Day's wisp flew up high, out from between the Treefather's upper branches.

"I see them!" Day said. "They're at the edge of the glade. They'll be here any second!"

"Who is here?" I demanded. "What's going on?!"

"The anti-virus units that pursued you through the Network," Sound said, "they're coming!"

"But how?" Ileene said. "I thought we were safe!"

"Didn't you say your wyrm-powers drew the Vyx's attention?" Wind asked.

"Yes, but—" My leaves rustled as my body shivered. "Oh no…" I gestured at Suisei. "When I showed Suisei my memories of my fight with the twEfE, I was—"

"—Don't tell me you used them?!" Wind barked.

"Stop this!" Day said. "There's no time to bicker! Listen: there's an entrance into my trunk on my left side, at the base. Enter it, and climb. The portal to the Network is there. Use it, and get out of here, quickly!"

"Why can't you just send us there now?" I hissed.

"Because they'll know!" Day replied. "Now go! We'll do our best to stall them."

So we ran—what else could we do?—moving away from Day at first, just to get around his massive roots. I swear, it was like we were skirting around hillsides! Coming around the first root, we didn't see an entrance but, sure enough, after coming around the second, we did. The simple, arched tunnel that bore into the Treefather's trunk was several times our size, more than enough for us to run in together.

As I dashed in, I looked over my shoulder.

"Fudge!" I hissed.

Anti-virus units—I'm just gonna call them AVUs—were floating over a hill at the edge of Day's Glade. In seconds, they'd be at the river, and from there it was just a hop, skip, and a leap to the Treefathers.

"Dr. Howle, C'mon!" Ileene tugged at my head-leaf.

I ran inside along with the others, only to stop. I gawked as I ran.

Whoa…

The tunnel let out into a massive hollow carved inside the tree, at gargantuan scale. It made me feel like a little bean sprout.

Unsurprisingly, Day's interior wasn't exactly the most brightly lit place. Light tumbled down thinly from holes high up on the Treefather's trunk, just enough to take the edge out of the gloam, but not enough to choke the gleam of the star-like blossoms growing from the thick mats of vines that covered so many of the walls. The place was rich with the scents of sap, earth, and—obviously—wood. Branches grew from the inner walls, sporting green leaves far paler than the ones outside. A few of the branches were substantial enough to function as bridges from one side of the expanse to another. Some even supported clusters of small shacks, bits and pieces of a ramshackle, vertically spacious settlement.

Looking up, I felt vertigo, only in the wrong direction. It was like being inside a skyscraper, except there was little, if anything, to block the view.

Between the branches, I could see almost all the way up.

We walked toward the middle of the ground floor.

"I think people once lived here," I said. My voice echoed in the woody depth.

The central space was littered with gallimaufry relics of long-abandoned lives: wooden statues, delicately carved; podiums topped in bowls whose incense stains lay buried in dust; clay amphoras, dry as bone; rugged tables; battered chests.

"Those statues," Ileene said, "they're krummholz."

"The treefathers had mentioned they'd made the krummholz from carved fetishes outsiders had given them," Mr. Himichi said.

As we walked through the space, we adjusted to the dim light, which brought more and more details into view.

There were carvings in the walls, painted and lacquered, in a mix of abstract designs and recognizable images. The latter had clearly been made by the pointy-eared, gray-skinned humanoids Night's vision. One carving showed a child holding hands with a krummholz in friendship.

It was hard not to linger.

A whole society had once lived here, and now, it was gone. Would that be how my world would be remembered, if it was at all?

"There, look!" Mr. Himichi said.

Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to carve a broad, inclined walkway that gently spiraled up along the walls.

"C'mon!" Ileene yelled.

We ran up the path, and, for a while, it was smooth sailing. We went around one full turn of the spiral path, but—wouldn't you know it—just when I dared to think we might be home free, we hit a snag, or, rather, the edge of one.

I'd run out to the front of the group, which meant I had to dig my feet into the wooden slope to slow myself down. I managed to skid to a stop just in time.

"Fudge!" I cursed.

There was a break in the path directly ahead. My toeless, wooden feet came right up to the edge. The gap was about as large as a room in a house. Looking down, I saw the spiral path's first turn immediately below us.

Fortunately, there was a simple wood-plank bridge to cross the gap; unfortunately, the bridge was completely broken.

Stepping back to get a better view, Suisei sized up the gap.

