1

“I think I hear music,” Hammer yelled out to the group, and everyone stopped.

Harper pulled Kylah within her Mana Reject barrier, then shouted to the row of teammates, “Anyone who has an MPR of .75 or higher, run Defense Buff now! And equip your melee weapons.” She focused on the trees. “Hammer, where was it coming from?”

The orc then peered at her, dazed. “Wha?”

A lump of fear rose in her throat. She assessed the other members. Hammer and Sierra both appeared to be disoriented now. She spotted Jackson close by. “Hey, Alabama, equip your hammer and get ready to bash some wood.”

The orc heaved the massive weapon and rested it on his shoulders. “Just point and aah’ll start hammerin’.”

Harper scanned the trees, but she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She glanced at her teammates. More were being affected by what was obviously the Dryad spell. “Fuck this,” she screamed in frustration. “This is not happening again!”

She cast Boulder and spun the marble rock in a circular motion, pounding it into the surrounding trees. Chunks of wood rained down onto the swamp as the Boulder smashed into a thin Douglas fir. It broke off and plummeted toward the members, who jumped out of the way. Meanwhile, Jackson and Zack yanked Hammer and Sierra out of the tree’s path at the last second.

“Take it easy on that spell,” Zack grumbled, but the veteran mage kept the rock whirling, striking at the trees in an expanding radius.

“Where the fuck are you?” Harper screamed and realized she was channeling the pent-up anger and sorrow she had been carrying for days. She wanted retribution against the creature that had torn Miguel away from her. “Come out, you fucking bitch coward!”

Her spell continued to pulverize the trees, but the Dryads were nowhere to be found. Then she heard a hollow, wooden laugh descend upon them. Harper recognized the feminine resonance immediately and looked up.

The mother beast hung thirty feet above them. It had extended its body fifty feet wide as its appendages wrapped around the tree limbs and trunks. Its brood, the Dryads, clung to the adjacent trees, ready to strike. Harper’s Creature Description details appeared for the matriarch.

DRYOPE (Level 31)

HP: 448

MP: 176

STRENGTH: 67

CONSTITUTION: 44

DEXTERITY: 33

INTELLIGENCE: 17

WISDOM: 100

XP: 278

DESCRIPTION: Theban shapeshifting boss-level spawner of forest nymphs.

2

The veteran mage counted seven of the smaller Dryads. They started clambering down the tree trunks while the mother beast attacked from her perch above them. With its two arms extended to the trees, the Dryope drove its wooden tentacles down like spears at the gathered teammates.

Four of the Dryope’s tentacles crashed into Harper’s Mana Reject barrier. Their thin claws splintered against the impenetrable green sphere, and Harper was immediately grateful for the physical upgrade she had received for the spell.

As Kylah’s arms wrapped tightly around her legs, Harper fired the Boulder at the Dryope. It severed the monster’s left arm, breaking its hold on the tree limbs. The massive beast plummeted toward them.

Harper turned, grabbed Kylah, and ran between tree trunks as the behemoth slammed into the wet soil behind them. Gray water splashed in every direction and the earth shuddered around them. Harper heard something splat against her barrier. Keeping Kylah close, she whipped around and saw a patch of muddy soil slide down her green protective sphere.

The beast stood up, and its blue eyes targeted Harper. “I will make your child suffer,” the monster croaked. It charged at them.

Harper cast Dirt Squall, and the spell’s wind force pushed the behemoth back. Pellets of dirt pelted against its wooden frame and ricocheted into the rippling water. That spell, along with the reject spell, used up the last of her 7.32 MPR, and her mana pool of 288 started decreasing at a rate of .18 per second.

The Dryope stretched its tentacles to reach them. Their tips flattened against Harper’s barrier. Needle-like thorns extruded from their inner linings and scraped against her green sphere. Still pushed back by the wind spell, the monster retracted its tentacles and wrapped them around the adjacent trees. The beast pulled itself toward them and sneered at Harper. “Your dead lover was a good birthing ground.”

