The next couple of days were filled with inscribing weapons and the occasional piece of armor for people, and soon it was time to get back to hunting with the temporarily larger group.

I spent the drive to meet up grumbling about being stuck with Lily’s squad for at least a little while longer, and once I arrived, seeing as I was a bit early, I sat down to meditate. The few minutes passed in what could have been an instant or years, but I was soon roused from my meditation by the rest of the group arriving.

I greeted them, and yet again we waited for the entirety of Lily’s group to show up, though this time Lily herself wasn’t the last to arrive, having actually showed up on time. Figuring it had to be a coincidence that she actually showed up when she was supposed to, I went back to chatting with the group.

“So it turns out there are actually two types of those gate things we saw, there’s the ones like the one we saw, which may lead to the game world, and there’s types filled with mist that just constantly spew out monsters,” I was explaining what I’d found out last night to my group.

“Wouldn’t that mean we could just barricade off or watch the mist filled ones and no monsters would be able to get through?” Rachel asked.

“I honestly have no idea, but I would assume the military has already tried that and not been too successful considering they haven’t put out any sort of notice to take over the mist gates.”

“Well the mist filled ones sound like a great spot to hunt, let’s go find one!” Liz added with her bloodthirsty smile.

“We’re not going to risk anything by going hunting through the forest for a mist gate. If we run into one then we’ll see if they’re a good grinding spot or not,” Lars mentioned, being a much needed anchor for Liz’s personality.

It wasn’t long until the rest of the group arrived, and we were soon in the forest, hunting plenty of the basic three star mobs. After our fourth encounter, one with a lot of craw and brags, I started to get a little worried, all of the groups today had been slightly larger than they had been yesterday.

It was only by two or three individuals per pack, but if this kept up the monster wave would be coming sometime quite soon. At least it wasn’t in the state of constant battle like it had been in game though. Or at least it wasn’t yet.

It was when we’d started fighting a group of phol that we ran into trouble. I was leisurely slinging ice spears at them along with the rest of the mages when I heard a loud crack behind me, and turned to see the claw of a craw already flying at me.

I dodged to the side, shouting “behind us!” as I gripped my spear and stared off at the craw that had attacked me. Another two were also creeping up on its sides, and would soon have me mostly surrounded, so I went in for a pre-emptive attack on the one in the center.

Stabbing inwards towards the joint in its arm, it tried to retaliate with a slice I almost lazily ducked under. I then released an ice spear, completely exploding one of its eyes. The other two were almost on me, so I decided to try something out. While dodging the craw in the center, I drew up my newest spell pattern a couple of times, and walled off the two craw that were coming to help, which let me easily deal with it after a few stabs of my inscribed spear.

With one of them down, I was going to slowly take out the other two, when I noticed the plight of the rest of the mages. The group of craw which had attacked us had been pretty large, and most the mages were scattered, running away from different craw.

I then noticed that only Lily, seemed to be holding her own, her sword and shield that would reduce her spell pattern damage working well as she steadily blocked or dodged the swipes of the craw, only to land vicious stabs or slices on the joints of it in return.

She didn’t use any spells in melee like I did, but she seemed to be a better fighter than I was, which made me frown a bit. Ignoring the one who was doing fine on her own, I started running around, ice walling off people long enough for them to get some distance, then trying to slice through the legs of the craw to slow them down enough for the mages to switch to bombarding them with spells again.

I had been pretty successful,only one of the mages ended up wounded, and that was from tripping, not me missing a monster, but I had pulled the aggro of every single one of the craw, so currently I was just running around while the other mages picked off what was left of the group of craw.

Things had almost gotten cleared back up, when I noticed something else coming through the forest. I started chanting ‘no, no, no,’ in my mind, but it didn’t stop the cloud of brags from arriving.

I had time for one cast of flash freeze before they were too close for the big aoe spells, but I only managed to get maybe a quarter of the group frozen. We were soon surrounded by the flying creatures, their oversized wings covering most of my view.

I got my back to a tree, and started to carefully stab out at anything that seemed like it was getting close to me, while spamming force bolt as much as I could out of my other hand.

Luckily, I only managed to get a few cuts from the sharp protrusions poking out of the edges of their wings, and avoided any poison while the cloud slowly thinned out. Once they had died off enough that I could get a better view of our team, I was starting to get worried.

There was one area where what seemed to be an unmoving body on the ground utterly covered in brags, and there were many other people still surrounded by them. Luckily, all of my group seemed to be safe, having grouped up, Rachel still healing up Lars at the moment.

I was quickly running to the motionless person, who hopefully wasn’t dead yet, just poisoned, and Rachel and the rest of my group was joining me. We started to cut off all of the brags that had covered the person up, and noticed that they were still breathing, if barely, while covered in a large number of cuts, tears, and stab wounds from the stingers.

Rachel was instantly healing, and when it seemed she was running out of mana I passed her a mana potion so she could continue. Once it seemed they were stabilized, though the poison seemed to be still keeping them paralyzed, we decided it was time to leave the forest. It was getting a bit too dangerous for real life.

After we’d cleaned up the few remaining brags, and gathered the group, we started heading out of the forest, when I noticed something very bad, another cloud of brags was approaching. I instantly warned everyone, and this time, the dangerous cloud was greeted with multiple AOE spells, cutting through their numbers quite severely.

Unfortunately, this group was also much larger than the previous, and we were soon back to our limited visibility fighting. Things seemed to be almost over when I heard a rumbling sound, and I groaned.

