He led us to our deaths. That was the only explanation Alex could think of as he lay there on the mushy ground. Why else would Cedric bring them here when he already knew what type of place this hellscape forest was?

Beneath a purple tree across from him, Alex’s gaze found the paladin of the crew standing impassively with his shield hanging from his arm. None of the monsters seemed to have their focus on him as of yet, though he doubted that would concern him even then. Alex searched Valerian’s face for something, trying to find what it took to do this, and couldn’t find it.

Yes, Cedric might, but Valerian wouldn’t. Alex thought himself a good judge of character, and the stolid man certainly didn’t seem the type to knife someone in the back.

Wouldn’t he? The doubt reared its head immediately. You don’t even know him. What if it was just a story that he met Cedric only a week ago? How could he know if Valerian hadn’t been part of Cedric’s former crew and was just playing a part here? He couldn’t.

And suddenly Alex wanted to scream at his naivety. Idiot! Absolute idiot! He had been wrong about people before, even the ones he thought were miles above mistrust, and there was no surer proof of betrayal than the feeling of a knife scraping at your spine.

As he felt it now.

The fear that had knotted his stomach before turned into something darker now, almost comic, and Cedric’s words echoed in his mind. What will you do now? The casualness of it irked him more than anything. I’ll fucking show him what.

His HP bar flashed faintly in his peripheral.

HP: 54.4/80

Two more whacks by Mister Tree and Alex was done. He was starting to realize that his per minute regeneration—which was very useful when he had a half hour to sit and rest—was meaningless when seconds counted.

The Deadwood was moving again, its lumbering steps producing a grating sound of wood scraping wood. The fact that a monster as bumbling and noisy as this had snuck up on him was as embarrassing as it was concerning. He needed to find a way to improve his awareness, but of course this shitty game didn’t have a perception attribute.

Pushing past the stabbing pain on his side, Alex jumped to his feet. His eyes flit across the area, searching. Diana still struggled against the vines half-way down the slope—for a breath now as well as to get herself free—and Daven was just now starting to rise from his knees.

The thought of helping them did cross his mind, Alex swore that it did, but life sometimes was much like an emergency in an airplane. You must save yourself first, always. Then, time permitting, you try to save the toddler sitting beside you whose mother already died of shock during that first round of turbulence.

That is, if the kid hadn’t been crying during the whole flight, of course. And Alex could draw a lot of parallels between Daven and an annoying toddler.

It was only to stop the nagging voice at the back of his mind that he promised himself he’d help them after taking care of the Deadwood, if nothing else then for the EXP it would provide.

Mister Tree was on top of him then, hollow eyes promising hurt. A drop of its sap dropped from those eyes to the ground, and the leaves there sizzled and crumbled. Odor as toxic as off-brand bleach rose into the air. The Deadwood reared and swung its branch-arm as if to backhand him.

Alex jumped to the side and tucked, rolling beneath the blow. A swish of air passed overhead, tickling the hairs on the back of his neck. It was a better roll than he’d ever done, even on a proper mat. It would have been perfect had a protruding root not jabbed him in the back.

He hissed, coming up from the roll all crooked and wrong, but forced himself to jump again when the branch was brought down over him like a giant whip. The Deadwood’s arm smashed against the earth, flinging detritus everywhere.

Muck and clumps of mushy leaves splattered over him as he slid to a stop off to the side of where the crew had been walking. A broad tree tainted purple blocked most of his vision, and he heard more than saw fighting going on below him: the distinct whiz of one of Diana’s air blades, the high keen of the Flesh Flower, and a string of curses whose creativity betrayed its speaker.

It seemed those two had finally decided to do something.

Alex ignored it all. With the power already filling him, he launched a fireball at the center mass of the Deadwood stalking toward him. The flames roared out of his hand, orange light carving a path through the purple dimness.

The monster was too slow to dodge. There was a flash and a boom as the fireball exploded on contact. Smoke rose, gray and acrid, and Alex saw log-like legs stumbling back before they were covered by the smoke too.

