Cast Out (Book 1 Done; Book 2 In-Progress)

Chapter 10: Parts 1, 2 & 3

As soon as the old man died, I cut off the magic that I'd been pushing into my weapon skill, Arena of Fire. Like someone blowing out a candle, the flames were snuffed out. The battle this time wasn't hard at all. If I was being honest, the only difficult thing in killing Washy was the fact that the guy was as slippery as an eel. That was the first time I'd seen someone who couldn't be hurt by physical attacks at all. I was even more surprised by the fact that the guy was someone who didn't even know about the dimensional energy's protection. After all, it seemed to be common knowledge among everybody, Players and NPC's alike. If it wasn't for the fact that he'd already died and come back to life faster than any Player could, I could've sworn that he was some newbie that hadn't done proper research on the game.

Even though the battle ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would be, that doesn't mean that it wasn't costly. Using that weapon skill to surround the 2 of us with flames meant sacrificing the weapons themselves. When the Arena was snuffed out, the ashes of the weapons I'd used blew away with it.

Misa was gone. Alexa along with her. Leaving me, by myself, to deal with a stampede of Tree-Beasts. They were already here, circling me right now. I think I finally figured out why there were so many clearings in the forest. Every time these things moved around, it looked like the trees would back away from them, leaving only a mysterious clearing where they'd gathered. Just looking at the darkness that came from inside those stretched-out sockets where eyes should've been would've been terrifying enough. Whereas normally these things were made from wood (which I could've easily set on fire as a distraction in order to get away), these specific ones were slightly different. The bark covering on their bodies had a reddish tinge to it. After being in this game world for a little more than 10 years, it was easy to guess that these ones had adapted to fire. They definitely wouldn't be afraid of fire like all the other She-Trees and Tree-Beasts.

While that was bad enough, I at least knew how to handle this kind of situation. There was something else though. For some reason, there was this heavy feeling at the center of my chest. That was never a good sign for me. I'd learned to trust my gut over the years, and this was definitely it trying to warn me about something. It couldn't be about the Tree-Beasts though. Although I wouldn't be able to fight my way out of this, I'd definitely picked up more than a few tricks in order to get me and Misa out of any fights that we could get into. No, that dread I was feeling definitely couldn't be coming from that.

Maybe it was because of that nagging little voice in the back of my head that was saying, 'If the dragon couldn't put down that old man, what makes you think that you did?'

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Wind roared all around me, the robe flapping madly as I fell through the sky for what would hopefully be the final time before Zhang, Misa and Alexa died. It was long overdue. You could even say that the sky itself was out for blood, by the brilliant streaks of red that showed. By my guess, there was only about a half hour left before sunset. In the hours since I'd lost to Zhang, I'd been in and out of the Mist more than a couple of times. I hadn't seen Zhang and his party since our last battle where he'd made that "Arena of Fire" as he'd called it.

But hey, what's the use of having skills which let you respawn faster than everyone else, if you don't use it?

As soon as my body neared the tops of the trees, I activated [Mist Form], flowing though the tree canopy until my "body" crashed into the ground. I picked myself up off the ground as I became corporeal again.

There wasn't a need for me to look around. I already knew where everything around me was, when my mist body splattered and spread out everywhere on impact. I also knew exactly where in the Boundary Forest I was. If the view from when I was plummeting through the sky hadn't already let me know where I was headed, the sounds of various different animals fighting to be the next Guardian of the 1st layer would've clued me in. The best part was, through my curse with Misa, I could already tell that my favorite people in the entire world were headed my way. It wasn't a coincidence, of course. It turns out that the pool of water I kept jumping into would always lead to whatever location you were viewing. Clearly this game had a lot of patches that needed to be made, because there were way too many things that made me overpowered.