Nic soared through the checkpoint around the dungeon’s exit. He crashed in on a wave of sand, firing off a spare flame talisman to make the tents around the swirling portal erupt into blazes. The news of his escapades in the larger camp must have already arrived before him- because the humans flinched back at the sight of Nic.

One soldier - a young man with red hair and a badly scarred lip - reached the axe on his belt, lifting a round shield.

Another, older guard put his hand out and stopped the boy.

Nic waved cheerily to the pair as he waltzed through the portal.

And into fresh-

Sweet-

Forest-scented air.

The world was alive. The air was full of moisture, cool and cold against his skin. Green life expanded up from black soil and spread its arms over the sky, covering the blue-white expanse in a canopy of leaves. Nic sighed and relished the taste of pine. His skin had adapted somewhat to the heat of the desert, but it would never be home. Another deep breath brought him the scents of burning charcoal from cookfires, roasting stew, flowers growing in the undergrowth, black loamy earth and damp summer rain.

As he stood there, relishing the living world before him, people were screaming, grabbing weapons, moving away from the little pink devil who stood in their midst with his head turned towards the sky.

Reluctantly, Nic drew his axe and cracked his neck. On his shoulder, Inkspur bellowed, “PUT DOWN YOUR ARMS. Your best have tried and failed. We won’t harm you, so long as you STEP ASIDE. There’s no need to waste your lives trying to scratch a TINY GOD.”

Archers took aim at him from wooden fortifications surrounding the portal exit in a v-shaped formation, and Nic was ready to summon the shield from the Plates of the Sun God. He would only need to kill a few to break through, and they seriously overestimated how long their barriers of sharpened wooden stakes would hold him back.

But it didn’t come to that.

One of the camp leaders stepped forward. He was a young man with dark skin and a shaved head, a perfectly trimmed triangle of tight black curls on his chin. Dogtags hung around his neck, out of place against the smooth leather jacket with rounded studs he wore for armor.

“We’re not going to fight you, if you don’t want to fight.” His hands were empty and he held them out to show it. “But we are curious what on earth you are, or why you tore up an entire camp.”

Nic frowned. “Did they tell you they were keeping elves in cages? To kill like cattle.” His words were relayed through Inkspur, who crowed them out through the basecamp.

Judging by the flinch and horror the words brought from the crowd- no.

But the leaders’ face didn’t shift more than a twitch. He had known. “Yeah, yeah I’ve heard some bad stuff is going on there. But I chose not to start a fight over it. Not now. Nobody knows what’s happening now, and we’ve all got to close ranks.”

He was speaking over Nic. Trying to assure the people around him.

“And the people there were losing their minds. Somebody in camp was going around using one of those new Shards you’ve all gotten to turn people into puppets.” Nic enjoyed the genuine surprise on the man’s face. It was a twist of the knife - and it hurt good. “Did you hear that?”

Because now people were second-guessing. Now the threat wasn’t to some elves that had strolled out of another world into their own- it was to them.

“No. No that one got by me.” The man said.

And precisely nobody believed him. After all, he’d admitted to knowing one bad thing they’d all been in the dark about. Now his credibility and his control were spiraling.

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got a handle on things then, huh?” Nic grinned his cockiest grin, and stepped forward.

The archers didn’t fire.

Step by step, he made his way up and out of the little camp surrounding the dungeon portal, walking past tents were people stared out in confusion and fear at the monster who talked like a human. He passed a crude wooden idol of Pathos draped in flowers with horns and teeth laid under her shadow. A girl wearing a crown of flowers stared for a moment- and stepped into his path.

“Do you follow the Twin Gods?” She demanded. She was the first human to get in his way, and she was armed with nothing more than a walking stick.

“Who? Pathos and Logos?” Nic paused. Did he follow them? The question had been simple, back in d23. Of course he had followed the scriptures and paid his respects at the temples.

His world was their world.

This one was different. It belonged to a people who wanted nothing to do with the System, except for the few mad souls who thrived in it. It was being destroyed by Pathos and Logos, who felt no obligation to their own holy words.

And yet the girl’s eyes were blazing brightly with belief.

“I don’t know.” He admitted. “Why, what does it matter?”

“Because.” She almost hissed. “We’re finally seeing the plan for this world. What our land was meant to be. What our purpose in life is. Isn’t that wonderful? Not to be wandering the dust looking for meaning? To have a reason to stand as one people.”

Nic was actually taken aback. This girl was deeply, fanatically crazy.

“You talk like a human. But do you have a place with us, in the Twin Gods’ plans?”

