I slowly began backing up. The guards had been right. I had no chance against this thing, even if I was another three levels stronger. This thing was just that strong. On the cusp of Initiate tier, a level that shouldn’t have been possible on this floor. Though, the system probably didn’t want people targeting these things and killing off the NPCs.

  Moonstruck Treant(Lvl 9)

  The treant is a gentle creature by nature. They are among the greatest of the forest guardians, being surpassed only by a scant few. A treant will often find a village to attach itself to. It will help the people of said village flourish until they no longer need it. Then it will move on. This one has been moonstruck. It is unable to think properly any longer and will go on a rampage unless instructed otherwise. You cannot command this creature.

  That sounded… terrifying. Moonstruck? I knew the moon had been said to be able to affect the mind back in elder times, but that was just crazy talk. Those old philosophers didn’t know what they were talking about.

  And yet here I was, bearing witness to the truth of the statement. This was the system, so these kinds of things did happen, but still… I found it oddly funny. I was about to be mauled by the drunken grandma in heels of a prime example of the long disregarded mutterings of gray hairs dead for millennia.

  As for why did I describe it like that—a drunken grandma in heels? Well it was because the thing acted like it. It was incredibly unstable, hobbling around like a boy who had just spun around the bat as many times as he could then tried to jog a hundred meters. It stumbled towards me, a looming shadow in the darkness, and I turned to run.

  I didn’t get that far. Because no matter how unstable a level nine treant was, it was still faster than me.

  I got about six steps in before a blow hit me like a semi on the Autobahn. Something in me crunched, and I was sent flying though the air into a tree. I felt my left collarbone snap at that. Rolling over onto my back, propped up against the base of the tree, I looked around for the thing. Right in time to watch as its foot came down on my legs.

  They turned to shrapnel and patellas.

  A scream tore its way out of my throat like it was alive. Agony given physical form and made manifest. The pain was overwhelming, causing my senses to go haywire and short out. My vision turned black for a moment, and when it returned it had a permanent black border.

  The thing’s poor excuse for a fist slammed into my chest, causing a ripple of cracks to roll down both sets of ribs in front and in back. That caused more of a pointy pain than my legs, and with my ribs now broken, one more punch would turn my insides to mush.

  Yanking things out of my inventory in a desperate effort to get something to protect myself with, I found my shield. How had I already forgotten about that thing? It was probably the most important item in there.

  I pulled it out. It covered nearly my entire torso, and it had a comfortable weight to it. A feeling of solidity.

  All these things flashed across my pain-addled mind as I hoisted it up to stop the incoming punch from the thing. It thundered into my shield with the force of a half dozen sledge-hammers, causing my arms to buckle and the rim of the shield to smack my forehead.

  Seeing another punch coming, I huddled even further beneath my shield, not even bothering to raise it this time. Blow after echoing blow hammered into my shield. It was going to break any time soon. I could practically hear the cracks in it growing. Every punch seemed like it would be the last.

  But the shield held.

  A miracle of all miracles, that was. I was still alive, even somewhat intact, having gathered my screaming legs up into the shield’s protection at the first possible opportunity.

  I owed my life to the thing dozens of times over now. I would have become a Felix sized pancake if I had taken even one more blow from that thing, but the shield held.

  But still the beating continued. It rained down on the shield’s boss, rim, and the slats that composed the bulk of it. Thankfully, though, the treant didn’t think to come around the side of the shield or just grab me. All it’s moonstruck brain… soul… thing, whatever it used to pilot its body, could think of at the moment was smash.

  And all I could think of was to sit there under the shield, and wait for the morning to arrive. Hopefully that would drive it away, though I didn’t hold on to too much faith in that assumption. Just because it stopped attacking the village when morning came did not mean the same thing applied to a random person in the middle of the forest. I was a bit of a more enticing target than the town. I didn’t have twenty-foot tall walls. Just a simple shield made of hickory which wouldn’t survive another day and a half of beating no matter how hard it tried.

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  The night passed in a haze of pain and fear. Seconds felt like minutes which felt like hours which felt like days. Yet the whole thing passed in a blink. Time did that weird thing it always does when you’re living by the minute. Like at school when you’re bored of a class but there’s ten minutes left combined with recess afterward.

  I nearly passed out a number of times, both from physical ailments and just plain old tiredness. Yeah, that’s right. I was tired, both mentally and physically. Being beaten to within an inch of your life with just a single punch will do that to you.

  Finally, the deep shades of gray signaled the dawn. It was the kind of dawn that snuck up on you without you knowing it as the shades grew ever so slightly brighter in a smooth sequence that tricked your eyes into believing it was still night out. Then you suddenly realized the sun was on its way.

