Chapter 256: Moving Along

Through the next week of the party trying to complete their evolutionary quests, after another week of fighting and killing high Steel and low Mithril tier monsters, Astrid hadn’t been sure where exactly they ended up relative to where they started. To get to where they fought against the chimeras, Gabriel had led them for several days through the Dungeon proper. Then, after staying there for a week, he’d led them on a meandering path from one location to the next, each one providing different challenges until they all were at the peak of level 90 and, in Astrid, Felix, and Muti’s case, ready to evolve.

The anticipation of just waiting here had Astrid a little twitchy, but there was nothing she could do for now. They’d all come to the same conclusion and weren’t going to risk pissing off the entire nation that had sheltered them for what was nearly two years at this point. Without being able to make progress and needing to recover, they, walking together, simply followed Gabriel’s guidance through the Dungeon proper. For now, they were currently in a desert, approaching an oasis surrounded by strange trees that towered high but only had leaves on the top. Gabriel called them palms, so that was what everyone else referred to them as.

“Mana eaters suck,” Astrid said, looking at the rest for agreement or confirmation. “It was so hard to activate any Skills near them.”

“The reason for the name. How well do you think that your Berserker Class option would work against them?” Skandr asked, his attention split between the conversation with the party and some flash of inspiration he was taking notes on at the same time.

“I think I’d have an easier time dealing with them, but the venom would still be painful, if nothing else,” Astrid thought out loud. “After all, it’s the influence of mana that makes people stronger, even if their Skills are largely focused on consuming health or stamina. It’s mana that fuels the levels we gain, so without it, it’ll still be debilitating.”

“That is correct,” Muti jumped in. “They are creatures whose venom disrupts the natural formation and flow of mana. Regardless of if someone actively or passively uses mana, that disruption is impactful. However, one whose Skills do not use mana will have much lower difficulty in using their Skills.”

Astrid pursed her lips and nodded her thanks to the Barbarian as she looked at her party. “I only need maybe twenty or thirty minutes with the right monsters to do everything that I need to be able to evolve. How about the rest of you?”

Felix and Muti were nearly as close as Astrid herself, and the party didn’t need to have a conversation about what each of them thought. The only two who weren’t very nearly finished were the focus of the others.

“I don’t know how much longer it’ll take me to succeed in this quest,” Benedict said, shrugging helplessly. “So much of what it requires is to work with people and actually be able to use my Skills, so this fight against the mana eaters wasn’t worth anything. If I was to guess, I’d say that I might take until we are actually meeting up with the people at the army instead of being able to get it done here. However, I think, with the volume of people there, I shouldn’t struggle too much in completing the parts that are causing trouble.”

Skandr flipped through one of his spellbooks before he met Astrid’s eyes.

“A lot of what I need to learn is research-based, and the Dungeon proper is a great place to conduct that research. However, I think that getting to the surface and examining more natural weather isn’t a bad idea either, because I need to better understand natural weather. The more I look into it, the more I realize I don’t know.”

“So that’s a yes to leaving. Then, we go to the surface, get our new equipment from Olafson, talk to the Verdant Walkers, and be on our way to the Bulwark?” Astrid said, flicking her fingers up as she went down each point of the plan.

“Sounds about right, but don’t forget that getting a break in Michel’s inn is a high priority,” Benedict insisted.

“Honestly, I want it nearly as much as you do,” Astrid laughed. “I feel pretty gross, since I haven’t gotten a real bath for so long. There’s only so much cleaning you get from getting doused in water from our ever-generous Wizard..”

“Then it’s just as well that I was about to take you all out of the Dungeon, anyways,” Gabriel said. He gestured to a fluctuating anomaly next to a large tree and motioned for everyone to walk through it.

“This isn’t the same way that we came in,” Muti said, stepping forward and squinting at the shorter man.

“Nope,” came the response.

“We’ve been basically blindly following him for the past two weeks through the Dungeon Proper,” Astrid stepped forward as Muti geared up to start to argue with him. “If you wanted to take us somewhere that would kill us, he could’ve done that at any time.”

Instead of even trying to argue further, Astrid just stepped forward and into the exit from the Dungeon. The faint tugging in her stomach returned, just like every time she went through the transition into or out of the Dungeon proper. Her vision spun for a split second before she stood on, to her surprise, a lightly wooded beach. She didn’t stand on sand, but instead on fine soil. She’d always been told that beaches had sand, but apparently not always. A series of trees sprouted all over, going almost all the way to the shore. Only at the moment that she smelled salt did Astrid realize something.

