Yeah, using flames was a bad idea.
Who would've guessed that becoming the only light source in a forest built on fog, shadows, and ambush predators would be the magical equivalent of ringing a dinner bell for every meat-hungry monstrosity within a kilometer?
Not Deacon.
Which is why he was currently sprinting like his life depended on it, because it did, across the tangled boughs of the cursed forest, with a fist-sized ball of flame still flickering atop his head.
Behind him, a horde.
At least forty creatures by his last count. Maybe more, but he didn't want to look back and seen how truly fucked he was.
Their snarls and shrieks, a chorus of distorted hunger and rage, licked at his ears. Clawed limbs, long tongues, vines, and much more all licked at the back of his heels.
Deacon vaulted over a thick knot of roots, landed on a slanted branch, and immediately pivoted as a massive centipedal-shaped beast lunged from the fog to his left, teeth like colored piano keys snapping inches from his arm.
He slashed across its face in passing with his short sword. The Mycelial Grasp flared, spores hissing through the air as his blade tore through its surprisingly soft tissue and into bone.
*[Jumping Driller Lv 5] has been slain – XP has been given.*
There was no time to slow down.
He dropped, tucked, and rolled across a moss-slick trunk, emerging in a dead sprint. A creature leapt toward him from above, bat-winged, with translucent skin and no eyes. He ducked low and spun, short sword cleaving it in half with a wet shunk as its bisected halves splattered against a tree.
Still running.
Every so often, one of the faster beasts or monsters tried its luck, lunging for his back or side. But Deacon would spin midair, drag a blade across their throat or eyes, then keep moving while ignoring every System Notification ding he received.
Eastward, he felt something pull at him.
It was pulsing again, that deep vibration in the stone and roots. Guiding him to a certain direction.
The terrain around him began to change, subtly at first.
Were there always sigils carved into the sides of the trees? Deacon wondered to himself, as he leaped from a much larger gap between the trees. Never really noticed till now.
He cleared a gap while flipping midair in order to avoid a projectile that would have taken off his leg and landed hard onto a narrow stretch of blackened stone that wound like a natural bridge through the sea of trees.
Moss covered it, but as he landed harshly atop it, the beautifully natural sheen of moss covering it was torn apart, with chunks of moss now flying into the air.
A roar ripped through the fog behind him, and out charged a massive beast—horned, plated, and stomping smaller critters flat as it barreled his way. It was bigger, meaner, and oozing bloodlust like nothing else he'd run into in this forest.
[Chimehorn Ravager – Elite Lv 7]
His eyes darted to it, sizing up its path, bulk, and fury in a split second, in conclusion: he was fucked.
He clenched his jaw, poured the last dregs of mana into his boots, and shot forward, moving faster than he had all night.
What did I do? He hollered in his head, his heart rapidly beating in his chest. Fuck me!
The bridge curved upward, then broke into a slope. He ran up the incline, his legs burning, monsters screaming behind him. Another creature lunged. He slashed. Another flanked him. He Spartan kicked it away from him and into the fog below.
The blackened bridge of stone twisted through the fog like a spine of some massive beast and in hindsight suspiciously deliberate in how it bent perfectly between the massive trees.
And still, the Ravager thundered behind him, its ragged bellows scraping through the trees like a blade dragged across stone. Each step it took cracked the mossy surface, sending chunks of ruined stone arcing off the edge into the mist below.
Deacon ducked beneath a swooping beast with talons like hooked glass. Its claws scraped his shoulder pauldron, tearing free a chunk of leather – nothing the armor's enchantment couldn't repair.
He twisted his torso, spun, and flung one of his daggers backward. The blade struck true, sinking into a smaller creature that had begun to climb the Ravager's back, hoping to use the massive beast as its own horse.
It died from a dagger to the head, and the Ravager didn't slow.
Then–
The hell? Deacon thought as a flicker of soft light glinted high above in the corner of his vision, visible through the thick fog that encompassed the cursed forest.
The flicker resolved into something solid, a lantern.
Deacon narrowed his eyes mid-sprint, just barely making out the warm orange glow cutting softly through the haze. It didn't pulse like the strange magical glow from earlier, it flickered gently, like fire. Was it an oil lantern?
It hung from a crooked beam, swinging slightly, and cast just enough light to reveal the outline of… a hut?
"...You've got to be kidding me," Deacon muttered, breath still ragged, his pace unbroken. The hut itself looked lopsided, old, and with a roof that was half-consumed by moss, was perched atop a massive tree.
A hut. A literal shack built into the upper canopy, sitting alone like a forgotten watchtower.
Why the hell is there a treehouse here?
The Ravager bellowed again below, its hooves pounding across the dying remnants of the stone bridge, still chasing him, and picking up its speed.
"Fuck it," he said aloud as he veered sharply, almost skidding off the edge of the tree, and launched himself sideways, toward the nearest tree, placing his right short sword's hilt between his teeth to hold.
His boots hit bark, slipping for half a heartbeat before he pushed upward, grabbing a hanging branch with one hand and swinging himself higher. The bark was slick with moss, but with his enhanced strength, he was able to dig his fingers into the tree bark and pull himself upwards before taking his short sword back into his right hand.
Behind him, the Ravager's eyes trailed after Deacon's form, but as it tried to adjust its charge, it found itself unable to. The massive beast roared in frustration as it barreled past the point where Deacon had turned, utterly unable to slow its momentum towards the massive trees in its path. A sickening crash echoed through the forest as it slammed into a fallen trunk, trees toppling in its wake.
