[ Mom is still away on her trip, and Marlene got some letter from James and disappeared. I ended up venting to Mark yesterday, just to have someone to vent to. The man has some incredible beer, but he's not exactly the best to talk with. Maybe I should just try dating again? The big question is whether that would make things less lonely - or more. So, yeah. Missing you today, dad. ]

+ Reid +

He closed his eyes, and savored the taste as fire-roasted Guinea Pig meat dusted with a crushed pill practically melted in his mouth. He'd been eating Pippin for every meal the last 5 days, and it still wasn't getting old. The meat just had a different texture and flavor to it that the turtle and the mole king lacked. It was fatty, and some spots even had decent marbling. The cuts from the shoulders were different in composition and taste than the ones from the belly, and the organs he'd grabbed to consume were different than the flesh itself.

His little post-fight nap had turned into a two-day snooze, and despite his best efforts to scrub himself clean, Reid could still smell gourd on himself. Nyx had woken up soon after, unsurprisingly resting after she'd helped Reid's in-Lysander recovery go more smoothly. He appreciated that quite a bit - suffocating inside a dead beast was a bad way to die.

Instead of hauling off to the next location at top speed, Reid made himself keep to a less strenuous, and more balanced schedule.

He woke, and did a light sprint towards his destination from the quiet morning hours, until the sun started to hang high in the sky. That was his cue to find a good spot to stop. He'd do a small amount of self affixation, in minor waves. Progress felt slower, but Reid was finding that working within himself for 30 minutes at a time, then resting for an hour allowed him to spend the whole afternoon and into the evening performing his self-affixation without causing himself backlash. He'd even had enough energy to unlock a new message from Sara.

It was far removed from the hours-on, hours-off style of affixation he'd gotten used to. In some ways, it was worse. But he had enough juice left at the end of everything that he could get a full few hours of sleep, and be good to go again the next morning. No matter how slow it felt, the gains stacked and built into real, hard progress.

Constitution: 310 -> 338 Dexterity: 260 -> 281 Intelligence: 187 -> 210 Perception: 202 -> 261 Power: 315 -> 325

As he finished his meal, Reid downed a water, and double checked his equipment. Everything was in its right place, and he was ready. He had a sense that the next beast lord was close, and the forest itself seemed more ominous. Branches and leaf coverage was thicker, which let less light through to the ground. It wasn't silent, but far less noisy than the forest should be in this area. The bird calls, the cries of Tamrids, and even the grunts and bellows of the larger mammals were so infrequent that each felt surprising and significant.

Reid knew he could've taken more time to self-affix. His gains weren't taking him to the limits of his potential - but he pushed himself forward anyway. At some point soon, he'd stop leveling quite so easily, and his stats would catch back up with his cap. It was a good, balanced plan.

His feet carried him forward, snapping twigs and crunching leaves into the ground.

The trees themselves shifted in color the further he walked, and Reid noticed more gnarled and crooked branches. He caught a glimpse of a tamrid, climbing through branches with unnatural and twitching movements of its arms.

What if this creature was powerful enough to scare off everything else?

The thought drifted over him like a scent on the breeze.

What if it's too much for me to handle?

The next idea was punctuated by a sudden chorus of screeches, howls, and bays.

Reid frowned.

He had fought salamanders. There wasn't anything in this tutorial that was going to be as bad as that had been, so he sure as hell wasn't scared of the next beast lord. He was maybe apprehensive about what the final one would be capable of, but he was also excited about the prospect of an intense fight. This contest, with his equipment readied and his stats raised and somewhat balanced, was something Reid was looking forward to.

I should leave this forest. If only I knew the way back.

Another lie drifted over Reid - but this time, he focused harder on it. The sensation, the momentum of it. This thought had appeared, and then dissipated - like mist rising, swept by wind. Reid stopped his walk, closed his eyes, and focused.

No one would ever find me out here.

The mist returned - seeping into him nearly unchallenged and unchanged. It lingered for moments before it disappeared. But he'd seen more of it. There was energy there - and some form of structure. The energy and structure tried to entice his own to mirror the shape - like a series of edges that, if sharpened, would cut you when you touched them. He imagined that, to someone more easily swayed, those things would build in their mental space until resisting the ideas became painful and truly difficult. He was not enthused by the idea of what the thing was trying to do to him - and he was also getting a vague sense of origin. Reid adjusted his focus within himself, and waited for the next attempt.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Maybe it would be better if they didn't look for me at all.

There.

The mist itself was a cloud of magic - subtle and sparse, delicate in ways Reid hadn't seen before. Direct attacks, healing, buffs, and even the odd manipulations in the mole's earthquakes and the guinea pig's gravity manipulation were all powerful and purposeful in their own right. The mist was magic trying to hide its nature - built to blend in and get ignored. Less of a punch, and more of a nudge. It gave him more of an idea on where the magic had come from, and Reid set off.

I should turn around.

Reid upped his jog into a sprint. The mist from that one had more structure to it - it tried harder to get his mind to create the sharp edges, and lingered longer. He slightly adjusted his direction to meet the origin.

I don't want to fight a beast lord alone.

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and Reid changed his gait so he could hold Requiem in both hands.

STOP!!

