Towering trouble a litrp.., p.4
Towering Trouble: A LitRPG Isekai, page 4
That had to be her second—no, third—worst wake-up call ever.
She stared down at what was left of the centipede, which had finally stopped moving. Her stomach growled.
Oh no…
Her mouth flooded with saliva. The smell emanating from the oozing remains was confusing her brain. She wanted to throw up. And she wanted to snatch up the delicious bug-flesh and devour it.
No way am I putting that in my mouth! I’d rather starve. I’d rather—eugh!
Seemingly of their own volition, her traitorous hands grabbed the back half of the centipede and pressed it against her mouth, which bit down reflexively; sharp teeth tearing off a huge chunk of acrid, rubbery meat.
Gagging, she chewed and swallowed the putrid—yet strangely tasty—mouthful. She took another bite. And then another. By the third bite, her gag impulse had weakened, and she was beginning to think this actually wasn’t so bad. This was food. Her body needed food. It wasn’t a human body, so why should she expect her old human tastes and aversions to prevail?
Within minutes, she’d eaten both halves of the giant centipede, guts and all. That was more meat than two whole chickens. Meat and…other things. She shuddered.
As she scrambled out of the hollow, she suddenly realised that there was no pain any more. The wound in her gut had closed completely, leaving only a thin red scar, which was already fading. Trolls sure healed fast! That was good, because she might need to do a lot of walking today.
This part of the forest was quite beautiful. She hadn’t really taken it in last night, what with the terror and pain and exhaustion. Now, although still wary and sore, she could begin to appreciate her surroundings.
Around her spread a tangle of ferns, strange fungal growths and damp leaves. Far above was a thick canopy, held aloft by towering, moss-covered trees. A gentle breeze lifted the first wisps of fog from the air, and the trees came alight with dappled yellows and browns and greens.
Saskia had always loved hiking in places like this (minus the impossibly large bugs), but she hadn’t done much of it over the past two years. She’d spent most of the first year after her accident as a total invalid. And in the second year, she’d been too busy with her job, and still not exactly in the prime of health. She’d gone hiking with her old friends a couple of times, but they were still as fit as ever, while she…wasn’t. They were very patient with her, but she’d still felt like she was holding them back.
Well that wasn’t a problem any longer. Injury aside, this body was monstrously fit. She felt like she could run up mountains.
First though, she’d settle for a hill. One with a good view of the surrounding area. She needed to get her bearings and decide where to go next. Find some people who wouldn’t kill trolls on sight. Perhaps seek out other trolls. Although, judging from how they were depicted in most fantasy fiction, her own kind might be no more accommodating than the elves.
Saskia scrambled up a steep slope onto a ridgetop, then followed the ridge up to the highest point. Unfortunately, even up here, the view was blocked by layers upon layers of foliage. To see anything beyond, she’d have to climb one of these ancient trees. It’d have to be a very sturdy specimen to support her weight.
Finding a suitable candidate, she shimmied up its massive trunk, ascending high into the canopy.
It occurred to her that if she had another seizure up here, she’d have much worse problems than just being lost. On the other hand, she put her life at risk every time she hopped on a bicycle, yet that didn’t stop her from doing it.
Actually, come to think of it, this wasn’t her old, damaged body, was it? None of her old scars were present now. Either her trollish regeneration had erased them, or they were never on this body to begin with. It stood to reason that the internal injuries she’d had as a human, including her brain damage, should also be gone. And that would mean…
No more seizures.
She almost let go of the branch she was holding. If she really was free of the seizures, it’d make everything else she’d suffered worth it. Almost.
Something rustled and chittered nearby. Whatever it was—bird or bat or gigantic man-eating bug—Saskia hoped it wasn’t too enraged at her for invading its nest.
Teetering atop the highest branch that would take her considerable weight, she poked her head through the curtain of leaves and looked out across the treetops.
“What…the…?”
