Lyrhea winced as the first glimmer of daylight hit her eyes, and she braced for death.

“…”

She waited, but death did not come.

“What the fuck was that, you dumbass game system? Wasn’t I supposed to die if the day ended and either of us were still alive?”

She realized that she should have spoken that aloud, but it was too late. Thankfully, though, the incompetent system or whatever was responsible for this headache seemed to be busy doing other things.

Not that she was going to cry about it. She preferred to be alive, thank you very much.

“You should simply accept your doom, monster.” said the forest.

“Piss off and tell me where your main body is.”

“Never.”

Lyrhea had been having this violent back and forth with the Forest Guardian for hours now, and while she appreciated it sending no small number of small woodland beasts for her to eat, she really would have preferred that it tell her where its main body was so she could plunge her blades into it.

“!!!”

She heard the forest make a nondescript noise of general alarm, and she couldn’t figure out why. She slowly began to figure it out, though, as the woodland critters that had been throwing themselves at her began to act like they were drunk.

She decided to risk herself and used her new sense for a small window of time, almost sending out a sort of ‘ping’ that lit up the entire area around her with enough different traces to overload her mind. She got what she wanted from it, though, and as her self-made migraine hit her hard she couldn’t help but crack a smile.

“You…” the forest rumbled as the trees began to lose some leaves. “What did you do to my avatar?!”

Lyrhea slumped down on the branch that she was on, resting her back against the main body of the tree it was attached to. He laughed dryly and kept her eyes closed to help her deal with the headache that she had given herself and just kept smiling.

“What did.. you do?!”

She didn’t speak, and just kept quietly laughing to herself.

“Answer me!”

Lyrhea lifted one of her knives and ran her long, forked tongue across the metal, depositing a line of oral fluids on it before stabbing it into the groggy body of the avian creature that was near to her reclining body.

“Take a guess. I’m a snake, aren’t I? So think for once.”

“!!!”

The forest shook again, and while Lyrhea couldn’t tell where the shaking was coming from exactly, she did have a good idea of the direction the shaking came from. Generally speaking, of course.

She tilted her head in the direction that she felt the tremors come from and rolled the dice.

“You’re over there, aren’t you?”

“No! No I’m not! I'm in the other direction!”

The nearby trees began to look rather sickly, and Lyrhea was loving it.

“You monster…” The Forest rasped, clearly worse for wear. “You… poisoned my avatar… you knew it would come back to me to heal…”

“I wish I could say that I was that good at planning ahead, but sadly I am not.”

“Then, how?”

Lyrhea shoved the now-dead bird into her mouth and got up.

“I thought that was your main body, and that the stuff I made would have killed it several times over by now. It wasn’t, and it didn’t, and you exist, so I dearly misread the situation. But now I’m coming for you, and you won’t be able to keep yourself hidden for much longer.”

Lyrhea dropped down from the treetops and began to stuff the countless thousands of groggy hornbuns into her mouth while slitting the throats of every green deer that she could reach.

“Stop… now… And I’ll…”

“A king with no citizens is no king at all.” Lyrhea said with satisfaction as she stuffed more and more food down her throat. She finished shortly after another hour had passed and began to walk towards where the tremors seemed to originate from. She had a while to walk, and many more animals in her path that needed to be granted a one-way trip into her maw.

…

The town was on high alert. A few hours ago, the Forest Guardian had wandered in to visit the nearby shrine, but it was not like its countless other visits.

This time the Guardian was heavily wounded and wobbling back and forth as though it were drunk. Nobody wanted to get close, as while they wanted to try and heal it before the shrine took it into itself and thus save the shrine some trouble, the last time someone had tried to use a spell on the Guardian it had snapped their neck.

The Guardian entered the shrine, and everyone thought that would be that, but it wasn’t. The shrine began to moan shortly after the Guardian entered, and then the ground began to occasionally shift as though something deep beneath was twisting and turning.

This woke everyone up, and the townspeople began to try and stabilize their homes and places of work as they also looked for whoever or whatever was responsible for this catastrophe. If the Guardian died, or if the shrine was destroyed, then the people on the other side of the forest would certainly come and kill or conquer them.

Then it hit them. The shape haunting the forest that the children had seen! The people across the forest were the ones responsible; they had done this to the Guardian and the shrine!

It was this realization that drove them into a rage, and they began to gather weapons and rally around the embassy of the opposing town. The men and women inside tried to plead their case, that they were not to blame and had no idea why this was happening, but their words fell on deaf ears and they were chased out of the town with calls for war following them.

When the sun was now fully visible in the sky, the mob had been formed, and the weaker men and women were left as the mob sallied forth to try and cross the forest and deal with the people who had done this to them.

What they failed to notice as they went, though, was that the true culprit had scaled their walls and was following the tremors deeper into their settlement, heading to deal a death blow to their New God’s agent.