Without having arranged for a meeting place, the best thing Kaldalis could figure to do was to pick up whatever quests were available and see if they could lead him to Reno and SeventyEight.

The most pressing needs the quests provided were very much in line with what he’d heard from the council. They needed large quantities of wood to construct the preliminary palisade, as well as raw stone to act as further building materials for whatever the council needed moving forward. There was also a quest to deal with a new variety of local wildlife, which was something called an aurochtoise.

Kaldalis surveyed his questlog with scrutiny. The quest to gather wood caught his eye in particular, as it mentioned a location called the White-Blossom Forest. Not only did it sound like an aesthetically pleasing location to visit, but he still had Sivima’s quest, which called for the core of a white-blossom treant. He followed the marker for that quest first, hoping to find his friends already there ahead of him. Or, saving that, that he’d get some really cool views for his stream.

Contrary to his luck, it turned out he picked the right quest to follow. He ran into Reno and SeventyEight almost immediately.

More in line with his luck, however, they were in deep trouble when he arrived.

The White-Blossom Forest didn’t entirely live up to its name. Instead of white blossoms, the foliage here was all rich green leaves. Kaldalis suspected that it might have simply been out of season. But the trees weren’t what he expected as well. They were a true forest of tall, thick-trunked trees, instead of a tangle of smaller and spindlier cherry blossom trees.

Then again, this was a fantasy setting and didn’t have to adhere to normal earth rules.

Despite the foliage being primarily green, there was a single splash of white in the canopy above. Moving towards it was how he found Reno and SeventyEight. They were engaged in combat with what Kaldalis could only guess was the white-blossom treant he sought. In the absence of blossoms on the other trees, he suspected this might be where the forest got its name. Like the trees around it, a thick trunk rose dizzyingly high up into the canopy, but the foliage on this tree was white petals rather than green leaves.

From other fantasy media, Kaldalis had developed an expectation when it came to treants. When he’d seen the name on the quest he’d anticipated a fight against a giant made out of wood, with a rough humanoid shape.

This treant, though, was like something out of a nightmare. It had limbs, but they weren’t formed out of branches, or out of split segments of trunk, which he expected. Instead, the roots were acting as the limbs, and looked more like a dense mass of writhing tentacles than anything else. It had no visible face or features, but instead as he burst out of the undergrowth and into view, the dozen or so sparse knotholes across the trunk seemed to wiggle and shift to orient on him.

Reno and SeventyEight were badly battered, but still moving when Kaldalis joined the fray. The treant itself looked to have hardly been scratched. Despite their vulnerability, he had the silver bullet to protect them. As a tank class, overworld aggro mechanics would pin any enemy to him. All he had to do was lunge in and strike it.

The head of his spear smashed into the trunk of the treant, giving him some hope for the fight to come. From the sheer size of it, he’d anticipated it being the same threat level as the Infernal Horde, but the damage he did was somewhere between that and the pushover mobs around Cotanaku. His strike did one hundred and fifty-four physical damage, and thirty-four wind damage, for a total of one hundred and ninety-eight.

True to expectations, as soon as he struck it, it turned away from Reno and SeventyEight to focus exclusively on him. He expected the pair of them to start hacking away at it once its attention was turned, but the pair of them fell back, breathing hard.

“Are you two doing alright?” Kaldalis asked.

Reno shook her head with a laugh. It sounded tired and winded. “The fuck you think? Took you long enough, by the way!”

“We’re grateful for your help,” SeventyEight said with a thin smile. “You got here just in time.”

He didn’t have time to respond to either of them as the treant surged towards him. Its tentacle-like roots lashed out at him, forcing him to hop back away. He was confident that he could tank through its damage easily, but without a healer on hand, trading blows wasn’t a move he wanted to make.

Kaldalis tried to circle around to stab it from the side, but stumbled over a protruding root from a natural tree. The animated treant’s tentacles whipped out at him like something out of a horror movie. In a panic, Kaldalis activated his Jump cooldown to hurl himself away. Inadvertently, he slammed himself into a nearby tree trunk, but he still avoided being smashed or ensnared by a nest of splintery tentacles.

The treant scrambled at him in a manner that was alien and terrifying, skittering more like a spider than slithering like an octopus. It contrasted with the crackling crashing sound of its trunk and branches grinding against the forest’s canopy.

With his Jump cooldown active, Kaldalis leapt straight up, hugging onto the trunk of the treant, more than high enough up that it couldn’t reach him with its tentacles. The trunk was terrifyingly warm, like the body of a large mammal rather than a plant, and it was almost strange enough to make him let go and fall back within reach of its attacks. Instead, he gripped his spear just short of the head, holding it like a poorly-balanced dagger. He used it to attack the monster, chipping away at it one hundred and ninety-eight damage at a time.

The monster tried to reach up at him, tentacles slapping against its own trunk. Kaldalis feared that it would start raging around to slam its trunk into the nearby trees until it squashed him, but that was actual tactics. This thing was just an animated plant, not a thinking foe. Stabbing at it again and again just took time, since he was working alone, with his friends still standing by.

Eventually the treant broke and ran, and now Kaldalis was forced to let go or else be smashed between the treant’s trunk and those of the trees around. It hadn’t employed such a strategy on purpose, but its wild scramble after being worn down meant that its trunk flailed around.

Kaldalis hit the ground in a roll and wanted to give chase, but he wasn’t alone out here. Reno and SeventyEight were still recovering nearby, and were likely in desperate need of his help.

“Excellent work,” SeventyEight said as she picked bits of bark out of her hair. “I never would have imagined such an unusual strategy.”

