A forest of countless trees and greenery at every turn was initially very beautiful. The sounds of wildlife all around me was great too at the beginning.

But after a few hours of just walking, avoiding tripping over roots and dodging the occasionally falling trees caused by Tim shoving through were soon to become monotonous.

My projected trip of great peril through unexpected hurdle after unexpected hurdle was dead. It turned into a somewhat unsafe expedition. Its dangers were walking through an unknown forest with no clear path and the mild sunlight peeking through the canopy.

With nothing much do besides keeping my feet ahead of one another, I was tempted to ruminate more on the uncertainties.

Ruvyn and Laura were not guaranteed to be there when we get to this ‘Old dog’. Layla would obviously start doubting me at that point. The child losing her trust in me was nothing but catastrophic.

Other worries ranged from finding shelter and food to what I was going to do once I reunited with my circumstantial parents.

To stop my mind from just running away with the speculations, I turned to just chatting with Tim and Olivia. My friend and his newest friend helped with that quite a bit.

We started talking about necromancy, a topic that was definitely not too inane. Learning more about a school of magic that I would otherwise have no access to got me quite invested.

I finally learned why there were no records of it in Ruvyn’s collection beyond a passing mention. Most of the subjects within the school involved using a sort of negative version to be able to cast any of the spells. Conversion of normal mana into said negative version involved a lot of morally questionable acts at best and blatant mass murdering at worst.

The spells themselves also required more gruesome preparation for any of the summoning variety.

This part of the discussion revealed a rather troubling point of contradiction.

“Hey Tim, what you did this morning was one of the summoning spells right?”

“Uhuh. It’s pretty obvious, why ask?”

“I mean, you just told me about the requirements for most of these spells was at least the maiming of a person. And that death knight was not some low tier skeleton. That has got to cost something horrible. But you were definitely not ok with the body disposal of yesterday. So explain.”

“Ah. I don’t do that. The conventional necromancy,” said Tim pushing a tree out of its place while slithering on like you would with a person in a crowded convention center.

“What do you mean? Do you just not use any sacrifice? How does that work?”

“Yes. I mean, most of the sacrifices and rituals are just to gather the negative mana. The stuff is initially needed for novice necromancers. If they have been doing necromancy long enough,they kinda have like an aura to them. The momentum of horrible deeds are enough to just make more negative mana without trying. I popped up here with that stuff already in me. A lot of that stuff. So I don’t need any sacrifices.”

“Alright, that is. Convenient for you.”

“Not really, I lose out on a few aspects of necromancy because of this. For one, I lack the main aura that all necromancers have. [Aura of death] helps buff your undead, so it’s pretty awkward to not have. Oli have me covered there so it’s ok. Another aspect I don’t have, and am glad I don’t, are the souls captured by necromancers over their career. Those can be pretty useful with creating unique undeads, but I’ll pass.”

“Ok. anything else I need to know about you. That blue glow your death knight has is probably not natural too right.”

“It is, I don’t know why, but my negative mana is not the same as the regular type and that makes them glow.”

“But it’s still safe t, Layla is not playing with an unstable bomb or anything, right?”

“Come on. My weird mana just makes the pseudo-consciousness in there a little different at best, there won’t be any complications.”

“If you say so. But why haven’t you just made a whole army or something right now, you had like five years without me.”

“I did, but controlling multiple units while you yourself are fighting is just too much work for too little gain. I tried to have Oli help me with the control, but she still had to take care of me so we scrapped the whole army idea.”

“Right, you did say you just made this for Layla to play, huh?”

“Yeah. Now wanna hear about how changing certain symbols in a necromancer summon spell can change the type of what you-”

The beginning of Tim’s newest topic was cut short when a ther burst out of the trees right in front of us.

The speeding animal was quick to notice Tim and scrambled to change direction.

The loose leaves on the forest floor and its own speed ensured that the boar lost one of its six legs from under it and made a great tumble. Before the ther could come to a halt, from within the forest came another animal.

