I tried to escape her grip, but it was like I was trying to break out of a steel cage back on Earth by bending the steel bars. Before I could slip free, I was already flying out the window.

  In an attempt to freeze my momentum, I tried to activate [Argent Flow]’s velocity-halting function only for it to fail with a crash as something with higher priority slammed through it. My mind spun like I had been hit by a car, while I spun through the air in the arms of the plant girl.

  With her right next to me, I could sense exactly how much Mana was inside her, something that had been partially obscured before for some reason. It felt as if I were a puddle, and in comparison, she was the weather.

  It took me a moment of flailing before I realized we hadn’t hit the ground yet, we were hanging barely a foot off the road, floating in the… no wait, hanging from a tree branch. One that had grown out of her torso to connect her to the ground.

  “You taste so good,” Phlaeris said, the undermeaning behind the words carried a hint of allure.

  “Please don’t eat me,” I replied. In response, she suddenly dropped me, such that I landed hard on the wooden pathway.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, I’m not a phytovore,” she said with a smile that revealed serrated fangs made of pearlescent white lignin. “I meant your soul. You taste like… someone I want to protect. Like you know how when you see a little sapling, and it’s so adorable that you want to preserve it forever as it is? That’s how your soul tastes.”

  “I can’t say I do… what’s up?” I replied, pausing when she suddenly turned away, her ears twitching.

  “DadsaidIneedtoseehimbeforeIleave. Waitformebytheforestgate, ifyouaren'ttherewhenIarriveIwillhuntyoudown,” she said in three compressed Nature words, the meaning of a whole sentence shoved inside them. Then the tree that had been holding her aloft snapped straight, and she was gone, flung back the way we had come… I think?

  Actually, where even am I?

  Somehow, I wasn't sitting on the ground below the window like I expected. I was in some completely different part of the village, the building I was launched from nowhere in sight.

  The things that were possible at a higher Ascension included completely ignoring the concept of geometry, apparently.

  Picking myself up off the ground, I wandered around looking for the forest. Despite the trees being taller than the fence around the village, I couldn't see them from my current vantage point.

  Also, wasn't the village smaller than this?

  With a sigh, I crouched and jumped as hard as I possibly could, catching myself with an Avalanche right before I left the ground. After a tenth of a second of building momentum, I let go.

  The buildings around me flickered, seemingly curling into the ground from my point of view. Walls on each edge of the village rushed towards me as I flew over them.

  On the descent, it was as if the village unfolded itself into existence right before my eyes, like a flower unfurling its petals. I landed right in the centre of the fully grown village that spat on Euclid's grave while throwing his model of geometry out the window.

  But now I knew which direction the forest was in. So I started walking that way, while travelling, I looked through the eyes of one of the drones I made that had been left behind in the living room. It had scuttled into a hiding spot and enabled low power mode when I was no longer within its detection radius, waiting for me to return despite that never going to happen.

  The town leader, whose name I still didn’t know, was talking to his daughter, unfortunately I hadn’t added audio processing, so I had no idea what they were saying. I made a note for the next ones I built to have that functionality.

  He pressed the ritual circle he had been working on to her chest and sent what looked like an ocean of Mana through it. Her body was lifted into the air and it looked like a storm was passing through the room she was in. Then suddenly she dropped, landing smoothly on the ground, her hair still fluttering as if by an invisible storm. With that, he whispered something in her ear, she nodded in response, then vanished.

  Not an instant later, I was bowled over onto the road when something collided with me at high speed from behind.

  “Hey! I went looking for you by the forest gate, but you weren’t there. I had to look all over town to find you!” she said, while I got back up off the ground and patted my cloak off.

  “Some people can’t move at the speed of light. Maybe consider the little guy you left stranded in the middle of nowhere,” I grumbled, before starting to jog again.

  “Wait, you’re not moving this slowly on purpose? Wow, what’s it like being Eidetically challenged?” she asked while walking in a circle around me. “Maybe dad didn’t need to worry…” she muttered under her breath.

  “Wouldn't you know? Eidos seems like something you have to build up over the course of your life. Also, what did you mean by worry?”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Phlaeris paused in front of me and let out the fakest laugh I’d ever witnessed, “No idea what you’re talking about. More importantly, you haven’t ever heard of Lineage Eidos? Oh, no, wait, of course you wouldn’t as a Player. It’s… well, it’s like the name implies.”

  I decided to let her have that deflection for now.

  She stood up straight and placed a hand on her puffed-out chest, “As someone born in an important lineage, my mere existence would carry a fair bit of Weight on the Tapestry.”

  “Important lineage?”

  “Mhmm, I'm directly descended from Flora herself,” the plant girl said as she started walking beside me again. “Do you want me to carry you? We’d get to the edge of the city a lot faster.”

  “Yeah, okay. Why can’t—” I said with a sigh, the world blurred, and I suddenly found myself standing in front of an open gateway leading into a dark forest lit only by the occasional beam of sunlight. “—you carry me through the forest?”

