Chapter 9
The Lass stood at a crossroads, exactly where the map indicated. The shape truly left no space for misinterpretation.
A massive tangle of roots of the tree rose from the ground in the shape of a woman bent over, the roots perfectly forming the shape of the ass and thighs, continuing into an arched back, and merging into the tree in the shape of the upper torso of the woman with her arms raised high, turning into branches.
They both changed direction so they could stare from a better angle.
“No way that grew naturally,” Luna remarked.
Alsen nodded. “Whoever shaped this had a great sense of detail.”
“And angles.” Luna walked closer. She struck the exact pose next to the Lass, crossing her legs, sticking out her ass, arching her back, raising her arms. “It’s right about at the limit of how much I can bend like this.”
Alsen stared at Luna and the Lass. Okay, something was wrong. Because the Lass stirred something in him, in spite of being a tree, which was a feat Luna never managed to achieve.
No way that happened naturally.
And it wasn’t that he had a thing for trees or anything. He did find the waitress in the inn hot, and his mind imagined a woman in the Lass’s place.
Luna broke the pose, examining the Lass closer. “There’s a hole exactly where you’d expect.” She poked into the hole with her finger. “There are ants inside. I wonder how many men found that out the painful way.” She giggled.
Yes, thinking back, Luna had a pretty face, an extremely well-shaped body, sculpted by constantly moving around, but neither overly muscular nor malnourished, which he could confirm as she stripped to her undergarments in front of him earlier today.
But none of that did anything for him.
No attraction. No awkwardness. No excited imagining of bending her over.
Nothing.
This absence of response was unnatural, at best.
And it wasn’t just him. The bandits on the road also hadn’t shown any interest in Luna. They’d dismissed her as not worth the effort to sell her as a slave. That implied a lack of attractiveness.
He pushed out a magical scan. Nothing on Luna herself. He tweaked it quite a bit, detecting a faint aura of magic within the Lass, but still nothing directly on Luna.
It might have been a side effect of one of her items, namely the invisible bag, but that felt extremely unlikely.
He had to examine this later, possibly by finding someone who could do a magical type of scan he had yet to think of.
Especially since she had already gotten her share of it, with Savnoj and his bandits. They were vocal about how unattractive she looked to them.
The waitress in Ambervale liked her, though, so Luna’s potential curse likely worked only on men.
That would have actually made sense. Some woman wanted her in the past, but Luna had a boyfriend or something like that, and so she wasn’t into her.
So, that woman cursed Luna to only be attracted to women, elegantly separating her from her boyfriend and ensuring no man would get in her way.
“So,” Luna said, done examining the Lass. “Aren’t you going to fertilize the Lass with the supremely divine lance? I’ll give you some privacy if you need it.”
He slapped his face with his palm. “It’s a tree. The sun’s setting, so let’s set camp for the night.”
“Sure. Let’s camp right here.” Luna pointed at a side of the clearing, which had the perfect view of the Lass.
Alsen saw nothing over which to argue. They dropped their things there, and prepared their sleeping bags.
“You know,” he said before she left to hunt. “I think you might be cursed.”
She stopped. “What do you mean?”
“Have you ever felt like you were unnaturally unattractive to men?”
“Yeah. Like all the damn time. That’s literally the story of my life.”
“Did you ever get checked for curses?”
“Like a hundred times, yeah. Some of them were really expensive, too. Nobody ever found anything.”
He shrugged. “Never mind then.”
Luna left to hunt.
Alsen used that opportunity to take out his spellbook. He had a new spell to write down. The indirect missile, albeit improvised, worked great.
The process of writing down the spell indeed forced him to optimize it. He thought it through, remembered how he cast the spell, in different variations, and pondered how to do it more efficiently.
When he arranged the thoughts, he started writing the spell down.
Halfway through, he smelled the fresh scent of blood. Luna loomed over his shoulder. “Indirect missile? Really?”
He sighed. She crept up on him far too easily.
“That’s the most boring, unimaginative spell name I’ve ever heard.” Luna shook a dead doe in her hand, as if it nodded to agree with her. “You cannot be serious with this.”
“I am. It’s an accurate name that’s easy to remember and work with.”
Luna burst out laughing. “But it’s boring! You could call it something cool, like Serpent Fangs or Dancing Death or Seeking Vengeance or Pellet Storm or really anything with some flair.”
“The purpose of the spell’s name is for me to remember how to cast it by its name. If I give my spells overexaggerated, nondescriptive names, then I’ll inevitably get lost in them.”