The panthera pounced onto the downed ther. The big cat leaned forward, ready to deliver the killing bite. The fangs nearly touched the pinned animal’s jugular.

The extra-limbed pig kicked out with its first pair of legs and scored a direct hit to the predator’s chest.

Its foe winded and knocked back, the ther bought enough time to right itself. The panthera was weary of the kicks at the front and steadily circled the ther. Its eyes were looking for any openings.

A misaligned ankle seemed to indicate one and the predator charged again. The prey made an effort to turn, but the damaged limb slowed it too much.

The ther was on its sides after a powerful swipe taking away its balance. Prey down again, the panthera approached from the back and safely delivered the killing blow.

It did not get to keep its kill though. Tim emitted a cacophony of wails from all of his mouths and even sprouted some more animalistic heads to add to the effect. The animal’s flight instincts immediately triggered.

We were once again alone in the forest. The ther’s corpse rested right in front of us.

“Alright! Got you your lunch, hand - or should it be paw? - delivered to your doorstep.”

“O...K. I guess we are having ther for lunch.”

I still had to do a bit of cleaning and butchering to this, so Layla had to be preoccupied during that.

“Hey, Tim. Can you play with Layla for a bit, cleaning this thing is going to take a while and be a bit gorey.”

“Sure, man.”

With that, Olivia came to Layla and took her behind a tree. Layla was told that Tim was going to give her another show like last night. The girl cheerfully accepted.

Tim started to unload the hay lined package from his back and turned to leave. I dropped off the packs I was carrying and moved onto the open patch with a corpse in it.

First, before any real business, I had to make sure that the pig was dead. I charged up a [mana arrow] with bare casting and added more symbols for sharpness within its construction. The spell was soon deep inside the ther’s skull and I was free to work.

It was here that I realised how ill-equipped I was for this. I went back to where I saw Layla walk off with Tim and Olivia.

After a bit of walking and I was there to see Layla playing red hands with the death knight. She was the current ‘slapper’ before she saw me and stopped. I gave her a quick greeting before turning to Tim.

“Gonna need some help, I lack a lot of tools for this. And a ten years old body is not enough to work yet.”

“Alright, I was wondering why you seemed to sure about handling a spider pig bigger than you are.”

“I was a bit overzealous. It happens.”

Tim just made a small snort from the human mouth he was using and waited for me to go before following.

Back with the ther, I opened up one of the survival kits for a knife and rope. I secured the pigs two back most legs to the ropes and called out to Tim.

“Alright, grab the rope and hang it up on a stable branch.”

“Ok, anything else?”

“No- Wait, remember to dig me a hole below where you hang it, about a quarter of the length deep should be good..”

Tim nodded and had another grotesque transformation. Two small human arms sprouted from his abdomen to match the head. The arms did not stop their emergence at their shoulders and were pushed out of their sockets by more of Tim’s dark ‘flesh’. Soon, there were two me-sized arms with tiny human hands sticking out of him.

One of those grabbed the ropes that held the pig’s ankles and lifted. The other stabbed into a patch of earth and removed a decent chunk. Ther hung and hole dug, Tim retracted his appendages and turned to me.

“That’s done, now what?”

“Now you go help me remove some trees for a fire and place to eat while I work this.”

I followed Laura’s instructions step by step and soon had a ther skinned and cleaned of its organs and blood. The butchering step was ironically butchered as I forgot most of Laura’s instruction. Plenty of erroneous cuts were made.

We still had plenty of meat in the end. There was only superficial lost to the overall pig. I possessed no method of preservation so the loss was no deeper than my wounded pride.

My pride took another hit when I went to put away the rope and knife into their pack. There, beneath the rations of each survival kit, were three small pouches containing, sugar, piper - this world’s peppers - and Laura’s own spice blend.

My own suffering of a bland and fishy breakfast could have been avoided had I paid more attention.

