Chapter 62 – Found

"What do you mean? Who found us?" Vel gave her father a confused look.

"Those responsible for my father’s death have found us," Damien said flatly, with a rigid scowl on his face. "I don’t know how they found us or why now after so long, but it's unmistakably them. I can sense the aura of a high-tier undead, a reaper, in the forest. It’s making a beeline straight for the cabin."

Hearing this, both Vel and I gasped, while Saph just let out a nervous gurgle. Although our slime friend hadn’t yet been let in on the secret Velyna carried around her neck and what this all meant, they were rightfully afraid of a high-tier undead monster.

"It's not safe here anymore. You need to leave Velyna. You all need to leave." Damien stared deeply into his daughter’s eyes as he said this.

"Us? What about you? Aren’t you going to come with us? Where would we even go without you? None of us knows anything about the outside world."

"I’m going to stay and hold the reaper off, so it can’t follow you…" Damien said with a solemn tone in his voice, one that hinted at the fact that he wasn’t sure how this was going to end for him.

"As for where you will go… Run into the forest, to the deep parts of the woods, where I told you never to go when you were younger. Once you get close enough, the key will guide you to the Crossroad. Use the key there to travel to the dungeon it is linked to and the city built around the dungeon. Find my sister, Sophia Varsen, at the Red Den. She knows all as much about the keys and those seeking them as I do. She will help you and protect you until I can find you again."

"Dad…" Vel’s voice quivered with fear and worry.

Reaching forwards, the father pulled his daughter in close for a hug. "I love you, Velyna. If your mother were here with us, I know she would be proud of the woman you have become, just as I am."

"I love you too, Dad." Vel cried, tears running down her cheeks.

"You don’t have much time. The reaper will be here any minute. Grab whatever supplies you can carry that you think you might need and then flee. Don’t stop running until you are far away from here." Damien said as he parted from the hug with his daughter.

With a solemn, nervous tension in the air, Saph, Vel, and I hurried to the young elven woman’s bedroom as Damien ran to his own. Inside her bedroom, I quickly made my way over to the large backpack I had taken possession of. Luckily, much of the space inside was freed up when Vel and I went through it a few days ago, and what remained inside was pretty much all I owned.

Stuffing the used clothes that I had worn previously inside the backpack, which were just lying in a pile next to it before this, did not take much time at all. Afterwards, I held the backpack open so that Saph could chuck a few changes of her own clothes inside while being aided in this task by our slime friend.

Although I was incredibly nervous about what was happening, I wasn’t as afraid or sad as either of my companions. Given how high-level Damien was, I couldn’t wrap my head around him ever being bested by some monster, high-tier undead or not. It didn’t make sense to me. How could someone so strong that killed those three men as easily as swatting a fly ever fear being defeated? Especially since he was way stronger than anyone who had ever lived back on Earth. It was unimaginable.

In no time at all, the three of us were rushing back out of the young elven woman’s bedroom with the backpack slung over my shoulder, Vel’s staff in her hands, and my dagger tied to my waist. On our way out, we were met by Damien, returning from his own bedroom, holding two things in his hands; the sword that previously sat on his dresser and a large pouch of something.

Before saying anything, the man opened the backpack slung over my shoulders and slid the pouch inside. From the sound of clinking metal, I assumed the pouch contained coins of some kind, but however much money was in there and of what kind, I was not certain.

Once done with that, Damien fastened the backpack up again and turned his attention to me. To my surprise, he leaned in and kissed me, right in front of his daughter, something I doubt he ever would have done if not for the severity of our parting.

"Eve, please look after Velyna. She is everything to me." He whispered after his lips parted from mine but still lingered a fraction of an inch from them.

A part of me wanted to be cheeky and respond by saying that she was more than capable of looking after herself or, if anything, was more likely to be protecting me. Instead, I simply just leaned in, giving him another quick kiss before saying. "I will."

As soon as that was said, our rush resumed. As fast as we could go, the three of us ran out of the house, while Damien made a more leisurely pursuit after us, into the forest clearing that their log cabin resided in. Outside, under the early morning sun, Vel immediately took the lead since she knew the forest better than me and maybe even Saph. However, we didn’t even reach the tree lines before we felt it.

A coldness ran down my back like none I had ever felt before. Pure, chilling dread filled my every being, much worse than the fear Damien had once made me feel when he used one of his class skills on me to make me admit the truth about my being here. Worst of all, though, was the unnaturalness of that dreadful fear, almost as if it was trying to drain the life from me. Instinctively, I stopped dead in my tracks and looked over my shoulder at the source of this fear, but that was a decision I soon regretted.

Stepping out of the forest on the other side of the clearing was a creature unlike any I had seen before. At a glance, it looked like a person wearing a tattered black cloak, but on a closer inspection, that wasn’t the case. The cloak was a mass of shifting, writhing shadow, within which was a skeletal form with bright, glowing beads of red energy where the eyes should have been. Thankfully, the reaper wasn’t looking at the three of us making our escape, but at the big burly man standing between us, with a longsword held at the ready in his hand.