Harper cast Fire Scorch as the monster drew closer. Her mana consumption was up to 2.18 per second. The Dryope shrieked against the flames but continued to inch closer. With Kylah still clutched to her body, the veteran mage launched Fire Bullet and waited for the fireball to expand. The spell started drawing 5 MP per second from her pool.

God, I’m going to run out of mana soon, Harper thought.

“I will allow your child to live, get bigger,” the mother beast spat. “Then I will consume her for the birthing.”

Harper screamed and released the fireball. It torpedoed through the monster’s timber frame. The Dryope rolled backward and clambered up again. Harper wanted to rush the monster, but she knew she needed to stay near Kylah and keep the distance between the young girl and the attacking beast.

The Dryope stood in a pool of water with a flaming hole punched through the middle of its body. It appeared to be unaffected by the injury. Suddenly it dove into the muddy soil, evading the force of Harper’s wind spell, and sped underground toward them like a gigantic mole.

Before Harper could react, the monster catapulted from the soft earth and hurled the veteran mage into the air. She clutched at Kylah’s arm, and her fingernails gouged through skin. Harper heard a bone crack. The young girl screamed, but veteran managed to pull her into the green sphere as it ascended into the sky.

They rose twenty-five feet as the Dirt Squall spell spun around them, misdirected and blowing against the emaciated branches at the treetops. Harper turned it off, leaving Mana Reject as her only active spell. Her mana reserves started to slowly replenish. She held Kylah against her chest while, below them, the Dryope furiously excavated a deep hole into the earth. Water rushed into the cavity, creating a large pool. Then gravity pulled the two mages back to the waiting behemoth, and they fell into its grasping appendages. The Dryope climbed on top of the green sphere and shoved it into the wet soil.

It’s trying to drown us, Harper thought as water passed through the barrier. They were both face-down now. Kylah sank below the water and screamed again, but the sound was warbled. Panicking, Harper flipped onto her back and held the young teenager over the rising water level.

Above them, the Dryope seemed to grin as it jumped on the green sphere, wedging them deeper into the mud. Brown water washed over Harper’s head and wormed into her throat. She coughed harshly, and more silt filled her mouth and nostrils. Her 313 HP started dropping.

As the barrier’s arc descended below the muddy water, Kylah was submerged and started choking and gagging. Having lost her staff, Harper tried to cast the fire spells, only to find they wouldn’t ignite. She hurled a Boulder, but couldn’t see or hear anything underneath all the mud. The rock veered blindly away from the monster.

Then Kylah scrambled from her arms and the sphere’s protection. The young girl’s legs were pinwheeling in the slick mud, finding no purchase. Suddenly she was yanked from the mud with such force that Harper knew the beast had her.

3

As the Dryads jumped from the tree trunks, one landed squarely on Jackson, driving him onto his back. The large hammer bounced away from him as his Creature Description details came up.

DRYAD (Level 5)

HP: 65

MP: 42

STRENGTH: 10

CONSTITUTION: 5

DEXTERITY: 4

INTELLIGENCE: 4

WISDOM: 15

XP: 40

DESCRIPTION: Shapeshifting forest nymph with powerful mental abilities.

The monster drilled a tentacle into Jackson’s left bicep, just below the shoulder cut-off of his armor.

“Damnation! That hurts,” the Alabama orc cried out. He punched the monster in the face and was shocked to see his blow decapitate the Dryad. Aah don’t know my own strength, he thought. Then he saw the follow-through of Zack’s steel axe and clued in.

“Get the hell on your feet and grab your hammer,” the former Marine ordered as his Mana Reject barrier glowed green around him.

Jackson jumped to his feet. Bright pain shot through his left arm. He groaned but didn’t even give the wound a second glance. He retrieved his hammer and followed Zack as they chased after the six other Dryads. The monsters were hopping from tree to tree with incredible quickness and agility, striking and then evading the teammates. In his peripheral vision, he saw Madison slumped in a pool of mud. It looked like he had fallen asleep.

“Hammer, what in the high hell are you doing? Wake the fuck up!” Jackson shouted, but to no avail. Far to his left, the mother beast was attacking Harper.

A Dryad jumped from its perch in the trees and landed on Nevan’s back, driving him face-first into the mud. The creature bit into his neck. The human hunter screamed.