After my own self-berating, I got back to cooking. Lunch was on the fire and smelling great. Layla, smelling something good for once since yesterday, walked back to me.

“Ooh. That smells so good. How did you get it so good?”

“I finally found some spices. Now you just wait a bit more.”

“Okay.”

She was clearly eager to have a taste, fidgeting while looking at the fire. I myself could not wait as well.

My first bite tasted exactly like I hoped it would. I closed my eyes to enjoy the flavors a little. I opened them to see Layla not enjoying things. Little tears were dripping down her face and she let out between sniffles.

“It…tastes...like...what…mom...makes..."

The sniffles settled in at that point and her words raced to make it out between breaths.

"I...want...mom...back.”

I quickly lowered my piece of meat to attend to this very unstable five-year-old.

“Hey. Hey. We are going to see mom soon ok. We are travelling to meet her now.”

“Re..Really?”

“Yes. And would mom want to see a sad face when we meet?”

“N...No?”

“Then what should we do to fix that?”

“No..not cry?”

“Good. being sad just makes you feel heavy and slow. And we want to fast and light to meet mom faster right?”

“N...yess.”

“That’s right. And eating more will make you big and strong enough for the trip. So eat up, brother will take you to mom, trust me.”

She wiped her tears and nodded.

The meal resumed, but lost some of its happy air. Tim and Olivia both stayed by the side and remained silent. The sun went past its zenith when the meal finally ended.

I got up to clean up for us to leave. Layla stood up from her place under the shades and walked up to me.

“Can I help you?”

The hope in her eyes stopped my readied “no” and made me pause to think up of something she could help with.

“Hm. How about you just help me pack the small boxes back onto Tim. Make sure to not touch Tim when you do, Ok?”

“Ok!”

With that happy exclamation, our journey went on.

In the following night while I was lying next to a sleeping Layla on our ‘tarp bed’, an idea came to me. It never crossed my mind before with Tim unable to talk at all, but now that he could, I felt the need to teach him the language of this world.

“Hey, Tim. Wanna try to learn the language of this world?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, it would be better if you could just talk with-”

“I mean, Oli already taught me it long ago when I asked about it.”

“Wait. So you could understand me talking with Layla.”

He nodded.

“And didn’t decide to talk to me in her language so she could understand too.”

“I mean, she seemed pretty scared of me at first. I didn’t want to add more of her fear by.. You know? Talking to her through a dead guy.”

“You still talked to me though?”

“I hid the mouth from her view all of those times.”

“Still rude man. Should have been talking to her properly.”

“Urgh. Fine, I’ll start tomorrow. Now get your fleshy ass to sleep.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll sleep and you work on how to approach and talk to a child, pedobones.”

“Fuck you.”

“I don’t think you have the equipment for that anymore.”

“Tentacles. I can definitely make tentacles.”

“Whatever, bye.”

I turned away from Tim and fell asleep soon after.

The next morning saw us getting closer to our destination. The forest was slowly giving away to taller grass and bushes characteristic of a savannah. The terrain change fit the description of where ‘Old dog’ was.

We completely broke through the forest around the early afternoon. The group was moving through the tall grass when I noticed a construct far off on the horizon.

It was a sort of hut suspended up on one of the few trees left on the open land. An apparent man-made structure right when we were nearing our goal was too much of a coincidence for me to pass up.

On our approach towards the curious construct, I saw a figure exit from the tree hut.

I was about to call out and waved to them once we were close enough, but the person suddenly froze when he reached the ground.

The yell for him to not be afraid of Tim was yet to come out when he suddenly dropped on all fours and charged towards us.

If his wolfish gait did not show his animalistic tendencies enough, a thick grey smoke began to billow out from his person to create a ghostly wolf overlapping the man. The spectral beast began to grow in size and solidity as he neared us. It went from just a ghostly image slightly bigger than the man himself to an actually solid grey wolf reaching half of Tim’s two storey frame. I was too shocked at the sight to tell him to stop.