For a moment he thought it was over. Only for a moment—as in the next, the Deadwood emerged through the blanket of smoke, its stride as certain as they’d been a minute before. It seemed unhurt, the bark of its face only slightly black and charred. Its jagged mouth opened and closed, clacking against each other. Smoke plumed out of the emptiness inside like a chimney.

Alex’s jaw hung open. It was laughing at him. This discount Treant is making fun of me.

His temper flared. Flinging his hands out, he tried again, another fireball followed by two flaming arrows and a concentrated stream of fire. Heat washed over the area. Flames spat and crackled through the air as Alex kept on the onslaught uninterrupted. His MP dipped after each trace, but he had enough to spare.

The fire rushed out of his hands like they were mini flamethrowers, and he only stopped when the whole monster was cloaked in smoke. There was a moment of silence there as he panted, heart pounding inside his chest. He barely felt the pain in his ribs anymore, until he coughed from inhaling the bitter smoke and had to clutch his side. Fuck. That hurt alright.

Then he heard it. Clack, clack, clack. The slow cadence of the laugh was almost mocking. It made Alex’s teeth grind.

Still laughing, the Deadwood lumbered forward through the smoke like the undertaker rising from the dead. The whole front of the beast was blackened and scorched, but it stood strong as only an oak-on-legs could. The beast’s mouth was fixed in a cruel rictus.

Two steps and its long arm was already swinging. The reach in each blow was massive and Alex had to retreat again, dodging in the face of overwhelming strength. Each strike drove him further back, each strong enough to crack him like an egg if it hit.

Ducking behind a tree, he slipped in the slush and almost tripped when his ankle caught on a root. No, not a root. Alex looked down. Daven’s longbow lay beneath him, almost entirely covered by the undergrowth. He stopped cold, unsure of what to do.

The crash of the Deadwood’s arm against the side of the trunk decided for him. The whole tree shook with the force, wood groaning, cracking, leaves and needles raining down on him. He bolted. But not before snatching up the bow on his way. He scrambled to the other side of the tree just as Mister Tree slammed the spot he stood a second before. Sprinting away, he didn’t look back.

Instead, he looked toward the fighting he’d heard. A quick glance showed Daven trying to reach his sister—who apparently had been able to cut through the vines holding her down and was peppering the Flesh Flower with wind blades and rock slides—only to get clipped on the side by another ramming of a Spring Rabbit.

“Daven!” Alex called. Without waiting for a response, he launched the longbow his way before turning back to face the Deadwood. There—he’d helped them. More than he had to, even, but now it was past time he put an end to the Deadwood. It had thrown him around long enough.

The lumbering beast was like an unstoppable titan as it pushed off the tree Alex had been hiding behind and strode toward him, each step so heavy it left deep ruts in the forest floor. The stench of the thing had only gotten worse with the burns, a sickening mixture of rot and melted tar that emanated from it like an aura.

He didn’t bother attacking the Deadwood again. It was clear it had some form of fire resistance in its outer bark. None of his attacks had worked beyond repainting the fake Treant a little darker. And not for free either—his MP bar that had paid the price.

Still, he let the power spread through him. Heat suffused every cell in his body before he stopped it there, just a thought away from boiling over. Alex let his breathing settle as he faced the Deadwood coming toward him. He wouldn’t be able to outmuscle the monster. That was its game. Slow, heavy. Simple.

He couldn’t beat it with power alone. He had to be quick. Slippery. But more importantly, clever.

The page popped open in front of his eyes.

[Attributes]

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 10 (+2)

Vitality: 8

Power: 13

Soul Affinity: 13

Free Points: 0 (-2)

His build might suffer for this, but that didn’t matter if he didn’t live to see it. And to do that, sacrifices had to be made. So he shrugged off his precious jacket, grabbed it by the collar and wrent it in half, then wrapped the cloth around his hands, covering them like oven mitts.

He was due a new coat anyway.

