Chapter 1

Gigantic trees surrounded them, as far as the eye could see in every direction, colossal trees grew from the earth, their roots rising from the ground almost as thick as the trunks of normal sized oak trees. The thick tree trunks ascended seemingly forever, lost to sight in the murky twilight above.

Except for the creaking of trees and branches in the gentle wind, it was deathly quiet for the first few moments that they’d stepped into the Dire Woods before something let out an unearthly howl in the distance. The howl seemed to set off a chain reaction of monstrous roars, howls and squarks in the distance all around them, a cacophony of animalistic jabbering that eventually petered out and faded back into an unnatural, unnerving, deathly quiet.

Jack leaned towards Meredith. “Is it too late to put in for some annual leave?” he murmured to her.

She glanced at him, a hint of a smile twitched at the side of her mouth, however her eyes told of her nervousness at being in a place like this. She took a deep breath in and exhaled slowly, her breath came out in a fog.

Jack turned back to the entrance they’d just come through, it appeared as a large, strange distortion in the air, like a tall rent in space reaching dozens of metres in height. The colossal trees surrounding them looked tortured and twisted when viewed through the lens of Dire Woods entrance. When looking through the distortion, one could see both the outside world where they’d just come from and at the same time you could also see the Dire Woods behind it. The entrance acted like a portal, depositing them in the middle of the Woods or taking someone to the edge. It was like looking through cracked warped glass and seeing two worlds overlapping and bizarrely merged together. Broken sunlight from outside the Woods streamed through the distortion in the air, it provided illumination to the large open area around them, but beyond was a gloomy twilight with faint glowing lights in the distance.

He then saw the three new team members that he and Meredith had recruited.

The first was Nathan Roshton, known as Nate to his acquaintances. He and Jack had become friends shortly after Jack joined the hunters guild and they’d been on quite a few hunts together in the months since. He was rank D like Jack, but his fighting strength and skills were more that of a C or B ranker in Jack’s opinion, but whenever the topic of ranking up was mentioned, Nate awkwardly deflected the conversion to something more lighthearted.

He’d been originally planning on not asking Nate or any of his other hunter friends to join him in the Dire Woods, but Nate had somehow found out and pretty much demanded to come along anyway. Along with his superlative skills in slaying monsters, Nate had the sheer enthusiasm and love of a good fight to go along with it, perhaps more enthusiasm than good sense, but nothing had managed to kill him yet.

The other two new members of the team were relative strangers to Jack, one of whom he’d never met before he and Meredith had approached them a short while ago on a recruiting drive.

The first new teammate they’d recruited after Nate was a man named Noah, he was a fairly big guy at just over six feet with a fair amount of muscle on his sturdy frame. He had short black hair and black skin, he wore a heavy set of armour made of a mix of metal plate, monster bones, tough hides and scales. He wielded a large warhammer with the reverse side sporting a wicked looking spike and was a user of the earth element. He was a rank C hunter and technically the second in command of their newly formed team under Meredith. He was definitely a decent hunter, but from what Jack had observed during some of their practice hunts before coming to the Dire Woods, he was a bit of a stick in the mud.

Noah could be rather strict and sometimes treated their hunts as military manoeuvres, he even insisted to Meredith that the team do drills during their practice sessions. Jack could appreciate a few teamwork tactic lessons and sparring, but he drew the line at push ups and suicide runs while wearing lead weights.

Noah had been a part of a hunter team previously, but once he and another one of his teammates had both ranked up to C at the same time, there was a debate which quickly devolved into an outright argument as to who should be team leader. In the end, Noah’s former team was saved from being split apart when Meredith and Jack had arrived, shamelessly poaching Noah away at Cheryl’s direction. Normally Noah might’ve refused but by that point there was such an amount of bitterness and bad feeling within his former team that he was glad to leave.

Noah was currently scanning his surroundings with a stern gaze, he met Jack’s eyes briefly and nodded before going back to silently viewing his surroundings.

The last member of their group was someone with whom Jack had worked with before, Katie, the young woman who had joined him for a hunt during an orc rampage through Park Estate near York. She was around her late twenties with brown hair and dusky skin. She was a wind element who used a large oversized metallic great bow along with a quiver of water crystal infused arrows and a D ranker like Jack and Nate.

Katie too had been part of a hunter team, she’d been hunting partners with a man named Laurence. However after the rather traumatic events of the orc hunt in Park Estate, Laurence had decided to quit hunting and find another career. Katie on the other hand wanted to continue, that was where Jack and Meredith came in. Jack remembered Katie had the rather useful skill of being able to track just about anything through the use of her wind element, which should come in handy in the future he thought, she also never missed with that giant bow of her’s.

That was it, just the five of them, Meredith, Jack, Nate, Noah and Katie. Along with their armour and weapons, everyone hefted large rucksacks on their backs containing various essentials like spare clothes, armour and weapon maintenance gear and the like.

