Chapter 21

Two days later, a group of people consisting of four hunter teams, half a dozen surveyors dressed in those strange camouflage ponchos and a couple dozen soldiers were all milling around in front of the Dire Woods rift. Surrounding them all, were dozens of journalists and interested onlookers held back by crowd barriers manned by police, all taking pictures, asking questions and just generally chattering amongst themselves. A few of the hunters were doing impromptu interviews with some of the journalists.

The hunter teams all had four to ten people in them, they wore their full armour and carried large rucksacks containing everything they’d need for a full two week trip into the Woods. They also carried the newly issued firearms the guild insisted on giving them, known widely as the SM1 or Slayer Model 1, a semi-automatic rifle that has been gaining increasing popularity all over the world. It fired armour piercing incendiary rounds that would go straight through most forms of armour and leave a burning trail of low grade powdered fire crystal behind, burning anything the bullet impacted from the inside.

The hunters and surveyors all milled around in the same group and stared at the soldiers in curiosity. The soldiers were apparently a special unit of the military from the Royal marines, just like with the police, they had been volunteers that had undertaken the risky practice of cultivation. More than a few of them bore the stigma of botched cultivation attempts such as burned or grey petrified skin, however it was clear that they were all reasonably strong. They were outfitted with the same gear that included the standard camouflage clothing underneath similarly camouflaged heavy carapace armour that covered much of their torso, arms and legs. They also wielded similar rifles to the hunters, had short swords on their belts and all had what appeared to be retractable spears on their back weapon harnesses. Jack squinted at them suspiciously.

Another curious addition to the soldiers group, were the strange mechanical quadrupedal machines that accompanied them. The machines stood in a cluster of ten, being attended to by several of the soldiers, each machine looked like large, squat, headless, four legged mechanical dogs standing about one and a half metres at the ‘shoulder’. They were all loaded down with large boxes, bags of ammunition, spare weapons and different supplies the soldiers had brought with them. In gaps between all the different supplies they were carrying, thick grey armour plating could be seen.

It was still early in the morning but before the groups of hunters, surveyors and soldiers could be kept waiting too long, the outpost commander and Cheryl followed by several other individuals came striding down the main avenue towards them.

Jack actually had to do a double take when he saw Cheryl, normally when she showed up to these sorts of things, she looked extremely casual, the most dressed up he’d ever seen her was when she’d filched a bullet proof vest from the police. This time however, she was in full armour, a set of black plate mail that accentuated her lithe figure and a winged helmet that she carried in the crook under her arm. Her gauntlets had bladed tips at the ends of the fingers that made them look like claws. Even though the armour was black, when she moved, the armour seemed to shimmer subtly with multiple colours, as if the armour were made from oil. However, she carried no weapon on her person except for the normal tools a hunter would normally carry on their utility belt.

Accompanying Cheryl were several rather nervous looking men, they all wore similar looking camouflaged survival gear to the soldiers but wore no armour and had no weapons except pistols on their hips. Jack sensed that they were all either weak cultivators or they didn’t cultivate at all, they must be the diplomats he thought. He frowned as he observed them, they didn’t look like much, in fact as he watched, one of them pulled out an inhaler and took a puff. Another actually looked slightly overweight, overall the group didn’t exactly look like Dire Woods material, except maybe as prey.

A particularly curious sight however, was the other individual with them. It was an elf, a female elf it seemed. She was tall, standing at just a little under two metres and wearing clearly borrowed human clothes, again the camouflaged survival clothes the military personnel favoured. She was just as slim as the rest of her race that Jack had observed, her skin was pale bordering on alabaster, her hair was a pale cream hue and her irises were yellow. Her features were undeniably feminine and Jack could objectively tell she was beautiful, but at the same time they were still too off-puttingly non-human, too alien.

“Whoa! She’s hot!” Nate exclaimed when he saw her.

The elf in question seemed to realise the attention she’d drawn and directed a haughty gaze upon Nate. Her face twisted into what appeared to be a sneer and a look of disdain or contempt before she swept past them, following Cheryl.

Cheryl marched past them and briefly conferred with one of the soldiers who seemed to be their commanding officer. After a few words, they finished speaking and the diplomats that accompanied her stepped over to the soldiers.

Cheryl turned around to address the entire party, she ignored the crowds of onlookers and journalists like always. Everyone in the square before the Dire Woods rift quietened down.

“Right then, you all know what you’re here for. We’re to head on over to an elven stronghold within the Woods which is apparently the entrance to the elven world of Alfheim. We have our elven guide here that will show us the way and make introductions.” Cheryl motioned to the elf who didn’t react, she simply stared at the assembled group with a kind of haughty impassiveness.

