Chapter 212: The Wooden Snake
Neil lay still for a moment listening to the day start outside.
Ileana was warm beside him and stirred with the small sound she made when she was waking but had not decided to yet, and he got up carefully with the movement of someone trying not to disturb the quality of morning quiet that existed in the window between a person sleeping and a person waking.
He washed and came back to find her sitting up with the loose unhurried quality of someone who had slept well and was not going to pretend the morning required urgency.
She looked at him with morning eyes, clear and direct.
They ate breakfast at the domain table and the morning moved at the pace mornings moved when there was no immediate emergency pressing from behind, which was a pace Neil had learned to receive rather than push against.
He noticed Jane at the far end of the table talking to Ileana, and the quality of the conversation was different from the first days in a way that was easy to read once you were looking for it.
Lighter.
More natural.
The careful calibration of someone new to an environment giving way to the easier quality of people who had started to actually know each other rather than simply be present in the same space.
Jane said something and Ileana laughed, which was not a performance laugh but the real version, brief and warm, and Jane’s expression in the moment after it was the small and unguarded version of itself, the one she pulled back quickly when she noticed it had appeared.
Ileana caught Neil’s eye across the table with the warm and slightly amused quality she had when she had noticed something and was pleased about it and wanted him to know she had noticed without making a statement out of it.
He looked back at his food.
Randy was not in his office.
This was not a surprise because Randy was rarely in his office, his relationship with the concept of a fixed location being largely theoretical, and Neil found him three streets from the main hall talking to a group of settlement officers with the animated quality he had when a situation had recently developed in a direction he found personally interesting.
The officers looked like people who had been on the receiving end of something they had not been prepared for and were in the process of receiving instructions about how to deal with it.
Randy saw Neil coming from twenty metres and his expression shifted into the particular version it had when something useful had arrived at a convenient moment, the easy surface of it carrying something more alert underneath.
"Oh, is it our champion." He said, and the officers collectively straightened in the reflex way of settlement personnel when someone whose name had been moving through the settlement’s conversation came into their immediate vicinity. "One moment gentlemen, this young lord requires my attention."
He detached from the group with the ease of someone who had concluded that conversation at precisely the right moment, which was before it required him to commit to anything specific, and walked toward Neil with his hands in his pockets and the particular unhurried stride of someone who moved at whatever pace he felt like moving at and had never been given a strong enough reason to change that.
"So." He said when he reached Neil, looking at him with the easy and slightly evaluating quality he had when he was already deciding something. "How can I help you today."
Neil got straight to the point.
"I want access to a realm where I can fight 4th Origin creatures. As many as possible. Fewer Diamond class."
Randy stopped walking.
He looked at Neil with the expression of someone who had heard something and had not yet finished deciding what category it belonged to, the assessment running behind the easy surface of his face in a way that was visible if you knew what to look for.
"You just came out of the Mantel Stone Realm." He said. "You were in there fighting 3rd Origin creatures." A pause. "You are already aiming for 4th Origin?"
"Yes."
Randy looked at him for a moment with the particular attention he produced when something had surprised him, which was not a common expression on him.
Neil’s essence was reading as 3rd Origin to anyone with sufficient perception to check, and Randy had more than sufficient perception to check, and what he was reading was 3rd Origin regardless of what he had noticed about the quality of Neil’s energy over the past days.
"You are still at the 3rd Origin." He said, not accusatory, just placing the fact on the table between them.
"I know what Origin I am at."
"Fighting 4th Origin creatures when you are at the 3rd—"
"With fewer Diamond class." Neil said. "I know what I am asking for."
Randy held the look for a long moment, the particular evaluation running, checking whether the firmness he was encountering was the stubborn kind that produced bad outcomes or the kind backed by something worth taking seriously, and arriving at the conclusion he usually arrived at when he looked at Neil long enough.
He fell into thought.
His expression moved through several configurations over the following seconds, the genuine version of thinking rather than the performed version he used in conversation when he wanted to appear thoughtful, and the distinction was visible in the quality of the stillness it produced.
"Hmm." He said, after a while.
Neil waited.
"There is one." Randy said slowly, the way he said things when he was deciding how much of his knowledge to commit to. "It fits what you are describing. Plenty of 4th Origin, mostly Bronze through Gold, Diamond is rare enough in there that you can go significant stretches without encountering one." He paused, and something in his expression shifted into a more careful register. "But no human can set foot inside it."
"Why."
"No oxygen. The air composition is entirely wrong for human respiration and the gas mixture is actively toxic to any biological system that did not evolve inside that specific environment. Most people would be dead in minutes regardless of their strength level, it is not a matter of being tough enough to breathe bad air, the air in there is simply incompatible."
He looked at Neil steadily.
"The creatures are called Wood Snakes. They are native to the environment and they are built around it in the specific way that creatures are built when they have been in a hostile environment long enough that the hostility becomes an advantage. High regeneration, and the most potent contact poison of anything in their Origin range. They can manipulate the plant life in their territory, use it as an extension of their offense and their defense, use the roots to move faster underground than they can move above it, use the canopy to restrict visibility and control angles. The whole architecture of the environment becomes their weapon."
Neil thought about this.
No oxygen was not the problem it would be for most people.
His battle suit had an oxygen supply that had kept him functional inside a magma creature’s stomach for eighteen days and had handled every hostile environment since, and his Phantom form had different requirements than a baseline human’s requirements when it came to what his body actually needed to maintain function.
His poison resistance was genuinely strong, the combination of his Phantom race’s passive resistance and the resistance he had built through years of Aquamorph work and deliberately hostile environments making him considerably harder to poison than anything that would conventionally be described as a 3rd Origin creature.
The regeneration was the part that required actual thought.
A creature that healed faster than you could damage it was not a problem of strength but a problem of approach, and approach was something he could work out, but he needed to have the right framework before going in rather than discovering the wrong one through a string of deaths he could not afford in terms of time.
"Arrange it." Neil said.
Randy looked at him for a moment longer than the confirmation required.
"You are really going."
"Arrange it." Neil said again, with the same flat certainty.
Something moved in Randy’s expression, the specific thing that moved when he had reached a decision about where to put his resources and had found the decision easy.
"Oh, are you really going." His voice had shifted into the particular register it had when he was already thinking about something else simultaneously, the surface of the conversation continuing while something more engaged was happening underneath. "Then let me quickly set up the—" He coughed. "The arrangement for you. Get ready, you will be leaving tonight."
He was already moving as he said this, pulling out his communication device with the focused energy of someone who had several things to organise in a limited window of time and was genuinely looking forward to doing them.
Neil watched him go.
He could tell exactly what Randy was setting up and not all of it was logistical.
That man loved betting more than was appropriate for his professional position and the specific energy he had walked away with was the energy of someone who already had odds in mind and was thinking about who to approach with them, and how much to offer, and on what specific terms, and whether the over-under on survival was going to attract more interesting money than the over-under on duration.
Neil sighed once and started walking back toward his domain.
He thought about Magnar on the way.
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Thanks for reading...
