Evening was setting in by the time they finished getting the pyre built. At first when Garret, the old man, asked him to help lay his son to rest, mark assumed that he meant burying him. He hadn’t realized just how hard a winter frozen ground could be, but once he understood he started dragging over dead wood by the armful.

He hadn’t intended to get involved, not after swamp rat valley. He’d had his fill of sob stories and needy locals; but once he realized the dead guy was the son of the old man, and the father of the girl, he just couldn’t walk away. As he collected the pyre wood, he thought about the coincidences here.

He was an old man who had lost family, out looking for his granddaughter. Bernard was an old man who had lost family, left to raise his granddaughter alone. Now, here he was again; just in time to see a father die, leaving his daughter alone in the hands of her grandfather. Is this how these quests were set up, or was the AI in charge of the tutorial tugging at his heart strings on purpose? It was too much of a coincidence for Mark to believe it wasn’t done intentionally. Still, it boiled down to the same two options in the end; leave these people to fend for themselves, or help them out and maybe find a bit of closure of his own.

Once the funeral pyre was finished, they laid Dan, the dead man, atop it. He was clothed, but they had taken everything else. Gear was too hard to come by out here for them to let anything go to waste, Mark was actually wearing the man’s winter gear now. He had tried to refuse, but Garret had insisted. Saying that he would freeze to death up here if he didn’t get covered up, and besides his boy wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

Penny lit the pyre, using a burning torch, Mark had started with his prosthetic’s kit. He watched her in the flickering light of the flames. He at first thought she was in her teens at the latest, but once things had settled down, he’d learned that she was actually twenty. Tears were glistening in the firelight as she began her eulogy.

“I can’t believe you’re gone, dad.” Her voice broke but she continued, “Once mom died and the business fell through, I didn’t know if you were going to make it. But when Pete called off the marriage…it was me who fell apart and you who kept us together. You were always positive, even when we had to sell everything and come up here to live with grandpa Garret.” She had been sobbing pretty hard for the last few words and simply ended with, “I love you dad.” Before moving away to cry alone.

“Not the reunion I had hoped for,” it was the old man’s turn to talk. “I never wanted you to leave with that woman, but I was glad you were happy. Still, when I got your letter that you and Pen were coming home. It was the happiest I’d been in years; I wish we’d gotten more than a few days together before… I love you son. Don’t worry about Pen, I’ll take care of her.”

Mark watched the proceedings with mixed feelings. He understood, intellectually, that this wasn’t actually happening. That it was likely just an elaborate info dump by the tutorial. But he couldn’t just ignore it. He sighed, knowing if the AI had done this to get him involved, it had worked. He was going to help these people, even though he hadn’t intended to get that involved. Decision made; he took a step forward to say something as well.

“I didn’t know you, but I’m sorry I didn’t get here early enough to save you. Thank you for the use of your winter clothes. I promise I’ll do what I can to make sure your family is safe.” After speaking, he stepped back as well. The three of them watched the fire burn until late in the night. Finally retiring to a small tent, the three family members had shared. Mark took the place that had been Dan’s and tried his best to sleep, despite the sobs he could hear from the girl.

The next morning found all three of them with red rimmed eyes. Mark and Garret sat around a small cooking fire, Penny had yet to leave the tent. The two men were discussing the situation in the mountains and drinking something like coffee. Neither of them wanted to force her out of there too soon, so they let her be.

“…Anyway, something up there’s got them stirred up.” Garret said between sips. His hair and beard were both long and grey and looked like they hadn’t seen soap in years. Coupled with the fur clothes and the long bow he carried, he fit the fur trapper mold almost too well. “Wolves, wild cats, even the odd bear. They just don’t come down this far off the mountain. They’re likely getting chased out by something that’s taking over their hunting grounds. Something big enough to chase these predators right out of their own territory.”

Mark sipped his own beverage. Garret had offered him a battered old tin cup, but he declined. He didn’t have a coat, but he had at least brought a cup. Wincing at the bitter taste, Mark listened as the old man repeated himself again. It was plain enough that he was in shock or something close to it anyway. He just kept repeating himself over and over, and Mark listened. When the old man seemed like he was starting to calm down, Mark spoke.

“I think I can take care of the problem, whatever it is.” He said, taking another sip of the bitter brew. “But I’m not much of a tracker. I actually came up here to learn how to process animal hides. How about this; you and Penny travel with me up the mountain, I’ll help you thin the numbers on these predators and figure out their source. And you can help me collect some knowledge and a few furs along the way?”

Garret looked at him at last, it really did seem like he’d slipped away for a while and was just now coming back to himself. Mark watched him ponder on his proposition, before he nodded.

