I reached up with one hand and shoved a folded piece of jerky into my mouth with the other. Turns out blood production was almost as hungry a business as climbing. Add the two together and you get something truly ravenous.

I kept climbing as I chewed. I just didn’t have the time to waste stopping every time I got peckish. I could only curse the fates that the boost didn’t kick in with the same speed as the hunger and wonder at why it was this intense. A bit of extra blood wasn’t that calorie intensive, surely?

It didn’t take that long to figure out. I’d made the adjustment manually, so I must have bypassed whatever natural processes the body had to manage growth speed. Fair enough, I would have done that on purpose if I’d known how too. The real lesson was my own ignorance. This time it had cost me nothing, but I couldn’t afford to risk anything more drastic than increased blood production without a better understanding of how my guts worked.

It made me miss my Mom’s guidance more than ever.

I resolved to steal a book instead. The written word was a poor substitute for a teacher, but Mom had to have gained her knowledge from somewhere and I was hardly about to stroll into university and take a seat.

I swallowed the soggy lump of jerky as I looked up. I narrowed my eyes. It was getting louder.

For a few minutes now I’d been hearing a faint scraping. It had freaked me out at first, tales of Knockers and gnarlwranglers flooding my mind, but after a few frantic seconds of flicking my ears about and bobbing my head I knew better. It was faint not from the eldritch machinations of fae spirits, but simple distance, and that made it future me’s problem to deal with.

Unfortunately, future me was now just me. I sighed and shifted my climb to a rough forty degree angle. I still had a few hundred meters left before I reached it, so that should let me pass it at a safe distance.

The sound strengthened far slower from then on. That was very much a positive. I wasn’t headed straight for it anymore, so any change would have meant it was moving.

Needless to say, that would have been a problem.

As it was I was still coming to realise that the sound was maybe a bit bigger than I had initially assumed. Triangulation was enough to tell me roughly how far it was, but I’d failed to account for the muffling effect of the intervening foliage.

But now that said foliage was fading away beneath my feet the sound was getting louder and louder at a surprising pace. The faint scratching of before deepened to the rasping crack of breaking wood.

I shifted to a shallower angle. Anything with the strength to make noises like that was worth avoiding by more than just a little. My new path would steer well clear of it.

As the sound gradually transitioned from above to beside me it became a bit more familiar. It was really quite reminiscent of a bear clawing its way into a beehive.

This comparison failed to reassure me.

Neither did finally catching a glimpse of the beast. The foliage had started thinning out to my left and I could see its wedge shaped head was as large as four horses alone, let alone the massive claws that clung to the edges of the hole they’d clawed into the bark. Its narrow head dipped in and out as if seeking out some manner of prey.

I shuddered in sympathetic horror. A beast like that… no hidey-hole could possibly be safe, and the heavy scales made fighting back an equally futile task. Each was as large as a shield, and contrary to the legends, hacking through something like that was hardly practical in combat.

The only real defense was not to fight at all. Conveniently, that was my default response.

I moved more than a little faster after that, but I couldn’t resist the odd look back. A beast like that was a rare sight indeed, and inspired a certain dread fascination. I was just barely still in sight when it's efforts finally bore fruit.

Wriggling, struggling, fruit. It sucked in a tongue resembling nothing so much as a pink tentacle and took in dozens of the poor bastards with it. The little black blobs coated most of its length.

Wait…

I held up one hand with the fingers together and thumb out, squinting as I gauged the scale. Fuck. Yeah, that tongue was wide around as a pine. A normal one, not like anything that would grow here. But going off that, the ants would be just about as big as I was.

That was not a fact I was comfortable with. Honestly, that just made it fit in with most other facts, but I forced myself to move a bit faster anyway.

I began to slow after only a few minutes of maintaining my blistering pace, but I kept moving a fair bit faster than normal for far longer. Even as my body began to wear out my lungs and throat never hit the point of burning with exertion.

I indulged in a good snicker. Too hostile for a proper cackling, but it would do. It had taken most of the day, but my new and improved blood had finally made itself known.

Ironic, considering how humans might call me a mixed-blood mongrel, but having another thing to throw in their faces was just icing on the cake.