Jackson rushed to his aid and swung the hammer. The Dryad tried to jump away, but he anticipated the mob’s movement and caught it midflight. The marble base of the hammer annihilated the monster in an explosion of gray wood.

“That’s right, you damn dawg,” he bellowed. “I gotcha!”

As Nevan got up and ran his hand over the back of his bleeding neck, the Alabama orc surveyed the battleground. Zack was chopping down a creature with his axe while Thao was blowing holes through another with her Boulder spell. That left three Dryads, but Jackson’s greatest concern was for Harper and Kylah, who were being driven into the mud by the Dryope.

He bolted for them, but slipped on the slick mud, falling headlong into a tangle of roots. Before he could get back up, two Dryads jumped him. As one held him down, the second monster curled its splintery tentacle around his neck, cutting off his air supply. Jackson pushed his body up from the mud just as two wooden tentacles skewered through his legs. He fell against the roots and started losing consciousness from oxygen deprivation.

As the tentacle tightened around his neck, he heard the panicked shouts of his teammates and sensed that they were losing the battle. He sent a telepath to Madison.

Buddy, you gotta snap out of it. We need yyyoooouuuu…

Then his mind went dark.

4

Kylah was upside down.

The Dryope had clenched both of her legs as it climbed up to the treetops. The young girl banged hard against the bark of a tree and screamed as the arm Harper had broken sent fresh waves of pain through her body.

The young mage tried to orient herself as she equipped the steel Bonebase sword the veteran had given her. I have to chop at those tentacles wrapped around my le—

She knocked against another tree limb, which jarred the sword from her grasp. No! Kylah watched the weapon rattle against the trees, toward the ground where the battles were playing out. In a fraction of a second, she saw her father bleeding and staggering in the mud. In the same moment, she glimpsed Harper shooting a fireball up at them.

A rush of heat blew by Kylah as the Dryope skirted the blast. The fiery stone ascended another thirty feet before it exploded into tiny fragments that drifted downward.

The mother beast had her at the top of the trees now. It sprinted over the redwoods and Douglas firs at an incredible speed, gaining distance from the rest of Harper’s team. “Your tribe cannot help you now, young sapling,” it croaked.

And Kylah remembered what the Dryope had said. I will allow your child to live, get bigger. As her light brown hair blew back from the wind, she imagined being bound with thick branches and, without realizing it, finished her thought audibly. “I’ll be fed whatever disgusting food this monster could rummage,” she muttered.

The Dryope slowed and looked down at her. “Yes. You will feast on maggots and dead meat,” it crooned.

Kylah gulped and became nauseated. She wished she were at her home. Her safe home with all of its soothing familiarities. The one Cloud Nine had dragged her and her father from. She was getting cold now. The massive creature was traveling so fast that she felt like a ragdoll within its grasp. She equipped her regular baselard and struck one of the tentacles holding her. A chunk of wood flew off, but the appendage only tightened.

The mother beast stopped, lifted the teenager up to its face, and screamed ferociously. Kylah recoiled from the demonstration of power as the monster’s musty breath rippled against her flesh. Incredibly, splinters shot from its mouth and pierced her skin.

“Okay. Okay. I won’t do it again,” she sobbed.

The behemoth grinned and its pointed chin scraped up against her own. As the morning sun sparkled in Kylah’s tears, the Dryope emitted a wooden purr, satisfied with its prey’s subjugation. With the young mage still firmly in its grip, it turned and started running toward a destination only the beast knew.

5

Thao killed one of the Dryads attacking Jackson before the remaining two monsters retreated eastward, seeming to follow their matriarch. With the Dryads gone, the spell that had affected Sierra and Madison most severely was lifted. Zack roused Jackson and cast Auntie Dote to cure the orc’s poisoning. Meanwhile, Harper and Nevan were hysterical. “My god, there must be something we can do!” he cried.

Harper, covered in mud and still gasping for breath, stood at the foot of the tree the Dryope had escaped from. She held Kylah’s Bonebase sword in her hands and gazed at it in a daze.

