Lyrhea rested up against a tree, using her arm to hold herself in place as she panted. There was a definite effort being made on her part, though not by using up all of her stored fuel.

In fact, she was wearing herself out because she wasn’t using her stored fuel. Of the hundreds of hornbuns she had eaten over the days leading up to this battle of attrition, more than seven-eighths of them still had yet to even be touched, so the fact that she was burning her own energy without relying on her stores was what was tiring her.

She was doing her damnedest to avoid using her stores as much as possible, burning them only when needed to make a clean getaway or to deliver that one good hit, though she had given up on giving any good hits with her own two hands as of late, as they were nothing more than a waste of time and energy at this point. Using her speed, though? That worked.

She had lured the wolf-bear into another prepared area, and the dumb thing was now running after her at a decent clip. She was tired, and while she could burn that tiredness away with a bit of her reserves, she chose not to.

Eventually she’d need to learn how to fight on empty against something like this, so why not do it sooner rather than later? Besides, she had a few things set in place to help her win this fight, so learning here would be better than being forced to learn while under the threat of a much more powerful and much less predictable opponent.

“I’ve got you now!” the Guardian roared as it lunged towards her. Lyrhea cocked a smile and rolled away, leaving the wolf-bear to unintentionally drive another stake into itself.

“You’d think that you’d have learned to avoid that trick by now.” Lyrhea said snarkily as she backed up and jogged a bit further down the path she had marked out ahead of time.

The Forest Guardian growled as it pulled itself off. This stake had impacted right next to where an earlier one had, and as a result, had dug deeper into its flesh than the others had been able to.

“This grows tiresome…”

The Forest Guardian raised its head and roared, and all the animals of the area of the forest that it governed obeyed. No longer would this be a one-on-one fight. It was time for the king to command its soldiers to fight, and then deal the finishing blow itself after the fact.

…

Lyrhea dodged as a hornbun made a suicidal charge from a thicket at her. One of her knives swung up and caught the airborne creature by the throat and brought it close, where she shoved it into her mouth even as another three of its ilk tried the same thing.

Four hornbuns became ten, which became thirty, which in turn became eighty, and then a hundred and fifty. And while the increased numbers were indeed causing Lyrhea to burn her reserves to keep up with it all, they were also doing her a favor and giving her more fuel to add to those reserves.

But those hornbuns were not the only threats that added themselves to the equation. A herd of green-furred deer made their presence known, and Lyrhea quickly found herself outmatched due to both the numbers of enemies and their variety.

Eventually she would take more blows than her healing factor could recover from, and she knew that, and so she did the only thing she could feasibly do in order to avoid the ground-based melee that she was stuck in.

She went to the trees and climbed.

She nearly was knocked down into the growing numbers of irritable woodland critters by a few well-aimed rams from a few courageous/ stupid hornbuns, but she managed to dodge them just barely and scurried up into the canopy to try and escape the horde. But while she had previously only dealt with hornbuns and green deer, there were numerous other animal-type monsters that made their home in the forest that she was in.

“Son of a bitch.” she cursed as a barrage of tree nuts and seeds were thrown at her from the paws of blue-furred squirrels with horse ears. As if those were not annoying enough, she also had to dodge yet more ramming attacks by vengeful avian creatures whose forms crossed those of pigeons with those of grackles.

“To face the Guardian of the Forest is to face the entire forest.” the Guardian’s voice boomed. It was still a fair bit away, but it seemed that it could send its voice nearly anywhere it had influence. Maybe it was more powerful than Lyrhea had first thought...

…

It had been hours since the chase began and night had fallen. Despite that, she was still in the middle of her fight.

A swing of her knives brought a few small creatures to an untimely end, and they found their graves soon after as she grabbed them. Another series of woodland critters high in the trees went into Lyrhea’s mouth, and she jumped to another tree branch before snapping at the Forest Guardian in anger and irritation.

“So I’m a coward for using tools and traps, but you’re not a coward for turning an honorable one-on-one fight into a one-on-thousands fight?” Lyrhea grabbed one of the birds, snapped its neck, and used it to beat another out of the air before swallowing both of them. “Double standard much?”

“It is merely my way of showing you that I now am taking this seriously.” came the voice that seemed to come from all directions. “I am not merely one body, I am everywhere.”

“So, you are Legion, then?” Lyrhea spat. “You are this forest, and it is you?”

“From a certain point of view.”

“And that main body?” Lyrhea asked, not knowing if she had a chance now and grasping at a straw. “What happens if it is killed? What happens if it goes crazy?”

“That thing? It is not my true main body. That is elsewhere, and you will never find it.”

“Answer the questions if you’re so sure of it.”

“Very well. If anything were to happen to my true body, then that which you have fought would become the new main body until I could settle it and rebuild from there. If it were to go crazy, though…?”

“Well?!”

“Then this place would become a slaughterhouse where the strong devour the weak. And I cannot allow that.”

Lyrhea ground her teeth and began to jump from tree to tree. This was an unwinnable battle, and if she didn’t win it she would die. She had no idea if this battle, now joined, had a true time limit that ended at the end of the day or some time after that, but she was running short on time and was about to find out regardless.

Day had already turned to night, and she was pretty sure that in a few hours the first glimmer of the sun would begin to reach her eyes. If she was to win/ lose within a 24 hour period, then it was game over for her, but if there was no time limit set after the battle was joined, then if she could last long enough to find and eventually destroy both the main body and primary vessel of the Forest Guardian, then she actually had a shot.

That is, if she lived past the next sunrise.