The branches of the Leechfort Tree were long and narrow, hardly the kind of thing Midday imagined he could walk on, but he had to find a way somehow—for the leeches were closing in fast. He debated drawing his scythe and attempting to use it as a weapon to keep the leeches away but, given how unwieldy something like a scythe was for that purpose and how uneven the footing was, Midday decided against it. If anything, he thought, it would be better to take his scythe off and let it fall the hundred-or-so feet to the soil to take some weight off himself, but Midday did not do this because he feared the idea of losing any of the already few options he had.

Midday had no idea how to climb a tree—or really anything at all, for that matter. He imagined that it might be possible to hop down to the branch directly below the one that he was already on, but the thought of doing so terrified him. The nearest branch was not especially far, at about 5 feet down from where he was, but getting there would nonetheless require him to drop down such that his feet would be touching nothing for a brief moment.

It was a small leap, sure, but a leap of faith all the same. One slight mistake would send him plummeting to his death, he realized, and it was this thought that kept him paralyzed in fear as the leeches continued toward him. Additionally, as if climbing downwards wasn’t hard enough on its own, there was also the fact that descending the tree meant getting closer to the very same leeches he was trying to get away from.

Maybe I should just stay up here at the top and try to fend them off? No, there are so many of them… I’d get overwhelmed before long. He recalled the bag of salt he had in his pocket. Is there anything I can do with that? Yes, there was but, unless all he wanted to do was stave off the inevitable for a few minutes longer, making good use of the salt would require him to make a rapid descent, relying on the supposed ability of the powder to paralyze any leech that stood directly in his way. No matter how hard he tried to find the ‘correct’ solution to the problem at hand, it was hopeless: every option had serious tradeoffs, and trying to figure out which one he should choose was a task he lost several seconds thinking about. Decisiveness, he realized, was not his forte.

The thing that made Midday move was the knowledge that he had to do something if he wanted to live—anything was better than just standing there as his demise approached.

Now with the simple goal of doing something, anything at all, he grabbed hold of the branch above him, the one Romulo had been standing on when explaining the conditions of this so-called ‘training exercise’ and pulled on it. The branch had already been partially snapped due to supporting the immense weight of the giant, and Midday reckoned he could break the very long but quite narrow branch the rest of the way there with some effort.

He pulled hard on the branch, very nearly lifting himself into the air with the amount of effort he put into tearing it from its spot on the tree, and the branch did snap a little more as the result, but not enough to actually fall as he wanted it to. A little more tearing would send it crashing down onto the leeches, crushing a few in the process and hopefully slowing the horde down, but his weight alone simply wasn’t enough to do it.

Shit! Shit! Shit! The leeches were getting closer with every passing second, and all he could think to do was panic. Come up with something! Damn it! He racked his brain for ideas, desperate to find anything at all to try, but the sheer terror of the experience made it difficult to think. He knew he needed to calm down, but that was easier said than done.

Finally, only after the leeches had already closed much of the distance that there had initially been—for they generally seemed to have all been congregated in the lower portions of the tree at the time of Midday’s arrival—he drew his scythe out of the holder on his back and started alternating between sawing and chopping motions in an effort to bring down the branch above, which was an endeavor severely limited by the fact that he could not move his feet lest risk tripping. It took a few seconds to do it, by which time the leeches were close enough that he could see saliva slobbering out from their enormous mouths, but the branch was finally severed from the tree with a last-ditch swing.

The branch, which had been something like 30 feet long, dropped like a boulder, narrowly missing Midday as it fell. It landed on a branch about 10 feet down, which both killed some leeches who had been waiting there and snapped the lower branch in its entirety, sending both logs spiraling downwards as harbingers of destruction. They broke another 6 or 7 branches before finally landing with a gigantic thud that shook the ground and reverberated throughout the area.

“+1 XP. +1 XP. +3 XP. +1 XP…” The voice began to speak. It droned on and on, tallying all the deaths that had been deemed sufficient to count for XP. All and all it worked out to 13 XP, more than all of what Midday had previously earned since coming to the plantation.

Even so, the effort had been a waste.

The leeches that had been climbing up the tree’s trunk as opposed to its branches were the most immediate threat by far—and they had been almost entirely unaffected by the attack. They were close enough to climb onto the branch Midday was standing on now, and that was exactly what they did. Like a huge, writhing mass of sludge, they inched towards him now, only a few feet from his ankles. Moreover, Midday realized that his attack with the branch had the unfortunate side effect of making it more difficult to start descending the tree to get away from them—for several branches that he otherwise might have been able to use were either gone or damaged now.

