Chapter 5 – The Young Elven Woman

Deep within the great forest of Artellan, amid thick and verdant foliage, stood a cosy little log cabin. The cabin was situated in the middle of a relatively tiny clearing that had just enough space for a tool shed and a small garden out back. All in all, the blending of nature and civilization in the clearing made for a very tranquil scene. Everything just looked so peaceful and harmonious together.

Birds were merrily chirping nearby, and the sky overhead was a clear blue. There weren’t even any clouds in sight on this great, sunny morning. By all accounts, it was the perfect day to go out and have a nice stroll through the forest or maybe even have a little fun playing in the woods. As it just happened, the latter was exactly what one of the residents of the cabin was planning to do when they threw open the door to their home and skipped outside.

This person leaving their home was a young woman, and although she had a very youthful look to her, one that was afforded to her by her half-elven heritage, she was definitely not a child anymore, despite how she might have sometimes acted. At the still rather youthful age of twenty, she had not been considered a child for a handful of years now. No, she was an adult, a young woman, with all the duties and responsibilities that adulthood brought with it. Or at least she would have had such duties and responsibilities if she wasn’t living alone with her father in the seclusion of this utterly huge forest.

The young elven woman came to a stop only a few feet from the door to her home, where she turned back and shouted inside. "Dad, I’m going out to play in the forest for a bit."

"Have you done all of your morning chores, Velyna?" The stern but caring voice of her father called back out to her from inside the log cabin.

"Of course, Dad!" Velyna impatiently hopped from one foot to the other as she waited for her father to give her permission to leave. Even though she had technically been an adult for a while now, he sure didn’t treat her like one. But to be fair, she didn’t really behave like one either.

"Then go, have fun, but remember to stay safe and don’t wander too far from the house" Her father eventually called back out to her, giving her permission to go out into the forest on her own.

As soon as Velyna heard this, she shut the door to the log cabin and took off running. A big grin was stretched across her lips as her feet took her as fast as she could go through the dense tree line of the forest. As she ran, the young elven woman nimbly and gracefully dodged around fallen branches and overgrown bushes. She was running with such speed that even the length of her modest, pale green dress fluttered in the wind behind her alongside the strands of her long dark green hair.

For a handful of minutes more, she just continued to run like this, basking in the feel of the wind on her cheeks and the tips of her pointed ears, poking out from the sides of her hair. Since she wasn’t a full-blooded elf, her ears weren’t as prominent as they could have been, but they were definitely longer and more pointed than those of a human. Just like her petite body was halfway between the slenderness of an elf and the more broad build of a human.

When Velyna eventually came to a stop, instead of gradually slowing herself down, she came to a sudden, screeching stop that almost caused her to topple over in the process. The reason for the sudden stop was that the young woman had seen something with those piercing, emerald eyes of hers. She had seen a poor little sapling that had a few of its budding branches beaten and snapped by a wandering animal that passed by a handful of hours ago.

Velyna slowly found her way over to the sapling and knelt down in front of it, paying no attention to the fact that she was bound to get her dress dirty kneeling on the forest floor like that. "Don’t worry, little guy, I’ve got you."

The elven woman reached out with her hands, placing them on the dirt around the base of the sapling. Although all the fingers on her hands were spread out, the thumbs and index fingers of each hand were touching those of the other. With her hands positioned like that, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the task at hand.

After a few seconds, a pale green glow started to spread from her fingers, into the rich, fertile earth of the forest, and then up the length of the sapling. The sapling’s branches that had been broken and beaten slowly began to regrow and point up into the air more enthusiastically than they had ever been before. When the glow eventually began to fade again, there was no sign the sapling had ever been mistreated. In fact, it looked more healthy than before it was damaged.

Plant Growth has reached Rank 7.

Upon opening her eyes again, Velyna was greeted by a floating blue text box with a handful of words written inside of it. The news of her skill increasing in rank brought the grin back to her lips again, but the young woman didn’t give the notification much more consideration and dismissed it as she stood back up.

