The problems kept piling up on me. Not only did we have the undead to think about I now had living wolves. The one Blink brought in was missing large patches of fur where it had thick heavy plates of bony armor. It was like an armadillo on steroids with claws and a bushy tail. I had become so used to seeing the smaller odd animals that I had stopped thinking about them.

This one, however, reminded me of how dangerous nature in this world was. Sure the dungeon called undead natural, and the shamans said that necromancers weren’t all evil. But, just enough of them were that no one trusted them. But, this wolf was just a wolf doing what they did, and it had two inches of bone armor plates stacked on its back.

I kind of was wondering, with so many animals that got armored, if I would see people who grew armor once I found them. Of course, I knew that they made armor; I just didn’t know if I would see horns out of foreheads and bone plates.

It took a while for me to pop the carapace off the wolf and get to work. Once I had the wolf cooking, I could figure out what we needed to do. I had been so focused on returning to this spot from the fort that I kind of forgot what I was doing.

I wanted to head to Essex and find Lannah and other people. It wasn’t that I desired the people. It was that I was tired of living where everything was out to get me. I also wanted to level, meaning I needed to learn to read. I knew that once I got to the town, I would have to deal with people, which wasn’t ever a problem one on one or even when I worked. It was always a problem in groups.

I pulled the wolf stake off the fire. It was one of the few times that I was surprised by the meat’s flavor. I had always been told that carnivores tasted terrible, so I had been eating because I needed food, expecting to have to choke down the meat. Instead, however, it tasted a lot like young chicken, if a little stringy. The part under the armor was the best, however, as it was where a layer of fat was and so, when cooked, made the room smell like bacon.

I had been thinking about what to do as I was eating. The forest on the other side of the river was drawing and killing the undead. I wasn’t sure how big of an area it was going to draw as I had thought that it was only going to be around the fort. The problem was that it might be viewing the undead as a source of calcium and so the drawing could be related to the health of the forest.

If it was related to the health of the forest, then the cluster core would be drawing from a much larger area. If that was the case, then I might be able to go south from where I was now and get to Cloudia. However, the undead were getting more powerful of late, which made me think that there was something else going on. The first ones that I had found were unarmed now. I was dealing with an organized, if slightly inept foe.

Also, the thing that made me genuinely think something else was going on was that I wasn’t able to just claim the undead anymore. I would almost say that the first ones that I encountered were a basic defensive alarm of sorts. Now that so many of theirs had been dying, they were upping their game. This made me think that I would have more trouble than I wanted to deal with.

I finally broke myself out of my thoughts, “Blink, did you see more undead out there when you were hunting?”

She looked up at me from her meal. Where I preferred cooked meat, she took all the organs raw, and so her snout was covered in blood with little bits hanging out. She nodded her head and slurped the rest of her bit in. Then as she was swallowing, she thought an image over to me.

There were undead moving through the forest, heading toward the ford. It was like someone kicked an ant hill, and now all the ants were hatefully moving to find and kill everything they could. The images that she shared from her memory showed mounted skeletons and other undead things. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was a pile of moving flesh with hundreds of eyes and at least a dozen mouths.

“And you show this to me now? Wouldn’t telling me about that huge thing earlier have made more sense than the wolves?” I almost shouted at Blink.

Blink snapped closed her mouth a few times with a big smile. Then she tore off a leg from the carcass. “Wolves knows wheres we sleep. Thing move on.”

That made some sense. If the abomination of flesh wasn’t heading toward us, then I didn’t need to worry too much about it. However, the wolves posed a threat as soon as we left the room. I needed to be ready to deal with wolves and not skeletons first thing in the morning.

I also had to figure out what I was doing. I clearly wasn’t going back across the river as that would mean going toward more undead. However, I didn’t know how big the haunted forest was, so I couldn’t just hope I could keep moving south. I needed a plan, and even the plans that I had seemed not to work well. It had taken me two days to cover what should have been a four-hour hike, and I lost a finger while doing it. Sure all of the combat was great for skills and would have given me XP if I was able to level. But, right now, it was doing nothing for me.

My best bet to pushing south would be to build out from where I was and slowly carve a path through the forest. The forest cluster was a great thing. The problem was that I had to carve those runes into living trees. So I needed to make a ton of growth stakes and cut a line through the area. Then, if I didn’t have them draw undead but just did the Lay-to-Rest, I could use them as soon as I encountered something. Then I would have a somewhat safe passage through the forest.

If I didn’t wait to make use of the stakes, just used them to create an overlapping application of Lay-to-Rest, then I could create a genuinely safe corridor. Of course, I would have to have some drawing, or the undead might stand at range and pelt me, but that might not be a problem. It would be a slow advance, but hopefully, I could get back to moving quickly once I got out of the woods.

The problem with the idea that I was dealing with was the speed at which I was going to move. The undead had already been getting dense enough on this side of the river that I felt the need to move to the other. Now the other side was a mess, too, if not a bigger one. Which meant that I was going to need a lot of growth stakes if I was going to do this.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think this would work only that I felt that it was going to take too long. I could make about 10 growth stakes daily, but that would only let me move under full cover, about 600 to a thousand feet. I needed something better, as I couldn’t see myself spending ten days to create enough for less than two miles of travel.

So I needed to go back a ways and figure a way around it. I didn’t have another choice. Even with a hundred tree growth stakes, I would be moving too slowly. If I had a way to make them smaller and faster, then it might work. But, as it was now, there just wasn’t anything I could do. I wanted to keep going south, but I was stuck.

I didn’t have a solution to my problem, and I didn’t seem to know anyone that I could ask for help on that. The old men could only teach me about the Sisters and help with general wisdom questions. Sam was a total jerk. Even if he had given me some good information recently, I didn’t see him helping me with this. Though it might count as a general enough question that he would tell me the direction to go.

It was worth a shot. I was supposed to have learned about geography as part of learning about the world. I knew that he wouldn’t give me specific directions someplace, but I might be able to get him to tell me about this haunted forest.

The daylight outside wasn’t gone, even if I couldn’t see it in here. So that meant that the spell would still work, and there was a chance that I would get the info that I needed so that I could figure out what I needed to do.

I looked around the room and moved the sharp bones and bloody mess all onto one side and away from me. Then I spread out my sleeping fur and got ready. This spell always messed with me, and I hated using it almost as much as I hated getting answers.

I spun up the spell and found that, yes, I could slam my wrists into the ceiling as I raised my arms high above my head. Then my body snapped back, and I started to spin. Then as loud as I could, I belted out.

Oh great and mighty greeter Sam, I the lowly Arn beseech you to answer my question. What is the history of this haunted forest I am now in.

As the last word of my question exited my mouth, my knees gave out, and my body fell to the ground. My face went toward the floor with the poor aim that only mana overuse could muster, and I found the inside of the wolf’s armored plates.

When I came too, I tried in vain to clean off the nasty smell of the blood and guts that were now caked onto my face. It was bad, but at least this time, I didn’t fall into the fire, and it was a much better landing than if my head had found the bones. Never before had I spun, but it was petty, like most things related to Sam.

“Alright Blink, it is early I know but lets go to sleep and tomorrow we can deal with moving on.”

I wasn’t happy as I curled up to sleep that night. Even seeing that I got a new skill of war hammer all the way to level 12 didn’t help me feel happy. I was hoping that Sam, of all people, would give me information that would help me out of the mess I was in.

* * *