Chapter 488: Deepwood Passage

The Deepwood was: Bruce saw immediately as he stepped through the portal: something significantly more than the F-rank forest they had been hunting all week.

The forest they came out into was larger. The pale trunks were thicker. The canopy was higher. The blue-gold luminescence of the leaves was richer and more layered, some leaves glowed blue, others gold, others a pale silver that Bruce had not seen at all in the F-rank forest. The undergrowth was denser and more varied. There were mosses that pulsed faintly with their own light. There were small glowing flowers that opened and closed rhythmically, as if breathing. There were vines that hung down from the canopy and moved very slowly, tracking motion below with the deliberate patience of a predator.

The air was thicker.

Not thicker in the sense of harder to breathe. Thicker in the sense of fuller. The Deepwood’s soul-energy was denser than the F-rank forest’s, and Bruce could feel it flowing into him steadily just by standing there, the passive absorption of ambient essence that all cultivators experienced was significantly stronger here. He was, simply by being in this terrain, gaining essence at a rate several times what the F-rank forest had given him.

He looked at Kael.

Kael’s glow had already brightened a step. Kael’s alignment with fire was not native to this terrain, but the density of ambient soul-energy was helping him regardless.

Theron’s scythe, still condensed, felt, Bruce could sense this from his own perception, larger and more present. The scythe was drawing on the ambient essence too, refining itself even before Theron summoned it.

They were, all three of them, going to advance faster here.

"This is a very good portal," Kael said quietly.

"Yes."

"Elenora’s sponsorship is real."

"Yes."

Theron said: "Where do we start?"

Bruce looked around. The terrain fell away in gentle slopes in three directions, with a rough game-trail leading east through the pale trunks. He listened. He heard the same kind of chiming sound that the F-rank forest’s deer-things had made, but deeper and more layered, multiple pitches, a chorus rather than a solo, suggesting either larger deer or a mixed cluster of species.

"East," he said. "The chiming is that way. Let’s start with familiar prey."

They moved.

The chiming was, Bruce discovered when they reached the source, coming from a mixed herd of two kinds of creatures.

The first kind was recognizable: larger versions of the deer-things from the F-rank forest, but with bark-plates that were more layered and antlers that had multiple leaf-tips rather than just one at each branch. Six of them, grazing peacefully in a small clearing.

The second kind was new.

They looked like, Bruce searched for the physical-realm comparison, the closest was a pale luminous fox. Slim, four-legged, with fur that glowed faintly in a soft silver-blue. They moved among the deer without threat, and the deer did not react to them. Some kind of symbiotic relationship, Bruce guessed. The foxes cleaned parasites off the deer, or something similar. There were four of them.

Total: ten beasts. Six deer, four foxes.

Bruce sent an ink-thread out silently and let his perception evaluate.

The deer registered as E-rank, low. Easier prey than the F-rank flame-manes had been at F-rank. The foxes registered as harder to read, they had a specific quality that made his perception slip off them, and he had to focus to hold his read of them. They were probably E-rank, mid. Faster than the deer. Possibly with some kind of talent-adjacent ability that was interfering with his perception.

He pulled the thread back.

"Six deer, low E, easy. Four foxes, mid E, harder. The foxes have some kind of perception interference, they resist my sensing. I want to see what they do when we engage."

"Plan?" Kael asked.

"I take the two lead deer with bullets. Kael, take the two on the right with fire. Theron, take the two on the left with the scythe. That should drop all six deer quickly. The foxes will react to the deer dying. I want to see how they react before we commit to killing them. If they scatter, we let them go and come back for them another day. If they attack us, we kill them together."

"Understood."

They moved.

The deer went down quickly.

Bruce’s bullets took two in the throat at range. Kael’s paired fireballs, smaller and more precise than his F-rank work, done at middle E’s higher control, dispatched two more. Theron closed the distance in three steps and took the last two with a single wide arc of the scythe.

The foxes reacted.

Bruce had been ready for them to scatter or attack. He had not been ready for what they actually did.

The four foxes bristled, their silver-blue fur suddenly standing on end in a way that made each of them look larger, more angular. Their eyes, small pale gold, locked onto the three hunters at the same instant. And they split, not fleeing but dividing their attention, two of them staying near the fallen deer, two of them advancing on the hunters with a low careful stalking pace.

The two advancing foxes were smart. They did not charge. They moved in a wide semicircle, positioning themselves to attack from angles that would be hard for Bruce, Kael, and Theron to defend against simultaneously.

Bruce read the pattern.

"They’re coordinating. They’re taking flanking positions. And the other two are protecting the deer bodies, they must eat the essence too, and they don’t want us to take it all."

"Then we take the deer’s essence quickly," Kael said. "Absorption is faster than butchering."

"Right. But we have to fight the two flankers first, or we’ll be attacked while we absorb."

"On my count then. Bruce, take the right flanker. Kael, left. I’ll cover you both from the middle."

"On three."

Bruce shaped his ink. He wrote, first-principle, not the seal, the word stop and threw it at the right flanker.

The word committed and struck.

The fox dodged.

Bruce blinked.

The word had traveled clean, aimed properly. The fox had dodged, moved sideways at the last instant, the word passing through the space where the fox had been half a second before. The word dissipated harmlessly into the air behind the fox, its target missed.

That was; that was new.

Bruce had never had a written word dodged before. Beasts in the F-rank dungeons had not had the reflexes to see the words coming and react. These foxes did.

He filed this instantly. He shaped more ink.

Kael’s fire-lance had launched at the left flanker in the same moment Bruce threw stop. The left fox also dodged, a similarly sharp sideways motion, the lance passing through empty air. Both foxes continued their approach without losing pace.

"They see the attacks coming," Kael said, tight.

"They see everything. Fast reactions and probably some form of precognition." Bruce shaped bullets, many of them, a full dozen, and prepared to fire in a spread rather than a directed volley. "Widen your attacks. Fire in patterns they can’t dodge cleanly."

"Understood."

Bruce fired the dozen bullets in a wide fan, aimed to cover a full arc of possible movement for the right flanker. The fox saw the volley coming and dodged in one direction, but the volley was wide enough that three of the twelve bullets caught it, one in the flank, one in the shoulder, one glancing off the head. The fox stumbled.

Kael, faster than Bruce would have thought possible, adjusted. Instead of a single fire-lance, he threw a wide sweeping cone of flame, not concentrated at all, just a general fire that filled a wide arc in front of him. The left fox tried to dodge and found itself dodging into another part of the flame cone. It caught fire. It shrieked.

Both foxes were now hit and disoriented.

Theron struck.

He crossed the distance to Bruce’s fox in three strides and took its head off with the scythe before it could recover from the bullet damage.

Then he pivoted, faster than Bruce had seen him move at any prior rank, and covered the distance to Kael’s fox in another three strides.

His second scythe swing took the burning fox at the neck. Both foxes were down in perhaps four seconds.

The two remaining foxes, the ones who had been guarding the deer bodies, bolted.

They did not attack. They did not attempt to save their fallen. They read the outcome of the flanker fight and left, disappearing into the underbrush before Bruce could shape another construct. Within three seconds they were gone.

Bruce stood in the small clearing among six dead deer and two dead foxes and considered what had just happened.

The Deepwood was, definitively, harder terrain than the F-rank forest.

But it was manageable.