Her mouth dropped open. Something buzzed inside it, and she swallowed absent-mindedly.
Before her, a lush green forest swept back into jagged peaks, shrouded in fog. Nestled in a valley between the mountains was the beginnings of a serpentine lake. To her right, the forest just ended, as if disappearing off a precipice. And behind her, the landscape tilted upward into some impossibly tall…something. It didn’t look like any mountain she’d ever seen.
Back the way she’d come, which was now on her left side, great spurs of stone jutted out of the swamp at an oblique angle. She was pretty sure those things were defying the laws of gravity, such was the extent of their overhang. Their slopes were covered in trees, except for the lower reaches of the closest one, from which jutted the strange spires of the elven town she’d just fled. Somewhere up there, she knew there must be a misty glade with a gnarled tree, something pretending to be a cracked computer monitor, and a bunch of angry elves, still looking for the troll that had eluded them…
Spectacular they may be, but these strange rock formations were not what what had elicited her expression of astonishment.
In the direction of the lake, beyond the veil of mist was a dark silhouette. Too substantial to be clouds, yet seemingly too vast to be anything else. An immense column jutted up from the horizon, filling a large portion of the sky. Overhead, the column split into tendrils of darkness that reached out across the firmament.
No, not tendrils. Branches.
The horizon was all wrong. This land wasn’t spherical or flat, but elongated, like a…
This was a tree. Or what a tree might look like if viewed by a microscopic creature sitting on one of its branches. Like Yggdrasil from Norse mythology; the granddaddy of all trees.
Those distant peaks; they weren’t mountains. And those immense spikes…weren’t just rock formations. The forest, the swamp, the lake, everything around her…they were perched on a single colossal branch of an unfathomably large tree.
Book 1, Chapter 3: Pincushion
Who’d have thought a day could be so complicated?
Not the things she did throughout the day. Those were simple. Saskia walked. And then she walked some more. Occasionally she stopped to answer the call of nature, or drink from a stream, or sample the various edibles she happened across—or which happened across her. As it turned out, trolls could eat pretty much anything.
Best to avoid the tawny mushrooms from now on, though. For about an hour after swallowing one of those suckers, she’d seen tentacles. Tentacles everywhere.
What was complicated was the actual day itself. The day-night cycle, if it could be called that. Here, it was less of a cycle than a meander. When the world was actually a planet-sized tree, simple concepts like planets orbiting the sun lost all meaning. Because this wasn’t a planet. And as far as Saskia could tell, this world’s sun was a drunken donkhole, wobbling lazily through the sky, occasionally stopping to pee on the celestial mosaic.
Whenever the sun wandered behind the trunk of the world tree (as she’d begun to think of it), or a branch, it was kinda like night time. Not as dark as a true night though; more like an eclipse back on Earth. Some of these branch eclipses only lasted a few minutes. Some went on for almost an hour. Only when the sun passed underneath the continent-sized branch beneath her feet did Saskia get to experience something resembling a night on Earth.
That had happened three times since she arrived on this world. The length of those days and nights, even ignoring all the eclipses, seemed to vary a lot, but overall, they seemed a bit longer than a day on Earth. Her gut told her that about three and a half days had passed on Earth. But she was pretty sure her gut had just pushed this number out of her butt, because her sleep schedule was completely messed up.
Three and a half days would make it Saturday morning back home. Saskia’s mum would be doing yoga. Raji, Ferg and Dave would be trickling into the studio, ready to start the weekend grind. Her old climbing buddies Ivan and Reiko would be halfway up Silberhorn. Assuming everyone wasn’t out desperately searching for Saskia, or attending her funeral.
Meanwhile she’d slogged through endless stretches of dense, swampy woods, catching only occasional glimpses of the sky through gaps in the canopy, or when she climbed a hill or tree to get her bearings. So she couldn’t be precisely sure what the sun was doing up there most of the time. She just knew it wasn’t following the sane, predictable arc that the sun would follow on a sane, predictable world.