"RUN!" Damien shouted, infusing his voice with the commanding skill he had used on us earlier.

What I didn’t realise before that moment was that I literally couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. There was something about the reaper’s chilling aura of dread that made me unable to run. Not just me though, but Saph and Vel too were trapped there, rotted to the spot where we stood. That said, that all changed when Damien used his command skill on us, which overpowered whatever it was that the reaper was doing to us and forced us to flee into the forest as fast as we could.

The last thing I saw of Damien was him raising his sword to strike at the reaper even though it was too far away for him to reach normally. Apparently, that wasn’t such a limiting factor for him though, as while we fled, I heard the sound of an explosion and that of several trees collapsing behind us.

Although the fear instilled by the reaper's aura was long gone as we fled deep into the forest, as fast as our feet, or gelatinous body could take us, the fear that pushed me on and on was all my own at that point. More explosions and collapsing trees could be heard in our wake, accompanied every so often by a horrible shriek that even at this distance made my head hurt.

I don’t know at which point Damien’s skill stopped forcing us to run away just as he commanded us to do, but the three of us never stopped for a moment. Taking the lead, Vel made her way, weaving between trees and bushes as Saph and I followed along as best we could. The more we travelled into the deep part of the woods the larger and older the trees grew.

Although my legs began to ache and complain of the exertion I put them through, I continued nonetheless, burning through the pain. Of course, our pace eventually began to slow, but still, we did not move forward toward our destination. How Vel knew what direction to head in, I did not know, other than the fact that her father had said the key would guide her. However, said key, the amulet around her neck didn’t appear to be doing anything of note. Like always, it just sat there, with its large emeralds sparkling in the morning light.

Apparently, the key was doing something, though, as, after nearly two hours of fleeing, we could make out something in the distance. During all the talk of the Crossroad and its keys, which Damien had with us, he never actually said what the place would look like, so we had no way of knowing if this was actually it or not. But I doubted that the giant wall of fog in front of us could have been anything other than the way to the Crossroad. Still, I could have been wrong and this could have been part of a trap.

A quick glance over at Vel told me she was just as unsure as me, but we had little choice but to run into the fog. Trying my best to reassure the young elven woman, I ran up beside her and held her hand in mine as we passed over into the unnatural-looking boundary that was this wall of fog.

It was a strange thing, that fog wall. Stepping into it felt like a tiny jolt of electricity arched across every inch of my skin. It didn’t particularly hurt, but it tickled and tingled a little bit. I wasn’t quite sure if that feeling stopped or if I had just gotten used to it, but after a minute of walking deeper into the fog, I could no longer notice the sensation. Apart from that, though, walking through the fog didn’t feel any different from walking through the forest. Hell, I could even hear the crunching of grass under my boots as we progressed.

On and on, we walked through the fog, which was apparently not just a wall but a vast, heavily obscured space, within which you couldn’t see more than a metre away from yourself. Seconds turned into minutes, and the minutes dragged on longer and longer until we lost track of time.

"Is this it? Is this the crossroad?" I asked as I tried to look around but could not see anything through the fog but my companions.

Saph let out a confused gurgle, to which Vel added. "I have no idea, but if it is, it isn't at all like I expected it to be… Wait, I think I see something."

I turned my head, following the young elven woman’s eye line, and just barely managed to see what she was referring to. Although whatever it was that she saw was completely obscured by the fog, the golden light it was giving off was faint enough to give away its location.

Without any more words needing to be said between the three of us, we took off running towards the light. As we grew closer and closer to it, the light grew bigger and bigger, to the point it was almost blinding. At that very moment, when we had no choice but to shield our eyes from the light, that was the moment we found ourselves stumbling through onto some sort of wooden flooring as the fog instantly retreated, revealing that we had arrived at our destination, a place that was unlike anything any of us had ever seen before. Well, the view from the office where I lost my virginity when I was going through the reincarnation process could have rivalled the beauty of this place, but that view was both literally and figuratively out of this world.

Directly ahead of us grew a large tree, rising over a hundred metres into the air, where its leaves shone with a bright golden light. Far below the branches of the tree, the three of us stood on a strange, circular platform surrounded on all sides by a dense wall of fog. But on close inspection, I realised that the platform we were standing on wasn't just made out of wood but formed from the natural weaving of the great tree’s roots.

Additionally, eight arches of wood were formed from the roots rising up around the platform on the very edge of the fog. Each one of the arches, save for the one we had come through, was topped with a large gemstone, each a foot in diameter and each a different colour. In all the gemstones were amethyst, diamond, emerald, onyx, ruby, sapphire, and topaz, and they circled the tree in that order.

Towards the centre of the platform was a raised stage, circling the great tree. To get up to that stage, there were eight staircases that led from each of the arches, grown naturally from the wood. At the top of all but the staircase leading to the arch that we had come through was some sort of wooden plinths, each with a uniquely-shaped empty indentation on the top of them, as if awaiting a key to be inserted.

"So this is the Crossroad…" I gasped in awe at the sleek, natural beauty of this space and the great, golden tree growing at the heart of it.