“So that's it then? We'll just trek through the Woods for a week and walk right up to these people and ask them if they want to be friends?” a hunter asked sceptically.

Cheryl simply shrugged uncaringly and gave a mildly expectant look to one of the diplomats.

“Ah er no…we er…it's not quite as simple as that I’m afraid. Apparently the elven party that attacked us several days ago and whom we subsequently er…fought, they were actually a high ranking nobles hunting party. In fact they’d been hunting the Kladican that we’d slain and instead found us. Um anyway, the noble in question was killed in the conflict and so now we have to return his belongings in order to open up diplomatic talks. We’re er…we’re a long way off from asking to be friends or allies I’m afraid,” one of the diplomats nervously explained.

If anything, that explanation just made everyone’s doubts about this endeavour increase, you could cut the scepticism in the air with a knife.

Cheryl gave the diplomat a faint gaze of pity and amusement, the diplomat meanwhile got out a handkerchief and wiped the flop sweat from his brow. Nate raised his hand.

“Do the diplomats all need to survive or can we get away with just one for this job?” Nate asked bluntly.

The contingent of diplomats all let out gasps of horror while the hunters and surveyors struggled to keep straight faces. Cheryl snorted in amusement.

“Don’t worry about them, the military attachment is in charge of their safety. Your job will be to carve us a path through the Woods,” Cheryl told them, ignoring the horrified look the diplomat who’d just spoken was giving her. “Also, if it comes to an actual fight with these elves, the hunters will do their best to step back and allow our military friends to do their jobs. You’ll only join the fight if directly attacked and you need to defend yourselves or if I order it. Am I clear? Right! Let's get going, if any of you have more questions then I don’t care, ask me later and maybe I’ll answer. Let’s go!”

With that, Cheryl turned away from the Dire Woods rift and began walking down the avenue followed by the rest of the expeditionary force. People and journalists watched them go, taking pictures and filming them. A few of the hunters hurriedly stepped out of line to sign autographs and take selfies with various tourists and soon the expedition was out of the gates and marching into the Dire Woods.

************

A day later, Jack was crouched over a large Amphibious creature in a small boggy area. The thing had been able to spit jets of water at him at speeds able to easily shear through flesh and bone if they’d hit. However, creatures that thrived in water always fell easily to a few good jolts of lightning. So now he was busy using its remains to cultivate from before he rejoined the main group.

The way Cheryl had organised the march, was for several surveyors to always range beyond the main group looking for threats in front, on the flanks and from behind. When they identified something that could cause the main group some trouble, they would radio it in and one of the hunter teams would go out and deal with it.

At the same time, the rest of the surveyors travelling with the main group would use their various tools and tricks to make sure the main group passed relatively unnoticed through the Woods.

Once, a month or so ago, out of curiosity, Jack had asked a slightly drunken surveyor about how they did their jobs without relying heavily on combat. After a bit of coaxing, what the surveyor had described essentially amounted to the surveyor corps taking advantage of the various Dire Woods creature’s ‘over evolution’.

When asked what he meant, the surveyor said that just about everything in the Woods and many monsters outside it, relied heavily on one or more of their ridiculously acute senses. There were things that could literally smell you ten miles away, things that had perfect twenty twenty vision in the pitch black dark and things that could hear an insect crawling through the ground from miles away. The surveyor corp took advantage of that by using tools and techniques that would confuse and overload the senses of various beasts and monsters. For instance, flash bangs, ultra strength pepper spray, unholy dung bombs, tear gas and dog whistles were all amongst the more common tools in a surveyor’s arsenal.

Jack finished off cultivating from the creature, having only taken part of its lightning essence, not wanting to overfill himself before heading back off to the main group. Nate joined him after a moment, stepping out from some trees as he cleaned his blade with a cloth. He gave Jack a nod and they hiked back through the Woods to the main group.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

A little while later, they both rejoined the main expedition. As they stepped out of the bushes with a rustle onto what passed for the main path, the soldiers tensed and briefly swung their rifles to target the hunters but when they saw it was just Jack and Nate, they lowered their weapons and went back to warily scanning their surroundings.

The mechanical quadrupeds that they later learned were actually called Loot Mules, were a type of robot meant for traversing tough terrain whilst carrying heavy loads for use by the military. They used a basic form of artificial intelligence to track and traverse the terrain in front of them. They were steadily keeping pace with the soldiers. Their thick chunky legs moved a little clumsily but were steady and strong and seemed to have no trouble with any of the terrain they’d travelled so far, whether it was dense undergrowth or near vertical rocky ascents. Each of the Mules were laden down heavily with all manner of equipment, from survival gear to boxes of ammunition to heavy weaponry. Jack decided to ask later if there would be any models available in non-military markets at a later date.