They tried to telepath the young girl, but all they heard were her panicked cries. “She probably can’t even hear us in that state,” Hammer remarked, and then half of the members broke down in sobs. Harper and Sierra fell to their knees, overwhelmed with grief. Nevan stared to the east with a stunned expression.

“What about the other team?” Thao asked as revelation bloomed on her face. Her eyes widened with growing excitement. “Maybe they can intervene!”

Harper looked in the direction the Dryope had taken Kylah. Eastward, she thought. Where Damon’s crew was.

Like a desperate family waiting for a call, each member telepathed Damon simultaneously.

6

Following the Dryope’s powerful demonstration, Kylah became withdrawn, hanging limply from the wooden tentacles that were bruising her calves. She bumped roughly against the treetops but didn’t react to the jarring collisions.

The mother beast, satisfied that it had pacified the teenager, concentrated on its skipping run over the forest. Its cobalt eyes focused on a specific spot on the horizon.

The Dryope’s lair lay on the very edge of the earth realm’s eastern boundary. Rather than fearing the unpredictable nature of the boundary, the monster was drawn to it in a primitive and instinctual way.

The mother beast and her minions, the Dryads, had no need for shelters. They lived in the trees. What they had constructed, though, was an elaborate birthing ground. The creatures had laboriously hollowed out the largest tree close to the border, using the metal weapons they had rummaged from their human prey. They had pulled back the bark and outer layers of wood in strips. The result looked like a gigantic crab that had been flipped on its back. They dropped their prey into the center, then pulled the strips back together near the top. It formed a basal cage.

The bottom of that tree was covered with a thick scum of organic residue. Undigested human and animal tissue lay amidst the placental slime that carpeted that wooden prison.

At one time, which had coincided with the first abandonment of humans in the realms, the fodder had been plentiful. Many of the stranded humans had been absorbed by the Dryad larvae on the floor of that birthing cage. Miguel’s ultimate demise had transpired there.

With so much prey to consume, the Dryope’s brood of Dryads had once numbered in the thirties. But as the humans became more scarce, the Dryads had thinned out to less than ten. At its core, the mother beast could sense the tribe’s imminent extinction. The young human it had captured wouldn’t do much to prevent that, but the matriarch didn’t have the capacity for reason or logic, and its instincts still prevailed. It would allow the human to grow to adulthood, then have her sacrificed on the monster’s wooden altar.

7

Having been delayed by the DNA recovery near the river, Damon and his crew were further south. He was chopping through the foliage when he was abruptly overloaded with the frenzied pleas of his teammates in the west. At first, the cacophony was a jumble of white noise. He stumbled against a redwood, wondering if he was having a stroke.

As he groaned painfully, Angie rushed to him. “What is it, Damo?”

The orc general leaned against the tree. “Tell them to stop,” he moaned. “My head.”

The veteran hunter understood immediately and communicated with the group on the other side. Everyone stop telepathing now!

The cyclone in Damon’s head finally quieted down. Then Harper spoke to the eight members. The Dryope has Kylah, and it’s headed your way.

8

After feigning a listless state, Kylah waited until the Dryope stopped paying attention to her. When she was convinced the monster had fallen for her ploy, she queued up a Fire Bullet. She allowed her body to stay limp, trailing behind the swift-moving behemoth and hiding the fireball as she charged it with mana.

She smacked against the crown of a tree and had to bite her lip to keep from yelping. She checked to make sure she hadn’t lost her spell, and as she looked over her shoulder, she saw a tree burning in the distance. That’s the one I hit, she thought.

She craned her neck to glance at the Dryope again. It remained focused on the horizon. Sawdust dripped from the corner of its mouth like drool. Kylah checked her mana. It was down to zero. She had used up all of her 56 points. The fireball was still growing, but only by small increments due to her 1.52 MPR.

She whipped the Fire Bullet at the behemoth.

The beast sensed the projectile at the last second and swerved, releasing Kylah as it tried to evade the spell. The young mage fell down through a lattice of redwood branches as the fireball tore through two of the monster’s tentacles. The severed appendages followed her downward course, rattling off of branches.