I slept in another temporary nook, waking early and getting a quick start. The massive ant-eating beast might be the perfect embodiment of the flaws inherent to static defenses, but it was a lesson I’d learned before. Evasion was the only impregnable defense.

So I forced my aching muscles to get back to work, moving for four hours and sleeping for two before I moved on again. I ate on the climb, with no established meals I wouldn’t have to abandon more than a handful of food, even if forced to flee mid-bite. It was a demanding pattern, but one that ensured I couldn’t easily be caught with my pants down.

Slowly, painfully, I climbed ever closer to the top. The canopy dominated the sky above, with branches massive enough to be proportional to the titan they grew on. They arched like buttresses to support the weight of dirt and wood bearing down from above.

As the pillar-tree’s true branches got closer the smaller branches that formed its easily scalable vertical jungle began to die out. As the hops from branch to branch grew longer I was forced to return to the bark to get from one cluster of jungle to another.

But as I climbed further out along the branch to get a better look and plot out my route it became clear that couldn’t last much longer. My path had carried me up and around to the water again. With the bare bark replaced by an unstoppable waterfall that could easily sweep me to my death even the most daring of climbing wasn’t going to get me from one outcropping to the next.

I needed a new solution. I hunkered down amid some leaves and let my camouflage hide me as I looked over the expanse above me. The first of the true branches jutted out like mountain foothills on either side, with the trunk forming the valley in between. That valley was tragically barren, with virtually no smaller branches to be seen.

Worse still, it was a river valley. This channel might not have been carved from the rock by the water itself, but the contained flow was no less furious for it. With the trees titanic limbs boxing it in on either side the water had no choice but to accelerate, forming rapids that made the mere crushing weight of the water elsewhere look tame.

_

No wonder the little branches died out. I wouldn’t want to grow there either. Hells, I didn’t want to cross it. I still couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to get around it. I could squint and curse all I wanted, but that wouldn’t let me see through the spray thrown up by the contained water, especially not where it was strongest, right against the branch.

The only way to know if the other side was any more navigable was to get up there and see.

I sighed. This was going to take a while.

Making rope was one of those things that could be quietly meditative in a friendly environment, and exhaustively tense in any other one. The smooth and repetitive motion of weaving fibers together could be relaxing, but that was exactly what made it terrifying. Lulling yourself into a false sense of security wasn’t among the most painful ways to die, but it was certainly one of the most embarrassing.

The toughness of the materials I had to work with wasn’t making things any easier, although that helped in its own way. The fear of my blade bouncing off the wood and into my face was exactly what I needed to stay awake. The vines I was harvesting weren’t the strongest, but countless generations in the mana-dense dungeon air would make anything tough enough.

That was really the only reason this wasn’t going to take forever. Not only was half the work already done for me when I started with vines instead of loose fibers, but I didn’t even need to braid them all that thickly to get something capable of standing up to what I’d subject it too.

I climbed from branch to branch slowly now, taking the time to strip off the better vines before I moved on. I braided as I went, looping the slack over my shoulder and under the other armpit when it grew past a manageable length. Soon the newly made rope was longer than any individual vine and weighing me down more than my layered rags.

I paused and put one hand on each end of the loop before holding them up in front of me with the same spread.. I’d put it at maybe a foot and a half. Throw in… I thumbed through the windings of the rope, times a dozen for the repetitions, that made…

I made a quick check for predators, then went back to counting on my fingers. Twenty-ish? No, eighteen. Eighteen feet of rope.

Not much, but then that was just the price of shitty rope. You had proper fibers, you could make it thin and light. You had improvised crap, you compensated with bulk or risked it breaking.

I wasn’t much for risks.

I paused on the edge of the branch I was climbing on, thousands of feet above the forest floor.

Ummmm...

Well, I didn’t like risks.

I shook my head and got about trying to unsling my spear. Annoyingly, it had been slung when I’d began my weaving and was now bound beneath an extra eighteen feet of rope. Starsdamn, what if I’d been ambushed? An inaccessible weapon could have spelled my doom.