  “Obviously, I can't have my arms occupied, what if something attacks me!” Phlaeris exclaimed from behind me, right by the exit to the village, and out in the forest all at once.

  I blinked; her movement looked like she was just vanishing and reappearing.

  “Okay, before we go. Do you mind dropping all resistance to my Authority for a moment?” I asked.

  She blinked towards me, appearing only a few inches from my face, staring deeply into my eyes. After a moment, she seemed satisfied with whatever she saw and vanished, her arm suddenly around my shoulder as she held me tightly.

  “Sure, go ahead, I'd love to see what you're trying to do,” she replied with a giggle.

  I wrapped my aura around her and grew a coin made of Storygrove in my hand, labelled ‘Phlaeris’.

  “For this expedition, protect me to the best of your abilities and promise to act exclusively in my interest,” I commanded. She tried to throw her authority up and shove mine away, but once I uttered the first syllable, the hooks were already placed in her. Those hooks weren't my aura; the Skill just told me how to set them with my aura. The power that maintained their presence was from somewhere else and only existed once they were in place.

  I did have to limit the command as I wasn't sure if I could fully override her will if she truly intended to act against me. Not like I could with Novi, who was my equal in Spirit. But she would be biased towards protecting me, which was enough for my purposes.

  Wait. How did I know that? I've never tested this.

  “I promise to—” Her hand slapped over her mouth, but the words continued despite being muffled. When she finished making the promise, her arm pulled me tight against her. Squeezing the breath out of my lungs, “You. Something like you is carrying around a Divine Power granted by Kaelzar, alongside tasting like the plant mother. What the hell are you?”

  The Storygrove branch vibrated as the Oath locked into place, and I dropped it into my Inventory. I just wanted a warning system in the event she double-crossed me for whatever reason. The fact that she tried to resist making that promise was interesting.

  “Yup, and I legitimately have no idea how to answer that, sorry,” I replied, disappointed that yet again someone asked that question. How was I supposed to know what I was?!

  The best answer I had was that I was a counter divination tool, meaning I would be used to combat a separate pantheon from Kaelzar’s. Assuming I survived until then. That assumption also presumed I would go along with whatever they wanted without getting my pound of flesh first.

  Did gods bleed?

  Her fingers dug into my skin, but the smile on her face never cracked. The fangs in her mouth gleamed in the sunlight.

  “Okay! Well, why don't we set out?” she said, patting my chest once before appearing by the gate. “Time's a wastin’ after all.”

  I followed her out into the darkwoods, my newly built drones scuttling after me, and let out a sigh. I felt really tired for some reason, not physically, obviously, it was more like a deep-seated weariness. I was starting to burn out before the gap in my memory, but this was something else entirely. It turned out that wiping my mind didn’t remove the mental exhaustion that built up during that period. Who would have guessed?

  [Zone Entered]

  You have just entered The Sylvan Maw

  A second window popped up in front of me while I made my way out of the village alongside the Zone notification.

  [Notice]

  The City of Humanity—Fateswatch—has advanced. It is now a Second Tier City. The Light that Knelt’s Blessing has been applied to the city as a whole.

  Li Wei has activated the city’s right to lay Light Paths. Paths will be marked on the map for citizens when the bridging is complete.

  You are not a citizen.

  He… it felt like so long ago now, even though I didn’t remember anything, but Novi said he had a Quest to kill me, right? Which was likely instated because of what Autumn mentioned relating to how the gods had to act in a way that was like they were trying to kill me. The Quest was just another extension of that.

  I put it out of my mind and scanned my surroundings, turning back I couldn’t actually see the village anymore.

  “How far have we gone?” I asked Phlaeris, who was hanging upside down from a tree, waiting for me to catch up.

  “Oh, not far, sort of. The forest is kind of weird spatially. There’s a reason I have to stick near you. If I didn’t, I’d find myself walking out of it no matter what direction I entered from,” she replied, appearing over me, riding my shoulders.

  “What if you fell from above?” I asked.

  “Well… there’s a reason this place is called the Sylvan Maw,” she replied, and I understood the implication.

  If I hadn’t landed on the Young Miss’s lawn, I would likely have been stuck in the forest… potentially forever, but more likely just until something killed me.

  We walked, seemingly directionless; however, I was following my minimap toward my spawn point. Which wasn’t a straight path for some reason, it was almost like something was spinning us on the fly whenever moving. Phlaeris kept popping into different locations around me, seemingly bored, waiting for me to reach our destination, like she was doing some sort of escort quest with an incredibly slow NPC.

  I checked the [Combat Simulation] that was running in the background and noted that it was substantially better at predicting her movement patterns already. That wasn’t much of a surprise; both she and it were running on Nature Mana. Even with her movement, she was telling a story in Nature that could be read if one looked hard enough.

  It was a story of uncertainty and suspicion.

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