As the two of them rejoined team Meredith with friendly nods and smiles, Jack caught the elf looking at them speculatively. Cheryl had multiple reasons for wanting to keep any fighting from reaching the main group by sending out the hunters to deal with potential threats prematurely, such as wanting to protect the diplomats who couldn’t really defend themselves being weak cultivators at best. However, one of the things she made clear to every hunter, surveyor and soldier at one point or another, was that their elven guest was not to see their capabilities in combat.

The female elf continued to eye them for a few moments before curling her lip in slight disdain and turning away. She kept a cool, haughty gaze ahead and seemed to be doing her best to ignore Dr Nicholson, one of the people assigned to the diplomats division and someone who specialised in linguistics. Apparently before the great changes had swept over the world, he’d had a hobby for studying ancient dead languages. He was one of the linguists who’d helped interrogate her and gain her cooperation in guiding them to the elven base. The man was of average height and slightly rotund, middle aged with tanned skin and glasses. Just like with the rest of the diplomats the government had sent over, he didn’t exactly look the athletic type and looked entirely unsuitable to even be in the Woods in the first place.

Dr Nicholson was amiably chatting away with the elf, oblivious or uncaring that she didn’t contribute to their conversation. In fact, when he spoke to her or she was forced to look at him, her body language seemed quite tense and on edge, entirely different to the obvious disdain she showed for the rest of the party. Perhaps her interrogation had not been entirely pleasant, Jack could understand that.

In the past, before the advent of magic, Jack had always been a quiet soul. That had earned him few friends, but in his silence, he’d developed his powers of observation and actually had a pretty good sense for people's personalities. And something about Dr Nicholson rubbed him the wrong way; the way he spoke and acted, the way he looked at everyone and everything around him with a faint smirk like he knew something no one else did. Out of all the other men amongst the diplomats, he was the only one of them that seemed at ease in a place that was filled with death. He certainly wasn’t a highly levelled cultivator, so if anything got close to him then he’d be dead, but if that frightened him then he wasn’t showing it.

The expedition continued its journey through the Dire Woods, the terrain they covered was difficult, forcing them to hack their way through thick brush, climb over giant tree roots and ascend steep slopes. However the elf was adamant that they were going the correct way according to Dr Nicholson.

Just as they were due to set up camp for the night, Cheryl instructed team Meredith to head over to the latest location a surveyor had scouted out and see to the potential threat there.

They all nodded and dropped their bags before heading off for the location highlighted on their pager maps. A few minutes of pushing their way through the undergrowth brought them close to their target. As had become routine, Katie took the lead and slowly led them forward, after a moment she stopped and seemed to be listening for something. She held up one finger to them, before holding out her hand in a straight line and performing a chopping motion upwards. That was a form of hand signalling that had been developed by the guild recently and was in fact mandatory for all hunters to learn. Katie had signalled that what they were about to face was a single monster and that it was extremely large.

Everyone nodded and they continued to creep through the bushes, taking care to be as stealthy as possible. The surveyor who’d spotted the threat hadn’t been specific on what they were about to face, having not been able to get close enough without risking themselves. The team got closer to their quarry and eventually they saw it.

At first, it looked like some enormous, amorphous, shadowy blob that was leaning against a partially fallen tree. However, it then moved slightly and the light provided by some nearby luminescent plants gave the team a better look. It still looked like an amorphous blob, a gigantic slime, about twice the size of an elephant and almost see through. Within its gigantic mass, multiple pieces of debris floated; broken tree branches, sticks, stones, clumps of dirt and boulders all floated within it. As they watched, the giant slime seemed to be gorging itself on the partially fallen tree, it’s bulk rippled and pulsed, sounds like a large volume of water being sloshed around in a container could be heard from the slime as well as ripping and tearing from the tree.

“It's a Forest slime,” Meredith stated in fascination.

“Oh, I think I’ve heard about them. They’re sort of like one of the evolutions a slime can become as they age, right?” Jack asked. Like many hunters, he liked to read ahead. The guild were always publishing details of new monsters that had been discovered, as well monster attributes, weaknesses, habits and effective hunting strategies.

“Yeah, they’re pretty rare in the UK, though that's probably because we tend to hunt slimes as soon as they appear, can’t get enough of that stuff we harvest from ‘em. Speaking of which, Forest slimes have especially valuable leavings, they even have a sort of core we can harvest. It's all pretty valuable.” Meredith smiled.

“Well what are we waiting for? Let's get to it,” Katie whispered excitedly.

“How exactly? Aren’t these things like tanks? They’re supposed to be able to soak up all sorts of damage,” Stacey pointed out.