Early on, she’d decided to head in the direction of the trunk of the world tree. In that direction were snow covered peaks and a lake. On Earth, such lakes almost always had towns or cities around them. But it was taking much longer to reach these landmarks than she initially thought it would. Distances were deceptive, especially when looking lengthwise down the branch, where there was no well-defined horizon.
And the terrain was rough. Whenever she’d gone hiking or climbing on Earth, she’d been following well-marked tracks, or scaling rocky or snow-covered peaks out in the open, where she could see for miles. Here, she hadn’t found anything more than animal trails. She couldn’t see crap, and she couldn’t take five steps without getting her legs or arms stuck in mud or snagging on roots or branches. These woods were thicker than a strawberry smoothie.
Her stomach rumbled.
Dogramit! she thought. Thinking about food again!
She stopped by a river to munch on a—well, she didn’t know what it was, exactly—a cat-sized furry eight-legged thing that was absolutely not a spider. While she was doing that, something long and slithery emerged from the water to munch on her.
Saskia looked at the sinuous shape sliding across the slick stones, and let out a sigh. Grabbing the beast around its slippery neck, she watched as it thrashed about in her hand, struggling to free itself. She squeezed. Not enough to kill it. Just enough to make it think twice about making a meal out of her. Then she sighed again and hurled it back into the water.
One thing she’d learned over the past few days was that the smaller creatures of this world were suicidally ambitious. They’d come at her with the temerity of a chihuahua biting the wheel of a speeding semi. Maybe they just hadn’t met a troll before.
Not that Saskia was complaining. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the food served itself to her. But at times like this, when she already had another meal, she’d let the misguided creatures live. She wasn’t a monst—
She wasn’t wasteful.
As for larger predators, there were very few that could threaten a troll. Occasionally she’d glimpsed large creatures through the trees and lounging about in swampy pools, but they’d left her alone so far. There were the ones she’d dubbed upside-down-cats—brown furry beasts with long tails that always seemed to be hanging beneath branches. They were about the size of a St. Bernard, but they looked closer to housecats next to Saskia. In the wetlands lurked scaly crocodilian creatures with long serrated beaks. There was something that looked like a rhino with massively oversized forelegs. A rhino-troll? Once, she’d almost walked into a large bear with tiger stripes, but it had turned and bounded away. Then there was the giant tentacular horror she’d sighted wading through the swamp. She’d noped away from that one right quick.
Finishing her meal, Saskia drank deeply, then took a dip in a clear pool. No rivers were this clean back home. This body wasn’t built for swimming, but she managed well enough. Floating on her back, she blinked up at the clear sky, which was just beginning to darken as the sun passed behind another branch.
The river was one of the few places where there was a gap in the canopy, allowing her to easily get oriented. The great trunk of the world tree made a pretty reliable landmark. Far better than navigating using the sun. Especially this sun. Everything she wanted to see was toward the trunk, or trunkward. So she needed to go that way.
And there it was again. What was that thing?
It was like…a tiny circle of light in the corner of her eye. She could turn her gaze toward it. But whenever she turned her head, the light would move with it, remaining on the edge of her field of vision. This anomaly had showed up several times today. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. It just…appeared. And if she ignored it for long enough, it faded away.
Back on Earth, this kind of visual anomaly would be a serious cause for concern. It might mean there was something wrong with her eyes, or her brain. Or it might be a prelude to another seizure.
Here, it was just another oddity to add to the pile of weird. Yeah, she may be seeing things, but she was on a tree the size of a planet, in the body of a troll. Seeing things was the least of her worries. It was probably just some magical critter nesting in her eyeball. Nothing to…
Okay, that’s actually kinda terrifying.
Now she had to get to the bottom of this, or she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep tonight.
Saskia waded to the shore and quickly dressed, watching the circle of light bob about as she moved. She was pretty sure she already knew the answer, but what would happen when she closed her eyes?
