Sam

  Mongrel eventually finished with the two survivors and came over to where Sam had found a seat on the ground, fruitlessly pulling up blades of grass. The old man was wiping his hands on a strip of a pieced-up blanket, having used the rest as bandaging, and watched her a while with pursed lips.

  "We should probably be burying them," she said, nodding toward the line of corpses some fifteen feet off.

  "Nah," he replied. "No time. Besides, some beast or another would just come along to dig them up again."

  "I suppose."

  With a dramatic groan, he bent down to take a seat next to her, knees crackling. His hands reasonably clean of blood and dirt, he handed his rag to Sam. She accepted even though it was already well-used, and began rubbing her arms and face with it. It wasn't like it could make her any dirtier.

  "I'll table the lecture about you running off all half-cocked," Mongrel said with a chuckle, though his brow retained a light frown. "Looks like you've got enough on your mind already."

  Sam snorted. "Thanks."

  Another pause. Then, after a while, he said: "You can't win 'em all, you know. There's no shame in getting your ass kicked every now and then."

  Sam finished with the rag and let it drop between her feet. "I know that. I'm not upset because I lost."

  "Why, then?"

  "Because I hesitated, Mongrel. I could've stayed on top of that monster, kept it from hurting anyone else, but I froze. Couldn't make up my mind on whether I should kill it. Because of that, people died. Their deaths are on me."

  "I get it, kid. Don't be so hard on yourself, kid. I reckon none of 'em would have lived if you hadn't gone in like you did."

  Sam looked up at the old man. She refused to allow herself the indignity of crying, but she couldn't stop a slight quiver of her bottom lip. "This can't happen again. I have to be able to kill monsters. If something like this happens again, I have to be ready."

  He said nothing, just watched her, slowly ran a hand through his thin gray hair. Then he gave a tiny nod.

  The two of them sat in silence for a minute, Mongrel just making random plosive noises to cut the awkwardness—quite unsuccessfully. Then he gave her a hesitant, weird uncle kind of pat on the back.

  "Reckon we should get a move on soon," he said, climbing to his feet. "The new kid got to Level 3 just before we hit all this mess, so if we keep going we might get him high enough to pick up Detect. I'm thinking all this fucking smoke and mirrors might actually be good for his leveling."

  "Right," Sam replied, and began picking herself up.

  As she got ready to leave, she noticed that the fog had begun closing in on the area where they stood, tendrils of mist spreading across the ground and twirling about their legs as though to grab hold of them.

  "The nettlegeist thing must have herded us here specifically," she said, "hoping the troll would kill us so it could get some easy leftovers."

  "I reckon so," Mongrel said with a nod.

  "So I guess it's some kind of… symbiotic… scavenger type thing?"

  "Reckon so."

  "So what are the chances of the nettlegeist running us into even more monsters when we keep going?"

  "High, I reckon." He looked up from his double-checking of Zero's gear, absently patting her neck as the mule stepped nervously in place. "Three of the boys have died already, somewhere out there. I know 'cause I feel them shoot back inside me to regenerate. I won't know exactly how they died until they pop back out and tell me themselves, but I can feel their emotions a little, and it doesn't seem like they died nice. Either the nettlegeist got them, or there are other nasties out there waiting for us."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "Fun," Sam muttered.

  "Truly fucking hilarious."

  They got moving again, picking a direction that seemed relatively safe—not that they had much to go by—and headed off into the mists. The two survivors from the slave transport tagged along without protest. The mercenary was a Level 6 Builder named Price, and the slave was a Level 3 Entertainer named Flowerboy. Neither one of them talked much.

  They made all right progress for what felt like a few hours. They reluctantly followed the path that the fog laid out for them, though they strained against it whenever possible, and stayed ready for anything. But nothing jumped out at them, and their vigilance was eventually blunted.

  Toward what had to be the afternoon, though it was impossible to tell through the impenetrable gray blanket that surrounded them on all sides, the group began to notice a strange affliction coming over them. Shortness of breath accompanied by a tingling in the mouth and throat, as well as rapidly spreading rashes. It was almost like some sort of strange allergic reaction. Only Sam and Gug were mostly exempt, likely due to high Toughness and Mutagenesis respectively.