She rolled her eyes. “At least make a fire, so I can cook.”
Alsen looked around. Dried roots and fallen branches lay all over one side of the clearing, almost as if someone had left them there earlier. He flicked his wrist, and the top of the pile caught ablaze.
“You couldn’t have put any less effort into that.” She headed to the fire, dragging the dead doe on the ground.
He continued writing the spell, a smirk playing on his lips. She couldn’t think of a way to turn the spell name into a joke. Boring, accountant-style spell names were the way to go.
Luna skinned the doe, cut off a few straight branches from a nearby young tree, and stuck the doe on them. She put it up above the fire, carefully calibrating the construction, as if this had any chance to not end up being burned. “So, what did you spend your system points on?”
Nothing, actually. He hadn’t given that any thought. But now at level five, he could take the level five node, with the pathing to it. “I haven’t put the points in yet. What are you going for?”
“Right, so I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
I’m going for the evasion build. That has a few no-brainers, like the evasion node at rogue, then at ranger, and the blade dancer.
But then it gets complicated, because I either spread the points around, pushing into three to five classes and cherry-pick the evasion nodes, or I commit to one of them to get to the capstone skill. ”
Admittedly, he avoided that problem by fully committing to archmage. She’d put a lot of thought into this. More than him, to his embarrassment. “What capstones do you find interesting?”
“There’s the obvious one, prescient vision.
From what I understand, it’s super-prediction for what other people are attacking you with.
That sounds insanely strong for an evasion build.
Then there’s the null step, the ability to break and shift the direction of one’s movement, canceling all inertia.
And finally, the absolute evasion node, which would give me a chance to avoid anything with a thirty percent chance, no matter the circumstances. ”
“A thirty percent chance? That sounds way too low to devote your build to.”
She snorted. “Not when you are lucky. I am lucky, so if I give fate a good excuse to help me, it will.”
“That’s not how it works. Luck always averages out.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Her voice dropped lower, turning much more serious. “Life isn’t long enough for things to average out. There are lucky people, and there are unlucky people. I am lucky. You are lucky too. That both makes us a great couple, and anything that has a chance to work is great for us.”
He frowned. “What makes you think I’m lucky?”
“That you met me.” She grinned. “Getting me as the extra soul to come with you into this world was an extreme blessing of fate. It was lucky.”
Alsen couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. It somehow didn’t sound like a joke.
“Plus, there’s smaller stuff like in the abandoned temple. You just so happened to blast the stone priestess in the way that we found the room beyond, which had the prophecy that’s now the centerpiece of your quest. That was pure luck.”
Right… that happened. Her logic had no flaws. If he came into the world alone and ended up alone, he would have had a much worse time due to lacking any survival skills. He might well have never made it to civilization by himself due to starvation or food poisoning.
He couldn’t dismiss it.
The thought robbed Alsen of the desire to chat. They ate the doe, horribly burned, as ever, and went to sleep. This time, Luna lay nearby, huddled in her new sleeping bag.
To Alsen’s relief, she didn’t cry tonight.
Finally.
He slept well, having a naughty dream of the Lass coming alive and visiting him during the night. No sign of Luna in the dream either.
The next day, they continued north toward the Oak Library. The path wound through more abandoned farmland, past empty villages, and alongside streams that looked like they hadn’t seen fishing in years.
Whatever the Dragon Emperor’s campaign had been, it had clearly devastated this region.
They made camp that night in the ruins of what might have once been an inn. The roof had collapsed, but enough walls remained to block the wind. Luna hunted a rabbit while Alsen made fire with magic, his reserves having recovered enough for simple spells.
The next three days passed similarly. Walk, examine something interesting, look for something else interesting, make camp, sleep, repeat.
Luna hunted their food. Alsen perfected his two written spells and breathing exercises.
They had checked six different strange tree formations, two caves that weren’t supposed to be there, a strange pond, an abandoned tree hut, a lair of something big that burrowed itself into the ground, and a fascinating flock of wild birds.
Loot and monsters avoided them, at least for now.
They talked occasionally, mostly about nothing important.
He learned practically nothing about Luna. She didn’t cry herself to sleep anymore, just slept huddled in her new magical sleeping bag. So, that was progress, at least.
On the eve of the fourth day of the one-day trip to Oak Library, they finally crested a hill and saw the Oak Library in the distance.
Except that it was burning.