For the first time in her life, Astrid saw the ocean.

She’d seen ponds and lakes and rivers before. Then there was the closest thing to the ocean that she’d ever seen, which was the Dungeon branch where the antlions and naiads had lived. There, paths of sand wound around in labyrinthine mazes, and she thought she understood what looking at the ocean would be like.

She was wrong.

Spreading in front of her, the horizon was nothing but waves, sky, and a few clouds. As she watched, the sun slipped just behind a cloud, sending rays of light bursting in visible lines through the air. It was nearly evening, the sky not quite turning orange, but only an hour or so away from lighting afire. Behind her, the rest of the Wanderers came out, and, evidently, they all were captivated by the same thing that she just saw.

They stood there, quietly watching for a short while. The sound of the waves crashing on the beach was soothing, and a part of Astrid wanted to go into the ocean, even though she knew there were thousands of monsters there that were never culled. Oceans were probably the most dangerous place on the face of the planet, and Astrid wasn’t going to tempt fate by going for a swim. Beautiful, but a whole lot of unknown danger underneath.

Gabriel also exited the Dungeon proper, allowing the Wanderers a moment of quiet contemplation. Eventually, Astrid turned to the older man and asked, “Did you bring us here on purpose?”

“Not exactly, but once I realized it was a possibility, yeah.” Gabriel scratched at the patchy scruff on his jaw as he answered. “Two weeks in the Dungeon is a big accomplishment. It’s hard, and though you probably didn’t quite notice it, you were all getting pretty close to getting some serious mana poisoning.”

Astrid squinted at him before mentally taking note of her physical state. She wasn’t hurting anywhere, was she?

As soon as she started to think about it, she realized that the stress and headache that had quietly twisted at the back of her head weren’t just nervousness about her plan moving forward. Now that she was outside of the Dungeon, though the ambient mana concentration wasn’t nearly as intense as she would have liked, she was absolutely feeling better by the minute. So yes, she was being poisoned, though it’d largely already been dealt with.

“We experienced mana toxicity before,” Skandr said, his face pensive. “When we were pushing into the Steel tier Dungeon branch as Irons, we could only make it for a handful of hours. Now, we were down there for weeks? How is it that it’s only minor poisoning that we are experiencing?”

“Because I have decades of experience and knew how to make sure that you weren’t staying anywhere where the ambient mana density was too much for long,” Gabriel answered. “Any time we were in a part of the Dungeon proper where the mana was thick enough to be dangerous to you, we never stuck around for more than an hour or two. Because you were all fighting hard during that time, you probably weren’t paying as much attention to the earliest symptoms of mana poisoning, and then I took you along to the next place where your bodies could naturally repair themselves.”

The Wanderers all made noises or movements of recognition, and then it was time to go.

Astrid turned to Gabriel and asked, “Is it better to go to the Verdant Walkers right now or to Neverwood? Whatever your answer is of the two, you’ll need to guide us to make sure we are not going where we’re not supposed to be.”

“There’s a Grove nearby whose Warden I know,” Gabriel said, turning and looking generally inland.

As he did so, Astrid followed his gaze and saw the massive mountain range that made the center of the Verdant Sanctuary. The scattered plant growth nearby was dwarfed by the dense life that she could see further inland.

With her attention turned away from the ocean, the way all of the mountain ranges seemed to grow towards the center caught her attention. From inside the forest and coming from the west, she had no way to see the mountain range as a whole. More than that, her Acumen was far too low to have the ability to see the hundreds of kilometers that she could now. With how much she had changed since she first entered the Verdant Sanctuary as a level 20, it was no surprise that she could do things now that she was never capable of before.

Even now, fog obscured everything more than maybe a half dozen kilometers tall, but she could see a shape that she never had before. All of the mountains grew taller as they gathered towards a single point. Almost like a—

“Looks like you’re starting to see something that your hosts would have preferred you didn’t,” Gabriel interrupted the trail her thoughts were going down. “Don’t ask me to confirm or deny what you’re thinking now. Honestly, don’t talk about it with anyone, because it’s something that the Verdant Walkers are extremely sensitive about. This is not a beach outsiders are frequently allowed onto, though it isn’t prohibited. Now, follow me and I’ll get you to speak with the Warden.”