His scowl intensified as she reached for his arm, and he slapped her hand away. “Oh I do. But I don’t like what’s in store and neither will you, so you can stay out of my way, and leave us monsters out of your cultist shit.”

“Nicolas…” Sofia warned.

But he was already striding forward, making his way out of the camp before someone changed their minds and tried for the bounty. As he reached the edge of the forest he dropped to all fours and began to slither at top speed, wanting to throw off any pursuers coming to claim the price on his head. He skittered up and tree and waited.

Sure enough, a moving veil of shadows shifted through the trees.

Nic didn’t hesitate. He dropped, axe in hand, and swung for where the neck should have been within the blurring field of darkness. There was a brutal impact and a head rolled across the floor, the shadows dissolving into nothing.

He flicked open his cultivation map to see the bounty had indeed hiked up by an additional five hundred.

Closing the notification, he dug out his knife and pried away the would-be hunter’s sole shard. It was a pitch black star of midnight points. He had to suspect that someone as weak as this wasn’t acting on their own, but probably just trying to scout him back to his lair. The real threat would have arrived in the dead of night and tried to catch him asleep.

Tucking the shard away, Nic continued deeper into the forest. Heading towards the silhouette of the massive tree where Nylea made her home.

---

It took returning to his old stomping grounds for Nic to realize how far he’d come.

The jungle was a fundamentally different place than the desert. His danger sense was on constant alert, picking up venomous, spiny insects crawling in the trees, predators moving across the branches above, sweet and poisonous fruits begging to be plucked. He actually considered turning the skill off, starting to feel nauseous from the sheer number of threats it read in the close-packed bounds of the forest.

The earth was rich with low-level treasures. Flowers that cured headaches, small herbs that could soothe exhaustion, minty-smelling patches of briar that were good for minor scrapes. A magic infused everything, and the trees glowed with the pale blue lumenarch flowers that gave the forest its name.

The urge to use Archive Recall on everything was strong.

Small squirrel-like creatures with metallic red fur spotted by emerald patches rushed along the trees. They had feathers underneath their arms and could leap from branch to branch by pushing off with their powerful tails.

A stream Nic passed over was full of small, translucent creatures like tiny humans. They giggled and rushed away, melding into the water and slipping through Nic’s fingers as he made a curious grab for one. They reappeared sitting on the skull of a vast boar, which stood in the center of the river, waving and laughing at him.

He declined to chase them.

Something had killed the boar, after all.

He travelled further and further into the dark of the woods, enjoying the hum of life and activity all around him. Eating small bright berries from the bushes and avoiding the ones that hosted poisonous snails that would eat him right back from the inside out.

That was when his danger sense lifted from an ambient whine of different points of danger to a single, consuming threat, moving at him from beneath.

His cultivation rotated into his legs and he kicked backwards as the earth erupted. A whole segment of the forest floor was actually a thin bed of leaves laid over a doorway made of rigid spun spiderwebs. A false ground, covering a deep pit.

As the door was lifted up by spidery black legs, a flash of insidious purple light filled the air and tendrils of dark energy pierced into Nic’s skull. It was a mental attack- but one that barely even phased him. He simply pushed his cultivation to burn bright and reject the energies trying to worm into him.

A spray of bone-white needles shot for Nic. He shifted aside and they thudded into a nearby tree trunk instead.

Already, the trapdoor spider was beginning to regret its choice of prey. The door began to hurriedly close back up, but Nic ran and dropped into a slide, hurtling down into the pit like a missile. His axe swung and cleaved through the leg holding up the door, and he dropped into the dark.

Huge legs covered in incredibly sharp bone stabbed down at him. The beast was covered in armor made of ossified tissue, the bones from dozens of prey animals woven together. It slammed the bladed tips of its legs at Nic’s skull-

But Nic was simply faster.

The first blow was deflected by his axe, and he slipped up the walls of the circular tunnel to dodge the flailing legs. A drop from above. A swing of his axe.

He cleaved open the spider’s skull like butter.

The whole thing had taken maybe three breaths from start to finish. At every moment he had simply been faster, stronger, better equipped for the battle than the unlucky creature who’d tried to ambush him; from the first move it had been unable to leave a single scratch on him.

It was becoming clear how deep the gulf between Dungeon monsters and the ones outside really was. After a few days hunting the former, the latter felt like child’s play.

Nic emerged from beneath the trap door hauling the carcass of the enormous spider, and squatted down to start extracting the meat, Shards, and poison from the corpse.

It was going to be a good hunt.