Chapter Five

Chris reached the location marked on his map. He stepped out of the trees and into a massive grassy clearing. A perfect circle of large trees lined the clearing, and Chris glanced up at them as he passed underneath. They seemed to be pulsating gently with an odd amber colour, and the branches were covered in needles instead of leaves, like a Christmas tree. Chris decided that these must be deciduous trees, though admittedly his knowledge of foliage was pretty limited.

At the centre of the clearing were three large trees surrounding an enormous wooden door laying flat on the ground. Next to the door was a group of three players dressed in leather armor, talking animatedly to each other. Chris put on a big smile and walked up to them. Time to play the socializing game and get some intel.

“Hey there! Have you guys been inside?” Chris raised his hand in a wave and as he entered the inner circle of trees a notification popped up in the centre of his screen, overriding his default corner notification setting.

New Quest: Heavy Infan-Tree

You have stumbled upon (or perhaps were sent to?) the secret hiding place of the fearsome Heavy Infan-tree. Will you deny your debilitating dread and delve deep into its depths? Of course you will.

Difficulty: S

Success: Reach the final room of the dungeon and escape with a deciduous.

Failure: Die inside the dungeon.

Reward: ???

Slightly confused, and more than slightly annoyed by the developer’s jokes, he wiped the notification away, while a large red-haired man with a massive sword approached him.

“Hey! You just got that quest too, huh?” The swordsman looked to be in his early twenties, and had a huge smile on his face.

Chris nodded and approached him with a hand extended in a friendly gesture, “Yup. I’m Chris. Everything in this game is a pun it seems.”

“Ah!” The man gripped his hand and pumped firmly. “Yes! I love the puns! I’m Corey. The little one over there is my brother Malik,” He gestured at the younger looking man behind him. Chris guessed he looked around seventeen. Malik waved at Chris dismissively. By the way he was waving his hand in the air he was clearly preoccupied with the in-game menus. “And this is my sister Levie,” Corey nodded his head at the girl next to him who was throwing a dagger up in the air and catching it, clearly the youngest of the three.

“Don’t let her age fool you, she’s the toughest of all three of us.”

Levie beamed at the compliment and missed catching her dagger. “Dangit, Corey! You distracted me!” She picked up her dagger and hopped over to Chris. “Hi Chris!” she beamed a smile up at him. “Are you going inside?”

“Levie, relax for a minute,” Malik said. “I’m checking the posts to see if anyone else has been through here before. There’s no point in going in blind.”

Corey nodded thoughtfully in agreement, but Levie rolled her eyes. “Come oooon! Half the fun is exploring the unknown!” she said. “Reading all the strats beforehand is basically cheating in my book.”

“Well, hey,” Chris said, trying to split his attention between the three. He wasn’t yet sure who was really leading their social dynamic, and he knew not to make assumptions too early. “It looks like you guys are all front-line type classes? I’m a healer if you want to team up and go in.”

“Hell yeah!” Levie let out a cheer and punched the air. “A healer! Score! Come on you guys! We’ll be unstoppable!” Her smile dropped when she saw the perma-scowl on Malik’s face was unmoved. She looked at him with a pout. “Malik, please? We’ve been standing here for a hundred hours let’s just go in, come on! Live a little!”

-----

Chris sat down on the ground and watched the blue specks of the Deathscape float around him.

“Well that didn’t work,” he said. From where he was now standing on top of a large boulder, he had an excellent view of the entirety of the cavern below him, and he watched himself die once again. All around him was the slightly hazy blue motes floating up from the ground which signalled that he was inside the Deathscape.

The four of them had rushed into the dungeon full of verve, and were promptly massacred. He looked down at his bloody body lying broken on the rocky dirt floor, and moments later the scene reset itself. The cavern went dark, and the air seemed to shiver. Then the wooden door in the roof slid open and he saw Corey drop down onto the dirt floor. He grinned and looked up at the others. “All clear in here!” Levie dropped in next, with Malik and Chris close behind. All Chris could remember of the next few moments was a swarm of teeth and claws ripping all of them apart before they could react.

Even in the Deathscape, with everything slowed down, they moved incredibly quickly. But at least here, without the threat of death immediately in his face, he was able to get a better look at the creatures and he now knew that they weren’t fangs and claws after all, but thorns and sticks.

Chris watched Malik pull out a small orb, some sort of magical reusable torch, and after a murmur from his lips the entire room erupted in light. A moment later all hell broke loose.

Chris looked up to the ceiling and could see the creatures illuminated in the bright light. They looked like living trees but they hung upside down from the ceiling, like bats - or like they had been planted in the soft earthen ceiling and were growing downward. “Deciduous,” Chris snorted. “Why am I surprised? Again.” When the light bathed over them, they all woke simultaneously and dropped down onto the unsuspecting adventurers.

“Beginning of the end,” Chris said. He watched the nearest creature launch itself onto Malik with its root tentacles while a hole in the front of its tree-trunk body opened up to reveal several rows of tiny razor-like teeth. Before anyone even knew they were there it had bit into Malik’s shoulder, taking a piece of him with it and spraying a gush of blood out onto the ground.

The rest of the team went down just as quickly and the entire battle, if you could call it that, was over within seconds. As he watched his lifeless body fall to the ground for the third time Chris threw his head back in a sigh, but then paused as he noticed something new, high above him. There, looking down through the opened dungeon trapdoor, was the same familiar delivery girl peering down at his bloody corpse with a most peculiar look of curiosity on her face.