"I think we can jump it," he said.

But Mr. Himichi stuck his hand out in front of Suisei. "No, Suisei," he said, "it's too far to jump. Trust me."

Ileene pointed at the stretch of the path beyond the gap. "Then how do we get up there?"

Mr. Himichi spent a moment looking around.

I almost wanted to tell him to hurry up.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Then, staring at the wall, he yelled: "The vines! We can climb the vines!"

"Are they sturdy enough?" I asked.

"They'll have to be." He started to climb. His leaves rustled about with every step.

I glanced at Ileene and then took a polite bow. "After you."

Ileene narrowed her ember-red eyes at me and then followed after Mr. Himichi. I went next, with Suisei right below me.

Let the record show that I was not a very good climber. Up until the world ended, the bulk of my experiences with climbing consisted of the times I'd mostly failed to do the pole-climb exercise in elementary school and middle school, especially when the National Fitness Exam was given. However, since acquiring magic powers, I'd scaled the side of WeElMed using nothing but psychokinesis and grit and, and also a wee bit of help from &alon. These experiences averaged out, leaving me feeling more confident about the situation than I otherwise would have.

Unfortunately, we were also under a time limit, and so I was definitely panicking, nervously patting my hands on the vines and the wood, constantly looking up and down.

It was very stressful, that's what I'm saying.

The vines had an unexpectedly rubbery feel to them, and they deformed slightly whenever I gripped them. Though I hardly weighed anything at all as a krummholz, that was still enough of a load that the sections of the vines I was gripping swayed between the clusters of holdfasts anchoring them to wood.

Had I been in my human body, the vines wouldn't have put up with me, though I think a kid might have been able to do it.

I have to say, though, I really missed not being able to make little psychic platforms to give myself places to stand on, but no matter how much I wanted to do that here and now, I just couldn't risk it. Using my powers here would alert the AVUs and eliminate what little lead we had on them.

"Whatever you do," Mr. Himichi said, two bodies above me, "don't panic."

"I'm trying!" I said.

I didn't bother to point out that several psychological studies had shown that telling people not to panic was more likely to make them panic than saying nothing at all.

Then my foot slipped.

I screamed.

Some of the holdfast immediately beneath me snapped off the wall, causing the vine to swing.

I screamed louder.

Suisei got off the vine just in time, hopping over to another mat immediately to his right.

"Genneth!" Mr. Himichi cried.

I looked up. "It's okay," I said, tightening my grip on the vines. "It's okay. I'm—"

Then the vine shuddered downward several feet. I spun in place.

"—No! I'm not fine! I'm not fine!"

Suisei scuttled toward me and, clinging to the vine with one hand, reached up and grabbed the section of my vine that dangled beneath me. He held onto it until it steadied and I stopped screaming.

"Thanks!" I said, tightening my grip.

"Hurry," Day said, "I can't hold them off much longer!" The Treefather's whispers echoed through his hollows.

Up above, I heard a whole lot of rustling, then quiet.

"Ileene, grab my hand," Mr. Himichi said.

Again, I looked up. Mr. Himichi had made it onto a walkable section of the big branch that stuck out from the wall. There was a small gap between where he now stood and the vines on the wall.

He must have leapt across the gap.

"No," he said, "come a bit higher, first."

Ileene was a little bit higher than the level of the branch when Mr. Himichi said, "That's good, jump," and she jumped.

Her pink and yellow flower-petal queues ruffled as she leapt.

Mr. Himichi grabbed her hand in hand. As she landed, he turned, positioning her beside him on the branch.

"Genneth, you're up!" he said.

"I'm coming! I'm coming!"

"You can do it," Suisei said, from underneath me.

After climbing up to where Ileene had, I looked over my shoulder. The gap between the wall and the flat-topped branch drew my view downward.

"Don't look down!" Mr. Himichi said.

I barely managed to stop myself in time.

"Go!" Suisei clamored. "Jump!"

I flailed my limbs during my split-second jump. My arms and legs could barely be seen sticking out from my leafy robe. Ileene and Mr. Himichi held out their arms to catch me, but I fell on them and the three of us smacked onto the floor.

It was one thing to do an action sequence when you were a high level half-pangol cleric with a chonky <Beast Shape> and magic at your disposal. It was quite another when you were a diminutive wooden puppet clothed in leaves, being chased by angry dodecahedrons that consumed imagination the way locusts ate crops.

