NOVEL WEB
Chapter 66: Fireflight
After a full night’s sleep, Erani, the Dryad, and I all woke up to the sun rising fully into the sky, finally casting illumination around us. Hells, it was probably already past noon. It felt like it’d been much too long since I’d last seen the world cast in light, which was technically correct, since I’d spent an extra two hours in midnight using Time Loop the day before.
I stretched and sat up from my position lying with Erani. We’d spent the night sleeping next to each other so she could practice her Angelic Shield, and it seemed like it’d worked. At least, it seemed like we’d sustained contact throughout the night. I knew I’d been casting Noxious Grasp while I slept – its Spell XP had risen from 24 to 89 since I checked the previous night – so it should’ve triggered her Spell, too.
“How’d you sleep?” Erani yawned as she sat up next to me.
“Fine enough,” I said. “So did it work? Angelic Shield?”
“Oh, right,” she rubbed her eyes, obviously still trying to pull herself out of her sleepy stupor. “Looks like it did. Getting close to Rank 10, at this point.”
“And at that point, all we have left is getting you a Spell Crystal. Holy, right?”
“Yeah. No idea where we’d actually find one, though. Our only real option would be sneaking into a town, and I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”
“It wouldn’t work to put one of the free Spell Ranks that come every second Level for your class into Angelic Shield, would it?”
“No, the Spell Ranks are only ‘free’ in terms of XP. The tenth will always need a Crystal.”
“Damn. What Level are you at this point, anyway?”
“I got to 12 recently. Put the Rank into Firebolt, as usual. It’s not close to Rank 20, but once I get there I’ll need two Spell Crystals to get its Upgrade. Cost goes up each time.”
“Hm, so we’d need a Spell Crystal for both of them, huh. We’re getting close to Kingdom’s Edge, and settlements aren’t common out here – much less ones that are stocked up on valuables like Spell Crystals.”
“Wait, we’re already close?”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “Did you forget where we were going, or something?”
“No, no, I guess I just got lost in the stupor of travel that I forgot we were actually trying to end up somewhere. Yeah, we have been going for about a week now, haven’t we?”
I nodded. “Mountains should come into view soon.”
She breathed. “Finally. Hard part’s almost over then, I guess.”
“Yeah. I– wait,” I looked around the area. “Where’s the Dryad?”
Erani blinked, turning around to search. “I don’t know. She was just here, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
We walked around the nearby area, searching for her. With her green, vine-covered skin, she had a bit of natural camouflage that made her difficult to see even when she was standing right next to me. But, now I realized just how effective it truly was. I found myself searching around random trees and piles of leaves, thinking they were her when they really just resembled her natural look.
“Find her?” Erani said, looking around on the other side of our makeshift campsite.
“No. Do you think she–”
I was interrupted by the Dryad suddenly bursting through the trees, sprinting as fast as she could with her arms full of something. I stared at her as she passed through and across the other side of our campsite. It was… animals? In her arms, I could barely make it out, but it looked like she had her arms full of animals – a Wood Spirit, a Rabbit, and maybe one other.
“What the fuck?” I said as I looked at Erani. The Dryad was already long gone, having passed through into the forest on the other side of our site.
“Was that–”
“Yeah. What’s going on?” I looked over in the direction she came from. At first, I didn’t see anything interesting – some trees, bushes, grass, a couple hills off in the distance – but then I noticed something else. Over the horizon, the sky looked strange. A mix of gray in the air and orange coming from the tops of the far-off trees. It was like…
“Fuck! Forest fire!” Erani shouted, looking at the same sight I was staring at.
I looked back in the direction the Dryad had fled into. There was fire coming from everywhere – almost in a perfect semicircle around us – but in that direction, there was none. Was the Dryad saving those animals? She’d seen the fire, or sensed distress from the nearby monsters, and run off to take them to safety?
“We need to go,” Erani grabbed my hand and ran off.
We headed in the same direction the Dryad had gone. The way the semi-circle of flame was shaped, we only really had one option of where we could go – anywhere else and we’d either be headed straight into the fire, or skirting close enough to the edge that it could easily spread into that area by the time we got there.
As we sprinted through the forest, I began to see many other animals and monsters fleeing for their lives, as well. Even the normally hostile ones completely ignored us, seeming to understand the dire situation – if they attacked us, they’d only delay their flight from the flames – not to mention they could get seriously wounded and doom themselves to be consumed by the inferno. A Wood Wraith bounded through the forest past us, whimpering in fear of the approaching heat. A pack of three Anacaps swung through the branches above, their long, spindly legs stabbing into tree trunks and flinging them far forward. freeweb novel. com
I glanced through the forest as we ran, and soon spotted the Dryad, who’d stopped to help a Day Owl that had gotten its foot stuck in a fallen log. She got it free as we passed, and it flew off. She looked over at us and said something frantically in her own language, forgetting that neither of us had any idea what she was saying. But she seemed to remember halfway through and stopped, twisting her brow in frustration.