He made one last massive lunge to jump onto my friend. Tim only got out a surprised, “What the-”, before he was knocked completely off of his lower body and entered a tumble with the wolf.

I quickly grabbed Layla and tumbled away to avoid the kicked up debris and Tim’s body.

Mid roll, Tim managed to coil his tail around his assailant’s torso and threw the grey wolf away. The giant beast tumbled for a bit before standing up on its hind leg and giving me a clearer view of it. The first thing I noticed was that it did not have any fur like an actual animal. Its skin was just a smooth grey marble.

The next thing that stood out was that the humanoid wolf had armor on it. In the same grey as all its other parts were plates of interlocking armor covering its shoulder, torso and thighs.

The thing rumbled out a growl and bared its black fangs and claws. Tim entered a ready stance as well.

His overall mass shrunk in on itself to create taunt whipcord-like muscles. A forest of broken fangs, claws and generally sharp bone rose from his body. They were accompanied by a wave newly emerged skulls with opened maws to make every surface of Tim a possible death.

Two lifeless dark grey eyes stared back into one blazing blue as the two stared each other down.

The grey one struck first with a swift punch right into Tim’s center of mass. He tried to react by leaning to the left, but the wolf was faster and managed to embed its arm deep into his right chest.

Tim swung back with his tail and caught the wolf in a diagonal swing, lifting it up off the ground. His larger ‘leg arm’ jabbed out into the airborne target’s chest and I could feel the impact from where I was standing.

The hit did little more than slightly crack the wolf’s chest armor. It latched onto Tim’s arm for leverage to launch off a drop kick. It took the momentum from its own kick to gain a bit of distance from Tim. The wolf looked over its own injury.

It did not like the little damage Tim managed to inflict and growled while lowering its stance. The thing seemed to shrink a little.

Its left arm flared out in more grey smoke that solidified into a darker grey round shield and its right claws elongated and fused into a black scimitar.

With a much more fluid movement than before with its punches, the wolf leveled a horizontal swing at Tim’s neck. Instead of ducking forward or back, Tim split his whole top half and dodged to the sides.

His split torso’s purpose was not only for evasion. From the exposed rotten flesh emerged more sharp claws, fangs and bone shards and the two halves of Tim wrapped around the wolf. To further his hold on the struggling canine, Tim sprouted some tentacle like snakes from his body to wrap around it and hefted it completely off the ground with his lower body to remove its footing. The wolf continued to struggle pointlessly for a while before it began to dematerialize. Before the entire smoke construct faded away, it mustered all of its strength for one last push to loosen Tim’s hold.

A figure sped out of the resulting smoke. Tim flapped his ‘wing arm’ and cleared the smoke away, but there was no one near his position.

I stood up hesitantly and allowed Layla to move from under my arm. I was just about to walk up to Tim and call for a retreat when I saw it, or him, sneaking up behind Tim.

The man’s squarish face was set in a deep frown of concentration. The tensed muscles highlighted a heavy scar that ran from his right eyebrow down through his nose and left cheek to end just above his shaggy black beard. His two torn up wolfish ears sat perked up and alert on his head of salt and pepper hair.

He slowly made his way towards Tim under the camouflage provided by his thick sand brown cowl. The warning that was on the tip of my tongue was never delivered.

The wolfman was already mid air and swinging down. In his one arm was the same gigantic black scimitar his wolf form had.

Tim did not react in time and lost his ‘wing arm’ to the downward cleave. Tim was unfazed by this and was quick to push his tentacles to restrain his attacker. But without his immense size to limit his dexterity, the man easily dodged all of Tim’s attempts at hampering his movement.

Quantity of tentacles was not the way to go. Tim switched to quality. He swept with his entire lower body at the attacker still occupied by his tentacles.

The man proved to be just the veteran his looks suggested. He kept enough situational awareness to make the impressive jump over Tim’s massive appendage.

He was not ready, though, for the tail to swipe back with the fallen ‘wing arm’ as an extension. He cleared quite a bit of distance before digging up a trench in the earth.