Suisei rustled as I pushed myself and the others up. He'd already landed on the branch by the time we were back on our feet.

"Run!" Day yelled. "They're coming! They're coming!" His scream squalled through his trunk. Everything shook; wood planks and other discarded objects fell from the upper branches.

The four of us looked at each other, and then followed along the branch to where it merged with the winding path carved into the wall on the opposite side of the Treefather's hollow.

We ran like heck, and it was a good thing the artificially flattened upper side of the branch was plenty wide. If not, I might have died from a fatal case of the heebie-jeebies.

"ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

My leaves shivered as the familiar, atonal shriek echoed up from down below.

"Run!" Suisei yelled.

We turned as we stepped onto the carved path, a smooth, step-free incline, just like its lower stretch.

Mr. Himichi pointed up. "There's something above us!"

Looking up, I saw that a bunch of branches had grown together into a platform in the middle of the space overhead.

"We have assholes at six o'clock!" Ileene yelled.

I looked down.

"ERADICATE THE BLIGHT! ERADICATE THE BLIGHT!"

The AVUs flew toward us at terrific speeds. Biting geometry swirled, tumultuous, around the units' dodecahedral bodies, glinting in the shafts of light that smiled down from the clerestory openings high up in Day's trunk.

Running in this body was like being surrounded by falling water; so many rustling leaves.

My head-leaf tugged at my scalp as it bobbed in my wake. In seconds, we were level with the platform.

Thankfully, the portal was there, exactly as promised.

Once, the platform had to have been some kind of gathering place. Toppled furniture and abandoned debris cluttered the platform, whose surface was hidden beneath by planks of wood joined by slots and dowels. The portal was a door in the air standing at the center of the platform. Wisps streamed from its periphery, playing like light in a reflecting pool.

"Now that's a portal!" I said.

I could see the Network maze through it!

Crossing the branches, we ran onto the platform, and darted into the portal, just as the AVUs rose up over the platform's edge. For a split second, everything vanished as I went through the portal, as if the world had blinked. The next thing I knew, I was out in the hallway of the Network's maze, human again, alongside my three companions. The labyrinth's walls were as enigmatic as ever, and different from before: an angry, almost reddish brown that pulsed in figurations of striations and squares.

From where we stood, I had a clear view of just how far the "severance" had progressed. The tower of light was just barely visible at the furthest reaches of my vision. The surrounding labyrinth was broken into pieces that, even now, continued to drift away, leaving us stranded on an island of maze in a sea of bottomless dark.

Overhead, somewhere beyond sight, something like lighting thundered.

"Can you get us out?" Suisei asked.

"I don't know!"

I glanced at the portal behind me, only to see the AVUs flying toward it. Curiously, their movements seemed to be slowed.

Was time running at different speeds on different sides of the portal?

I guess we'd find out soon enough.

"Run!" I yelled.

We managed to get to where the hall turned up ahead when the AVUs burst back to the maze, announcing their presence with gusto: "ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

Tenacious little buggers, weren't they?

Groaning inwardly, I ran harder. Up ahead, the path widened, like a nerve ganglion, and then branched out in four directions. I chose one at random— the second one from the left—and then ran toward it while doing my old trick of summoning crystalline trees in the branches I hadn't picked, hoping it would distract our pursuers.

Unfortunately, I underestimated just how persistent angry mathematics could be.

Half a dozen of AVUs bowled across the labyrinth, swathed in swirling metal, demolishing one wall after another, shattering them like glass and crashing symbols. Their battle-cries overlapped in a manic stretto.

"ERA—"

"—RADI—"

"—CATE!"

"ERA—"

"—DICATE!"

With all the nearby walls gone, our surroundings had become a single, large room. Crevasses split through the area where the severance process was breaking the maze apart. Wall fragments bounced off the floor and spilled into the crevasses, disappearing into the abyss. But, even with the walls gone, the portals and portholes remained intact, floating above the tumbling debris.

Behind us, the AVUs' dodecahedral cores spun around like gyroscopes from within their swirls of metal shapes. They aimed at us, turning toward us with bloodhound intent. Others skirted the perimeter of the room and swerved to the opposite side before turning around and taking aim.

They surrounded us like the numbers on a clock face.

"ERADICATE!"

Then they charged.

"There," Suisei yelled, "that portal!"

It was our nearest (and only) option.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.