“Valkyrie, with all due respect, but we agreed yesterday that Willow would go with us. Ronin is supposed to go with Chernous’s scouts up north.”
“Told you!” Willow chuckled and fastened her cloak.
“You’re making a mistake Loki,” Valkyrie said. “This is gonna be a long hike.”
***
The last thing I wanted was to sow the seeds of discord in our group.
Willow had powerful skills that really did save our asses back at the Screeching Mountain. Her Phoenix fried a cloud of bugs that were ready to feast on our flesh.
I couldn’t understand how Valkyrie, who was old enough to be a mother to half of us, could dislike someone so much. And without a good reason. Pavel, I understood, he was an asshole. Spider was an eccentric so he’d sometimes get on people’s nerves without realizing. And Amoeba, nerves thinned out by sleepless nights, knew to lose his temper and say things he’d later regret. But not Valkyrie. She wasn’t like that.
We had to leave early, otherwise, we risked getting into the portal around noon and staying in an unfamiliar location till nightfall. Not to mention that we weren’t quite sure where this portal led or even if it was on the same plane of existence as ours. If it wasn’t, God only knew how time functioned there.
This time around, we were prepared: we brought bags of dried meat and waterskins made of elk hide, filled with clean water. In addition to the players, we were accompanied by Rat, Fang, and Tail. All nine of us, except for Rat and Amoeba, were dressed in warm winter clothing and chainmail, and were armed to the teeth. Ivan was carrying his trusty club, the Goblins had throwing darts, while the rest of us were armed with scimitars, which White and Fedor had improved upon and made them easier to use.
The road to the Abode took quite a bit even though all the surrounding areas had been cleared and explored. The only danger were the migrating mobs. Cap’s squad had done its best, and only Pavel’s intervention stopped them from annihilating every living thing in a radius of several miles.
***
The Abode was surrounded by tall fir trees and a swamp — finding it, if it weren’t marked on the mini-map, would’ve been quite the task.
Not much had changed in the few days I had been away, save for the amount of snow that had fallen, burying a third of the totem. Even more footprints could now be seen around the Elder.
The mobs continued to hop into our world, passing through the portal. I couldn’t wrap my head around how they did it: either they had magical abilities or creating portals was a racial skill of theirs. Or... Or it was just a mystery we were yet to solve. In any case, the fact that there was a portal here meant that anything could just pop out of the tree at any moment and attack us. Luckily, it couldn’t be big, as the hole in the trunk was relatively small. Besides, I doubted that someone had gone through all this trouble of putting a tree and a portal here just to make our lives even more miserable than they already were.
***
Portal Operator instantly dispersed the lilac surface, sending dozens of sparks and cinders flying across it.
“No way,” Spider mumbled, frozen, like everyone else, with his mouth open in surprise.
“I have to agree with you, friend,” Amoeba remarked, approaching the portal and carefully touching its surface with a false limb.
The pseudopod passed through the slightly blurred membrane without much trouble and Amoeba’s lips stretched into a wide smile. Like a small child who saw an airplane for the first time and decided that he wanted to become a pilot.
“What’s in there?” Willow asked, trying to ignore Valkyrie’s scowl.
“It’s hard to say... But it feels much hotter than here... I daresay that there’s a tropical, or at least a warmer biome on the other side of this portal.”
“Not a desert, please! Not again!” I heard Ivan’s frightened whisper.
I agreed with him.
“No, no, not that hot... It’s just warm,” Amoeba replied and confidently headed toward the portal. Everyone knew that it was impossible to stop him once he decided something, so no one tried to dissuade him. His gelatinous body disappeared in the lilac only to appear a mere moment later. “Take off your jackets. It’s really warm here. Early morning, sunrise, forest... Well, you’ll see for yourself.”
We were glad to remove our heavy coats and jackets, just staying in our armor. Ivan, throwing off his fur coat made of bear hide, immediately rushed to the portal and jumped into it. Amoeba’s head appeared from the portal once more.
