God's blessing on this isekai'd Nazi! (Konosuba x Nazi Male reader)

Chapter 13

The ground below him was wet and slippery, with little puddles of dark mud encircling the sole of his boots. Equally humid was the atmosphere, with the scent of rinsed vegetation permeated the air. The air, however, was cold as its chilling touch made its way through his thick clothing in order to send shivers down his spine. No ray of sunlight fell from above onto the wet grounds of the forest, instead all he had was a directionless illumination of pale, misty light which seemed to simultaneously obscure and illuminate his vision.

Interrupting the otherwise smooth surface of the amorphous whiteness which enveloped the forest were tall sentinels of wood whose thick, dark brown, trunks extended high above where the concentration of mist only allowed him a glimpse of the leaves above. Despites the area clearly being a forest, there was something off about the trees. Perhaps there were too few of them, or perhaps there was too much space in between them: one certainly had the impression that the area used to be far more packed before a mysterious force had artificially culled its population for space.

Adding to the eerie atmosphere was the apparently lack of sound from any sort of wildlife one would expected to hear of in a forest: there was no calls of the birds who surveyed the forest from their headquarters above nor any cricketing of the insects which he assumed scuttled below. Instead he was left with in a sort of atmosphere of profound silence, as if everything in the world had lost its ability to create noise apart from himself.

Besides being an extremely unnerving situation to be in, the silence only aided to recall the pangs of depression he had sought to avoid through sleep. The feeling was terrible, and so he tried his very best to rid himself of it.

At first he attempted to dismiss the emptiness by clearing his mind, this proved to be ineffective as the dark clouds of thoughts reformed almost as quickly as they had been dismissed. Then he tried to distract himself through physical activity, like quickly traversing the forest in a sprint without any awareness regarding where he was going. However, that too was ineffective. Not only did it fail to clear his mind, on the contrary the very chaos he had sought to purge came back with a vengeance as it continuously distracted from his immediate concerns-culminating in him tripping over an exposed tree root. After that events moved quickly.

The first thing which happened was a sudden disorientation that overcame both his vision and body, the stable scene of the misty forest ahead was suddenly lost as it quickly melted into the rapidly approaching detail of the muddy ground. 

Then the pain came, followed quickly by the cool touch of wet earth. But that wasn't the end. On his right side he felt the pull of gravity attempting to drag him down and, before long, a good third of his body was already pressed against the smooth slope of dirt.

Instinctively, his right hand shot out in search of something against which to pull for stability. A split second later, he felt his fingers consolidate around the thick body of a tree root. With one hand lying flat on the ground while the other latched onto the tree root, he attempted to push himself back onto the surface with his left hand while using his right hand as a guide.

But a moment of weakness caused him to lose his grip on the root while the moistness of the ground betrayed his left hand to the slopes. His panic probably doomed any further chance of recovery for him.

After that the feelings of pain took over. For the most part the pain was mild, being what you would expect from rolling down a slope at high speed. But occasionally he would feel some part of his body, be it his chest or arm, smash against something hard, a rock perhaps, which would send shockwaves of hurt throughout his body while the affected area became a wellspring of pain.

As he felt himself tumble down the slope, his mind remained focused squarely on the feelings weightlessness that accompanied the fact he was spiraling out of control occasionally disrupted by short intervals of pain. In this state he had lost his sense of time, unable to make out quickly enough how long he had been rolling for before some other part of his body would call his attention away.