Yup. Still there. That confirmed it then. Whatever it was, it was inside her.
Feasting on my tender, juicy eyeball, she thought with a shudder.
Inspecting the light closely, she realised that it wasn’t just a circle. There were finer details that she hadn’t noticed earlier. On one side was a slight bump, and there were darker and brighter areas across its surface.
And then she had her first epiphany. When she turned her body, the circle turned with it! How had she missed that before? It was so obvious, now that she was paying attention to the details. She did a three-sixty, and watched as the bulgy bit rotated all the way around the perimeter of the circle of light, returning to its original spot at the same time she did. She stood next to a stone on the grassy bank, then spun around again, several times, while looking down at her feet. The bump remained pointing at the stone.
This is a compass, she realised. A compass in my eye. How weird is that!
Weird and useful. So very useful.
On Earth, a compass pointed north. But this wasn’t Earth, so where was this one pointing? Looking up at the sky, she immediately got her answer. What was the central axis of a tree? Its trunk, of course! This compass pointed trunkward.
The more she focussed on the apparition, the more vivid and tangible it seemed to become. More details were becoming apparent on its surface. And colours. Most of the surface of the compass had a greenish hue, but there were specks of cream and salmon red and wood brown. And there was a ruddy blue crack snaking down the middle. Or perhaps not a crack. Fissures normally took the path of least resistance, but this line meandered about, in no hurry to go anywhere. It looked more like a…
More like a river. Like that river. Like the one she was standing right next to.
Not just a compass, she realised. It’s also a map.
This little circular map was beginning to feel eerily familiar to Saskia. It looked less like the kind of map you’d see on a smartphone or car dashboard, and more like a minimap in a…
In a video game.
And not just any game. A very specific map for a specific game; a map she was intimately familiar with, because she’d designed it.
As the realisation hit her, the object—the minimap—seemed to coalesce into a ghostly replica of the one she’d created for Threads of Nautilum.
Saskia felt her mind becoming frayed around the edges. After everything she’d experienced over the past few days, she’d become certain that this was all real. That she was really here. And that this world, no matter how strange it seemed, was a real place. She’d eaten, slept, breathed alien air, felt mud squishing between her toes. She’d even bled. She’d felt pain. What kind of game made its players feel physical pain? This couldn’t be a game, could it? There was just no way…
She sighed and looked back at the map. Really looked at it, now that it was looking almost as tangible as the world around her. On close inspection, it wasn’t quite the same as her design for Nautilum. But the differences stemmed from the fact that this looked like a three dimensional object hovering in the air in front of her, rather than an image on a flat screen. It resembled an antique compass or watch with a glass front, containing a map where the spinning hands would normally be. The compass bearing was shown with a little arrow on the outside. There was a dot in the centre of the map that marked her location. But there wasn’t much else to see on the map itself besides the river and the forest. The big landmarks were apparently too far away.
It was hard to estimate the scale of this map. Saskia had initially added distance markings to Nautilum’s minimap, but she’d later scrapped them, deciding that they looked too ‘techy’ for a high fantasy game. Now she wanted to punch her earlier self for making that choice. They would have come in handy right about now.
Then the sun fled behind a branch eclipse, and the light and shadow of the forest faded into the familiar flat, featureless gloom. She’d taken to calling this effect darksight. As soon as her darksight came into play, the minimap became blurry and indistinct.
This discovery led to another epiphany. Her darksight was an overlay, just like the map! As the light faded, this second sight took over, replacing the near-pitch darkness that her eyes perceived. The transition was near-seamless, so she hadn’t given it a second thought until now. It was as if she were simultaneously watching two different versions of the same scene overlaid on top of each other. Right now, her darksight dominated, but with a bit of conscious effort, she could distinguish the two…for want of a better word, she’d call them layers. Her map was a third layer, one that seemed to be competing with her darksight, and losing…