The fighting had been constant enough, what was it now? I couldn’t even see what was causing the noise due to all of the brags. Soon enough though, it made a noise that sounded like an elephant trumpeting, if you thought you could hear the scream of a dying person in the trumpet of an elephant. I cursed. That had to be phol.

I soon fought my way through the cloud of brags alongside Lily, and we saw a group of phol charging from one side, and a wave of molts coming from another side. We both yelled “RUN!” at practically the same time, and then grabbed whoever was nearest us, urging them to run before we set off ourselves.

With the cloud of brags constantly around me and harassing me, I soon lost sight of all the people I had been with, but I continued to run, as I could hear the phol still following somewhere behind me, the rumbling making it clear, along with the few death wail like trumpets that would occasionally come from them.

Eventually, I managed to kill off the rest of the brags harassing me, and I then had clear vision to see what was going on. I was actually out of eyesight of the phol, and the molts were nowhere to be seen. I relaxed a tiny bit, but then tensed up when I realized I was alone.

I wasn’t sure how well I could continue to run without any backup, so I looked around, pulling out my phone to check my location. I was actually pretty close to the gate we had found earlier, so I decided to go there and shoot a text to my group saying that I’d be there, as it would make a good meetup point for anyone who had ran the same way I had.

Maybe ten minutes later, I was beginning to worry, no one had replied to my text, though I didn’t have the numbers of any of Lily’s group, so I decided I needed to try and start figuring my way out on my own.

I then began my exploration to find a way out of the forest without running into to many monsters. I slowly walked around, being careful to be as quiet as possible, and headed towards the sandwich shop we had met up at. Maybe three quarters of the way there though, I ran into a very large problem.

There seemed to be a flood of molts between me and the edge of the forest. They covered every bit of the ground, looking to be stacked two high for what had to be miles along. Shuddering at the numbers, I decided that I was going to try a different direction.

While searching along, I finally got a text back.

Lars: We got out of the forest, but we can’t find any way to get to you from out here, just try to stay safe, we’ll get a bigger group and come rescue you.

Roland: I think you’ll need a much bigger group than you’re thinking of. I’ll keep trying to find a way out of here for now. Don’t risk yourselves.

Glad that they had at least escaped, I put my phone on silent before going back to trying to find a way out of the forest. No matter which way I went however, I kept running into more and more monsters, and every time I would be pushed back a bit more, the encirclement seeming to close around me.

I eventually came to stand in front of the gate. The monsters had seemed to ignore it, and it was the only direction I had left to run, but was I really willing to go through when I knew that they would disappear randomly?

I was debating on if I should continue to try and find a way out of the massive numbers of monsters, when I started to hear an all too familiar rumbling. Groaning, I turned around for a second to see another group of phol, and they were chasing someone.

I waved them over, trying to get their attention, and stood right in front of the gate. They turned to me and began sprinting a tad bit faster than they had been before in my direction. I continued to wave them over, than almost started to regret it when they got close enough to recognize Lily.

She wasn’t the overly dressed up arrogant looking Lily at the moment though, for now she just looked terrified, and I wasn’t going to leave someone out to die no matter how much of a dick she had been.

I took to casting frostbites at the phol who were charging, trying to hit their legs so I could watch them trip up and fall over each other. Once Lily got close however, I grabbed her, pulled her through the gate, idly noting that the other side of the gate seemed no different from what I was used to. I was soon spamming ice wall as much as I could to block off the entrance before running some more

My ice walls weren’t going to last forever, and I wanted to get as far away from the gate as possible before they melted.

“Wait, where are we?” Lily asked as we ran, clearly confused about the change in scenery.

“We went through the gate. We need to go now, my walls aren’t going to last too long and we need to get out of range of the phol before they figure out how to get to us.”

“Wait! I’m not going through the gate, what do you think you’re doing!?”

“Well it’s a bit too late for that, and what I think I’m doing is saving your life,” I said with a deadpan expression.

“But we don’t even know where we are!?”

“We’re away from the monsters, that’s what counts. I’d rather be lost and alive than dead in a place I know.”

Lily didn’t say anything back to that, just took to fuming in silence as we ran. I wasn’t going to stop her fuming, but I was probably going to need her cooperation until we figured out where we were.

We continued through the woods, me, searching for any sign of human passage, Lily simply looking annoyed that I’d dared save her in less than a perfect rescue.

While we didn’t see any humans or signs of passage, not that I would be able to recognize them even if we did, but we did run into the occasional monster. We killed them without much fanfare, neither of us willing to talk to the other, and soon the sun started to go down. Deciding it would be safer to sleep in a tree, I climbed up one, only to have Lily question me.

“Why are you climbing a tree? It’s too dark to see anything from up there?”

“Because it’s about time we get to sleep, and I’m not going to risk sleeping on the ground without a ward net.”

“You mean you’re just stopping like this? You should obviously just keep going, I think I’m going to go insane if I have to sleep out here.”

“Well I’m going to be sleeping here, so you can go explore on your own in the dark if you’d like,” I mention, thinking in my mind that I’m the one who’s going to go insane from having to deal with her.

She soon quit complaining, only grumbling a bit under her breath before eventually copying me and climbing up a tree, trying to get comfortable, though that’s a hard task when we were both used to our oh so soft beds.

Eventually though, we both nod off, though the night of sleep is not very restful, waking up at every sound in the night.