs became substantially less free-spirited and much more life-or-death.
Where the heck did all the big trees go? She wondered. Yeah sure, the top of the cliff was a bit less forested, but it had still been fairly dense woodland. There should have been lots of places to duck off to escape a territorial and angry charging enormous creature, but it had become a light woodland at some point without her noticing, what trees there were in the area were scraggly and small things.
Still, she couldn't just keep running in a straight line, and she veered off to the side to try and shake the charging droopnose, which now sounded like it was just a dozen or two feet behind her after less than thirty seconds. The ground immediately hardened under her feet, and a pointed twig dug painfully into the bare sole of her foot. She just needed… there!
A rocky pillar, something like thirty feet off the ground, with a old and wizened-looking tree somehow growing at the top, just a few hundred feet away. Given how fast she'd lost her prior lead, she could only hope she was fast enough to make it.
It was close.
Too close, really. She'd actually ended up using the droopnose's own head as a springboard to get her halfway up the rock ledge, jumping off the copper crest it used as armor to grab a scraggly bush, swing herself over to a protruding ledge, and from there she was able to essentially run up the rock wall, her excellent balance of Strength and Dexterity making the vertical climb barely more difficult than a set of slightly-steep stairs.
Once she was at the top, Alyssa grabbed onto the tree with one hand and leaned over the edge, watching as the droopnose shuffled around, comically straining its neck just to look up. Now that she was safe, Alyssa could see that the entire thing was the size of an elephant, easily ten to fifteen feet tall, but its head was largely inset inside its torso, with its face in turn recessed into its head. Overall, it gave the impression of an enormous feathered tortoise with a head permanently retracted into its shell, save for the six massive and muscled limbs it used to get around.
"Well, you were worried about the herbivores," Alyssa muttered to herself.
Hopefully it would get bored before too long, and would give her a chance to leave soon. The pseudowyvern was perched in the tree above her, which made her wonder about just how intelligent it was. It was clearly able to know that it was supposed to wait around her and show her to where it had found other humans, but how did it know what that meant?
Now that she was just sitting out in the open with nothing to do, Alyssa found herself looking around a lot more at the place she'd found herself. The trees were a lot less common, as she'd already noticed, and this area was a fairly flat meadow with thick but short vines and bushes absolutely coating the ground. A few extremely colorful flowers hung from what few trees were around, filling the air with their cloyingly sweet scent and attracting all number of small birds and insects.
Now that she was aware of the insects, it was suddenly impossible for her to be aware of anything else. Massive flies buzzed around, some kind of ant-like rock creatures were swarming all over the tree she was next to – a discovery that had her swiftly releasing her grip on the tree itself – and on second glance, the tree itself was maybe part of the rock? It was definitely Wood, she could feel it with her magic, but it was just emerging from the pillar of stone she was perched on, its roots indistinguishable from the rock around them.
An absolutely enormous dragonfly swooped in from the sky, with a wingspan easily as wide as one of her arms, picked up something that reminded her of a rabbit from the ground, and flew off again with its prey squealing in its mandibles.
This place was wild. In every sense of the word.
------
Fortunately, the droopnose wandered off before Alyssa found herself too inundated with rock-ants. She'd had to flick a few off her feet, but they stuck primarily to the stone tree, which she assumed was their home in some form.
But with the droopnose shuffling and snuffling away, returning to the creek bed she'd found it at, Alyssa had the opportunity to sneak away, jumping down from the rocky pillar in a single bound, and following the inkling further uphill. How the heck had Jacob or Clark gotten this far inland? There was no way they could have washed ashore this far up a mountain.
….Or maybe they could.
Alyssa started as she crested a hill of grasses, and found herself at a beach. Waves lapped at a driftwood-laden shore, seabirds filled the air with their ceaseless cries, and most importantly, the pseudowyvern flitted over to where she saw a wisp of smoke arising.
Approaching the shore was something of a mind-bending scenario. She could see the ocean, and beyond that the sky, but as she got closer Alyssa realized that those two were a lot closer to one another than she'd expected. There was a few hundred feet of water, and then there was nothing but air beyond that.
Then she realized what was going on and her jaw dropped. There was a thick sheet of water clinging to the side of a sheer cliff, billions of gallons lifted above the ocean far below permanently, enough to create an entire beach ecosystem hundreds of feet above normal sea level, where she'd washed ashore.
Then she noticed her teammate.
"Alyssa!" Clark called out, waving wildly at her, "You made it! Do you like the view? This place is truly fantastic!"
"It's… something. Wow. I'm really confused though." Alyssa replied, probably too quietly for the man to hear her, and she bounded her way across the scattered driftwood towards his obvious campsite.
There was a hollow of sand underneath a massive sun-bleached tree trunk, a ring of stones surrounding a smoldering fire. What caught her eye was the fact there was obviously a setup for two people at the campsite, though.
"Did you also find Jacob?"
"He found me," Clark responded eagerly, "I was impressed that he could do so, but he can do a lot of really impressive things!"
"Yeah…" Alyssa shook her head, "Sorry, the beach is just breaking my brain a little bit."
"No, no! I get it, that sort of thing is wild when you see it for the first time. It's just so amazing, yeah?"
"So, where is Jacob now?"
"Oh, he went off to get some water. We found these coconut things that make as great drinking glasses, but the sea obviously can't be drunk so we take turns running off to fill them up in this stream nearby, while the other one waits here to see if Henrietta would come by."
Alyssa inclined her head, "Makes sense. She was the one who helped me find you." She pointed at the circling pseudowyvern. "Once Jacob gets back, we'll head back, Oliver is already waiting for us."
"Oh man, this is going to be so amazing, yeah? The five of us, all fighting off demon hordes and monstrous dragons, being heroes. We'll look so awesome, and epic, and amazing!"
Alyssa flinched. She really didn't want to be the one to break the news… so she wouldn't. That was Henrietta's job, to break bad news to the team. Definitely not hers.
"Mhm," she responded noncommittally, and did her best to hide her growing discomfort as Clark kept elucidating on how excited he was to be the knight in shining armor, swooping in and saving all of the people from the forces of darkness.
Fortunately, before the awkwardness could pile up too much - and at least he was wearing something, even if it was barely even a loincloth - Jacob returned. Like the rest of them, he had been de-aged to an unblemished body in its mid-twenties, and that he still carried himself like a grizzled and scarred war veteran would almost be amusing were it not for the deathly serious gaze he pierced her with. In one hand, he carried a pair of large round green things, and in the other he had a sword made of ice slung over his shoulder.
"Ranger Ride," he greeted her, "Good of you to join us. I presume you found Commander Inq?"
"Warrior Veeran. It is good to find you in good health. And yes, myself, Inq, and Smith have established a more permanent shelter, and I'll lead you there to regroup."
"More permanent?" Jacob caught, "Is there some reason we aren't immediately heading towards the nearest village?"
Alyssa winced. That was unintentional. "I think it's best if Commander Inq explains."
"Then lead the way, Ranger. It will be good for us to all be together at last."