After offering what aid she could to the poor little sapling, the young elven woman took off running again. Her slender and petite body was so light that she could really pick up some speed when she wanted to go fast, and because of this, only a few more minutes passed before she made it to her destination.

"Saph, are you here? Do you want to play?" Velyna called out as she slowed to a stop in front of a particular tree.

What made this tree any different from all the others around it was that there was a small hole in the earth underneath its roots. It was a burrow just big enough that a creature the size of a large rabbit could crawl inside and safely sleep through the night away from more dangerous predators. However, the friend Velyna was calling out to wasn’t a rabbit, and they weren't inside the burrow under the tree.

"Saph, where are you?" The young elven woman continued to call out as she looked around the immediate surroundings. It wasn’t like her friend to go wandering about since she was relatively weak and often got picked on by the forest's more mean denizens.

While Velyna was looking around the forest floor for any signs of where her friend could have gone, she failed to notice a gelatinous blue blob hanging out in the branches of the forest canopy overhead. It was a blue slime, a creature of the forest that was spawned by the ambient mana in the air. It was about a foot in diameter, and its gelatinous blue body was transparent enough that you could see a spherical, fist-sized core floating within it.

Now, slimes weren’t normally known for their ability to climb trees, but this one was particularly mischievous and had a sneaky little plan that it was determined to enact. It was waiting for the exact right moment when it could catch its target unawares, and that opportunity soon presented itself when the unsuspecting half-elf stepped directly underneath its hiding spot.

The slime wasted no time and immediately jumped down from the branch it was perched upon, which made the young woman below let out a squeal as she was knocked to the ground. Velyna helplessly lay on the soft, lush forest grass as the blue slime victoriously bounced up and down on her petite chest, causing the amulet hanging around there to be jostled around a fair bit. The amulet was a simple but intricately crafted piece of gold jewellery, within which were two bright and shining emeralds. It was one of her mother’s most cherished possessions and had been left for her after her mother died during childbirth.

Watching her friend celebrate so happily, Velyna couldn’t help but giggle. "How did you get all the way up there, Saph?"

The blue slime, referred to as Saph by her friend, just let out a gurgling noise as it vibrated the outer membrane of its body. Technically speaking, the elven woman couldn’t actually understand the slime, but she had a feeling they were saying something along the lines of. "It’s a secret. I’m not going to tell."

This, of course, just caused Velyna to giggle some more as she stood back up and dusted herself off. "Oh really now… Well, I guess I’ll let you have your secrets, Saph."

In response, the blue slime just happily bounced in circles around their one and only friend.

"Do you want to play? I have a few hours before my Dad will get worried and come look for me." Velyna asked, but it was mostly a rhetorical question since the energetic slime always wanted to play. "Hmm… What should we do… Do you want to play hide and seek or go exploring some of the outer regions?"

The moment the young woman mentioned the outer regions, Saph’s membrane began to nervously shake. The cowardly slime was too afraid to ever go near the outskirts of the forest again after that one time they ventured near there before they had ever met Velyna. Humans lived close to the outer regions of the great forest, and humans just loved to make slimes go splat. Luckily, elves, or at least half-elves, were much more friendly. That said, Saph had only met the one half-elf, so they weren’t quite sure if that was just how all of them were or if it was just this one that was so friendly and kind.

"Okay, scaredy-cat, what about playing hide and seek?" Velyna was fully expecting the slime to be on board with this idea, but instead, they just shook their gelatinous body in a horizontal motion mimicking the shaking of a head. "No? Then what do you want to do?"

Saph started to energetically bounce up and down in the air before bouncing away from their friend. When the slime got a couple of metres away from Velyna, they stopped and turned back to face the young elven woman as if to say. "Follow me."

More than a little interested in finding out what her friend was up to, Velyna just patiently followed the slime as it bounced along. Each of the slime's bounces sent it around waist height into the air as it moved forward at a very jerky speed. Although it wasn’t as fast as she would have wanted to go, the young woman was more than happy to just see where this was going.