“Alright lad. I need to teach Penny how to track, set traps and process her kills anyway. She never wanted this life, poor child, but if she has to learn anyway…maybe she would do better with a fellow student around her own age.” He nodded to himself, oblivious to Mark’s wince. “There are seven wolves right here and no time like the present… give me a minute to go get Pen up and around and we can get too it. I need to keep these old hands busy for a while anyway.” the last was spoken under his breath as he left the fire, but Mark heard.

He completely understood the sentiment. When he lost his own family, he’d been trapped in the hospital, he hadn’t had the option of busy hands. He still believed that if he had only been able to get back to work and stay busy, he might not have been so badly effected… at least, he might have dealt with it a little better.

“I don’t care!” Mark had been listening to the old man trying to convince his granddaughter to come out and learn how to skin a wolf hide for a while. She wasn’t having any part of it however. “I don’t care, what does it matter if I can skin an animal. I don’t want to be in the fur trade, I don’t want to be up here, I want to go home.” She was shouting, and by the end she’d run out of the tent and into the surrounding woods.

Garret came out a moment later, looking lost. He saw Mark looking at him and moved over to join him, staring out where Penny had disappeared into the woods.

“Sorry you had to hear that,” he said with a sigh. “Like I said, she never wanted this life. Doesn’t help that it was one of those wolves that killed her old man… wish I could let her grieve in peace, but I’m afraid the woods aren’t safe anymore. But…”

Mark didn’t feel like it was his place to offer advice on this one, after all his own granddaughter had run away from him too. At least Penny hadn’t jumped onto a one-way alien space ship heading into something like a war zone. Neither did he want to be the one to go chasing her down.

“Let’s go drag the wolves back to camp,” he finally said. “If she isn’t back by the time we are ready to start then we can go collect her. She should be ok for a few minutes.” Nodding, Garret followed Mark to the dead wolves.

It wasn’t an easy job. The wolves had frozen blood in their fur, and their bodies had gone stiff. After lugging the first one back to the fire to warm up slightly, Mark was rethinking his desire to learn this particular skill. He persisted though, listening to the old man talk about the trade as they worked. When the last wolf had been carried over and Penny still hadn’t returned the pair started to worry.

Not wanting to leave anyone alone they both went out to find her. Thankfully she wasn’t too far away, simply sitting on a fallen tree staring into the distance. Tears had started to freeze to her face, but she made no move to wipe them away. Garret tried talking her back for a while but she ignored him, eventually the old man moved over to Mark.

“I can’t even get her to listen to me, would you give it a try?” he asked reluctantly. “She resents me for being here and, well, maybe hearing it from somebody else will get her to come around.” Mark sighed inwardly but did his best to keep his expression the same. Did the difficulty of the quest also dictate its realism, or was he just feeling jaded after swamp rat valley? Still, he nodded his head and moved over to sit next to the girl.

He didn’t say anything, just sat next to her. Eventually, she opened up and started crying, telling him all about her life and how she had come to be here. He listened, making the right noises at the right times and told her he was ‘sorry to hear about that.’ At some point she ended up leaning against his shoulder, and he rubbed her back gently while she talked. After she had cried herself out, he finally spoke about going back.

“I won’t say I understand what you’re going through, or that learning how to skin wolves is somehow going to be a good time. But, it’s dangerous out here and it’s cold. Look at Garret over there, he’s shivering, and he just lost his son. The son he hadn’t seen in a long time, he isn’t holding up very well out here. How bout we get the old man back to camp, eh? Let him show us something he’s good at, while he warms up by the fire.”

Mark had realized Penny was soft hearted when she tried to warn him off earlier. So, he shamelessly played on her emotions regarding the old man, who likely was holding up better to the weather than any of them. His words had the desired effect though, goading Penny to get up. taking Garret’s arm she helped lead the confused old man back to camp. He looked to Mark who mouthed ‘just go with it’ before nodding and allowing his granddaughter to ‘help’ him back to their camp.

Mark watched them go. She would realize eventually that he had manipulated her, but he hoped it wouldn’t be until after he had finished the quest. Realizing that he was tracing his artificial eye with his new hand again, he consciously put his hand down. Then, trailed the pair back to camp.

What followed was an entire day filled with cold, bloody hands. Aching muscles, and more than one accidental finger cut… and cussing. Most of that came from Penny, who decided that if she was going to do this, she might as well take out her feelings on the wolves that had killed her dad. Needless to say, most of the pelts were ruined, but Mark got a thorough understanding of the steps involved. He also learned that, whenever possible, especially when it was this cold out, that the sooner he did this, the easier it would be.

