Both Leo and Honey are fighting to not laugh as the stag tries to free his antlers, Teemo still perched on his snout. It doesn’t take long for his ear to flick and for him to finally sag in defeat.

“I am bested. Finish me and claim your mana, Voice of Thedeim,” he says, sounding like he finally accepts that Teemo is both my Voice and someone not to trifle with. Teemo, of course, blows a raspberry at the statement.

“And wait for you to respawn before getting to have an actual conversation? You’re not getting off the hook that easily. Though, speaking of off the hook…” He hops to the scion’s horns and takes a good look at the prongs lodged in the wood. “Yeah, you got them in there good. I think I can get you out.”

The stag looks like he’d rather just be killed, even if it didn’t mean respawning, than have to suffer the indignity of being freed from the fallen tree. While Teemo works, I take the opportunity to politely ask him what the crap that was.

“Oh, the Butterfly Effect? I’ve kinda had that one in my pocket for a while, just never had a chance to use it. You’ve thought it to yourself a few times, and it sounded like a good use of Fate affinity to me,” he idly chats as he taps the various antlers, looking for the ones most-seriously lodged.

Looks like it was a good use for it, yeah. I’d ask you about some of your other affinity stuff you’ve been playing with, but probably best to wait until you’re on the way back for that.

Teemo turns and gives the stag a smirk and a wink. “Can’t go spilling all our secrets, right Boss? Anyway, Stag. It feels like these ones here are the most stuck, so I’m going to expand the space around them just a hair, and you should be able to pull yourself free.” He hops back to the tree and gives it a few pats, then nods. “Alright, give it a try.”

The stag gives a defeated sigh and pulls. He doesn’t make much progress, but he looks hopeful as he plants his hooves and puts a bit more force into it. He stumbles back a bit as his head finally comes free, and he gives my Voice a deep bow once he recovers.

“My deepest apologies, Voice of Thedeim. I took you as an insult to my lord, and took offense even when he didn’t. Too often, outsiders come and hope to take advantage of his kindness, and I thought you were such a vulture, to come and try to take advantage of him in this delicate time.”

If I could, I’d exchange a glance with Teemo, but he seems to be on the same page, at least. “That’s a pretty quick turn-around on your attitude there, Stag,” points out my Voice, causing the other to wince.

“...My Lord is also displeased with my earlier attitude. He… mislikes violence, and so tends to leave it to my discretion after a larger invader tried to attack his core.”

“Speaking of violence, I’m told you have an invader problem?” interjects Teemo, seizing on the chance to get the conversation on the track he had been hoping for since even before the fight.

The stag nods and leans forward, offering for Teemo to jump atop his head. “Yes, something has changed in the Green Sea.”

Teemo accepts the invitation, and Leo stands to follow as the Stag looks deeper into the Southwood. He takes off with a bounding leap, and Leo darts after to follow. They travel quickly, though I get the feeling the Stag could leave Leo in the dust if he really wanted to. The Voice takes a few minutes to organize his thoughts as they move through the forest, before he explains further, still on the move.

“The Green Sea is a massive ocean of stagnant mana. If there are any other dungeons further to the north, my Lord knows not of them. For a time, the invaders from deeper inside were manageable. My Lord’s dire bears have been up to the task of handling anything that had tried to attack us, until recently.

“Before now, the invaders had been more or less mirrors of what my Lord spawns: beasts with minimal elemental affinities. Kinetic affinity abounds, but even Life and Nature affinities are rare, and the invaders roughly reflected this. But now… they are showing other affinities.

“Birds with wind affinities are hardly a surprise, but a sylvan wolf was. Then an igneous cobra. Then a luminous hawk. The curiosity at the new affinities came to a head with the stygian hart, a pathetic mockery of myself. At that point, I feared there was something watching, somehow spying on my Lord’s works to try to pervert them to their own vile designs, but it became quickly obvious that combination was a simple coincidence.”

