The tree looms overhead, covering our approach. Though it’s technically the same species as the one the Ferin inhabited, that one seemed much more… benign. Staring up into the dark branches above fills me with a deep sense of dread. Maybe it isn’t worth going in here. We aren’t prepared. We need magic items, quality armor, and enough potions to drown ourselves! We need-

Sensing my mounting anxiety, I feel a hand land comfortingly on my shoulder and turn to see Lauren giving me a small smile. I notice the hand become a fist just in time for her to punch my arm, and she faces my subsequent glare with a much less innocent grin. “Don’t go pissing yourself here, it’ll be fine. Didn’t you just take on an entire village by yourself?”

“Yeah… I guess it’s just nerves. At least with them I had some idea of what I was up against, and had the element of surprise. It felt different.” And I was very insane, but that’s only half the point. A more truthful answer would be that I finally found a level of pain that made me really afraid; a level of mutilation that couldn’t be magiced away with Energy. A large part of my fearlessness against the Carnines and Wights was their almost unilateral inability to put me down for good. Virtually any hit could be healed, as long as I kept my head relatively safe, and even that would just be a sudden death. No suffering involved.

The Ferin did me a bit of a favor, teaching me to fear again.

“The truth is, we don’t know the enemy we’re up against. Thetzeke made no mention of how smart they are, but we can assume they have some basic sense about combat if they have the spiders laying traps.”

“We should be wary of them now. Though they guard the tree interior more than the area underneath the tree, we must be wary.”

“Great. Anyway, we have no idea how organized they’ll be, and that’s going to be made all the worse by the… you said the moss releases hallucinogens?! We’re fucked if we don’t plan this out.”

“Avoiding the effects of the moss is simple. You merely must avoid breathing during the harvesting and wrap it tightly for transport.”

“I’m using a glass vial. There’s no way in hell I’m getting accidentally high and wandering this murder-forest.”

“You will need a great many vials. Potions made using Deepwood Moss require far more of the ingredient than one would expect. The structure of the moss is mostly Mana, which it gets from the Dungeon it lives near.”

“I thought you said this grew other places than here.” I look pointedly at him.

“I spoke truly. The ambient Mana concentration is sometimes high enough that the moss can grow anywhere it is sufficiently dark, but such places are rare and fleeting. Here, there is always moss.”

“Huh.” I rub my chin, thinking. “But R- I mean, one of our mages never mentioned the last dungeon we found had ambient Mana. I think he would have noticed something that obvious.”

Thetzeke blinks several times at me, as though that was somehow an inane question. Before I can say something unsavory about his clearly malfunctioning brain, he explains.

“While beasts that make use of magic, as well as those sentient species that use magic at birth, can instinctively sense and use ambient Mana, it is otherwise a learned skill. Do humans know how to use magic at birth?”

“Ah, no.”

“Thus is your answer.”

The guy might be a walking encyclopedia for all the bullshit of this world, but damn if he doesn’t try my patience with every sentence.

“Do you know how to interact with it?”

“No. Though some of my kind saw fit to learn of such things, I deemed it useless due to its fairly situational nature.”

“Using the Mana, sure, but what about sensing it? You would be able to find dungeons like this easily, even if they were hidden.”

“Dungeons in this world are generally not hidden. They are large, obvious points of interest designed to provoke curiosity and greed in the contestants.”

A small smile crosses my face as I realize they never managed to find the Barrows because of exactly that kind of thinking. It’s a wonder they were so interested in Energy despite clearly lacking much of the patience required for it. The bigger issue is that Thetzeke can’t teach me how to do anything with ambient Mana, and I need to learn to both perceive it and use it.

I haven’t forgotten Syndarus’ offer to teach me in the event I can convince her newly reformed self to not kill me on the spot, and being able to train in a dungeon, full of ambient Mana, would spark monumental growth in my magic abilities if I could use it correctly. Not having to worry about drinking potions all the time, or resting to recover it, would mean I could virtually never stop casting!

Of course, those lofty hopes fall away quickly in the face of reality. I have no readily available teachers.

Unless… Lethin knows? Fuck, that reminds me. It’s unlikely she’ll even tolerate my presence, let alone teach me until I do something about Insanity. I haven’t felt anything happen within my Sanctum in the past days, but I’m certain that asshole is just biding his time. I would rather not go into this upcoming battle with him free to mess with my Energy, but I don’t have much of a choice. I need to make some kind of deal with him, but it has to be very well thought out, and a forest full of monsters isn’t the best place for that. We can’t leave until we get the moss, otherwise the trip would be wasted and Lauren and Cerberus would probably stab and maul me respectively for being an idiot.

The takeaway? I get to tough it out and pray to an uncaring god that nothing goes too horribly.

---

From my place on the mossy ground, I’ve watched the tree, and the area we’ll be harvesting, for probably an hour. The dungeon must be doing something with the light in its vicinity, because despite the fact that I can see the star shining on tree nearby, almost none of that light gets reflected in here.

Making out detail is difficult, but immensely important given Thetzeke underestimated how many of those spider traps there were going to be. Initially, Cerberus and Lauren were keen on just running in, grabbing the moss, and fighting our way out. Thetzeke seemed content to let this happen, and only my repeated insistence that I at least scout the area first kept the lot of them from doing just that.

Once I brought them to the relatively safe lookout I’d found and actually pointed out all the possible ambush points and the much more definite spider traps, the excitement for combat bled away. Also, given that the entire ground is covered in moss, having Thetzeke actually point out what we’re trying to harvest seems only logical. Exclusively to me, apparently, as my hellhound, rogue, and alien druid are all confident I’m complicating things too much.

Cerberus and Lauren I expect this from, but Thetzeke shouldn’t be this dumb. It’s as though he just doesn’t understand how shitty a situation can get when a team isn’t on the same page, especially in a low light combat situation. I mean, his job was to work alone (technically he has the giant Cathid mount as well, but they have clearly trained substantially together so I don’t count it) and scout, meaning he probably rarely, if ever, worked as part of a team. It’s annoying that he’s clearly so smart, but such an idiot when it comes to being aware of where he’s lacking.

My attempts at delicately explaining this to him in a hushed whisper are met with utter dismissal, which he voices at a normal speaking level. He then responds to my hurried gestures to shut up and be quiet by insisting that we’re far enough away, and there’s nothing around to hear us anyway.

A gust of wind from overhead and a pained grunt from Thetzeke interrupt my attempts at verifying his claim, followed a moment later by a glob of something impacting the ground that Thetzeke just vacated thanks to Cerberus quick thinking. Unfortunately, that first shot served only to herald the coming monsoon of airborne acid

“More, incoming!”

Three of us move forward as one, with a fourth hurriedly running back to retrieve his forgotten mount.