He didn’t say anything else, and Astrid figured she should probably follow his lead as he made his way into the forest. Even though the rest of her party looked at her in curiosity, Astrid just shook her head. Instead, she briefly allowed herself to think about just how tall a tree whose roots were thousands of kilometers long would be. Would its trunk be dozens of kilometers across? And was it the origin of all of the Verdant Walkers?

She entertained the thought, but, just as Gabriel had warned, refused to say anything about what she had just noticed.

***

There is an access point to the Dungeon proper within a Dungeon branch near the edge of our lands. Within the reaches of that access point, you will find a place to accomplish your evolutionary quests. Once you have evolved, exit through the same access point and then leave our lands.

When the Wanderers rather firmly said that they would not be swearing themselves to loyalty to the Verdant Sanctuary, the answer to if they would be allowed to remain was given quickly. Now that Astrid was fairly certain she knew what the Verdant Walkers were protecting in the center of their country, she couldn’t say she was too surprised that they were unwilling to let people who were unbound to the protection of the country stick around.

“Since that’s what you would like us to do, that’s what we’ll do,” Astrid bowed her head to the tree person in front of her. Something about this grove seemed to communicate that this was probably the strongest individual Verdant Walker she had encountered until now. Since they were a Warden as well, that certainly meant that there were at least five Verdant Walkers in total, currently tied up with the Warden who simply called themselves “Warden.”

“Thank you for the protection and assistance that we’ve been given for so long. We are exceptionally lucky to have been permitted to stay in the Verdant Sanctuary for so long.”

If you desire to return, there will be paths available to you. You need only return to our borders and flare your mana. That will quickly gain the attention of the guardians, and they will be able to communicate with others within the country to gain you access once more.

Astrid again expressed her gratitude to the Walker, and then, as they withdrew the roots from touching her feet, she was struck with the reality that, at last, it was time to go home.

“Next stop, Neverwood.”

The rest of the Wanderers seemed to not feel the same sense of occasion that she was, and simply smiled as she turned to Gabriel to lead the way. He turned and started to lead them along, calling back to the rest that, “It’s just two hundred and fifty kilometers or so. Shouldn’t take us too long.”

With new equipment, a good night’s sleep in a soft bed, with warm food waiting in the morning, and permission to evolve on the other side of the journey, the Wanderers threw themselves into the journey ahead. They raced through paths, leaping over just about any barrier that got in their way.

In the course of just about two hours of moving at a quick pace, they made it to their destination, which was, according to the experienced old man, two hundred and fifty kilometers away. Averaging something over a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour for two hours? It was unbelievable, but the only reason they went that “slow” was because Skandr couldn’t maintain a speed greater than that. As it was, his Alacrity was about 500 without his equipment, which gave him another 100, and then, finally, with Benedict boosting them all and Skandr drawing on one of his spells to push himself even faster, they moved at a ridiculously quick clip.

Just as the sun was truly setting, Gabriel led them up an unfamiliar trail to a familiar destination. They all happily hustled along, and, somehow, probably because of Gabriel’s presence, they didn’t draw Pollock’s attention. The pissy Barbarian didn’t show his face, and Astrid couldn’t say that she lamented his absence. Instead, she and the rest of her party made their way to Michel’s inn, where an unexpected group was waiting for them.

“Hail, the returning heroes!” Vera greeted them, only the faintest hint of sarcasm coloring her voice. Largely, she seemed to be genuinely excited to see their return, and the others did as well. Olafson, with his most precious spatial pouch obvious on his hip, and Michel, with a full spread laid out across two tables that had been pushed together, stood in the center of the room.

One of the golems brought out an entire suckling pig, the skin perfectly crispy across it, as Liora and Vera smiled. The lindwurm stepped forward and embraced each of the Wanderers in turn, finishing with Astrid.

“I’ll eat quickly, then speak with you in the morning,” she said, her thin, firm frame squeezing tight. “I’m still beholden to my Class’s demands, and I’d hate to ruin the end because I was unable to control my transformation.”

“Since we are on a deadline, then,” Michel said, “Everyone, eat! Once you’re done, we all have some gifts for you, and then, you can rest. We’re all looking forward to hearing your stories, so please, dig in, enjoy the food!”

Astrid smiled and stepped forward, and, even though she wanted a bath, couldn’t think of anything better than just enjoying some time with friends for now.