Alyssa had always imagined her first night on a new planet as one immersed in luxury. Henrietta's Expedition had seen them dropped in a world that had been praying for heroes for years in the hopes that someone might be able to halt an implacable plague of undeath. She and her group had appeared in a town square in the middle of a festival, to overwhelming applause and the welcome of the local king.
That had set off a week-long feast for the Heroes Apparent, during which time Henrietta's original team had used to get used to their fabulous new magical powers, eat the finest foods, and slept on the finest beds.
Of course, like most Expedition worlds, it was substantially less-developed than their home, so things like the food wasn't as good, the beds were less comfy, and the magic was a lot less understood... but it was the principle of the thing!
But here, in the middle of this trackless possibly-infinite wilderness, she'd never get to be crowned with fancy clothes, never have all the princes of the land fighting for her hand, never get to show a Tyrant its proper place, any of that.
She shifted a bit where she sat, accidentally tearing open a new hole in her leaf-tunic. With no small amount of annoyance, she swatted at her clothing, but that only made the tear worse and jabbed her skin with a bit of the stem-vein… things. She couldn't even fix it.
If she'd kept her [Vineweaving] skill, she... well, no. It was a [Cloaked in Forest Veil] class skill, and that meant it would at best have been effectively level 18 for her as a [Ranger of Far Lands]. It only worked on living plants at that level, and these leaves were too dead for anything like that.
Alyssa sighed, and on impulse, picked up a piece of firewood and stared at it, studying it from different angles.
[Ignite]
The flames started a few inches from the stick's tip, and she could feel the flows of Wood mana spiraling and twisting itself before it blossomed out like a crimson flower, transforming into Fire. In response to the sudden influx of fire magic, the wood began to glow and then char, reality yielding to the command of her skill.
Mild pyromania sated, she tossed the burning piece of wood on the fire, then grabbed another one to repeat the process. This time, she focused more on the activation of the skill, trying to sense the ways in which her mana coiled around inside her before it passed itself off to the stick. It had been ages since she'd done true skill grinding, but if she was going to be stuck with just [Leafstep] and [Ignite] for the foreseeable future, she wasn't going to let either of them lag behind the other.
Having a touch-based mana sense made that sort of thing a lot easier than it would be, say, for a sight or sound-based one, and Alyssa felt a bit of smug superiority at her choice of sensory development. She didn't need a specialized skill just to figure out what her internalized mana flows were doing, take that Athuel.
[Ignite]
Another piece of wood erupted in flames, and Alyssa looked on with satisfaction at what she had wrought.
There were all sorts of absolutely nasty things in forests, especially the ones on the outskirts of their territory. For all that their home planet was mostly tamed, Alyssa had briefly visited the Verdant Ocean in another foreign world, and she'd seen some of the absolute terrors that lived within that.
And while she had absolute confidence that everything would eventually yield to the power of the Empire of Humanity, that was slim comfort to her in the here and now.
Everyone always liked to worry about the carnivores, and it wasn't like she blamed them. But by and large, humans didn't make for good prey. Even a single mid-level soldier could take down just about any beast in their weight class, and scare off plenty well above that. Carnivores didn't tend to like pain, and a few well-placed attacks tended to deter anything that wasn't desperate. The only real exceptions were regenerators like hydras, who were just as happy eating the pieces of meat a soldier carved off their body as the humans themselves. But other than that, just being a prickly meal would keep you safe.
No, it was herbivores you needed to watch out from.
Not all of them, of course. The fast and stealthy ones were no particular threat, but there was a certain class of herbivore that tended to take a more proactive stance to not-dying, driving off competition with incredible durability and some truly nasty magical effects, making them a highly unappealing target for a meal. Of course, they rarely settled for sharing their territory, and while a forest drake might leave humans alone even if they encountered one, a forest boar would happily charge headlong into a troupe of armored humans with the sole goal of killing them, scaring them off, or dying in the process.
Herbivores didn't need to be smart, just strong, aggressive, hard to kill, and have lots of babies, so if they ran into something like that out here they might be in trouble. If they'd never seen humans, they might not recognize them as a threat, but they would recognize a human as a potential competitor, and that would be… bad.
So, she would be making herself a spear.
It wouldn't be a good spear by any means, that was certain. She didn't even have an adequately pointy rock to use as a tip, so she just had to try and kinda-whittle a straight and decently sturdy branch she'd broken off a nearby tree into something resembling dangerous. Without a knife it would take actually forever, but there were enough sharp rocks that she could manage something.