The man was hit, but not down and stood up to glare at Tim again.

Said guy was just casually putting his severed arm back in place and knitting back the other miscellaneous wounds he suffered throughout the fight.

Tim’s apparent disregard of all of his effort seemed to give the wolf man pause.

The lull in combat did not last long. The warrior seemed to recall something and gained a worryingly confident smirk while running ahead.

Tim intercepted his approach with another tail sweep that was fluidly jumped over. He followed up with a swing of his ‘wing arm’ at the enemy seemingly stuck in mid-air.

The certain hit did not reach its mark when the man conjured up a very solid [mana chain] between his stump of an arm and the ground and dragged himself down out of its trajectory. He bounced up right within Tim’s guard with the force of his descent.

He lined up his massive scimitar right at Tim’s chest. The strike went through and exited out of Tim’s back.

A great explosion of mana followed. Tim was obscured in dust and he guy was knocked back down on his ass. He was not bothered by it and relaxedly brushed himself off before standing up.

Whatever he expected to happen seemed to not be Tim still standing and looking mightily pissed with his entire body rippling in activity.

The guy only had enough time to turn his sword into a grey shield to block the snake corpses that bursted out of Tim’s abdomen. The block did not do much good when another attack came from above him. More snakes popped out and started spouting the bile that I only saw in Tim’s main mouth a few times.

Everything exposed to the caustic solution started bubbling and steaming. The man put up his peculiar grey armor, but could not cover everything fast enough and screamed out in pain. The substance was not only corrosive, but also paralytic to some degree. The man began to show visible struggle in his movements.

He was keenly aware of the danger staying near Tim at that point. He covered his entire body in a quick application of his wolf form to push Tim away before transforming back and running off.

He seemed resigned to just escaping with his temporarily superior speed when his eyes landed on me and Layla. Those eyes then fell onto one of the broken boxes by our side, the ones dropped when Tim first fell down. His eyes turned back to Tim and gained a new light of determination to them.

He changed direction and was soon by our side. Tim stopped his pursuit once he saw where his target was. I was panicking internally at being held hostage when the strange old man spoke.

“You guys have real bad luck huh. First your dad’s in trouble and now you run into this THING. At least you brought something I can use.”

“But-”

Before I could even rectify his mistake, the guy was off. He was holding one of the things I assumed was a pipe bomb from Ruvyn’s stash and rushing off towards Tim again.

That was clearly a bad sign to me and I called out to Tim.

“Tim. Watch out.”

My warning was either too quiet to hear or unintentionally ignored by Tim from his concentration in the fight.

It didn’t matter in the end when, with enough momentum built in his giant wolf form, the man briefly changed back. He threw a bundle that was his cloak into Tim’s center of mass and then changed back to run pass. I desperately screamed again.

“TIM. GET AWAY FROM THERE.”

Tim was unaware of what was in that piece of cloth and just looked confusedly at me when the explosion happened. An all-consuming sphere of purple twisted itself into existence with Tim at its center and began to pull in all that was around us. Tim’s agonized screams through all of his many mouths could be hear through all of this.

His voices were immediately joined by that of Olivia as she flew in right after Tim. I was about to just walk in there too in my overall state of shock when the bastard returned and pulled me away. That was enough to snap me out of it.

I exploded onto the nearest target for my anguish.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?”

He didn’t even get to answer before I lobbed a [burst shot] in his face. The explosion was blocked by him but it still seared me from proximity. The pain was ignored and I went on with my assault.

“ANSWER ME. WHAT DID YOU DO?”

I repeated the same question a few more times before I noticed how quiet things were. Tim was no longer screaming in pain. The sphere was shrinking. It was soon gone from the scene and left only an expansive crater in its place.

“You killed him. You killed him. You killed him. YOU KILLED HIM.”

I threw spell after spell at the the murderer that had the gall to look confused and left a few nice burn marks on him. I had a good chuckle at that before dropping.