The last attempt wasn't mist - but denser magic. Reid felt it prick at his ethereal self - followed by a groan that rumbled out ahead of him. He was close now - and this beast had screwed up by poking him too hard. Hard enough for his resistances to kick in. Reid made a mental note to ask Nyx how the thing's magic had gotten through at all, and sprinted.

A Tamrid appeared out of nowhere from his right, and slammed itself into Reid's armor. The weaker creature fractured its own skull and dropped dead from the impact.

A deer-like mammal flew in from Reid's back as he stared at the dead Tamrid, hooves raised to strike. A halfhearted blow from Requiem obliterated everything above its shoulders. Reid's momentum slowed, but didn't stop. The few creatures in this section of the forest all brought themselves to him.

A trail of dead, lower-leveled beasts ran from the initial Tamrid, all the way to a small clearing in the woods. Light filtered in here, beams stretched from canopy to ground that were more like a painting of a forest than reality. Moss covered most of the area, and had started to climb up a few of the large, smooth stones that littered the ground.

At the center of the space stood a stout old tree, devoid of all but a few leaves.

Elder Drus, lvl 43

The beast lord's body groaned as it flexed branches, and lifted itself up on thick roots. A section of bark on the trunk shifted into a skewed face. The mouth was low, and eyes were offset in a steep diagonal. Its open maw revealed jagged bits of wood - and the smell of rotting meat wafted forth.

Reid rolled his shoulders, and grabbed Brock from its socket. He pushed power into his arm.

"Branching Terror my ass. You're just a tree with tricks."

A root groaned as the Drus lifted one of the smooth stones and hurled it towards Reid with deceptive speed. Trees weren't supposed to be fast, right?

He sidestepped the projectile, then let loose his own. It shattered against a raised limb that intercepted it - only for the shards to pepper exposed roots and branches around the point of impact. The tree screeched in pain - a high pitched, warbling noise that it repeated a second later when it tried to attack Reid's mind.

More rocks flew. Reid kept Requiem in his right hand and cracked branches as he resummoned Brock in his left. The tree had enough appendages between the branches and roots that it was hard to pin down. But it was manageable with Reid setting the pace. He dodged another rock, slammed his mace into more reaching branches, and threw another shrapnel brock.

Bark and woodchips built up on the ground as they continued. The beast roared in frustration when it finally managed to hit Reid properly - only to have its branches stopped by Reid's armor. It had been tough enough to leave a gouge, but not enough to threaten Marrow's integrity. Reid repaid that strike by snapping the limb off.

The Drus tried to attack Reid with more mental magic, but it was rebuffed. It attempted to brush him back and retreat, but Reid didn't let it. It called two more creatures in - grey, panther-like things he hadn't actually seen before, but both of those were still just G-grade animals to him, and they were barely recognizable after Requiem hit them. The number of limbs and roots dwindled. The fight edged closer to the main body of the Drus. Wounds and broken branches started to bleed with a saplike substance. More wounds accumulated, and the creature's movements slowed.

Reid started to get hits in on the thing's main body. Despite his resistances, he could feel hard and sharp emotions swirling around the creature. It exuded anger and frustration and malice in tangible form. Unfortunately for the tree, Reid was the only other thing anywhere close to it, so any impact the ire had only served to empower his swings.

Still, the Drus fought on to the bitter end. Even after all of its branches were severed, it lashed out with the last bits of its roots. When those were no more, it tried to bite Reid with its jagged mouth. It even succeeded at one point, and Reid had to pull a long wooden tooth out of his leg. He didn't get a kill notification until he'd used requiem to smash the creature completely in half.

You have defeated Beast Lord, Branching Terror [Elder Drus] - lvl 43. Experience Awarded (+400,000 xp) (+120,000 xp)

Panting, speckled with the thing's sap-blood and looking like he'd just come out of a woodworking class, Reid slumped against a non-sentient tree and downed a water. He spared a quick glance at his level as he caught his breath.

Experience: 17,263,001 / 26,214,200 -> 37,783,000 / 52,428,800 Level: 44 -> 45 Control: 530 -> 550

"Nyx, that was a pretty fucked up beast lord."

"First, good fight. Second, are you ever going to stop ignoring your notifications? And third - just imagine the impact if you had a bunch of people with you."

He considered it - her third point, at least. "Regular people would've needed a large, coordinated force for the guinea pigs - and then having that same large force against this one would've ended with a bunch of people freaking out."

"Or outright killing one another, yes... So, I suppose you wanted to ask why it was able to get thoughts to you?" Reid nodded. "The simple answer is the nature of the magic being used. But I'm not going to go farther than a simple answer right now. Pretty sure I'd get restricted - and it might be better for you to figure it out on your own. You good with that?"

Reid rolled a sore shoulder. "Sure. Different kind of challenge sounds nice." He stood, stretched, and eyed the carcass of the tree. It didn't look like it would be usable for much in the way of carving -there were too many burls, and every piece was curved or broken. With the sap - he couldn't even use the stuff for kindling. Or, more accurately - he didn't want to figure out if inhaling burnt sap was a bad thing.

A bit disappointed in not getting anything edible or physically useful out of the fight, Reid finally opened his notifications.

"Oh, SHIT."

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