45 Chapter Forty-Five – Cause I’m a Wanderer, yes, I’m a Wanderer… (1/2)

'Fantasy Magic Forest Dangerous. Enter at Own Risk.'

I wanted to put up a couple dozen of those signs as I made my way through the overgrown magical woodlands. Opting for the smart thing, I generally tried to stay close to the river, and if I had to, I could just climb on board Forge and slowly follow it downstream.

But while that might have been easy and somewhat serene, it would not have been nearly as much fun.

There was way too much large game hereabouts, especially on the carnivorous side. I mean, there was plenty of small game, too, but not nearly enough to satisfy the dietary demands of so many large predators. I could only make the assumption that magic was satisfying some of their energy demands to cut down their food requirements, or they must basically alternate between hunting and no-energy hibernation to absolutely minimize food requirements.

Or maybe the vegetation was simply that nutritious, given how verdant it was. The health and vigor of the greenery was impressive by all standards, which, magic world and all, I should have been expected.

I was observing everything, from the amount of insect life to the somewhat unreal numbers of flowering plants around, adding a remarkable amount of color to this place.

Result of a fey presence, or the reason for it? I did see the smallest kinds of faeries fluttering about with the butterflies and bees, indistinguishable unless you knew what you were looking at. Sunlight seemed to glow and glitters on the pollen and dust in the air, spreading light where it normally wouldn't be.

Of course, where there was an inordinate amount of light, so there would be darker areas, where the forest was quiet, mushrooms increased, you could sniff blood in the air, shadows grew longer and the light drew in, plants drooped, and the wind quieted down, unless it rippled the branches with eerie synchronicity.

Those were the areas I wandered into, the pockets of shadows operating between the pools of sunlight. Generally speaking, I ended up killing everything I found in those places, with extreme prejudice.

Sometimes there was loot, sometimes there was not, and if so, it was usually scattered among the remains of the dead.

Being the prudent gamer conditioned by eight years of Nightmare and reinforced by scavenging the heck out of the Hag Swamp, along with having a Sword who could quick gather up everything no matter how scattered it was helped immensely.

The things in these dark and bloody places were naturally the more dangerous and unnatural creatures of the forest. Packs of spiders led by a queen as big as a small house, big web tunnels in trees the size of redwoods. A scorpion of equal size in a dark cave, all black carapace and snippy-snippy with them pincers. Between the two, I started to expand my poison collection.

There was a hundred-foot constrictor in the river, and then a viper of equal size deeper in the forest. A wyvern the size of a real dragon in a cliff-nest. Manticores with a nest the size of a city block spread across several of these unreal-sized trees. There was a mutated leopard with spikes all over him he could shoot off, and then a bear with plate armor supplementing his hide, the size of a small elephant… and breathing rotting gas.

Indeed, there were quite a few creatures like that, going through abrupt mutations and size increases, and not just the normal 'nature-defender' Dire mutation, that made them big and strong and aggressive. When a hydra's heads aren't matching up, all with different looks and patterns to them, that shows an aggressive outside force at work.

Or forces. Shadow-imbued spiders, demon-tainted bears, primal-tainted snakes… different forces were acting on the environment and concentrating their power on apex predators.

Well, the berserk bloodstags were an exception to the predator bit, but they were still omnivores…

The lizard-centipede was new and interesting, that many clawed legs could definitely be a problem if I let it entrap me. Then there was the whole stand of Bone Willows, but not much they could do to me if I just stood back and hacked them down with Banestars from a safe distance, which is exactly what I did. The animated remains of their meals certainly weren't enough to dissuade me, and I sent the whole clearing down to vivus.

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And that's how my days went, traveling back and forth between little islands of positive light, to these infections of intruding powers that had sprouted here, there, and everywhere. I reflected that this was normally the kind of stuff that Rangers, Wardens, and Druids would be trying to do something about, and the Fey should normally be reacting to, but there seemed to be no sign of any organized influence out here.

It might be that I was in a zone between influences, where all these creatures had fled to avoid being killed, or were the last of their kind after being killed off elsewhere.

Or, it could be the reverse, they had moved in here and were expanding, and had beaten back the influences that had once claimed this area.

Mmmm. That Sidhe-whatever Elven kingdom, for example. Given the passive nature of most elves, as long as monsters didn't step over the lines, they'd just let them be, until they grew into an impossible problem and forced the elves to react.

Of course, I could be all wrong. Warlike, aggressive, and expansionist elves were certainly a possibility. It all depended on the society and if they could keep their numbers up. I knew jack-all about this world and its powers, other then a hamadryad queen somewhere sent out an erlking to claim a valley Hags had held onto for some time… after someone else had killed them. Brave and intrepid, them Fey.

Said something about the wuss nature of Fey. Good on Stats and magic, but not on intrinsics. They were brutal, cunning, devious, and casually cruel… but they were much better lovers and Casters then fighters, on the meta side of things. Even their resistance to aught but cold-forged iron was done better by demons.

Of course, at lower levels, higher Stats made up for their lacking in combat. However, as things rose further and further, Fey combat ability fell further and further behind. An Erlking couldn't possibly keep up without his Favored Enemy bonus, and if you knew enough to get rid of it, he was meat on the plate… and less then awesome against anything other then Humans, or whatever his per civilized race hatred was.

Heh, with the Girdle, I was stronger then he was, even after he buffed himself…

I was making some minor toys for myself as I considered the bones I'd found.

The elves here seemed to the shorter versions, a bit over five feet tall. It would make next to no difference on their combat prowess. I'd come across the shredded gear and scattered bones of several of them, and the rather well-preserved remains of several in the spider lair.

The difference here was in how bad racial conflicts were in this magical world. Plenty of room to go from decent to basically war footing. Even uncaring neutrality could be a thing.

My face having this curse across it certainly wasn't going to earn any goodwill. I sighed as I realized I'd have to wear a half-mask or something until it was gone. It had receded from my neck and shoulder as my Null increased, and covered about half of the left side of my face, more then enough to look utterly horrible. It didn't bother the Fey, who lived with extremes of beauty routinely, but it would freak normal people out, who would happily leap to the conclusion it was infectious and run me off in their idiocy.

Not hard to do, and I could hold it in place via my Vajra. But wearing an accoutrement that wasn't magical in some way wasn't my style, of course. By preference, even my underwear would be magical, no reason for it not to be.

I could use my Mask Tat for now, I supposed.

I'd had plenty of downtime available to work on my Tats. The main components of them was the inks, and the Hags had given me a bunch of stuff to work with. It was painful, but pain was an old friend by now, and if every Chakra point I opened to put these things on hurt worse each time… welp, I got to know the limits of my pain tolerance rather intimately.