Broken Lands

Chapter 415 – More than Monsters

The tracks led the group around a Giant Fire Ant anthill, where they were set on by literal flaming ants the size of chihuahuas. It was something else Sophia hadn’t fought in the Broken Lands but it still brought back memories; there was a dungeon in Texas that had flaming ants. Those ants were bigger, but it was Texas. Bigger ants should be expected.

Admittedly, there were almost certainly larger ants in the anthill. Sophia guessed it was probably a separate area; otherwise, exploring it would be almost impossible. There could easily be the start of a different questline waiting at the bottom of the anthill, too. They didn’t need it, so they’d leave it for someone else.

Sophia nodded to herself as she called her Plumes back into her Hoard without needing to deal with any of the ants; Ci’an and Dav were able to deal with them all. She liked calling the linked Challenges quests even though that wasn’t the terminology the Archons or the Guide used. Challenges could be the zones themselves. They needed to complete three Challenges in different zones to move on. “Wait. Xin’ri, I thought the Challenges all had to be in different zones. Does what we’ve done so far even count?”

“Probably?” Xin’ri didn’t sound confident at all. “I’m beginning to wonder if I added that. Our Challenges back home were always separated, even in the Maze, and we called those zones. When the archons used the word zones I think I just assumed that’s what they meant. I mean … if it weren’t for the Maze, I think I’d call these different zones. The entrance area is a pretty safe zone with no defined Challenges, then there are Challenges scattered all around the area, one to a zone. I haven’t yet seen them fighting each other and there’s some space between them.”

“It’s still early,” Dav said pessimistically. “It wouldn’t surprise me if fighting between zones was a thing later, maybe even later on this floor. Dealing with multiple types of enemies that are also fighting each other is a pretty smooth step up in difficulty from a single homogenous enemy type. I think you’re right that each area is what they meant by zone though; in an open space like this, distance is sort of like walls. It’s better design, too. Less artificial-looking. It’s actually pretty easy to change the setting fairly quickly if you’re careful; transitional zones are important but don’t actually have to be all that large on a planetary scale. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the zones aren’t all the same size or shape, either, which helps a lot with making it seem natural.”

Sophia blinked. “I forgot that that’s what you did back before you got here.”

“Not the design work,” Dav clarified. “Thankfully. The level of detail work needed to make an environment really feel alive the way this does would drive me nuts. The background noise of the birds and insects and the way it quiets nearby when we fight but not when we talk … that’s harder than you think. I’d much rather poke holes in what someone else did, though, and that means I know something about it. When something just plain looks wrong to you, it needs to be fixed, but it can’t be fixed until you figure out why it looks wrong.”

“It probably helps a lot that the World Tree uses actual creatures to do things like sound,” Sophia said with a wry smile as she watched a small brown bird that could easily have been a house sparrow startle as they approached and fly frantically to a nearby tree. “Getting the ecology to make sense with a lot of different areas and people who come through regularly and hunt the monsters, though … I can see where that would be hard.”

She was certain Cliff was going to find it immensely rewarding. 

With that, they started pointing out small things they saw to each other. Dav was particularly good at figuring out where new zones were and especially bad at spotting the “normal” inhabitants. He could see where a large boulder wasn’t actually a half-buried boulder but some sort of shelled monster that pretended to be a large rock spike but he had to search for the circling vulture after Sophia pointed it out and couldn’t find the quail at all until they were close enough that the birds leapt into the air to flee.

It was fun.

The Little Nibblers were not fun. They were small bitey fish that swarmed the group as they forded a small creek that formed a long, thin zone of its own through the plains, separating the scrubland they were leaving from an area with taller, thicker grass. Killing an individual fish was easy, but there were so many of them that grabbed on to anything they could manage, including both fingers and clothing, that Xin’ri ended up sweeping all of them with a weak lightning attack to make the bitey fish fall off. Even after that, she had to smack a few off her staff, since it wasn’t hit by the lightning it produced.

The tall grass hid a lot more than the shorter, well-separated plants in the previous area. The first snake attack made Sophia glad she was wearing thick leather boots, while the third just made her sigh. They weren’t dangerous, they were just annoying.

It was roughly an hour and a half of shooing off or killing pests and carefully avoiding whatever else they could manage to skip when the tracks led them to a hole in the ground. The tall grass around it was cleared to the point that the raised lip of the hole was completely bare dirt. It was nearly a foot across, certainly large enough to make Sophia wonder what dug the hole, but also definitely not large enough to fit in unless it was a symbolic opening to another area.