Now twenty-five feet above her, the mother beast bellowed with rage. It leaped high above the treetops, and Kylah thought, for a brief moment, that it was going to let her go free. Then the beast allowed gravity to pull its enormous weight back to earth. It plunged through the trees, snapping limbs like matchsticks.

“No!” Kylah moaned as the monster sped toward her.

It snatched her with its one remaining arm and pulled her against its rough chest. Before they crashed onto the ground, the Dryope spun around, allowing the impact to spread through its back.

The mother beast grinned at her. “I should kill you for that,” it croaked. “But I think you know, young sapling, that I have other plans for you.” Its eyes, as big as teacup saucers, glowed in the gloomy shadows of the forest. “Still, I can make you pay.”

A wooden tentacle unwrapped from the bark of a nearby tree and fluttered playfully in front of Kylah’s face. Its thin, finger-like claws opened and closed. Then the monster’s hand flashed away and she saw the lining of its tentacle. Long white thorns protruded from the inner layer as the appendage slapped against her face. The thorns pierced through her cheek. Kylah screamed. The pain was incredible. But as she screamed, her skin stretched against the impalement of the thorns, pulling on the holes that had been punched through her skin.

She abruptly closed her mouth, forcing her face to relax and lessen the agony. She tasted the thorn’s secreted poison on her tongue. It tasted like whiskey—not that Kylah would have known that. What she did know was that she couldn’t swallow the bitter liquid. Not if she wanted a chance to survive.

She opened her mouth and allowed the poison to drip out like drool. It splattered onto the monster’s chest, and Kylah prayed the beast wouldn’t notice. Still, some of the poison did enter her bloodstream. As she lost consciousness, Kylah cast her antidote spell, hoping it would neutralize the effects and stay active after she passed out.

9

After surveying his teammates, Damon was grateful he had a Grimalkin member in his group. He pointed at the treetops. “Lorenzo, get up there and locate where they are!”

The Italian didn’t waste a moment. He leaped at the nearest tree trunk, extended his claws, and climbed up the bark. Once he was at the top, he searched for the tallest tree and jumped to it. Clutching onto a thick limb, he scanned the countryside, looking for signs of movement. He couldn’t detect any.

“Do you see them?” Damon shouted up from the forest floor.

Lorenzo waved his palm to silence him. He climbed to the uppermost crown of branches and shielded his eyes against the glare of the morning sun. Still nothing. He squatted, flexing his quads, and leaped vertically into the air. As Lorenzo reached the apex of his jump, he spotted a slight movement on the horizon. He locked onto the target as he settled back onto the crown. The brown spot was far in the distance.

“Come on, mate,” Silo called up, frustrated. “Do you see them or not?”

Lorenzo ignored the question and trained his eyes on the shape. It was moving southeast toward them. “I got it,” he shouted and pointed north. He glanced at Damon to make sure he saw the gesture.

“The Dryope will look like a huge living tree,” the orc general shouted. “Locate Kylah before you attack.”

Lorenzo nodded and got moving. He raced over the trees to intercept a target he still wasn’t certain was them.

10

As a level-9 Grimalkin, Lorenzo’s speed surpassed what the rest of the group could muster. Within minutes, he could see the image more clearly. Having never seen a Dryope, he could only guess that the brown shape was the monster. A living tree, Damon had told him.

He prepared mentally for the interception. He would equip his Nagamarrow sword when he got close, but for the time being, the Grimalkin hunter was using his arms to propel himself over the trees.

Lorenzo considered his spells. He wasn’t as well versed as some of the other members, but he had seen Boulder in action and opted for that. He cast the spell. The marble rock swooped over the trees, trailing behind him. Whatever you do, don’t hit the girl, he thought.

He could make out the definitions of the shape now. To Lorenzo, the Dryope looked like a wooden octopus as it sped across the forest. It hadn’t noticed him yet. As for Kylah, he couldn’t see her at all.

Oh god, I hope it hasn’t killed her yet, he thought. God, please let her be alright. He pumped his arms and legs, soaring to what he knew could be his death. But Lorenzo was prepared and ready to meet his maker.