“There, normally we wouldn’t do all the steps like this out in the field, but we won’t be back to my cabin for a while, so I figured we might as well learn about the whole process. The differences between raw hide, brain tanned hide and how to smoke them to prevent insects from chewing your hard work full of holes, now…” Mark was glad his eye had a recording feature, because this old trapper was a literal fountain of knowledge.

Once they were done, they got cleaned up as best they could and decided to stay at this camp site another night. It had been a long day and they were all tired. There was a chance that something would smell the blood and come to investigate, so the two men decided on a watch rotation and called it a night.

* * *

That’s how nearly every day of the next week passed. They would wake up, tear down the tent, gather up the gear and climb higher into the mountain. During that time, Garret showed them how to hunt; set traps, recognize animal sign and how to process their kills. They didn’t get one every day, but the number of predators was a lot higher than it should have been and getting worse the further they climbed.

They had so many animal pelts at this point, they were forced to make a sled to haul them on. Mark pulled the sled, filled with the skins and all their gear. The other two even rested on it while they moved. Mark’s strength and endurance weren’t beyond human limits, not yet anyway, but the upgrades to his body allowed him to keep going when almost anyone who hadn’t gotten similar modifications would have had to stop.

On the sixth day of their trip, they saw the first broken tree. It had been perhaps a hands span across, and was snapped clean off near the ground. The tree’s canopy, barren of leaves this time of year, had been smashed apart. Branches littered the area, and at the heart of that destruction was a shattered bird’s nest.

“What do you think?” Mark asked Garret as they stood, near the smashed nest.

“Honestly lad, I don’t know. Evidence points at something smashing this whole tree down just to get at that nest. But it was long empty. That species of bird fly’s away for winter. So, I don’t know what kind of animal would bother doing something like this.” Not being able to figure anything out, they packed up and kept moving.

Soon enough, they found another snapped off tree. This one had been nearly a foot across and also had a smashed nest inside. This nest had belonged to a squirrel, and if the small smear of blood was anything to go by, it hadn’t escaped whatever had knocked down the tree. From there, snapped trees became more common. Until they reached an area that was completely devoid of upright trees. They had been smashed down and piled up into a heap, taller than a house. A hole had been dug into the pile, in the light of the setting sun it resembled nothing so much as the mouth of a cave.

“Oh no,” Garret said in a near whisper when he saw the brush pile made from whole trees. “I was skeptical at first, but seeing this… it almost has to be.” he trailed off, a vacant expression on his face.

“Has to be what Grandpa Garret?” asked Penny with a squeak. She’d come a long way in the last week. From hardly speaking to the old man to listening intently while he explained the trade. Of course, both Mark and the old man knew it had more to do with the handsome stranger, than any desire on her part to be a fur trader. Still, it was a start.

“I heard about these when I was a boy, but I always thought they were a legend, or all killed off long ago.” he said, still staring at the mound. “Stronger than an ox, big as a hill, dumb as a post. They live in the deep woods, far away from people. Unless I’m wrong my girl, that heap of trees is the home of a forest troll.” At his words the young woman gasped.

“Are you sure? I heard about those in college. They say there aren’t any more of them in our area. They only exist far out beyond the frontier, if they still exist at all.”

Mark wasn’t nearly as startled. He didn’t know local custom, and everything he’d seen lately had been wild. So now, if he was told there was a forest troll he just nodded. Not bothering to question if it was supposed to be here or not. After all, it wasn’t any weirder than a city sized snapping turtle. Honestly, he thought it was stranger to hear Penny talking about going to college.

“Think its inside?” He asked, after the pair had finished talking about local troll lore.

“Um, well, from what I remember them telling us in school, forest trolls are nocturnal. So…maybe?... there’s something else too, I think, something important about forest trolls, but… The suns going down, we should probably get out of here before it wakes up, if it is in there.” She said, starting to panic a little.

“You two wait here,” Mark said, hefting his mark III. “I’ll go check it out and if it’s in there, well, guess we will see when I get there.” The others tried to talk him out of it, but he just smiled and moved away. He wasn’t worried, this was an easy quest after all. He did switch the lever on his rifle over to the most powerful setting, just to be safe.

He moved forward as quietly as he could. He had gotten a little better thanks to Garret’s lessons, but he still wasn’t very subtle. Moving toward the piled-up trees he started to reconsider how cocky he was being. After all, if the thing was strong enough to break off all these trees and pile them up like this, it really must be a monster. He shook that thought away as paranoid. This was an easy quest, it had to be easy to kill. Taking a breath to steady his nerves, Mark walked into the cave like opening.

