Toren Daen
I left Fiachra that very day, venturing back into the forest with nothing but my meager supplies and a gut roiling with determination. I could survive on the bare necessities: Toren had been for years. Shelter, food, and water were all present in the forest. But the danger was ever-present; always looming and ready to swallow me whole.
Six weeks had passed since then. All I had done was train and train, running myself ragged in a desperate scramble for power. Learning to navigate this forest with the grace of a cat, fighting day in and day out with beasts across the forest, and struggling for food and water had granted me immeasurable improvement.
And if I had tried what I was doing now when I first began, I would be dead in a millisecond.
I stood silently on a tree branch, hyper-aware that I was surrounded. This deep into the Clarwood Forest the sun was rarely visible. The oldest and tallest of the trees grew in solid stature here, blocking out the sky with their canopies and casting the world in perpetual darkness. The forest floor was rife with fauna and mana beasts, making the tall boughs of the mighty clarwoods ironically safer than the ground.
At least, that was usually the case. Right now, I was being hunted. My senses tingled as I waited for the monsters to close around me.
Because there was rarely any light in the forest, most of the mana beasts around had evolved exceptional night vision. Even with my eyesight strengthened by mana, my own senses weren't quite as good as those naturally occurring. I learned this the hard way when a mana beast–some sort of cat-like creature black as a panther but twice the size–had nearly killed me in a faceoff on the forest floor. I was extremely lucky my wounds healed quickly, or else I would have fallen then.
Now I relied heavily on another sense. The scrabble of claws against trees reached my mana-enhanced ears. I suspected my affinity for sound mana made this detection task easier and made my sense of hearing more receptive to strengthening, which was a godsend.
Five beasts. I tilted my head, skittering from a bit further rebounding off my eardrums. No, six. Maybe more farther away, but out of my range.
I shifted into a low stance on the thick branch, my knuckleduster dagger held in a reverse grip. As I heard a low hiss of breath, I launched myself from my perch with a timed combination of a telekinetic push at my feet and strengthened legs. I rocketed through the air with a slight whistle and a crack of wood, but my attention was on my target. As I soared past a tall tree, I pushed off it slightly with a burst of glowing white telekinesis, shifting my angle just enough.
The mana beast had no time to react as I rocketed past, swinging my dagger as I went. The steel, imbued with mana to strengthen the material and sharpen its cut, scored a furrow across the unwitting monster's neck.
It spurted blood, an artery clearly severed as it toppled off its perch to the ground below. Using a telekinetic pull, I yanked myself towards another bough of a tree. Catching it with one arm, I nimbly pulled myself to stand once more on a perch. Growls and hoots of anger echoed across the boughs of the tree, but I didn't move.
These mana beasts were one of the top predators of this part of the forest. They looked almost like apes, but with far thicker hindlegs and flaps of skin connecting their arms to their hips, kind of like a twisted flying squirrel. After all, a fall from these trees was almost always fatal. These monsters couldn't fly, but they could glide.
They were also intelligent. They hunted in small packs, herding their prey towards the others with organized hoots and howls. I learned that the hard way a few weeks ago when I fell for their gambit. I barely escaped with my life, and only because of a sound grenade scaring them off.
There were more powerful monsters out here, after all. And loud sounds drew them like moths to a flame.
These beasts were trying the same thing again, making noise in a slight area around the forest to make me dart in the opposite direction, where I knew several other beasts awaited me. I wasn't out of their encirclement yet, but I was close. And so easily killing one of the flying apes had agitated them.
My head whipped to the side, the ever-so-slight whoosh of air alerting me to an incoming mana beast.
I jumped backward, not using telekinesis this time. I narrowly avoided a swipe of an ape's razor-sharp claws, something used both for climbing and goring unfortunate reincarnates.
I knew that one from experience. These mana beasts had given me a great deal of trouble, and I had gone through most of my shirts because of them and their deadly claws.
I backpedaled along the thick branch, weaving out of the way of another swipe. The apes were larger than I was and could match my mana-enhanced strikes blow for blow. I was pushed back, almost to the trunk of the tree.
Before a swipe could hit me, however, I let myself slip off the branch. Instead of falling, however, I jabbed my dagger into the side of the bough, using my momentum to swing back up. Testing out my newest template spell, I condensed a shroud of sound around my shin. The air around it warped in nauseating colors, humming audibly. The vibrating sound alerted the flying ape, causing it to pivot swiftly.
Too late.
With a midair twist, I landed a powerful roundhouse kick to the mana beast's head. The spell wrapping my shin burst with my strike, vibrations adding to my blow as the creature's skull rattled.