  But the beating didn’t stop. It didn’t stop when the first light came, it didn’t stop when the sun was—I assumed—fully above the natural horizon. It didn’t stop for nearly three more hours after sunrise.

  I was beginning to think it wouldn’t go away at all, which was a miracle in and of itself with my brain in the state it was, when the pounding simply… ceased. It didn’t slow, it didn’t stagger to a stop as the beast came to. It just stopped.

  Coming out of my shell after I was certain it was gone took a bit more willpower than I had thought. But after an estimated fifteen minutes or so, the birdsong came back. That gave me the courage necessary to poke my head above the rim and take a look around.

  A series of monstrous tracks led off into the woods. The indentations left by that thing’s… trunks(?) were massive, three inches deep at the edges and a foot and a half wide. And that thing had been hammering at my shield all night.

  I could see where they were coming from as clear as the day I was rejoicing to see. Good. That meant I had a solid reference point for which direction to head in when I set out for the village. Which would have to be soon. I wasn’t in the mood to ever, ever go through something like last night again.

  First I would take a short rest. I deserved it, and I would get myself killed if I left now. Probably from passing out while a predator watched.

  A nap would be dangerous, though. I couldn’t take that risk out where a fox could rip me to shreds if it caught me sufficiently off guard. I couldn’t let… I couldn’t… I…

  I woke to the light of the noonday sun. Yet again. This was the third time in a row I had opened my eyes to see that glowing ball of fire hanging out in the center of the sky now. Only one of them had been a good thing: when I entered this floor.

  Stopping myself from panicking, I started to move. Only to realize in a rather abrupt fashion, that wounds given by a level nine monster to a level two human would not be healing any time soon.

  Superficial scratches, sure. But broken bones, torn muscles, and slight concussions? No way.

  That news was not appreciated very much, as it meant I would have to drag myself all the way to the village using only my right arm. All while the entire rest of my body threw a fit and screamed at me in the hyper voice of an unusually loud five year old.

  Fantastic.

  Well, the day wasn’t getting any younger, and the pain wasn’t going lessen at all. So I started off.

  And boy, let me tell you. It hurt like all the nine hells thrown into a blender along with some delicious spices like cardamom and fresh scorpion tails thrown in. Also add a dash of agony, a splash of half a hundred mosquito bites, and a tiny bundle of gympie-gympie leaves.

  There you have it. That’s what dragging shattered legs, broken ribs, a snapped collarbone, and a hypersensitive nervous system across a rough forest floor covered in needles and grass feels like.

  It took hours. Literal hours for me to reach the clearing with the village in it. Hours of the worst, self-inflicted, soul seeping pain you could possibly imagine. I passed out four times along the way. At least I hadn’t met any monsters. I wouldn’t have been in any shape to deal with them.

  I crawled out of the trees into the light of the late afternoon sun and waved my hand until the village guard saw me. They approached carefully—good for them, that was the proper reaction—but when they saw me and the state I was in they all but dropped their weapons as they rushed to my side. Thanks, boys.

  The two guards I had met yesterday were there as well as a few more strange faces. Probably from the wall-top. They had a short conversation among them, but I didn’t catch a word they said. I was too delirious to understand much of anything apart from pain and a vague sense of my surroundings at the moment.

  Eventually two of them ran off and came back with a stretcher to carry me inside. The senior guard tried to talk to me, making reassuring noises, but he gave up at my non-reaction. After that they just hoisted me onto the stretcher, too worn out to voice a complaint, and carried me beyond the gates.

  I was dropped off at a house near the center of the village, then helped inside by a young man and his wife, probably only five or so years older than I was. They set me on a bed in the middle of a barren room and the woman busied herself at a counter in the corner.

  Oh the bed. It felt heavenly, so far beyond my old bed there was barely any comparison. It was like comparing the texture of clouds to hard steel. There was no common denominator I could think of that did it justice. The bed was just that good.

  I would learn later that the bed was actually fairly mediocre when it came to those sorts of things, but my apartment mat was basically just that—a mat. It wasn’t much more than an anti-bruising sheet settled on the hardwood floor with a pillow the texture of a rock. This one was miles better in comparison.

  The woman in the corner finished up whatever she was doing over there and brought me a cup of some steaming liquid. It was hot. Very hot. But she forced me to drink it all the same. That was nice, but I didn’t really feel like drinking at the moment.

  A few seconds later I started feeling an odd sensation. It was as if I was floating right off of the heavenly bed and rising towards the clouds. At the same time, I was sinking lower and lower into a dark and welcoming abyss. It was wonderful. The pain vanished for the first time in a long while, and I could just relax.

  I fell asleep then, comfortable for the first time in nearly ten years.