I sent furtive glances about as I put my back to a relatively solid branch. My luck held, and nothing sprang out to eat me as I carefully unwound my rope and got my spear safely in my hand again.

With spear and rope both out I tied a knot around the middle of the spear shaft. It wasn’t my best work, but I’d tied knots with everything from strips of cloth to fresh sinew. In the end the rope did what I wanted.

Sure, I’d had to hack a notch into my spear to get it really secure, but I couldn’t have kept the weapon anyway. It was grown of this place and could no more leave than the goblin tribes could.

With the easy part over, it was time to get down to business.

I climbed out to the last branch I could access without going through the water, reaching out a little further each time. When my arms couldn’t stretch out any more, I drew back and drew my spear.

With the next branch only a few feet out of reach it didn’t take more than a light toss to get the spear through its offshoots. I started to drag it back and it quickly went perpendicular, with the rope in the center and either end getting caught up on the branches to each side.

I pulled on it gently, wanting to test the hold, but reluctant to start rustling branches. It seemed to be fairly secure though, so I swung out and pulled my way up to the next branch.

Well, that was a pretty dramatic way of putting it. I more just stepped off my previous branch and let gravity yank me about how it pleased as I hurriedly shuffled my way up the rope. Hanging out midair wasn’t something I was interested in and overly sudden flourishes greatly exacerbated the risk of something snapping.

And if the rope snapped my bones would be quick to follow. Give or take however long it took me to hit something.

Once I was on my new branch I scrambled across the cluster of connected branches to the next gap and repeated the process. It was a little wider than the last one, but not by too much.

I got quite good with my new climbing technique over the next few hours, but it still felt like ages before I reached the titanic true branch. Even so, it’s obscuring shadow felt comforting. I was already on the shady side of the tree, but the mists spilling out from the rapids brought the light down to cave-like levels. It reminded me of the security of a good hidey-hole, with walls pressing you in from nearly every side, even if my logical brain knew that it was nowhere near those proportions.

Of course, any old goblin could tell you the number one flaw of a hidey-hole. How damn good it was, and how everyone else could tell that too. If you found the perfect spot, someone else might just have found it first, and here was no exception. The rampant life of the jungle expanded into every available space, and such prime property as this had hardly gone unnoticed.

My wary glances while climbing might not have revealed a chameleon owl swooping down on me, yet, but they had warned me of the dark shadows flitting about above. They were subtle, barely noticeable against the dark bark, but they were definitely there. Some other kind of flyer, although that didn’t mean my more familiar fear wasn’t hanging around as well. if I could barely see these new creatures in the darkness then there was no way I’d see a chameleon-owl.

I couldn’t quite manage any real details, but as I closed the distance I could start to pick up the sound of wing beats when I strained my ears. Definitely not an owl then.

As I drew closer to the underside of the branch the fading light thinned the branches even more. I added more vines to my rope one by one as the distance grew greater, but eventually there were simply no more to be had. I was left standing on the last little outgrowth before the dark expanse of bare bark leading up to the branch with no path forward.

Spreading mists hemmed me in to either side, framing a corridor upwards. But that corridor had no steps, and the powerful current of the split waterfall made going around impossible.

I swallowed and looked back down. At least staring dead ahead wasn’t going to put a crick in my neck. The thinning branches had forced me close to the trunk, clinging to the last parts thick enough to hold my weight. Feet in front of me the water rushed past, a mere outflow of the true currents to either side, but still a threatening few inches of mirror-dark water.

I lowered my stance, straining to grip the bark beneath my feet with my claws as I shifted forwards, reaching out with one hand. The water pressed down on my hand like a skintight glove of leaden ice, but it lacked the crushing pressure I’d feared. The current was at its weakest here.

I withdrew my hand, shaking off the vestige of the chill. It didn’t help. The current had soaked through my rags.

I looked up again. It was a long way… but unachievably long?

Maybe. I just wasn’t seeing many better options at the moment. Risking the climb would be dangerous of course, but there was no guarantee that turning back would be any less so. It could be comforting to back down, but that was only an illusion of safety.

I sat down and reached for my pouches. I had work to do.