“Don’t do what he did, otherwise, you risk losing your head.”
***
The portal led to a small cave. Ivan had crashed into a wall covered with green moss. Luckily, he was unharmed, although he had lost a bit of HP. Fortunately, with his regeneration, this wasn’t a problem. But the rest of us would’ve ended up with broken bones had we done what he did.
The cave was rather warm. The stagnant air smelled of dampness and dirt, and the green moss soaked in the rare rays of the rising sun that snuck in through the exit that led out into a forest.
Next to the cave was an oak tree, and next to it — a few ash trees, favored by small blue birds. In the distance, we could see a wide river and a cliff overgrown with grass and bushes dotted with red berries.
“You smell that?” Valkyrie said. “Fresh air and life...”
She was right. Unlike our forest that was currently dying of cold and bending under the weight of snow, this place was bustling.
“I went to Serbia once...” Willow smiled, plucking a flower from the ground and putting it into her hair. “It reminds me of this place...”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that we’re in the middle of winter, while this place is in the middle of spring?” Amoeba asked. “Nature, my friends, doesn’t work like this.”
“Maybe it’s cold waves,” Spider suggested. “Give it some time, the first wave of cold will do the same to this place as it did to us.”
“Perhaps. But there’s also another possibility: we’re much further from home than we thought... Perhaps we made it all the way to the southern hemisphere. Or even a different continent, where the System is yet to launch the winter protocol since there are no players that it needs to kill... Still, how come it’s spring here?”
To be honest, I was the last person to care about such things, but he did have a point. For the first time in weeks, we found ourselves in livable conditions in which there’s no need to warm your hands over the campfire that’s about to go out, or pray to God for a drop of water, traveling between the dunes. What was this if not happiness? If Amoeba was right and the weather here was the same all year round, then this really was a piece of paradise on earth!
Although, knowing the Game, I wouldn’t be so sure about it. Paradise could still be infested by demons.
***
In about half an hour, we came to the shore of a fairly large river through a narrow pass overgrown with trees and shrubs, some of which were unfamiliar even to Amoeba. I looked at Rat who was waddling under the weight of all the supplies we had brought along. Perhaps we needn’t have worried so much: there seemed to be plenty of food and water all around us.
“How interesting,” the biologist mused. “It looks like an ordinary forest at first glance, but then you notice that the crooked trees only look like birch, and that birds look like painted sparrows...”
“Wait... We haven’t seen any mobs,” I said, remembering the Leshy with no level that I had first encountered at the tree.
Just as I said that, between the trees right by the shore, where we stopped for a short break, figures of short, bearded men appeared.
Leshyes
That was all the System gave us: no descriptions, no ranks, no levels, nothing but their name. It was strange, considering that the mobs around our base all had levels. Hell, even the microorganisms in the Primordial Waters had them.
The Leshyes didn’t seem to look too worried about us. In a group of ten, they began to
walk along the shore, picking up shells and sucking their contents. Save for their long beards, they had nothing on them. Sometimes, they’d stop to look at us only to continue scavenging the place for food as if we weren’t even there.
“Hello!” Ivan exclaimed and waved at them, but the Leshyes only looked in his direction in surprise before returning to their meal.
“I doubt they can understand us,” Spider said, slowly approaching one of them. “Isn’t it strange that they have no levels?”
The Leshyes noticed Spider, who probably seemed like a hideous monster to them, and shifted a little to the side.
“It was the same with the heads in the Tower,” I said. “But they, like the Giant, are a part of the Game... I doubt that these guys are as important.”
At that moment, one of the Leshyes that had backed away from Spider, choked on the contents of a shall and fell, turning blue and frantically twitching his arms and legs. His friends didn’t seem to notice as they continued their shellfish hunt.
“They’re so... indifferent,” Willow muttered, as we watched with interest.
As soon as the Leshy went limp, the behavior of the rest of the group suddenly changed. Pushing each other aside, they rushed to their fallen friend and began to tear him apart, devouring him within minutes.
