Chapter 49 – A Deadly Itinerary

It was early morning, and the sun peeked over the mountains and through the waterfall, casting a golden glistening beam of sunlight through the moving water onto the cavern floor. While most caves were dark and damp affairs, this particular cave hideout had perfect open air, rushing water that caused the air pressure to cycle and act as a natural form of ventilation, and direct sunlight, although it did get a bit chilly at night. Bjorn really did find an ideal spot to set up base.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the most important feature of the hideout, the fact that the waterfall and ledge created an impassable barrier for the allosauruses. The waterfall itself formed a natural camouflage for the cave entrance, and the ledge above could really only be accessed if you had arms to pull yourself up. The allosauruses, with their big murderous jaws and tiny arms, had no way of throwing themselves up, unless the water level somehow changed.

Unless the water level changed… was I being smart, or just paranoid? I had a tendency to overthink things, but my overactive imagination yielded tangible results more times than I could count. I decided to run my thoughts through the dwarf.

“Bjorn,” I said to him, getting a bit more worried the more I thought about it. “So I’ve been thinking about this hideout. There’s a problem.”

“Spit it out then, we don’t have all day,” the dwarf responded in a gruff voice while tying a piece of twine onto his knapsack to secure the fastening. “We still need to map out the territory before the scent marks throw everything off. Once the sun sets it’s too dangerous to move across the island.”

“Yes,” I replied. “But this is really bothering me. So this hideout is safe when the water level is low, because you need arm strength to be able to climb up to the ledge. But what happens when the water level rises to the height of the ledge? Won’t anything be able to just walk up into here?”

Bjorn scratched his head and put his canteen of home brewed beer to the side, processing what I just said. “I can’t see how the water level will increase any more. Since I moved here months ago, the same herd of giant sauropods outside have been hanging out. The water level goes down when they leave the lake to graze, but I made a rope so the base is still accessible if they’re not here. Other than that, the water level doesn’t change much.”

“But what if another herd moves in?” Rosalia chimed in. “You said that we disrupted the territories when we killed those spinosauruses, so maybe another herd might be pushed towards this lake by predators?”

With that logic presented to him, Bjorn groaned and rubbed his temple. “I didn’t think about that. You’re right, but there’s not much we can do. It’s just a risk we have to take. I’ve searched a good part of this island, and let me tell you, I haven’t found a single place that’s better than this one so far.”

He tugged roughly on the twine he was working on and securely fastened it around his burlap knapsack. “Maybe our luck will be different today. After all, you two are around now, which is already a sign from Thor that my luck is changing.”

I decided to shut Bjorn up before he triggered any more death flags. “What’s the plan for today?”

Bjorn motioned us to the chalk diagram of the island and jumped onto his desk to point better at the carved drawing. Siege Tank Golem watched on thoughtfully, like a pet rock with a personality.

“Your golem marked these three spots as possibilities for an exit off this island,” Bjorn said, drawing three chalk circles on the wall. “This one is off limits.” He made a big fat X through the one that was situated in T. rex territory, right in the lake that had the massive crocodile species that made even dinosaurs look small in comparison, called the razanandrongobe sakalavae.

“So that leaves us with these two areas,” the tanned dwarf continued, pointing towards the other two circles. Siege Tank Golem nodded in agreement while letting out a low acknowledgement of assent. Both of the circles were at the far ends of the diagram. One was at another shoreline, and the second was in an unmarked area in the middle of the island.

“Up to this point, I haven’t mapped areas that far from my base,” Bjorn explained. “If we make this trip, we might run into species I haven’t encountered before. We have to prepare suitably and make sure that we have a retreat path if things go south.”

“If it’s that dangerous, why don’t we just go to the one you’ve already mapped out?” Rosalia asked, referring to the circle on the lake in T. rex territory. “At least we’ll know what’s there.”

Bjorn laughed. “Of course we’ll know what’s there, that’s a certainty. But you know what else is a certainty if we go that way? We will die. That’s a certainty. For the other two circles, there’s a possibility that we will die. So the choice is yours. Given two choices, do you pick certain death, or possible death?”

Rosalia opened her mouth as if to respond, but backed off when she realized that the dwarf’s logic was infallible.

“We’ll go to the second circle first,” the dwarf said, pointing at the in-land circle in the middle of an unmarked area. “Gives us more options for retreat. And if that one doesn’t work and we still have enough daylight to march on, we’ll check out the first circle near the shoreline. Sound good?”