It took less than a minute for the slime to lead their friend to the destination they had in mind. Since Velyna knew this part of the forest like the back of her hand, the young woman had already realised, based on their trajectory, that she was being led to a nearby natural spring. Many animals would congregate there and drink the fresh water that flowed up from an aquifer hidden deep within the earth.

On more than a few occasions, Velyna had taken a dip in the water and found it extremely relaxing, but that just made it more confusing why her friend would have led her there. Saph hated the water since their gelatinous body was extremely buoyant and not suited for water-based movement. The slime just ended up helplessly floating around in the water like a sitting duck whenever their friend had coaxed them in, and they had not found it at all fun. The mad giggling of their elven friend only served to make the shame of it all sting even worse whenever it happened.

When Velyna was led out of the trees to the small clearing where the spring resided, it immediately became clear what Saph was leading her towards. The spring itself hadn't drawn the slime's interest, but the naked figure of a blonde-haired woman passed out beside it was what the slime had obviously wanted to show her friend.

The moment the young elven woman laid eyes on this unconscious person, she became a whole lot warier. Even though the naked woman was lying face down on the grass, it was clear that they were of human heritage, and Velyna’s father had strictly told her that she should under no circumstances ever approach another human. Despite being a human himself, her father often told her that humans were bad and brought pain and suffering wherever they went.

What was weird, though, was how relaxed Saph was around the unconscious human woman. Although the slime had no way of telling her friend about the experiences they had with humans, the way they reacted every time the subject was brought up made it clear that the slime was deathly afraid of them. However, none of that fear was present at this moment in time.

Instead of cowering and being overwhelmed by her fear, Saph was just openly bouncing towards the naked, passed-out human as if there was nothing to be worried about. What Velyna didn’t know was that slimes were able to see by sensing the mana in the air around them and that all living beings had a specific type of mana signature. This included humans, and despite the fact that the woman lying face down on the grass was a human, she didn’t have the same mana signature as the ones Saph had a run-in with all those years ago. This human’s mana signature had a strangely pleasant feel to it. It made the slime’s membrane tingle with excitement whenever it was near them.

As the blue slime started to gently prod the unconscious body of the blonde human, Velyna couldn’t help but wonder if all human women looked like that when they were naked. Although the young elven woman couldn’t see much of the other woman, her rear was on full display and was rather large, not to mention round and supple looking. It was giving the young half-elf all kinds of strange feelings that she had never felt before.

Other than her father and Saph, Velyna had never actually met another living person, and even then, it was arguable if Saph even counted as a person or not. Most humans would have considered creatures spawned from the ambient mana like that little blue slime to be monsters, but in Velyna’s experience with Saph, there wasn’t anything monstrous about Saph, but that’s beside the point. What mattered was that Velyna had lived such an isolated life that she had no experience being around another woman, and just the sight of this one’s bare butt was making her feel all weird and tingly.

"Hey, be careful, Saph." Velyna called out when her friend started to try and nudge the human with a bit more force, but since the slime didn’t have hands, she was having a rough time of it.

Upon hearing this, Saph just bounced back away from the human and made a gurgling sound that their friend approximated to mean something like. "You do it then."

The young elven woman just let out a sigh as she slowly crept her way over to the unconscious human. Her heart was beating nervously in her chest as she did, but the fear was only adding to the excitement. She knew her father would have never wanted her to do something like this, but the human was naked and she could run back home if things went poorly. What was the worst that could happen? She thought.

"Hey, are you okay?" Velyna called out as she put a hand on the human’s back, but she was just as unresponsive as before.

The possibility that they might have been dead crossed her mind, so the elven woman slowly rolled them over onto their back. The minute the unconscious human plopped over onto the grass, Velyna's mouth dropped. The human woman's breasts were much larger than she had imagined; they were almost as big as the woman's head, almost...

Velyna's eyes were so focused on the human’s bare breasts and the warmth that the sight of them brought to her private parts that she failed to notice that the human had woken up and was staring at her with a very perverted look in her eyes.