It teetered, blood running from its nose. Its eyes rolled back into its damaged skull, then fell off the branch into the yawning darkness of the forest floor. I landed squarely back on the branch, exhaling lightly. That spell was designed to amplify the internal damage of anything I struck, condensing shockwaves to bounce around inside a target. I had effectively pulped the beast's brain. After all, what is sound but vibrations traveling through air molecules?
I had no time to rest now, however. The death of two of their number enraged the remaining creatures, sending them into another frenzy of hoots and howls. I heard the roars of a few of the creatures approaching but knew another was nearby. Not allowing myself to stop, I waved my hand, and several fireballs appeared before me. They cast my disheveled and worn body in a grim orange glow, flickering with promise. I sent them off hurtling toward their targets, narrowing my eyes in concentration.
All three missed their marks, but were close enough to illuminate the snarling faces of each ape. Another difference from the monkeys of Earth was that their teeth were all razor sharp, and I didn't want to have the misfortune of getting too close. The apes glided towards me on their flaps of skin, assisted by wind mana. Thinking quickly, I conjured another fireball; bigger and more condensed this time before sending it toward the middlemost beast. It had to swerve out of the way, staggering its arrival.
Before the apes could reach me, I switched my dagger from a reverse to a forward grip, then rocketed off my branch with both a telekinetic push and strengthened legs. Simultaneously, I used a small pull of telekinesis to upset the careful balance of the middle creature, which had barely dodged my fireball. It started to tumble in the air; the equilibrium required to glide disrupted dangerously.
I zipped past the two other beasts, a small coating of fire surging on my left hand. The spinning beast screeched in terror before I deflected its wildly swinging claws upward with a flash of steel. At the same time, I used a telekinetic pull with my right hand as I swung in an uppercut with my fire-coated left, yanking the beast's skull violently into my attack.
Its jaw cratered into its face in a burst of heat, its cries dying out instantly as it went limp. Still falling, I used a pulse of telekinetic force on the body to push me to a nearby tree. I jammed my dagger into the trunk, holding on with one hand while the soles of my feet anchored me further.
The remaining two beasts had reached the branch I had jumped off from. Two quickly became three when the final beast revealed itself, the last of this pack. They jeered at me from their perch, but didn't jump after me.
I snarled back, using a bit of sound magic to make my voice reverberate with as much menace as I could manage.
The beasts slowly quieted, cowed by the fight. They had lost half their number, going from six to three in a matter of minutes. If they lost a single ape more, their pack-hunting tactics would be null.
And these beasts knew it. They fled into the darkness, far away from me. I watched them go for a while, hanging from my dagger with my teeth bared. When I was certain they were gone, I exhaled, letting that side of me drift into the wind.
I scanned my surroundings one more time, focusing on my hearing and mana sense. When I was sure the coast was clear, I scaled back to my 'home tree' with a combination of telekinetic pulls, leaps, and using my own dagger to catch myself when there were no branches to alight upon. This was even easier than when I started, and not just because of my parkour practice. With my growing insight into my telekinesis crest, I was now able to cause two effects rather than just one, which I used to great advantage to cave in one of the flying ape's jaws.
I reached my hollow soon enough. High in the trees near the canopy of this eternally dark forest, I had carved out a small nook into one of the clarwoods. A branch jutted out just outside of it, lending me a small place to rest on. Inside the tree was where I stashed the belongings I couldn't carry with me. Namely, small bowls carved of wood and a sad attempt at a pot whittled from a thick branch, the remainder of my clothes, my sling bag, my coins, and my journal. I didn't dare take my sling bag with me when I fought: enough of my garb had been shredded through the last month and a half that I knew I wouldn't be able to keep it safe.
Many packs of those flying apes had tried to assault me in the past couple of weeks as I staked out my hovel in this tree. They were extremely territorial, and I had to constantly ward them off from my small slice of peace. This was the closest thing I had to a home base, after all.
My body and clothes were perpetually caked with grime, and I wouldn't be surprised if the beasts of this forest tracked me by smell alone. There were plenty of streams cutting through the forest floor but staying too long at any of them could lead to being swarmed. There was no chance for a bath of any kind.
I sat down on my branch, pulling my journal and pen from my nook in the tree. It was a rather nice book: leather bound with the crest of Named Blood Daen stamped prominently on the cover. Inside, Toren had laid out his plans, hopes, and dreams for his future. Now I did the same, but with far more caution.
I wrote my words in code: a combination of a basic date-shift cipher, then a block cipher, and finally a simple key-shift. It was technically quite rudimentary and a pain to decipher, but it had become easier and easier with time. Furthermore, I used the date of the day I had died in the year 2023 instead of the year of Alacrya, hopefully making it just a bit more secure.