Noah continued to sternly watch their surroundings. Nate rummaged through one of the supply crates they’d been tasked with transporting, looking for peach yoghurt, Katie nervously thumbed her bow string, glancing around in trepidation.

While everyone got their bearings, Jack thought back to when they’d been recruiting for the team with a wince. He didn’t have a problem with anyone they’d recruited, Nate was great, so was Katie, Noah was…….okay. But there was one other hunter who’d wanted to go with them but Jack had point blank refused her. Stacey, he still remembered the hurt look she’d given him when he told her no, and the argument afterwards. He grimaced at the memory again, it's not that he didn’t want to team up with her and go hunting, but he'd been warned by multiple people that the Dire Woods was a genuine death zone that was single handedly contributing to over half the hunter death toll for the entire county of North Yorkshire. For some reason the thought of taking Stacey into a place like this and seeing something happen to her, well he didn’t want to think about it. So it was just the five of them.

Jack turned to Meredith.

“We moving out Meredith? Where does it say to go?” he asked her, referring to the map and instructions they’d been provided by the guild before leaving.

“Hmm, there’s supposed to be a guide from the surveyor corp here to meet us, the outpost was here originally, but apparently it was temporarily moved somewhere else, they’re supposed to lead us to the new location,” she said, frowning as she looked around. Everyone else looked around too, searching for the guide. “Also, we need to be careful, there’s supposed to be a heavy monster infestation in this particular area, so we need to be quiet, the guide will probably tell us more.”

“Ah! Oh, um….is that them up there?” Katie pointed up, to a nearby tree branch.

Everyone looked to where she pointed, they grimaced. Half a human corpse, the torso, was resting atop a tree branch with its intestines dangling a few feet below.

“Oh, what are the chances that's our guide and not just a….random…..dead person?” Jack asked hopefully. Katie walked to a spot directly beneath the unfortunate corpse and knelt down to pick something up. She looked down at it.

“This is his ID, it says his name is Norman Bellows, journeyman of the surveyor corps. Is that who we were supposed to meet?” she asked, looking at Meredith.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Meredith sighed with a grimace. “Yeah,” she admitted after a moment. Everyone let out small groans of frustration.

“Hey! Don’t worry guys,” she tried to reassure the group. “We’ve still got the map, we know where we need to go, it's just a simple matter of getting there.” She gave them a bright smile.

Jack, Nate and Katie gave her sceptical looks before Noah strode forward.

“Right, you heard her, we’ll follow the directions on the map, it's only ten kilometres so we should be able to make that in a day, easily,” he stated firmly. “Let’s move out,” he ordered before marching forward.

After a small delay Meredith hurried to follow him along with the others.

The area they walked through was relatively flat with plenty of dry open ground without much vegetation, the massive trees that surrounded them all grew far apart from each other with their roots partially emerging from the ground.

However, there also appeared to be a fair amount of wreckage strewn around, broken boxes, crates and shipping containers, split sandbags, broken glass, bent metal sheeting and more. The remnants of the previous base perhaps? But why had they moved?

The team walked together over the open ground, ducking under roots and skirting around giant tree trunks. Meredith had half an eye on her pager which she was using for its map and tracking software, with it she was able to see their destination and where they were in relation to it.

After quarter of an hour of nothing but walking, a bored Jack was beginning to wonder just what was so dangerous about this place. He got his answer soon after.

“Er guys?” Katie whispered, sounding very worried. Jack looked over to her and saw she was looking up. He looked up too.

“Uh oh,” was all he could come up with. Above them, emerging from the impenetrable gloomy twilight of the tree tops were scores of giant insect-like creatures, crawling down the tree trunks all around them. They looked like giant centipedes or scorpions, elongated creatures covered in grey chitin armour, sporting giant pincer like mandibles and claws. They made no sound except for the quiet clacking of large pincers scuttling and clinging to the wooden surfaces of the trees.

Everyone dropped the crates they were lugging and got their weapons ready.

“Get ready!” Noah called out as he brought his hammer to bear. “Katie! Start picking them off!” he barked out.

Katie jumped in shock, she’d just been staring in horror at the wave of hungry death descending upon them. But Noah’s words galvanised her and she quickly whipped her bow out before smoothly nocking her first arrow and letting it fly in less than five seconds.

The first insectoid horror went down with a large arrow embedded in what passed for its forehead, its head then burst apart in a shower of dark ichor, likely an effect from the water crystal infused arrow head. The creature dropped the rest of the way down to the forest floor, landing in an unmoving heap. She managed to kill a further three before the rest of the creatures reached ground level and the other hunters were forced to defend themselves, or run enthusiastically at the nearest monster in Nate’s case.

Without any more time for thought Jack found himself confronted by his first several opponents. They were about the size of large horses and swiftly moved towards him with a scuttling weaving motion like snakes, almost gliding along the ground. He poured a liberal amount of lightning energy into his axe and took a swipe through the air, blasting out a shockwave of rippling blue lightning into the approaching enemies.

