NOVEL WEB Chapter 5: The Master of the Forest
Since Naru was starting to get the hang of magic. She started spending most of her days playing around with it and playing pranks on the other dear. It was mostly harmless things like making them slip on banana peels or throwing overripe tomatoes at them.
Unfortunately, that backfired for her.
Initially, Naru was throwing tomatoes at the other deer. It was a harmless little thing she was doing for fun. But eventually one day a deer decided to catch one of them. After taking a bite the deer’s face lit up and they begged Naru to make them more tomatoes.
Naru was now being inundated with requests for tomatoes. They were a food that wasn’t native to this world, but it seemed that the deer quite like them. Naru became so busy that every day that she didn’t have much time to do much else besides making tomatoes for the other deer. She was also exhausted every day, making plants grow cost quite a bit of her mana and she was doing it with no rest.
That was until her mother called her over one day.
“Naru you know you can say no right?” She said with a worried expression.
“Eh?” Naru said.
She was the kind of person who always took overtime if her boss demanded it. The concept of saying “no” was something that she had trouble with.
Her mother scratched her deer ears which twitched slightly.
“If you like giving them tomatoes that’s fine but you really don’t have to indulge the rest of the deer” She said.
“We’re deer after all, it’s not like we have jobs like humans,” her mother said
[I guess that’s true] Naru was always a people pleaser. She never really told anybody that she didn’t want to do something. She decided to compromise.
The next day she told the other deer that she would only make a certain number of tomatoes per day and they would have to split them amongst themselves.
At first, it felt odd to be denying a request of the deer and Naru had trouble saying no, but she was getting better at it.
** ** **
Today, Naru was being taken by her father to meet the “master of the forest”. It was something all the magic deer had to do before being allowed to live in the forest. The master of the forest made an effort to know every living creature that lived in its forest and thus required that they see them before went about their lives in the forest.
At first, Naru thought the master of the forest would be a deer, but she was quickly informed that that master of the forest was the oldest tree in the forest.
Her father brought her to a secluded grove that she had never seen before. The tree here were all massive and towered over her, their trunks the width of roads, Naru wonder how such large trees could even be felled. Looking around, Naru found the largest tree in the area. Assuming it was the master of the forest Naru began to walk towards it.
Her father grabbed her shoulders and pointed towards another tree.
It was unlike the other tree and was located more towards the middle of the grove.
It was a gnarled-looking old oak tree. It was surprisingly small compared to the other tree nearby, the foliage of the other trees seemed to have created an opening where sunlight would filter through and fall on the old oak tree.
Naru’s father nudged her towards it.
Naru in response began to nervously walk towards the tree. Her father told her the master of the forest was grumpy and Naru didn’t want to be kicked out of this forest before she was even allowed to settle down properly.
“Umm, Hello?” She called out to the tree
The tree seemed to rustle in response.
Naru noticed a face shaped into the oak. It was the face of an incredibly old man. Each crease in the bark looked like it was another wrinkles in the man’s face.
The face seemed to smile slightly. Naru heard something falling above her, and moved out of the way, an object soon fell in front of her. She bent down to pick it up and realize that the object was a shiny red apple.
“For me?” She asked the tree
The tree seemed to rustle approvingly in response
Naru took a bite of the apple, it was a little bitter but otherwise, it was quite sweet
“Thank you, Mr. Tree, I’ll be living here for a while now ok~,” Naru said bowing politely.
The oak rustled again and Naru returned to her father’s side.
“How’d it go?” Her father asked
“Pretty good!” Naru said munching on the apple the tree gave her
“Good” Her father said looking relieved
Gauging her Whitehorn’s reaction Naru felt uneasy.
“What? Does the tree reject people sometimes?” She asked him
“No, but he sometimes gets into… Moods.”
“Moods?” Naru asked.
“One time he expelled a poor deer for two weeks for accidentally trespassing into his grove.” Her father explained.
[So he’s an old geezer!] Naru thought. Near her house in her old world, there were several retirees who didn’t like people being near their house, they would always come out waving their canes to shoo away people who loitered too close for too long.
Naru felt like she understood the master of the forest a lot more.
[I’ll make sure not to bother him.]