Leo speaks up as the pace starts to slow. “A wide variety of affinities is strange, but it sounds like you have even those under control.”

The Stag nods as his leap and bounds slow towards a jog. “We did, and technically still do. But the attacks continue to slowly ramp up, despite my Lord not having expanded recently. He’s not even made any new varieties of node that could draw that kind of attention.” He pauses as his ear flicks, and slowly shakes his head. “I don’t believe prismatic salmon would draw this many different invaders, my Lord.”

Teemo shakes his head as well. “Yeah, whenever the boss gets a new node, the invaders are focused on getting at it. It sounds like these are acting more like expansion invaders, but without the expansion to draw them in.”

The Stag nods. “Indeed. And with their strength increasing, my Lord worries he may not be able to keep up. While he has a wide variety of spawners under his command, he’s starting to max them out. If the hordes continue to grow in strength… he may be overrun. Yet even that may not be the most concerning thing about these invaders.”

That gets everyone’s attention, including my own. Something the Stag would consider more concerning than the death of his dungeon? I can’t even begin to imagine what it could be. Fortunately, I don’t need to try to imagine, as the Stag brings us to a small cave, with a dead invader inside.

I have no idea what it is. It’s about the size of a wolf, and even has some of the basic shape, but none of the fur. Instead, it has bulbous, segmented carapace, colored a dull red. The four legs have claws like a mantis, rather than feet at the end, and a strange spiky tail comes off the rear. On the front, the head looks like a giant leech.

I’d be pretty concerned if I had this thing as an invader, sheesh. Even dead, it looks wrong in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. My scions also take in the corpse in their own way. Teemo looks partially disgusted and partially creeped out by it. Leo has his lips pulled back only slightly in a wolfy frown at the abomination, and Honey is frantically making notes.

“What is it?” asks my Voice, looking at the Stag so he doesn’t have to look at the thing.

“Take a closer look. Its status is just as… unsettling as the rest of it.”

Teemo does so, and I get a look at it through his eyes. Neither of us seems to notice anything too out of place, until I look at its type. See, both invaders and my denizens have types, which seem to be roughly like a biological kingdom, or maybe whatever is a step or two below that. Still not a biologist. Whatever its actual place in organizing, the categories are pretty broad. Beasts cover most of my spawners, even the ants and bees. Undead are another category, as well as elementals, slimes, and dragons. I’m pretty sure Violet’s gremlins are spirits, which feel more primal than undead. I guess they’d need to be, or they’d just be undead.

I’ve even heard people talk about fey, even though I don’t have any of those spawners. But the point is: everything has a category. This one doesn’t. Or… I think it does, but… it’s hard to explain. I know there’s something there, even though I can’t sense it.

Teemo frowns as he picks up on my thoughts. “That’s the same kind of weird void I get when you talk about some of your stuff, Boss.”

“Does your Lord know what it is?” asks the Stag, looking hopeful. I’m certainly not feeling hopeful about what this thing is.

My first thought is that it’s somehow human, but I seriously hope that’s not the case. It’d have to take some serious transformation magic to make a human look like that. It’d probably be easier to start with some monster template and change it to look like this, instead of trying to do it to a human, and that’s even leaving aside for the moment that humans apparently can’t exist here. While I guess it could be the result of one trying to do it anyway, I doubt it. My gut says the angel lady would only send humans here as dungeons.

Maybe the connection here isn’t as one-way as I had thought? What if someone is peeking back at home? The idea of home hits me harder than I thought it would, but I do my best to shove it aside. I died back home, and I doubt I’m going to get a pass like Lazarus. I force my train of thought back on the tracks, and give it a shove to keep going. If someone from here can peek at home, could they make some abomination like this? It’s probably better than this thing actually being a human, but not by a whole lot.

Or maybe not. While it’d be a nightmare to be turned into something like this, the restricted supply of humans would limit the numbers pretty severely. From how the Stag’s been acting, there’s basically an army of these things already.