A leech lunged at him, which he responded to by tossing a pinch of salt at it—which successfully stunned the creature for a moment—and kicking it off the branch. It fell off the side of the narrow beam on which Midday and about 30 giant leeches were having a heated standoff.

At such a high altitude, the fall proved lethal even to the leech who was adapted to falling great distances onto its prey. Midday did not receive any XP for this kill though, and he guessed that the reason for this was that the voice had deemed that particular leech insufficiently powerful relative to himself to reward him with XP for killing.

Not that whether or not he got XP mattered to Midday though, for he still had the more immediate problem of several dozen leeches to deal with, each of which was about 30 pounds and thus would be impossible to deal with using only simple kicks and punches. His scythe wouldn’t be all that useful either, for even if he did somehow manage to swing it at them without losing his footing, the leeches were all big enough that, at his skill level, he reckoned the blade would get stuck inside them instead of cleaving through.

His best bet, he knew, was to flee as soon as possible and take his chances with dropping down to the next lowest branch, but even as he was pushed further and further back along the branch, he hesitated. Midday was not a fighter. He had never been in a fight. He had been the target of beatdowns, sure, but never had he stood as a genuine combatant to a threatening opponent. This was a new experience for him, and he simply didn’t have enough experience to handle it without letting emotions cloud his judgment.

Still though, instincts were a powerful force in these kinds of situations. As another leech lunched toward him, Midday reflexively leaped down off the branch and landed, just barely maintaining his balance, on the next one below it. He kept his center of balance as low as possible in an effort to stay standing despite the wobbling caused by his feet crashing down upon it.

Looking up, he saw that the leeches were unphased. Despite their slow speed, they had ridiculous mobility along the bark of the tree, and the leeches were seemingly able to ignore gravity as they crawled onto the underside of the upper branch and hung themselves like bats in a cave, positioning themselves such that they could drop down on Midday if he made the mistake of walking under them.

Midday grimaced. This must have been the so-called mutualistic relationship Romulo had mentioned. There must have been some sort of bizarre mechanism inherent to the bonelike bark of the Leechfort Tree that allowed what otherwise should have been very immobile creatures to crawl along it with perfect ease. Is there anything I can do to exploit that? Midday tried to strategize—something the leeches were content to let him waste time trying to do because it allowed them to assume even more advantageous positions while he was busy thinking. Eventually Midday realized that the Leechfort Bark had no obvious weaknesses, at least none that he could discern with what little time he had. He then realized that he had just wasted a whole 5 seconds standing still as yet more leeches from lower on the tree approached him. There were now leeches both on the branch above him, ready to drop down, and on the one he was standing on, ready to lunge at him. There were even a few leeches on the branch directly below—though the fall to that one was almost 10 feet long because the branch that had originally been closest had fallen due to the log he had dropped on it not long before.

The leeches on the same branch he was currently standing on began their slow march toward him, forcing Midday to take a few steps back onto the thinner portion of the branch away from the trunk. The branch bent and cracked as the already thin beam beneath him became even thinner with each step. Think of something! Think! What the hell is wrong with you?! He strained his mind for ideas. Anything would do. It didn’t matter how awful it was. He just wanted to at the very least do something before it was too late.

An idea came to mind. A very questionable one at that, but an idea all the same. These leeches are after my blood… And, if I reopen the wound on my finger… I’ll start shooting blood… Maybe that will accomplish something? It was a stretch—a massive one at that—but, seeing as he had nowhere near enough salt to deal with an army that now numbered more than 50 giant leeches, Midday decided to give it a shot.

He ripped off the bandages on his finger, seeing the disgusting and still entirely unhealed wound with his own two eyes for the first time as he did so. It was a sight that ordinarily would have made him nauseous but, at that moment, the gaping hole where his left middle finger should have been barely registered. All he saw was a source of blood and so, with his right hand, he ripped violently as he could at the recently formed scab that had been keeping the blood in.

Complete agony ensued as blood started shooting out of his finger with a forcefulness rivaling the blood loss he had endured in the first few seconds after Jenjo had cut it off. The leeches reacted immediately, forgetting their strategic positioning at the sight of fresh blood. Each of them charged toward him at full speed, desperate to be one of the few that would get to latch on and drink the limited quantity of blood contained within Midday’s body.

Doing his best to ignore the pain, Midday pointed his left hand at the gigantic horde of leeches and allowed his blood to shoot out directly onto their bodies, hoping that maybe he would get a reaction of some kind.