The year was 1736 SR, or Sovereign's Reign. According to Arlen, Toren's tutor, the date marked the anniversary of the Vritra's arrival to 'liberate' the native Alacryans from their misery.
In my journal was everything I could remember about the events of The Beginning After the End in chronological order, the best I knew them. I also jotted down as much miscellaneous information as I could. I doubted I would ever see the novel again, and I needed to pen down everything I could remember.
From what I knew, Arthur would return to Dicathen from his training in Epheotus in two years or so, give and take a few weeks or months. After that was the Battle of Slore, the discovery of Rahdeas's treachery, Uto's death, then Arthur's couple of months of training. Very shortly after that, he ascended to white core. That was the bare summary of 'Volume 6,' though calling it a book now felt foolish.
An unknown amount of time passed between then and the beginning of 'Volume 7,' but I speculated it wasn't terribly long. Maybe a couple of months at most. The Battle for the Wall and the Fall of Elenoir. The Battle of Etistin Bay and the subsequent loss of the war by the capture of Dicathen's flying castle...
Over the past month and a half, I had filled this journal to the brim with all I knew and could remember. Names, places, events, estimated dates, etcetera. I hadn't written down any concrete plans for how I would accomplish the goal my contract demanded of me, but I had the barest inkling of an idea. If my knowledge of the future was correct, Scythe Nico's first appearance was at the slaughter of Etistin Bay.
I sighed, closing the book with a quiet clap of paper. I had overthought and gone over everything I knew a dozen times over, but ultimately I would just need to wait and see how the future of this world played out if it was anything like what I knew. I had only read through the start of Volume 11, so I didn't even know everything that would truly help me succeed.
If this world followed the path I knew at all.
I clamped down on those thoughts with iron. The days of constant fighting and training served to distract me from my woes and problems, but when I sat alone with nothing but the wind rushing through the trees, I was forced to think.
The Unseen World crowded my vision, the dark seeming somehow darker as the range of my senses narrowed and wisps of mist and fog encroached. Lady Dawn stood across from me on the bough of the tree; her sundress fluttering in unseen wind and watching me with her perpetual sternness.
"You have progressed far, Contractor," she said. I grinned a bit tiredly. Lady Dawn rarely ever complimented my training, but she had been an immense help in increasing my battle prowess. From guiding my mastery over mana, to combat forms, to helping me assimilate her Will, I felt deeply indebted to the phoenix. She tilted her head, inspecting me. "You have come to a decision," she stated.
Over the past six weeks, especially since the first time I used my dagger, tensions between the phoenix and I had cooled considerably. We still kept secrets: deadly secrets. She didn't ask what I knew of the future or how. I didn't ask how I was reincarnated, or the original reason for it.
I suspected I had thrown a wrench into that original plan when I became her Contractor.
But I felt more comfortable letting her in on some of what I knew in return for training me.
"I vaguely know the time and location of the first concrete appearance of one of the anchors," I said. Nico would appear to decisively end the Battle of Etistin Bay in Alacrya's favor. "So far, my knowledge has been accurate. But there hasn't been time for divergence," I added, stashing my notebook back into my sling bag. "I can't make absolute plans until I learn more."
Lady Dawn tilted her head. "You are returning to the city," she said in her authoritative monotone. The phoenix rarely asked questions outright.
"I am," I said with an exhale. This excursion into the forest had been a strange combination of training, laying low from Blood Joan, and running from my problems. I was far more powerful than when I first entered this forest. I had cemented a bit of my fighting style, honed my magic, and was close to breaking through to Yellow Core. But more importantly, I was thinking with a clearer head. The truth of my reincarnation in this world had settled enough to allow me to make rational decisions; plan more effectively. "It's high time Blood Joan paid for their crimes."
I didn't know what Lady Dawn thought of my quest for revenge. She never commented on it when I spoke of it. Then again, Lady Dawn rarely went out of her way to speak beyond training and instructing me. We were more business partners than anything else.
I only had one more pair of clean clothes, unfortunately. But when I reentered the city, I didn't want it to be in the rags I wore now, caked in blood, dirt, and sweat.
I packed everything I needed into my sling bag, before swinging it over my shoulder. Securing the strap, I bounded down the seventy or so feet to the forest floor. A stream trickled just below.
I stayed barely long enough to refill my waterskin, knowing the dangers of waiting any longer. Then I launched into the air with a flare of telekinesis, beelining north.
Fiachra awaited me.