I watched her pure-white eyes glance around, trying to figure out how to portray what she wanted to tell us. Eventually, she seemed to settle on hand gestures, waving wildly to try and communicate something I couldn’t understand. She kept pointing to the fire, then to me, then to the fire, and back at me. Was she trying to tell me that the fire would kill me if I stayed here? I knew that already.
Whatever, I shook my head. I’d just woken up, and was suddenly fleeing from a forest fire. Now wasn’t the time to be deciphering impromptu sign language. I took off running again – every moment spent stationary was another moment the fire crept closer.
“We need to go,” I said to Erani, who was looking at the Dryad with her brows furrowed. “We can figure that out later.”
She hesitantly nodded, and we ran off, shortly followed by the Dryad, who also seemed to figure out that her efforts were fruitless.
As we weaved through the trees and leapt over rocks and fallen branches, I looked around us at the distant fire. It wasn’t incredibly close at the time, but I knew how quickly forest fires could spread. In no time, the ground we stood on would be charred and lifeless. The semicircle it formed around us was closing in, forcing us forward.
I was very glad to have two things during our flight: a Dryad that seemed to know the forest like the back of her hand, and a set of physical Stats that were higher than an Unclassed’s would be. Every point in Dexterity helped a great deal to keep my legs limber and helped me find my footing any time I stumbled over a root, Strength helped me make longer strides and push off the ground even harder, and, of course, my relatively exceptional Endurance kept me from tiring out as quickly as I should’ve. All of that combined with the Dryad’s expert guidance helped us move more quickly than we ever would’ve otherwise.
She led us through the frantic forest, taking us across in winding directions, seemingly to get the best, clearest path possible. Though, some of those detours seemed to also have the purpose of allowing her to free a stuck animal or two. Whatever – we were moving faster now than if we didn’t have her, so she could have a few moments to do what she felt she needed to do.
Erani was a huge help, as well. Occasionally, we’d come across a huge fallen tree that blocked the way, and she’d just hold out a hand and blow it to pieces with an Explosive Firebolt. It seemed like the Dryad didn’t know the whole forest, then – if a tree fell recently enough, she probably hadn’t seen it yet – but it could’ve also been that the Dryad was taking Erani’s Firebolt into account when finding our path.
But then the Dryad suddenly stopped, and Erani grabbed onto the back of my shirt to keep me from continuing forward.
“Shit,” Erani cursed as I blinked and got my bearings. We were standing in front of a chasm, one that ran at least ten paces wide, and was so long I couldn’t see either side. The ravine split the ground before us, leaving a deep line in-between. It wasn’t so deep that we’d get too hurt if we fell in, but the walls were steep enough that we wouldn’t be able to get back out.
I glanced around, trying to figure out how we could get across. I didn’t like the ‘run in one direction along the edge and hope we find the end before the fire finds us’ plan, but I wasn’t seeing many other options.
“What do we do?” I asked Erani, who looked just as lost as I was. We looked to the Dryad, who was busy at work, rushing across the ground and grabbing things to carry with her. At first, I was hopeful she had an idea to get us across, but then I realized what she was doing. With a great toss, she lobbed a small rabbit to the other side of the ravine. Then, she scrambled over to help a Wood Wraith across.
“Seems like she doesn’t have any ideas to save us, either,” Erani said. “Or, if she does, she can’t tell us what they are.”
I took a breath, trying to calm my nerves and assess the situation. The chasm was obviously much too wide to jump across, and it didn’t seem like we could swing across with a vine or anything else like that. The Dryad wasn’t strong enough to throw people as big as us across, either – plus, it’d still leave her stranded on the other side. We needed a way to get all three of us across, preferably as quickly as possible.
There were trees all around us, but none of them had branches long enough to let us climb across, either. And the branches that did approach being long enough got much too skinny for them to support our weight, anyway. Besides, many of the trees were dried up and dying; it looked like a bit of extra force would knock them to the ground.
I blinked. Could that work? No, surely not. If it didn’t it’d fuck us over, big time. But…
I looked behind myself, back at the smoke rising from the distant burning trees. Forest fires moved fast – depending on how windy it was, they could even move faster than we could run. If the fire caught up to us, even if we made it across in time, it could take us over even as we ran away from it. We needed to move as soon as possible, and that meant not spending an hour coming up with the perfect idea of how to get across a hole. Sometimes, you just had to use the first thing that came to mind.
“Hey,” I pulled Erani over, “I have a plan. Grab the Dryad, too – we’ll need all the people we can get.”
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