She could then harden the tip in the fire, and basically hope that would be enough. Well, [Ignite] might help, but if they were really far from civilization or somewhere that it was completely absent, creatures might not know to fear it? How did that work?
She was about halfway done with the spear when a sound caught her attention, and she jerked her head upright to look into the nearby treeline. She squinted, and thought she might have seen something?
Alyssa slowly rose to her feet, holding her spear in her off hand and picking up a rock to throw at where she'd heard the sound coming from. It clattered through the branches with a rustle of leaves, but Alyssa was certain she saw something moving in the shadows. Keeping her eyes fixed on the creature, she reached down and grabbed another rock, throwing it at the unidentified thing.
"Rrrp?" She missed again, but it clearly elicited some kind of reaction. A moment later, it jumped down from the treeline onto the rocky ground.
As it came into view, Alyssa blinked and cleared her head. It was… kind of cute?
The creature was quadrupedal, roughly four feet tall at the shoulder, and was covered in a mottled brown-and-green coat of something that looked halfway between scales and feathers. It shimmered oddly in a way that reminded Alyssa of active camouflage, and had a flap of skin obscuring the top part of its legs, but connected to a large crescent-shaped claw right on its elbow.
Its face, meanwhile, had two owlish eyes glowing with a curious blue light, slightly offset from looking straight ahead, and a rounded snout that wasn't quite draconic, nor quite doglike, but somewhere in the middle. Its mouth opened, revealing massive normal teeth and, more worryingly, glistening black fangs on a sinuous, serrated gray tongue.
The tongue lolled out of its mouth, beginning to coil and snap back and forth like a snake. Alyssa did not like the looks of it, and she definitely didn't like how the tooth-tongued thing fixed its eerie gaze directly on her, reared back onto its hind legs, and screamed.
It almost sounded like a wolf howling, if combined with a woman's shrill scream, a flailing black tongue-thing, and the fact it unveiled short, stumpy wing-things to make it look even bigger than it already was. Black spittle flew forward with such force that some of it actually managed to hit her, alongside a faint brush of hot air that smelled like rot. Alyssa gritted her teeth and gripped her spear. The question was, was this some kind of territorial display from a predator, that wouldn't commit to the attack… or a warning to get out or face the consequences?
"Wuh? Huh? What was… AAAAHHHH WHAT IS THAT!"
Oh great, now Oliver was awake. The nerd couldn't keep his voice down? Worst-case scenario, he'd just look like prey. Well, so long as he didn't make the mistake of moving, then the tooth-tongue might not pay too much attention to him.
"Shhh!"
"Don't shush me!"
"Oliver, shut up right now or I will stab you!"
Oliver shut up.
The tooth-tongued creature was beginning to look away from Alyssa, closer to where Oliver was, and she couldn't let that happen. Alyssa screamed her own territorial shout and charged at the tooth-tongue spear point first. She had to drive it off, because running wasn't an option for many reasons. If running did become needed, they had a pond to their back and rock to either side, and if Oliver couldn't even walk through the underbrush without tripping over his own feet, what would running be like?
The tongue flicked through the air like a whip, the animal yanking its head to snap it back and forth at uncomfortably high speeds considering she was wearing leaves and was armed with a pointy stick. It kept bouncing all over the place chaotically, providing no good openings for her to take advantage of. But, she refused to relent. As the tongue was at the furthest point on its arc, Alyssa closed the remaining distance and sidestepped the flailing, landing a potent jab right in the creature's open mouth.
It squealed in pain and tried to take a few steps back, but Alyssa kept up the pressure, jamming her stick further down its throat with all the might three Strength and Dexterity could offer. In response, it started reeling its tongue back in, and as Alyssa prepared to leap out of the way, Oliver yelled out "Behind you!"
Alyssa froze for the briefest of moments, trying to figure out if Oliver was referring to the incoming tongue or something else, and that hesitation was enough for the creature to slam its fanged tongue into her upper arm. The teeth bit into her flesh, and Alyssa screamed in pain, and stabbed the offending slimy appendage away. Fortunately, it didn't stick too tightly into her arm, but it did exacerbate the wound. It didn't hurt, just felt cold, which wasn't a great sign but wasn't the worst either.
"Oliver! I told you to- to shut up!" Her voice caught slightly in her throat as a bit of jostling informed her that no, her arm could decidedly still hurt.
"I'm sorry, you just didn't-"
"Shut! Up!"
