Angel and I walked over to the camp and set about preparing breakfast. Well, she set about preparing for breakfast while I went out to bring back a deer for us to stew in the makeshift pot Harald had put together from reeds and clay. It was a rough design, but none of us had had the opportunity to make a stop and shop for things in the second floor with how busy it had kept us.

  Hopefully that would change on the third floor, as I had a feeling it couldn’t be much worse than this. Nothing could be worse than this.

  Accompanying the pot was a small stack of bowls. Thankfully, there were enough of them for me to eat out of one as well. Harald had thought ahead to the eventual case that one of them might break their dish, so he had made six instead of three. Now there was a new pair being fired in a bed of coals separated from the main fire. Those would be mine, but I was borrowing one until they were ready.

  I came back dragging the carcass of one of those irritating Thorn-crowned Stags. At this point, the wounds caused by their antlers were easily healed in an hour or so and I hadn’t even bothered defending myself, just grabbed the antlers and twisted them sharply at an awkward angle. No blood. Quick, clean, efficient.

  The meat was tough and lean, as I had expected, but it wasn’t all bad. Mark had some skill at determining which plants were safe to eat, and I went with him just to be certain. I was the test subject—the victim, if you so choose.

  Some of them were, in fact, poisonous. Ouch.

  Come to think of it, why hadn’t he just used his identify? It would have saved me a whole lot of unnecessary discomfort and purple swelling. Maybe he just wasn’t quite used to the identify feature quite yet. Either way, he ended up almost killing me. Twice.

  The first time was with a mushroom he wasn’t certain about but plucked anyway. It ended up being a kind of mushroom from the world outside called a death-cap. I wasn’t certain why it effected me so fast—maybe it was system augmented to some degree—but I just straight up collapsed like an abandoned marionette. There wasn’t any warning, and I was out cold for five minutes or so during which I’m told I was writhing in inconsolable agony. After that, I got up and moved on like nothing had happened. It was rather strange and disconcerting.

  The second time was an unassuming plant with a slightly bitter scent and an even more bitter taste. I immediately discounted it for the stew we were making and moved on, but before I had taken more than ten steps I collapsed. Yet again. This time, I hear I turned purple and blue all over, most noticeably in the face and nose. I didn’t writhe in pain either. I just lay there, deathly still, breathing slower and slower before hopping up and wondering why my nose was suddenly so red it almost glowed. The effect lasted for about an hour before fading.

  Still have no idea what that plant was called. I almost want to try it again to find out, but that probably wouldn’t be wise at my age. Though… maybe my defense or health would help? I’m not sure. Depends on whether the plant had a percent-based health attack or flat damage.

  Eventually the stew came together wonderfully. It was tough and gamy with bitter herbs, but it was hot food and tasted like the shores of heaven. And no wonder it did. My taste-buds had been stranded on the deserted island of poverty for far too long to remember decent meals beyond cup-noodles and granola.

  When we were finishing up eating, Mark decided to bring up the topic we were all dreading before it became too late and we’d have to wing it.

  “So, what’s the game-plan for today?” he asked, looking around at the three of us, “I mean, I get that we have to fight her, but how should we go about it?”

  Harald and Angel both looked at me, as though I had all the answers to their questions. Why they would think that was beyond me. Still…

  “Let me take Dalia alone—that’s the first thing. I’m the only one that can get even close to her, and that’s only due to the fact that I’m already mad and not in the slightest bit intimidated by the Shadow now. Y’all would fare much worse than me.”

  It was a small lie, one that none of them would detect, as none of them knew the Shadows as well as me. The simple fact of the matter was, any of them would fare just as well against Dalia as I would. The problem was, they would go mad in the meantime. And I did not want that. They wouldn’t come back from madness like I did. And the madness would be permanent for them. But as I had received my madness before the Shadow had fully touched me, there was a slight—ever so slight—chance that I might recover if she died. Especially by my hand.

  So it wasn’t entirely selfless of me to fight her alone. I wanted that finishing blow all to myself.

  “That seems sensible,” Mark nodded, “So what should the rest of us do?”

  “You’ll need to keep any and all distractions away from me. We’ll be attacking in the day, so the treant shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But if it does somehow come to it, you might have to fight that thing. It’s level nine, but it’s not built for speed so there’s a chance. Even still, it will probably take all of you to defeat it. Don’t hold back for the sake of the village it comes from. If we don’t take out Dalia here and now, there won’t be a floor for that village to remain. Besides, most of it will be rubble by this point.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The three of them nodded, hesitantly. They didn’t like the idea of rolling up and finding a colossal tree with tendencies towards excessive violence waiting for them. But if they were going to have to fight it, they would rather be prepared.

  “Do you have any suggestions on how we should take it on?” Harald asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know enough about how you fight for that. You three have been fighting together for, what… a week now? And I just had a glimpse of that yesterday. There’s no way I could come up with a plan right now. It would only confuse you.”