Neither Rosalia nor I had any complaints. With our deadly itinerary decided, we began preparing for our trip into the unknown. Rosalia topped off her divine power in Luxuria’s hot spring bath, and then joined us as we listened to Bjorn explain all his different types of baits, lures, and traps. He explained that we couldn’t just rely on T. rex urine when going into unknown territory, because it was only effective against raptors and allosauruses. If a male T. rex or some other large predatory animal was in the vicinity, they would take the encroaching scent as a challenge.

Instead, we would have to use other tools at our disposal. Despite the dwarf’s impressive set of tools, the safest way out of the lake was still via Siege Tank Golem’s shoulder.

“Bah, us dwarves aren’t built for heights, but I’ve already survived such a fall,” Bjorn said while apprehensively looking at the looming stone behemoth’s wide shoulders. “What’s the worst that can happen.”

I suggested that we travel all the way on my golem’s shoulder, but the suggestion was shot down by Bjorn, who insisted that there were a few problems with that plan. The first issue was speed. The golem just didn’t travel fast enough to do a round trip to the first circle and back to the waterfall.

The second issue was awareness. Although there were some obvious signs like large footprints in the mud that were visible from the golem’s shoulders, Bjorn explained that we would be missing a lot of tell-tale indications of what animals lived in the vicinity if we rode the whole way on golem back.

“Without proper tracking, we’re walking into a lion’s den with a blindfold on our eyes.”

And that led to the third and final issue. There were animals on this island capable of toppling Siege Tank Golem.

With that in mind, we set out into the wilderness on Siege Tank Golem’s shoulders for the first leg of the journey.

SPLASH.

Despite my golem’s best efforts to shield us from the waterfall, we still got a bit wet while going underneath it. It wasn’t a big problem though, since the heat from the direct sunlight would dry us off in no time. Coming from underneath the waterfall and into the heart of the temperate island, the breathtaking beauty of the region could not be understated. If it weren’t for the man eating animals every step of the way, this place could be a seven star hotel location back on earth.

“I just can't get over how beautiful this island is,” Rosalia gasped, taking in the view in front of us.

“Agreed,” I replied. The business part of my brain was already making general calculations on how much tourist revenue this place could get in a hypothetical situation on earth. I would love to be the owner of a hotel chain somewhere in the middle of the pacific.

The herd of sauropods were out of the lake for grazing, which was obvious from the tracks they left out of the right side of the lake. To the left of the lake where the allosauruses emerged yesterday, it was eerily quiet. There were no signs of the chaos from yesterday, and the tracks were washed away as well by the waves created from the gushing waterfall behind us.

Clinging onto Siege Tank Golem’s shoulders, we surveyed the area as the golem made his way to the left. We needed to make our way through allosaurus territory to reach the second chalk circle location.

“Blast, a dwarf doesn’t belong in the skies. Our feet belong on solid stone or solid dirt.” Bjorn looked down at the ground leerily, before beginning to fiddle with his tools and traps and homemade contraptions in an effort to calm himself down.

“Here, take a look,” Bjorn said with a slight quiver in his voice that I didn’t expect from the stoic and hardy dwarf. He showed us one of the contraptions he made, a portable spike trap made from sharpened bamboo tied together with string that was interlocked in a wooden box-like device. “You can tie this to a tree, and once something triggers the string, boom, bamboo spikes in its face. I killed two raptors with this.”

Bjorn had a glint of madness in his eyes as he continued to wax praise on his contraptions. Was it a racial trait for dwarves to have an unhealthy obsession with engineering type endeavors? I wasn’t sure so far, but from what I knew about the dwarf race, it seemed to be the case.

Rosalia was sitting right next to me on the golem’s shoulder, her shoulder brushing against my back as she looked across the forest. I tapped her on the head, and she looked at me, blinking her big eyes as her pupils adjusted to the light reflecting off the metal coiling on the golem.

“You can hover, right? Can you scout ahead so we can have an earlier warning if something happens?”

She brushed her blonde hair out from in front of her eyes and answered. Her eye color was a transparent gray green in the sunlight compared to the icy blue gray that it transformed into when she took on her class. “Actually, it costs divine power to use [Angelic Hover]. It’s not much, but over time it adds up to a lot. All my abilities require a bit of divine power in addition to mana, especially reraise which takes a lot of divine power, so it’s better if I save it.”

I nodded. We didn’t know when we’d have a chance to recharge Rosalia’s divine power in the bath today, so it was for sure better to be economical with her divine power use.

We made our way through allosaurus territory on Siege Tank Golem’s back without a single trace of an allosaurus, which was making Bjorn nervous. “I don’t like the look of this,” he said in a low whisper. “If we don’t see any even when your giant rock is thumping around like a dinner bell, the territories might be in the process of shifting right as we travel. Not good.”

Right as he said that, a flock of birds rose from the treetops in front of us, as if something disturbed them.