To say that we were shocked would be an understatement. There was nothing left of the corpse, save for a reddish spot in the sand that the Leshyes were now licking on, unwilling to let so much as a drop of blood go to waste. After the meal, they continued their search for the shells as if nothing had happened.
The long silence was broken by Amoeba.
“Have you noticed how much they’ve grown?”
“W-W-Who?” Ivan asked with difficulty, fighting back his urge to vomit.
“The Leshyes. They seem... stronger,” I said, looking at the mobs.
Amoeba nodded.
“Loki’s right. Have you heard of the ten percent law?” Looking at our confused faces, he hurried to explain. “Lindeman formulated a rule according to which when energy is passed in an ecosystem from one trophic level to the next, only ten percent of the energy will be passed on. All of this is, of course, conditional but the law shows that when eating plant-based food, most of the energy contained in it doesn’t go into increasing the herbivore’s mass but back into the atmosphere, soil, and so on. All in all, the total mass of the herbivore is ten times less than the mass of the plant. To make it short, it seems that this law doesn’t work here. Most of the energy that has been consumed went into increasing the mass of the Leshyes... Let’s say that they weighed about sixty pounds prior to the meal... Looking at them, I’d say that they gained another sixty.”
***
While we were trying to make sense of what Amoeba had said, the Leshyes searched the entire shore and, after casting a glance in our direction, disappeared between the trees.
“And? What does that mean?” Valkyrie asked.
“It means,” Amoeba smiled, “that the System works a little bit differently here than in our world. First of all, the levels, and even the names of the mobs, aren’t displayed correctly. I’d go as far as to say that there seem to be no levels here. Second, growth seems to be based on mass growth, which isn’t limited either by the laws of or nature, or the capabilities of the body. In theory, the mobs here can grow indefinitely as long as they have enough to eat.”
***
Judging by the marker on the mini-map, the fragment was somewhere north from our position, and about a couple of hours of walking if we didn’t come across any obstacles. And as luck would have it (because why would anything be easy when it could be difficult), our journey was immediately interrupted by a sudden roar. It seemed to spread for miles around, scaring off the Leshyes and the blue birds perched on the nearby tree. We looked at each other. Ivan and Rat stepped forward to take the first blow in case of danger, the Goblins got ready to throw the darts, and the rest of us drew our scimitars.
The roar repeated. This time louder and closer.
A few maple trees quivered. One broke with a crunch under the weight of something really big that soon jumped out in front of us.
Wild Boar
Two huge Boars, several times bigger than Rat, with black fur, red eyes, and pink snouts sniffed their surroundings.
“Shit,” Ivan whispered, clutching his club, and preparing to strike. “I’ll never be able to eat pork again...”
For a moment, the Boars stopped and looked at our group. We were frozen in shock, to say the least. The first hog, the larger one, with yellow saliva dripping from his mouth, looked at Rat and rushed at him.
“Amoeba... do... do boars eat meat?”
“They do. If there’s no other food, they won’t think twice about eating their young... In addition, if my theory is correct, they could’ve already devoured more than a dozen of Leshyes and other mobs.”
Visor didn’t fail me this time either. In a moment, the Boar’s snout was burned by a lightning bolt that flew out of my hands.
The beast roared and leaped forward, preparing to impale me on its tusks. By the looks of it, it weighed only a little less than the Mammoth. I didn’t want to stick around to find out if it was as strong. The Boar’s short legs slammed hard into the ground, pushing his huge body forward, toward the sweet, tender meat... I aimed the second bolt precisely at those short legs. The Boar staggered and almost fell, but its dense bones withstood the attack, although the blow caused it immense pain.
The same couldn’t be said when Ivan slammed it with his club. The Boar’s knee joint shattered with a nasty crunch.
With a grunt, it plowed through a couple of feet of overgrown shrubbery and struggled to get to his feet. The next bolt hit him in the eye, disorienting him further, Spider climbed onto the hog’s thick neck and, with his eight sharp legs, cut the carotid artery.