“The being we’re following was headed this way, but I can’t tell if it went into the hole or not,” Ci’an stated with a frown. “I thought it was headed off to the right a bit more but there’s no way to tell now. Not with whatever dug this hole here.”

“Where do you think it was headed? Maybe we can find another sign of it past this zone.” Dav waited until Ci’an pointed, then started slowly walking in that direction. “Stay there and I’ll try to make a straight line through here.”

“Yip yip!” A pair of loud, high-pitched barks sounded like they came from the burrow directly in front of Sophia, but there wasn’t anything there. Sophia glanced around until she saw another cleared spot ahead of them and to the right, not quite in line with where Dav was headed but not too far off, either. A knee-high brown rodent with a black tail stood next to that hole. It hopped in place as another “Yip yip!” came from the hole in front of Sophia. Was it sending echoes through a warren somehow?

That was that thing, anyway? The markings weren’t right for a chipmunk, and those were three-dwelling anyway … weren’t they?

The confusion cleared almost immediately, replaced by knowledge from Cliff. That was a Voice-Throwing Prairie Dog. While they were prey animals, they weren’t helpless; they created huge colonies below the prairie and would swarm if the colony was sufficiently threatened. Unlike many of the other creatures in the World Tree, however, they wouldn’t attack first. They also had a significant range of vocalizations that could warn their kin or even call them if they found something particularly yummy.

“Wait, you have a language?” The words Sophia directed at the Prairie Dog came out as “Yip yip yiiiip?” to Sophia’s ears, clear evidence that not only did they have a language, Sophia was able to speak it. While she no longer had the full Innate Communication Ability the Guide gave her and Dav when they arrived in the Broken Lands, what she did have was apparently close enough.

That or she was getting the language from Cliff. Yeah, that was probably it. That suited the way her Abilities worked now better overall and it only made sense that a dungeon … er, Tower … would be able to understand the languages of its residents. Cliff had to supply them in the first place if he wanted his Voice-Throwing Prairie Dogs to actually communicate with each other. Once he had Voice-Throwing Prairie Dogs, anyway. Sophia was certain that would be soon.

The prairie dog was just as startled as Sophia was. It gave another “Yip!” that held the same meaning as swearing, then jumped in the hole next to it. A moment later, its head popped out just enough to see Sophia.

Sophia grinned at it. Another string of yips meant, “That’s right, little one; I can talk to you. Will you talk to me?”

“What do you want?” The oversized prairie dog’s yip sounded deeply suspicious.

“We found a statue …” Sophia turned towards Dav to tell him to hold the statue where the prairie dog coils see it, but he was already ahead of her. He held it with the rabbit-person facing the prairie dog, which meant that the spot of light that glowed on the outer surface of the sphere was mostly turned away from the rodent. 

She nodded and continued. “It was in a tree and there were signs that someone ran away from it. We’re trying to find that person.”

The prairie dog looked back and forth between Sophia and the statue for a long moment, then seemed to come to a decision. It yipped, “Wait!” then disappeared into the burrow.

Sophia was glad it didn’t ask her to follow it inside. She probably could have if she turned into feathers, but that wasn’t exactly a fun way to travel. It was slow, for one thing, and she couldn’t maneuver worth a damn. The fastest way to travel like that was to manifest herself at a feather on the far side, call her feathers back to herself, then push them out again and turn back into feathers. She didn’t think that would work very well in a space that was only barely large enough to fit her. Maybe there was enough room underground, but she wasn’t willing to count on it.

It wasn’t more than a minute or two before a pair of rabbit ears announced the arrival of a small bunny. Cliff’s knowledge corrected Sophia; even though it looked exactly like the sort of small bunny she’d seen in the wild a few times, it wasn’t a wild rabbit. She was looking at a Lapine, a specific species of Tower rabbit that had the ability to speak. The species name sounded familiar, like she’d seen it somewhere before, but Sophia wasn’t sure where. It was probably the scientific name for rabbits or something. She knew it started with an L.

“You dealt with the shadows?” The rabbit asked nervously in Arcas. “I don’t want to have to run again so you’d better not have brought the shadows here. Oh no, I see! The moon is lit! It hasn’t been lit since the shadows covered it. Oh, oh, does that mean you can deal with more shadows?”

“Yes we can deal with more shadow lurkers,” Sophia reassured the Lapine. “That’s why we’re here. How did you get away from them in the first place?”

“I hopped and I hopped and I hopped,” the Lapine answered. “And then I left the idol on a tree and hopped even more and longer! I only stopped when I couldn’t hop any more. The prairie dogs brought me inside when I collapsed next to their colony and helped me recover, but I haven’t dared go back to where I left the idol.”