  "Could be hallucinations," Mongrel said once it became severe enough that they could no longer ignore it. "Might be the nettlegeist is trying to freak us out, get us rushing, making mistakes."

  "And if it's not that?" Sam asked.

  "Might be another monster fucking with us. Hard to say." He scratched vigorously at a growing red patch on the side of his neck until his nails made white streaks of flaking skin. "But I guess our outlook just went from bad to worse." He directed a stern frown at Oatmeal, who looked like he was trying to disappear into his collar. "So you better quit fucking around and level up already."

  No one was feeling particularly good about it, but there was little they could do to stop the symptoms, so they just kept going, picking up the pace as best they could without being reckless.

  The day wore on, and they finally began to notice some sort of change in the sky as the section of fog over their heads slowly darkened. Strangely, they also felt as though the fog began retracting with the failing of the day, eventually allowing them to see more than a few feet in front of them. The bony, mostly leafless trees around them came back into view. Though a drab, uninspiring sight, it was still welcome.

  Of course, they still maintained a healthy suspicion that it was the nettlegeist luring them into another trap, but as time passed and nothing attacked them that began to seem increasingly less likely.

  "I think our friend is starting to get tired," Mongrel speculated, followed by a fit of hacking coughs. He finished with a long groan, wiping spittle from his lip, and said: "Monsters don't get AP, so any innate skills they have are necessarily cantrips, meaning they can use them to their black little shriveled hearts' content. They still suffer skill fatigue, though, as far as I know.

  "I reckon the nettlegeist was expecting us to have croaked already. Needing to keep up this fog for a whole day might be starting to take its toll.

  "Good," Sam said, nodding. "Maybe it'll clear up enough that we can track the bastard down."

  "Here's hoping."

  They hardly had time to utter that thought before an unholy wail cut through the twisting wall of mist, almost like the throaty yowl of a dying cat. Definitely not human.

  Within moments, the fog began trembling, dispersing, evaporating.

  "The shit was that?" Mongrel growled, naked sword resting against his shoulder and his free hand resting on his cocked hip. "Nettlegeist slip and fall down a ravine or something?"

  Oatmeal, taking things in somewhat less even stride, had his trembling blade in both hands, point held out before him as he jerked his head this way and that. "Is that good or bad?" he asked, looking a bit green in the face. "Oh god… I'm going to die, aren't I? Why did I agree to this…?"

  There was another cry, fainter this time, shortly followed by a familiar-sounding hoot.

  "That's Number One," Mongrel said without hesitation.

  Sure enough, a minute later the old chimp came hobbling through the undergrowth, displacing some of the final stubborn tentacles of mist. He wore his bow case strapped to his back and the weapon itself in one hand, an arrow clutched against the grip.

  With rare energy, Mongrel shoved past the others and met Number One halfway at a steady jog. He got on one knee and put a hand on the old chimp's shoulders. "Good to see you, buddy," he said.

  The rest of their conversation passed in silence as signs flowed rapidly between the two. Sam lingered nearby, not wanting to interrupt, until Mongrel stood back up and faced the others.

  "I've got some pretty good news and some slightly less good news," he announced. "Number Two is the only other chimp still around, but him and Number One got separated, so we still don't know where he is.

  "That's the slightly less good news. The pretty good news is that Number One managed to stalk our stalker for a little while and got a shot off on it. It did a runner, but he thinks he can track it.

  "So I guess the question is, do we want to chase the fucker down and kill it, or do we want to take the opportunity to get out of here while we've got it running scared?"

  "We kill it," Sam said quickly, sounding a good deal more confident than she felt. "If we give it time to rest and recover it might just come after us again before we can get away, and there's no guarantee that it will give Number One another chance to tag it."

  "Fair enough," Mongrel said, "and I happen to agree." He made a lazy gesture toward the others with the point of his sword. "Anyone, objections? Opinions?"

  Oatmeal shook his head.

  Flowerboy shook his head.

  Gug was staring off at nothing with his tongue out, clearly not paying attention.

  "Let's kill it," Price said, prodding at a rash forming on her jawline. "I've got friends that need avenging."

  And so it was decided.