“We need to expose the core and damage or remove it,” Noah spoke up as he observed the creature still gorging on the tree. Everyone thought for a few moments, however any chance to develop an elaborate, foolproof plan disappeared when a branch cracked loudly underneath Nate’s foot.

“Oops.”

The slime stopped devouring the tree and turned to their party with a preternatural swiftness, being an amorphous translucent blob it didn’t have any eyes, but it certainly seemed to see them.

All of a sudden, a thick tendril of slime containing large pieces of rubble shot out from the main body and rocketed towards them. Jack reacted by instinct and put up a large shield in front of the team. The stitching in the runes seemed to help the energy flow easier and there was no pain this time, just a faint tingling. However, despite the lack of discomfort, his shield still buckled and nearly gave way from the weight of the attack by the slime. Jack actually felt some of the weight transfer from his shield to his arm and he was forced back a couple of steps.

The tendril withdrew back into the main body of the slime, everyone scattered and surrounded the beast before flinging as many elemental attacks as they could at it, hoping to wear it down.

The giant slime rippled as it absorbed the attacks thrown at it, however there was no discernable damage, Jack then found himself being targeted by another tendril which incessantly attacked him over and over. He defended himself with a conjured oval shield but every attack felt like being hit by a freight train, his shield buckled every time and he had to hurriedly draw upon more energy from his core to reinforce it.

Just as he was down on his knees and his shield about to get bludgeoned again, a vertical slash of water jetted through the outstretched slime tendril, neatly slicing through it. The tendril fell to the ground in a viscous slop and remained there.

The slime recoiled and rippled violently, as if in pain. Jack looked over to Meredith, from whom the slice of water came and saw her grinning as she twirled her sword spear around.

The slime soon recovered and began attacking the team once more, it lumbered towards Nate and shot out several more tendrils in an attempt to grab him. Meredith however, was ready. She used the same cutting attack in order to sever the tendrils before they could come into contact with Nate.

With each tendril severed, the slime recoiled in pain and seemed to get smaller, slower and weaker. The hunter team’s elemental attacks also seemed to have greater effect. However, the creature didn’t take heed of that, it simply continued mindlessly attacking the hunters and Meredith continued to use the same cutting attack to sever its tendrils until eventually the slime was less than a tenth its original size. Chunks of slime covered debris littered the area.

The fight was ended when Jack was able to rush in and stab the slime’s core with his spear. The creature reared up and spasmed violently before suddenly losing all cohesiveness and dropped to the ground in a splash of highly corrosive fluid. Jack leapt back just in time to avoid being drenched in the stuff.

With that, the short battle was over.

“Great work everyone.” Meredith beamed.

“Is that a new sword Meredith?” Stacey asked her as Jack, Nate and Noah began to sift through the slime and harvest it.

“Yep, Gary made it for me, whaddaya think?” she proudly showed it off, Katie also wandered over to take a look. Behind them, Nate stepped in a puddle of goo and frantically wiped his boot on some nearby moss. He stumbled into Jack and they both went down in a confused tangle of limbs.

“It still sort of looks the same as your old sword spear, did you use it to generate that water slash? I’ve never seen a water attack like that before, even from Cheryl,” Stacey remarked, oblivious to what the boys were doing.

Behind them, Jack and Nate crawled away from the puddle of corrosive slime. Jack shoved Nate in annoyance who then impacted off Noah’s sturdy frame, Noah turned around and looked at them in irritation.

“I know right, Gary smelted a water crystal for it and then made it into a wire for the core.” Meredith smiled as she held her blade up.

“A wire? He made the water crystal into a wire? Why? What would that do?” Katie asked in confusion.

Noah shoved Nate who went stumbling back into Jack and they went down again, landing dangerously close to the slime.

“Take a look at the edge here,” Meredith showed Stacey and Katie the edges of the blade. They were a slightly different colour than the silvery grey metal of the rest of the sword, the edges were nearly pure white in colour.

“They’re a different colour? A different metal?” Stacey asked.

“Yeah, Gary used Steel Coral for the edges, the metal actually conducts the water element really well. So when I channel my element through the wire core, it becomes razor thin, then the Steel Coral harnesses it and lets it out. After that it's just a matter of aiming it.” She brought the sword spear up and swiped it through the air, a thin blade of highly pressurised white water sliced out and rapidly shot through the air, carving straight through a nearby tree branch.

The branch narrowly missed landing on Jack and Nate who were gingerly digging through the viscous slime for the core with their weapons. They jumped back in shock.

“C’mon boys! Hurry up and get that slime core, I want to get back to camp and eat, chop chop,” Katie told them with a grin. They both turned around and gave her disgruntled looks.