The Boar roared in pain and soon went limp. The second hog, who had rushed at us, turned around and hastened to retreat the moment it saw what fate befell its companion.
You have reached level 107!
***
Things seemed like they couldn’t become any more strange.
And then about twenty anthropomorphic creatures jumped out of the forest from where the Boars appeared a moment ago, holding long sticks with glowing tips.
Bargolas
The tall, thin creatures had five or ten limbs that functioned as arms, two long legs, and a serpentine tail that sprouted from their spine. The arms came out of the back and shoulders, some even the abdomen depending on the individual. Their bodies were covered with smooth, almost black skin, and their heads looked like that of frogs, with large, bulging eyes and huge mouths. Their clothing consisted of loincloths adorned with colorful feathers. In addition to spears, they carried some items that I didn’t recognize or knew anything about.
And the strangest thing was that there was a significant difference in size between them. Some of them were gigantic, even taller than Ivan, while others were smaller than the Goblins. Luckily, none of them were as massive as the Boars they were apparently chasing.
When they saw us, the Bargolas stopped. They looked at us and then at the Boar whose neck was bubbling with blood. The largest Bargola took a step forward and raised his spear above his head.
“Skats kru wa! Scha ralya-vur-uv! Hunting! Urva-katz! Our!”
I choked on a piece of dried meat I had taken out of the bag to satisfy my hunger. I shook my head, thinking I had imagined hearing Russian in between the foreign words but then I recalled that this was probably Linguistics at work. The skill couldn’t translate all of the words as it wasn’t leveled, so it picked out just a couple.
“They can talk?” Amoeba asked.
“We’ll see...” I turned to the Bargola. “We came here through a portal. We mean no trouble and don’t care about the Boar. You can have it. Who are you? Are you players?”
“Uaro vkra understand?” their leader said in surprise. “Urva-katz tsvar-vkar. The
elders of Vador-varo. Follow ova-vraok!”
Successful use of skill [Linguistics].
Reward: +1 Linguistics
I turned to my friends who were listening with both confusion and interest, hoping to understand what the Bargola was saying by intonation alone.
“It seems that they want the meat... They’ll take us to their elders, I think?”
At that moment, the leader of the Bargolas, as a sign of peace (or at least I hoped it was), thrust his spear into the ground and froze in place, pointing behind him with several hands. His dark skin glistened under the rays of the sun rising over the forest.
“Well, if that’s the case... I suggest we follow them since the fragment is in that direction anyway,” Valkyrie said uncertainly.
Chapter 15
A PROMISE
There was something cyberpunk about all this. What seemed at first like ordinary spears made of wood and some sort of radioactive or reflective metal were now cutting through the hog’s carcass like a hot knife through butter, cauterizing the wound before any blood could be spilled. The smell of sizzling meat and burning fur made my eyes water. I wanted to cover my nose and breathe only through my mouth... which was a difficult task since I didn’t really have a nose.
“This used to be common practice in military field surgery. But then they invented antiseptics, anesthesia, and other drugs that made our jobs and lives easier, and cauterizing fell out of practice.” Spider grinned. “I once had to perform a rather simple operation without antibacterial agents, and then...”
Before taking us to their elder, the Bargolas had lunch. They tore through the cut pieces of meat with their sharp teeth at a surprising speed. The most interesting thing was that their weight increased in proportion to the food they consumed. Still, not by a hundred percent, as it had been the case with the Leshyes.
“It seems to me,” Amoeba mused, watching the feast of what appeared to be intelligent beings with interest, “that our new friends are somewhere between us and the Leshyes on the food chain... The ten percent law seems to work on them. Well, rather, it’s twenty or thirty percent, while the Leshyes gain almost one hundred percent of what they consume.”
Reborn: Evolution: A LitRPG Series (Warlock Chronicles Book 3) Page 16