Sure enough, he did. One hell of a reaction at that. The leeches broke into a chaotic frenzy as they battled each other to slurp up the limited quantity of blood being shot into their frontlines. He thought he heard someone exclaiming “holy shit!” in the distance, but the notion that someone might be watching him barely registered as he contended with the gut-wrenching fear and hellish pain at the forefront of his mind. Things got crazier by the second as more and more leeches piled onto the spot where the blood was being shot into. Several leeches fell off the branch during the struggle, plummeting to their deaths.

“+1 XP. +1 XP. +1 XP…” The voice droned on and on throughout the carnage, rewarding him for causing the deaths of several creatures, but Midday gave no acknowledgment to the voice. His mind was still focused purely on survival.

If they follow the blood so feverishly… Midday somehow managed to grin, now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. In one simple gesture, he pointed this finger away from the branch so that the river of blood became a waterfall leading straight to the ground far below.

Drunk off the taste of blood, nearly all of the leeches jumped down after it.

+1 XP. +1XP. +1XP…” The voice droned on even faster now, rapidly calculating the XP reward for dozens upon dozens of simultaneous deaths.

As far as Midday could tell, there were about 5 leeches remaining in the tree after that and, seeing as they had just watched so many of their kin perish at the hands of this scrawny human who had no business posing any kind of threat to them whatsoever, they were furious. They all rushed towards him at once, moving faster than any of the leeches had done before then.

But at this point, Midday believed that he already won. He had enough salt to deal with such a small number, and the remaining ones he saw were just charging straight at him. Midday simply threw a pinch of salt at each one whenever it got close and kicked it off the side. He had managed to kill 3 leeches in this manner and was feeling extremely relieved, convinced that the real fight was over, when he realized that there was something heavy on his leg. He turned his attention away from the leeches attacking him for just a split second, to see what it was, and very nearly fell to his doom upon wincing at the sight of a giant leech latched on and sucking away at one of his calves. It had snuck up from behind, he realized, while he had been preoccupied with everything else.

Luckily, he still had most of his salt and was able to pour a large quantity of it onto the creature to get it to let go, after which he kicked it off the branch to its doom, but the leech had nonetheless already bitten him and thus injected its enzymes into his leg—which was now bleeding profusely.

Unable to do anything about the bleeding for the moment, he turned his attention back to the two remaining leeches he was aware of and finished them off with his proven-effective combination of salt followed by a kick.

With that, it was over—or, at the very least, he hoped it was. He surveyed the area as best he could for any sign of remaining stragglers but saw none: he decided that they were either A) hiding in hopes that he would leave without killing or B) planning an ambush. Either way, he was almost out of salt now and wanted to do everything in his power to avoid additional combat. Fighting them head-to-head without the help of salt was something he wanted to avoid at all costs.

He stood there on that branch for a while, victorious but still unable to bring himself to take the immense risk involved with descending the tree without knowing how to climb. The fact that he was feeling immense pain in his left hand and was losing blood at an alarming rate from two separate places on his body did little to help matters. The blood loss was getting to him fast, and his mind was getting hazy as he struggled to stay conscious.

Romulo, perhaps understanding this, then proceeded to pop out from behind a tree he had been hiding behind and stepped up to the enormous pile of leech carcasses left under the tree while gazing up at Midday. “Holy shit! All I wanted you to do was face your fears and climb down! But you straight up eradicated those fuckers! Maybe I underestimated you! You might be ready for the old growth sooner than I thought!” The sun had already set by then and Midday could only faintly make out the silhouette of the cabinmate he hated oh so much at that moment.

“Get me out of here,” replied Midday, not wanting to talk.

“That’s fair,” said Romulo, feeling a little—but only a little—guilty about the whole affair. He had kept a bow and arrow drawn and aimed throughout the whole exercise, ready in case of an emergency (his take on the definition of the word was very unique, it seemed) and so he felt as though he had done nothing wrong. Romulo took a few moments to transform his fingertips into claws once again and started working his way up the tree.

He picked up Midday as soon as he got to him and hurriedly worked his way back down afterward.

“You know, that whole exercise was less than 5 minutes long. We technically have 1 hour and 55 minutes left to train, because you missed yesterday and so I added on an hour to adjust for that, but I think we can just call it a day here.” With Midday in his arms, he started toward the cabin. “I promise you that tomorrow’s training will be something much easier—with a 0% chance of death.”

Midday offered no response, seeing as he had already passed out from both exhaustion and blood loss.