Deacon didn't look down after seeing it barrel into a couple of trees and tip over, once he had, he continued to scale the massive tree.
He launched to the next branch, boots crunching against rotted bark, then again. Every jump closer to the hut revealed more of it: worn wooden panels, dangling roots twisted into rope-ladders, a half-broken window shutter swinging like a loose jawbone.
The lantern hanging beside the door was rusted iron, flame alive and flickering despite the thick fog curling around it. A scent of burnt cinnamon reached him, something warm, weirdly out of place.
He vaulted onto the thick platform supporting the hut, spun, and crouched low. No sound from below. Just the fog shifting and the dull echoes of snarling and growling below.
He was above them. Out of reach, for now – he would eventually have to go back down to complete the quest.
The door creaked as he pushed it open with his right foot while both hands were gripping the hilts of his short swords.
Inside, the hut was… not what he expected.
Then again, he wasn't even sure what he had expected, it was a hut perched atop a giant tree, after all.
It was small, definitely, and crooked, but not abandoned. Dust covered everything, but only lightly. A single chair sat beside a circular table marked with carvings in a language he didn't recognize. Shelves were filled with yellowed scrolls, cracked jars of something that smelled like pickled rot, and bones – some belonging to animals and some very much humanoid in shape.
On the far wall hung a tapestry, torn at the corner, woven with an image of three women standing beneath a black sun with their throats strangled.
The Fates, maybe? He thought, but hadn't lowered his guard.
What the hell is this place? He mused to himself.
Deacon stepped deeper into the hut, with his grip on his blades tightening with every groan his boots made while walking atop the floorboards.
As he scoured the hut, he came to the conclusion that it was monster, beast, and humanoid free - devoid of any life other than his own and the small plants within their bright-colored flower pots.
He slid his right short sword back into its sheath and kept the other low as he moved toward the bookshelf. It stood opposite the hut's front door, partially hidden behind the massive tree trunk rising through the center of the room.
The thing was tall, carved up with fancy swirls that screamed Noble Household - honestly, it gave him a weird vibe, like whoever lived here swiped it from some fancy estate and dumped it in here. The wooden shelves looked ready to snap under the load of all those old journals and tomes stacked on 'em, hundreds of 'em, sagging the wood… Wait, some of the books are part of the shelves, Deacon realized as he brushed a shelf and saw it slotted into the wood of the shelf and glued into it with some sort of sap.
He stretched out a hand and tugged free a journal with a dark blue cover, its spine all cracked and worn, the title on top faded to nothing. After puffing the dust off, he cracked it open, and the writing inside? Total gibberish. Symbols, runes, some swirling script that didn't match a lick of anything he'd ever studied or memorized—English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Centauri, Dwarven, Elven, Gaelic… nada, not a single thing he recognized.
He frowned and flipped through a few more pages, trying to find at least a word that looked familiar...
Then, the letters began to shift.
Not physically. Not ink-on-page shifting. But somewhere in his mind, the patterns bent and reformed, smoothing into words he could read. His eyes widened slightly as a line that had looked like spider legs now read plainly: "Never trust the gods."
Deacon blinked.
He looked at the journal, then at his hands, then back again. "...Huh."
It took him a second to process it. Then, as he mentally processed what was going on, he nodded to himself, slow and satisfied.
"Of course," he muttered. "It all makes sense now. I'm a genius, my intimate knowledge of languages, both living and dead ones, lets me magically decipher a language I've never seen before in seconds… I always knew it."
Unbeknownst to him, the System had quietly kicked in the Tower's automatic translation protocol, standard for any registered Floor Quest, especially those involving historical documents. Deacon had learned about this in the academy in the third lecture of his Elementary Understanding of Floors class, but had forgotten about it.
Deacon flipped to the next page.
The handwriting remained tight, precise, but there was a tremble now. The kind that leaked in between the letters, like someone had written through gritted teeth.
"I gave him everything. My loyalty. My service. My love.
And when I questioned a quest for the first time, he called it betrayal.
The god who raised me from the dust threatened to return me to it."
Deacon snorted.
"Gods…" he muttered, shaking his head. "…Right. So, I'm reading the diary of some kook. That's always good to see."
He leaned back slightly in the creaky wooden wall with one leg pushed against it, and his left hand tapping his short sword against the wooden wall.
"Gods aren't real, they're just a bunch of fantasy crap from Earth created by people who got glimpses of the supernatural when they weren't hidden, stories people made up to explain thunder and plagues and why the sun keeps coming back every morning. Hell, the Olympian gods supposedly banged their siblings, and people still worshipped them."
He thumbed to the next couple of pages, still grumbling under his breath.
But the line that greeted him silenced him again.
"It was for the best that Hannah and I went our separate ways. She was of nobility, and I, the daughter of a witch. We had our fun as children, but as we grew older, expectations set in, and we drifted away. She had her political and social obligations, not to mention the management of her family's estate. And I had my magics."
Deacon didn't laugh this time. He just stared at the ink.
Something pulled at him. A memory.
"Ah," he whispered, fingers tightening slightly on the edge of the page. "Yeah…"
His gaze drifted out the warped window, where the fog was still thick but distant now.
"…I get that," he finished.
He let the journal rest in his lap for a moment as an old memory stirred behind his eyes.
Boots crunching on gravel. A bonfire by the river during an academy outing. A shouted argument that turned into a broken friendship.
"Yeah," Deacon muttered as he raised the book back up to his face.