Alyssa, cradling her bleeding left arm, gave her best halfhearted stab into the creature's still-open mouth. With its tongue now firmly inside its snout, it chomped down on the stick and, while the spear didn't give way completely, still let out a too-loud crack, fractures and splinters breaking away from the wood.
[Ignite]
The remaining piece of wood in Alyssa's hand burst into flames, and she smacked the tooth-tongue as hard as she could manage. It skittered back from the sudden attack, and she couldn't land a solid enough blow to really make a difference. It did retreat from the flames though, giving an opening that Alyssa was quick to exploit.
"Change of plan, we're leaving."
"What? But-"
"Come on!" Alyssa yelled, trying to pull on the far too slow mage. He barely moved, and the tooth-tongue was already coming back. "Actually, go!"
"Which is it?"
"Move," she yelled, shoulder-checking him into the pond, "Swim for the other side!"
Oliver said something, but it was lost in the splash as he landed in the water, and before he had the chance to say anything else, Alyssa was running at the creature once again.
She bent down and picked up a couple of rocks from the ground while she ran and threw them at the beast. One connected with a solid thunk on the tooth-tongue's side, but it seemed unfazed at the attack. Instead, it lashed out with its tongue again, and Alyssa threw herself to the side to avoid it, tucking into a roll to keep her momentum up.
She heard the tongue flailing about towards her, but she kept moving, A stick that had been deemed too thick and too green to be firewood was sitting right on the edge of the water, and when she sprang back up onto her feet, it was grasped in her hands as a primitive club.
As the tongue came questing towards her, trying to maim her once again, Alyssa swung out – ignoring the protestations of her bleeding forearm – and smacked it away, driving it into the ground. Then, before the tooth-tongue could start building momentum back up or recall it to its mouth, she closed the distance once again and brought the club down on its skull with a hefty clonk.
With a bit of a strangled whimper, the tooth-tongue whipped its tongue back into its mouth and began to slink away, but Alyssa wasn't about to let it get away that easily. It was fairly clearly a predator, though a weirdly aggressive one, and she didn't want to take the chance that it would return to challenge them for this territory in the future.
With agility borne on pure adrenaline, Alyssa stomped on the tooth-tongue's head and catapulted herself up the stone wall next to it, wrenched free a sizable stone from the wall, and let it fall.
It crushed the creature's head with a squelch at the same time Alyssa landed on the ground, keeping her footing thanks solely to [Leafstep] activating.
"You can…" she panted, "You can come back now."
Oliver spluttered something indignantly as he waded out of the pond, dripping wet but fortunately unharmed.
"What was that?" was the first thing she was able to properly resolve as an actual question from him.
"You're the diviner, you tell me," she muttered as she leaned against the rock wall.
"[Appraise] isn't high enough level to work on it," he responded, completely seriously.
"Wait, does that mean it would work if it was a high enough level?"
"Well… yes? It's an identification skill. That's what it does."
"Even if you're right about us being alone on this world?"
"Obvious… actually, I don't know. I don't think it's ever been tested."
"Neat. You'll have to tell me all about it once you do," she sighed. "Okay. Can you help me drag the corpse into the woods? I don't want to leave it right here in the open for scavengers, I want to at least take it out of our line of sight."
"I can try," Oliver shrugged, "But why can't you do it on your own? And why did you kill it if you're not going to make any use out of it?"
"Too big to be easily carried. And while I wouldn't mind making some better clothes, I don't know how to skin an animal and tan a hide-"
"You don't? Isn't that basic stuff for you to know to do your job?" Oliver interrupted, and she glared at him for a moment before finishing.
"I don't know how to skin an animal and tan a hide with a sharp rock and pointy sticks as my only tools. Basically, we don't have what we need to do it, and I'm not having a rotting carcass sitting around until we figure it out."
"I suppose that's fair."
Before Alyssa could say anything else, a blur of black cut her off, a figure dropping onto the rocky ground. She scrambled to grab her club to fight off this new threat, only to pause as she realized that it was a human, one wearing a flowing, shiny black tunic and draped in draconic wings.
It's a human! Was her first thought.
Wait. She regarded the newcomer warily. There were all kinds of critters, sprites, and spirits with various illusions that could be responsible for this, but her general musings were dismissed as she properly assessed the woman before her. She looked very different with no hair and looking like she was in her early twenties, but it only took her a moment longer to properly identify someone who, last she'd seen, had been easily forty years older.
"Commander Inq?"