The outside looked like a jumbled mess, but it was nothing compared to the inside. It smelled like a latrine in here, and the bodies of several half-eaten animals lay rotting on the floor, forgotten. Mark looked around, using the night vision setting of his eye to get a better look at his surroundings. The hole wasn’t any bigger than a standard bedroom, maybe ten by twelve. There was so much clutter everywhere that it was hard to tell where the troll would even sleep if it was here. Almost as if it were reacting to his words, he heard a deep sigh coming from that mound of debris.

With a frown, Mark switched his vision over to infrared. A gasp escaped his mouth unbidden when the entire mound lit up with an orange glow. At the sound of his voice the mound, sat up. Head scraping the ceiling of its improvised home, the forest troll looked around, trying to find the noise.

When its eyes landed on Mark it let out a bellowing roar, getting to its feet right there in the nest. Mark didn’t wait when he saw that, he turned around and ran outside the moment he heard the creature roaring. The beast’s head had already been touching the roof while it was sitting down, when it got up, the entire thing began to collapse around it. Lifting its arms, it pushed out with a grunt. Sending logs flying everywhere, it looked like a bomb had gone off inside.

Mark cursed himself for a fool as the troll burst out of the now destroyed dwelling. Raising the rifle to his shoulder he snapped off a shot at the rifles highest setting. The beast grunted when a fist sized hole opened up in its chest. The beam went all the way through, making a wound that Mark could actually see through. He breathed a sigh of relieve when he saw the damage, thinking that it was over.

To his shock and horror however, the beast let out another roar and the hole started closing up. His mind blanked at the sight, while the troll finished freeing itself from the tangled trees. Mark came back to himself as the troll stepped out of the mess, it really did look like a hill now. It had to be at least ten feet tall and nearly as wide.

Reaching out an arm, that hung down to the beast’s knees and was corded thick with muscle, the troll picked up a tree trunk and swung it up over its shoulder like a club. Before it had a chance to do anything else, Mark fired off the remaining nine high powered shots from his rifle. Nine new holes appeared center mass on the troll’s chest creating a hole big enough for a basketball to fit through.

The tree branch fell from the troll’s limp fingers as it stumbled back and fell with a crash. With a relieved sigh, Mark moved up to inspect the wound. To his complete dismay, the wound was starting to close. Not waiting for this juggernaut to regain its feet, Mark tossed aside the now empty rifle and drew his Broken blade.

Without hesitation he leaped onto the downed beast, swinging towards its neck with his full might. The broken naginata wasn’t a tool designed with chopping in mind, and Mark expended a ton of energy to drive the knife sized blade into the Troll’s thick neck. He flailed away, chopping at the neck like a lumberjack would chop at a particularly stubborn tree. The troll twitched with every strike, until eventually, the head rolled away and the beast lay still.

Mark stood there, bent over at the waist taking huge gasps, one lungful of air after another. He was completely coated in the beast’s blood and he’d expended more energy in this fight than almost any other. At least he hadn’t been injured this time. Regardless, that fight was crazy hard. How was this supposed to be easy?

Garret and Penny approached him once he had caught his breath, and likely after they were sure the beast was dead. Both their eyes were round with shock and, in Penny’s case admiration. They just stared at each other for a second, still processing what had just happened. When they started chuckling, the chuckling grew and eventually turned into laughter. They were in shock, and the laughter was a better outlet to their fear than crying, so they laughed. The grandfather, granddaughter pair finished closing the distance between themselves and Mark and, regardless of the blood, enveloped him in a hug.

“I remembered,” Penny said some time later, after they had cleaned up and started a fire some ways off. “What was so important about forest trolls.” She continued when she’d gotten the others attention. “They are really strong and can heal from nearly everything, except for fire. Fire prevents them from healing.”

Mark listened to that numbly, then looked up at the near mountain of dead trees that the troll had entombed itself in as a house… well, that explained why the quest was listed as easy. If he had waited long enough for Penny to remember that little tid bit, he could have simply lit the whole thing on fire. The troll had already cleared the entire forest for a considerable distance to build its home, so the fire spreading wouldn’t have been a problem. Mark only nodded to her words, just another lesson learned the hard way.

They had been up a long time, skinning the troll had been a lot of work. Once they had started a fire for light, they realized that the entire beast was the green of the forest, and pebbled like a toad. Corse green hair grew sparsely all over its body too, getting in the way of their knives as they worked. They hadn’t finished yet, but due to the late hour decided to call it a night.

Mark came in from his watch shift, having switched with Garret. He moved smoothly through the darkness, able to see near normally as he got out of his thick clothes and settled into his bedroll. Also, thanks to his ability to see in the dark, he was unsurprised when a warm body slipped in to join him.