As the lightning hit them they stopped and spasmed, coiling up and writhing, Jack took advantage of their pause and moved amongst them. He hacked into the monsters, killing one monster as quickly as possible before moving onto the next.

Before long he had a pile of dead insectoid monsters laying at his feet, however he wasn’t given any time to celebrate his victory as a new wave of slavering insectoid monsters mindlessly charged at him. He threw himself into the fray.

A while later, after dealing with his third group of enemies, Jack found himself with some breathing space and chanced a look at how the rest of his team were doing.

He saw Nate right away, he was standing near the base of a tree and was pouring a thick continuous gout of flame at groups of onrushing monsters, laughing maniacally as he did so. It didn’t look like Nate needed any help.

Noah and Katie were fighting near each other, it appeared Noah was fending off any monster that got too close to Katie while she methodically took down one monster after another. Noah had manifested a large boulder of rock around the head of his warhammer and was using it to squash any bug that got too close.

Meredith was some distance away, completely surrounded by monsters. At first it looked like she was in trouble, Jack could barely see her for all the chitin, mandibles and claws surrounding her. But even in the midst of it all, she was still moving, rapidly and elegantly lashing out with her swordspear, slicing apart everything in range, twirling and spinning like she was in a dance.

Before long the tide of insectoid enemies started to diminish, however the monsters did not retreat, they kept relentlessly attacking, either not realising or not caring about dying. In the end, the last monster wasn’t killed by Jack or any other member of their team, just before the last creature threw itself at Nate, it was killed by someone new arriving on the scene.

The last monster scrabbled towards Nate in a frenzy, Nate wore a grin of bloodthirsty anticipation and eagerly raised his sword to strike like he was winding up for a swing with a baseball bat. But before he could take a swing, another human came out of nowhere in a flash. They suddenly appeared next to the monster, crouched down with a katana outstretched to the side in a pose as if they’d just struck something. The monster next to them keeled over, cut in half by the stranger.

No one spoke for a moment, staring in astonishment at the scene, Nate then broke the silence.

“You…You….KILL STEALER!!” he spluttered indignantly, as if that was the worst insult he could come up with, which knowing Nate it probably was.

The stranger stood up straight, smoothly sheathing their katana, ignoring the fuming Nate beside him. They were wearing a dark but somewhat ragged looking long poncho underneath some pale animal fur hides resting on their shoulders. They wore a hood so nobody could see their face, as they stood up they removed their hood to reveal the face of a young man with long blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes. The man grinned at the onlooking team, still ignoring the glowering Nate.

“Hey guys! I see you all got the Dire Woods Welcome,” he remarked cheerfully with a bright grin.

Everyone stared at him silently for a moment while Nate continued sullenly glaring. Katie began combing the battlefield, retrieving her arrows.

“You did that on purpose, you waited for the last possible moment to make a dramatic entrance,” Nate accused but was ignored once more.

Meredith walked over to him from where she was surrounded by an impressive pile of monster corpses.

“Er hi there, I’m Meredith Shriverston and this is my team, are you from the outpost?” she asked politely.

The man turned to her, his eyes widened for a split second before his face was transformed by a charming grin.

“I am indeed ma’am, and I must say it's a pleasure and an honour to meet you. Even here in the Dire Woods outpost we've heard about the lovely and powerful huntress; Meredith Shriverston.” He turned his charming grim up to level eleven. Meredith awkwardly looked back at him, uncomfortable and a little exasperated, uncertain about how to respond.

“He’s got the hots for Meredith, it's obvious, look at his smile! He’s trying to be seductive!” Nate derisively heckled from the sidelines.

Jack and Katie sniggered while the stranger’s smile dipped and a look of vague annoyance replaced it.

Before things could deteriorate any further, Noah stepped forward.

“Please identify yourself,” Noah ordered the stranger authoritatively.

The young man was a little caught off guard but quickly put a confidant smirk back on his face before answering. “My name’s Darren Stone, hunter rank C. I got sent out here to investigate why one of our surveyors stopped responding to our radio hails. We sent him out here to act as a guide for a team of new arrivals. You haven’t seen anyone like that out here have you?” He grinned at them.

“We’re the new team sent by North Yorkshire branch headquarters, team Meredith,” Noah stated in response. “I’m afraid the guide was already dead upon our arrival so we took it upon ourselves to find our own way to the outpost,” Noah informed the stranger.

“Ah, shit. Poor Normy.” Darren looked sad for a moment before perking up. “Oh well, good thing I’m here then. Don’t worry, I’ll escort you the rest of the way safely,” he said with a confident grin.

Noah simply looked back at him with a raised eyebrow that spoke volumes of his scepticism, but he didn’t say anything, he simply nodded once.

There was a screech in the distance that made everyone look around warily.

“Right, time to go. That fight will’ve attracted some attention and we may not want to be here when whatever that was gets here,” Darren declared. “Follow me.” Without another word he turned around and began jogging away. After a moment, Meredith sighed.

“Lets go,” she simply said before jogging after Darren. Everyone else followed behind her.