Reno grinned and leaned back against the tree she was resting against. “That’s Kaldalis. Master of the Weird Shit That Somehow Works. Remind me to tell you about our elevator phase skip on the Pterodactyl fight two expansions ago.”

“Are you two okay?” Kaldalis asked, ignoring Reno’s snarky words and the argument they always spurred. It wasn’t his fault it worked. “I’d like to finish that thing off, if you two are up for the chase.”

“It wore us down a lot,” Reno said. She shook her head and motioned at party bars Kaldalis couldn’t see. “I had a few potions, but they’re all gone now. We’ve got like two hundred hit points left between the two of us.”

“I’ve got a stockpile,” Kaldalis said. He opened his inventory and reached for the potions. “Special thanks to my viewers for the assist. Please continue to support me because I sure as fuck wasn’t this prepared on purpose.”

A couple of potions each got them back in fighting shape, and a couple more into their own inventories would ensure their continued safety.

“Care to get the hunt on?” Kaldalis asked, gesturing in the direction the treant had vanished.

SeventyEight peered off into the forest. “If you think we can find it. It has a pretty good head start on us.”

“Something tells me that it won’t be able to outsmart my tracking prowess.” With a grin, Kaldalis pointed up to the trees above and ahead of them. There were visible scrapes and broken branches from its passing, and then down at the forest floor, where a trail of white blossom petals from the treant had been left behind.

“Huh,” Reno said. “I guess we can make the attempt.” She threw him a party invite, and they moved out to follow the creature.

The treant had covered considerable ground, but with such an obvious trail to follow, it had no hope of escaping.

Hilariously, it had attempted to hide. Its tentacle-like roots were pressed against the ground, laying still. The creature almost would have been able to blend in, if not for the giveaway white blossoms and the sap-leaking puncture wounds all clustered around one spot high up on its trunk.

Able to fight as a unit this time, the trio made short work of the white-blossom treant. Kaldalis actually took a hit in the fight, as he stayed on the ground to stop the tentacle-roots from flailing around and becoming a hazard to his friends. The beast only clipped him for one hundred and forty-two damage, and a stack of poison that was barely a tickle for his health pool.

It seemed their own damage was barely a tickle to the beast as well, and even in its weakened state, it took a long time to finally wear it down.

That was going to be a slight problem.

When the monster finally fell, awarding Kaldalis sixty-four experience points, they were pleased to see the drops. Not only was the creature worth several units of lumber between the three of them, but Kaldalis got the treant core for his quest. In his inventory, it appeared to be a thick rod of wood with a deep amber hue. They also got some research notes, though Kaldalis didn’t know where to take them to at the new camp, or if he should just hold onto them to deliver to Bangen on his next return visit to Cotanaku.

Kaldalis turned to his companions as they fiddled with their inventories. “So, this has been a learning experience.”

“Yeah,” SeventyEight said with an enthusiastic nod. “It taught us that this area is indeed higher level than Cotanaku.”

“With appropriately higher rewards.” Reno flashed SeventyEight a grin. “You have to admit, that was a heck of a burst of experience.”

Before the Finnian and Vathon could make any plans to do it again, Kaldalis had to step in. “But given the challenge, the quests should also be proportionately more rewarding, and are probably the faster route.” Kaldalis gestured around at the trees covered in green foliage. “We should focus on getting them done rather than looking for more fights.”

He got way less flack for the suggestion than he expected. Perhaps Reno was finally up for using her head as more than just target practice.

Kaldalis silently thanked the treant.

The trio went to work, and Kaldalis got considerable progress on catching up his harvesting skills to his level, since they were so far behind. Now that they knew what to expect, they avoided trying to harvest from the rare white-blossomed trees, and gave them wide berth when they saw one.

After getting the lumber required (and picking up a little extra for Kaldalis’s peace of mind) they moved on to the nearest quarry area, which was gathering from rocky outcroppings in a grotto-like cave up the coast from the town. The enemies there were some kind of iguana with weblike skin along their limbs like a flying squirrel. They seemed lethargic and passive, though. They defended their perches and nests, but weren’t aggressive as long as the adventurers left them alone.

Kaldalis urged his friends to let them be, even if SeventyEight became panicky whenever one extended its wings and took to the air to move from one rocky perch to the next.

The final quest, which told them to defeat a couple of aurochtoise, was another demonstration of how unprepared Reno and SeventyEight were for the level of the camp’s surrounding area.

An aurochtoise was something like an ox crossed with an armadillo. It had two huge curled horns on its bovine-like head, but was protected by a thick plated shell across its back. They were tough foes for Kaldalis, on the same tier as dungeon trash in terms of damage numbers, but despite the attack disparity he usually suffered from when compared to a DPS player, he felt like he was doing the lion’s share of the damage even with the two of them working.

“How are we feeling?” Kaldalis asked as they finished the last fight of the quest.

“Peachy,” Reno said in a thin voice. Kaldalis didn’t even have to look for the telltale signs that she was lying. It was painfully obvious.

SeventyEight nodded. She put a hand to Reno’s shoulder, then adjusted how she was standing to give her a supportive hug. “We need to stop for a meal, anyway. It was lunchtime like two hours ago.”

“How can you tell?” Kaldalis asked.

“You can’t work in a restaurant for six and a half years and not know what time is lunchtime,” SeventyEight said with a sage nod. “I swear, working the lunch rush that many shifts changes you. Even on days off, my blood pressure spikes around eleven and doesn’t come back down until one thirty.”

“Oooh. Uh, yeah. Then let’s get a late lunch,” Reno said. “I wasn’t hungry before, but now that you’ve said something…”