Without waiting for the Deadwood to approach him, to come at him on its own terms, Alex exploded toward the monster. No feeling confirmed the changes he made. He didn’t uncoil like a spring, nor did his eyes feel sharper by any indication.

But when the tree monster swung at him, the gnarled wooden joints of its branch-arm creaking, Alex went low, under the blow, and into the guard of the Deadwood.

Time seemed to slow as he rose from a crouch and came face to face with his enemy. Human eyes met hollow wooden cracks, inches apart. The smell this close almost made him retch. Musty and toxic. The Deadwood—big, hulking fella that it was—had no range of motion small enough to hurt him there. It tried to gain distance, reeling back.

He wouldn’t let it. Alex grabbed on to its sides, fingers digging into the peeled and scorched bark. A low grumble escaped the empty pit that was the Deadwood’s mouth.

It was no longer laughing. Good.

Black sap leaked out of its eyes, forming deep grooves on the corroded wooden skin until it pooled at the mouth.That was his target.

With his mitts on, he thrust both his hands into the mouth of the Deadwood, gripping sharp wooden teeth. The monster tried to clack the jagged things close, to rip apart his fingers, but Alex kept it open, pulling the jaws apart like he was holding onto a lion. The sap soaked the jacket, singed and withered the outer layer, but it couldn’t get to skin.

Alex’s mouth opened in tandem with the Deadwood's. There, deep in the cavern of his throat, a blaze lit up. The outer bark had not budged under his fire, so he would simply have to try the innards.

He had never tried this, but it wasn’t some complicated thing. The power felt like a rush of heat same as when he did it with his hands. His fire wouldn’t burn him, he’d known that for a while now. And if it worked for the rest of his body, then there was no reason he couldn’t become a dragon.

Take this, you rheumy piece of shit. Then the flames came, spitting and crackling, spouting like a watercannon out of his mouth and into the hollow of the Deadwood.

Alex swore he saw the cracky eyes of the monster widen for a second, before the whole thing burst into flames from the inside. The conflagration took so violently that he couldn't keep the stream of fire for long and stumbled back, covering his face from the hot breath of the Deadwood.

It seemed the fire could burn him easily enough once it was no longer under his control.

The Deadwood had a moment of confusion as Alex slipped out of its reach, ducking beneath its flailing arms, before it tried swinging for him again. It tried. The monster broke into tiny panes of black glass before it could take a single step. The fire blinked out with its kindling like a phoenix folding into itself.

Alex was left standing there, panting for breaths that stung his nose. His heart rattled the inside of his ribcage. Each heartbeat a dagger of pain. The inside of his forearms was covered with grazes and splinters. There was mud on his face, cold as warpaint. A drop of sap had leaked through the jacket, leaving a coin-sized burn on the outside of his hand. He hadn’t noticed until now.

Someone was laughing around him, too, a strange, manic thing. It was only when he felt a hand on his shoulder that he realized it was his own. I’ve gone mad. The laughter stopped. He shrugged off Valerian's hand as the white adrenaline ebbed away, replaced by a colder sort of thrill. But damn me if that didn’t feel good.

Valerian didn’t try to hold him back as he stepped away. Truth was, Alex wasn’t even angry anymore. As he saw the two experienced Chasers observing the siblings down the slope, he realized what this had been. A test, of some kind. A sick test, but he had just fought a mini Treant in a twisted twilight forest. This was a sick world.

Shouting curses, Daven was madly clubbing the Spring Rabbit beneath him with his bow like it was a baby seal. It took three more wet squelches and the monster broke apart. When his next strike hit air, the archer tumbled forward into the dirt. It seemed he’d found his mortal nemesis as Alex had with the Wild Boars.

Beyond him, near the bottom of the decline, Diana sat on a craggy root catching her breath. Her braid had come undone and a mane of red hair tumbled down onto her shoulders. The ground in front of her was torn and gouged like a no-man’s-land. Where the Flesh Flower once stood, the earth bulged and jutted out in lances, and the trees surrounding the spot bled sap from long gashes.

The three of them had passed.