  As a matter of fact, I could think of at least three different methods they could use against the treant to great effect. But I wasn’t going to tell them that. I was still examining their personalities, strengths, and weaknesses to determine if I wanted to continue in their party, and they needed to learn more about the dungeon before any of that. I had made myself a promise that if I didn’t feel comfortable with people, I wouldn’t go with them. These folks still fell within those parameters. However, I could give them was a bit of advice.

  “A few tips, though. I have fought this thing before, so I know at least a little about it. It is fast, but not designed to move at great speeds or be able to turn very well. Keep moving and don’t bunch together. Angel should stay back out of sight. That’s probably your best shot. I won’t dictate anything more than that. You will have to talk about that amongst yourselves.”

  Angel looked at me strangely. I wasn’t certain what she was thinking, but she was suspicious about me. To be fair, I was new to their party. There was a certain amount of suspicion warranted in both directions. Still, her look went beyond normal bounds. That was odd.

  “Right,” Mark said, standing and storing his dish in his inventory, “I think it’s time we got moving. Sitting around theorizing will only make us more nervous about the coming fight, and that would be bad.”

  The rest of us stood as well, storing our bowls and tossing the wood stakes we used to spear the meat into the fire. The two other boys moved to collapse the tents, while I put out the fire and doused the ashes until they no longer smoked. Angel, in the meantime, started on the replacement to her previous bow the An Dreores had snapped. The bruise that had caused her was gone by now, but I was willing to bet she still remembered the pain.

  She had chosen a branch from an Elm tree and trimmed it the night before, leaving it to cure in the heat from the fire. It wasn’t quite ready yet, but it would do for the time being. The string was made from the woven fibers of a particularly resilient plant she found. It bent nicely and refused to snap no matter how much tension she put it under.

  Her first few attempts had gone poorly. Either the wood had had a blemish in it, such as a knot or warping under the heat, or it hadn’t bent correctly under pressure. One of them had bent so far from the middle the arrow would have hit the ground at full draw no more than four feet from her toes. But this attempt was much better. It wasn’t perfect—it wouldn’t ever be—but it was good enough to serve today’s purpose, and that was saying something for a war-bow.

  And yes, it was technically a war-bow, as it was being used to fight another person. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as a true war-bow would have been, as she couldn’t draw a hundred and some pounds just yet, but it was good enough for her purposes and strength.

  Mark and Harald, by contrast, had spent their injured evening sharpening their swords and repairing the dent in the shield. It hadn’t taken them too long, as Harald enlisted Mark to just pound the warped shield back into place with his bare first. That was funny to watch, let me tell you. It also reminded me that Mark was a little stronger than I was, if not by much. He was shaping up to be a swordsman, and I was some kind of tank, though I didn’t know how I would do that without a shield. And why was I gaining health in the first place if I was going to use a shield. That was a strength and defense based item, not a health-based one.

  Curious and potentially hazardous for my health.

  Setting that problem aside for the moment—that was for a later me when I finally received a class—I finished with my task and sat down to wait for the others. I watched them going about their work. Mark and Harald were bickering about which side of the tent should go on the outside of the bundle, even though it didn’t matter in the least because it was just going in their inventory. Angel was grumbling as she struggled to string her bow with improper form. I let her continue just for the laughs. Eventually she got it, though, and when she saw me watching she frowned. I was going to pay for that later.

  In total, breaking camp took about twenty minutes. We didn’t have a whole lot to take down, and we also didn’t have to worry about Tetris-ing the luggage into the back of a vehicle. Inventories were the most useful things ever.

  The journey back to the village was rough. I don’t mean rough as in we had to contest with a bunch of monsters, though we did. Mark took care of most of them with relative ease and few injuries. What I mean is that I pretty much couldn’t remember in which direction I had come from. I had run wantonly in a direction at least somewhat away from where the fugitive villagers had gone, and I had tried to keep to that direction. But with the woods being the way they were, all shadowed and disorienting, I could have gotten lost.

  Still, I remembered which direction we had fought the An Dreores in. (In an aside, I really hoped my party members had remembered to loot the corpse. That thing had had some great materials for weapons-crafting.) And I remembered from which direction I had come when I stumbled upon it as well, so I had a general sense of where the village was. It was still going to be hard to find, though. The smoke from the fires was a couple days old by now.

  We wandered in that direction for three or so hours, as Angel later informed me, but eventually we found the village. It wasn’t exactly standing, per-se, but it was in better shape than I had thought.

  That is to say, the wall was still at least partially leaning over instead of being squashed flat, and a few houses only had massive holes blown in them instead of being completely crushed to rubble and spare planks.

  The big problem was, however, the woman standing in the middle of it all, holding up her hands and glowing with a pale light just faintly visible in the afternoon sun. It was weak. Far too weak, even for the middle of the day. And that made me incredibly suspicious. What was she up to that would deplete her magic so much? I could barely even see the air being warped by mana-overload anymore. But I could feel that overpowering presence just as strongly—if not more.

  That concerned me. Deeply.