Niphru awoke again as the sun began to rise, hearing birds chirping, though there was an odd note to them. As he left his temporary den, he looked around the barren trail he had been following, paying attention to the life around it.
He saw many things he had trouble understanding. There were trees that didn’t anchor to the ground, but instead were held midair by vines as the tree itself floated in the air. In other areas, he saw all kinds of brightly glowing plants. Atop some of the vegetation, there were very odd birds, some with a metallic sheen to their feathers, others with pulsing lights, some even had transparent parts to their bodies.
As he watched, one of the partially-transparent birds engulfed one of the pulsating light birds, only to explode into a spray of gore after a particularly bright pulse. As he continued to observe, the splattered fragments of the transparent bird quivered and grew thin wings before flying in random directions. While he was staring in shock at this spectacle, he heard an immense impact in the distance, and the ground shook hard enough to throw him off his feet.
The birds scattered into the air, at least those that could. Revealed by the sudden motion, several birds on one tree had become trapped on the branches, or perhaps were even part of the plant? Niphru couldn’t tell for sure from where he was, but there was less struggling than he expected.
As he got back to his feet, he looked further down the trail, seeing a cloud of dust rising above the trees far in the distance.
Deciding to avoid going further down the trail again, he instead expelled some more mana to avoid overloading, and headed into the forest. As he moved, he kept his illusion up, and maintained a vigilant gaze on everything around him. Here a strange lizard chewed on a glowing plant, there a rodent ate a snake, and up above were clouds of birds darted between the trees.
He had to stop, however, when he came across a mutated wolf, an immense nose sniffing the air before its head turned to face him. He knew from what humans said that wolves always hunt in packs, and if this one could locate him, he knew he had to move fast. Whipping his head from side to side, he noticed a number of vines leading up into and above the canopy, and he raced towards one of the larger ones.
As he ran, he heard the wolf howl, multiple others joining it from all around. Pounding footsteps sounded out all around him as he hurled himself forward as quickly as he could. Finally reaching the vine, he began running up it, dropping his illusion and leaving the ball of foxfire floating behind. He scrambled up the vine as fast as he could, rapidly reaching the canopy and jumping from the vine to the largest branch he could spot nearby, then slammed his flame down into the vine, igniting it.
Even as the vine ignited, the first wolf reached it and began to carefully clamber up it, the surface of the vine bursting out in sap that extinguished the flames. Trying again had the same result, the vine simply putting itself out as if it was never burned. Meanwhile the wolf approached even higher up the vine, sniffing and looking around. At the base of the vine, another three wolves appeared, silently glancing at each other before vanishing back into the forest heading towards where he was perched.
Since he couldn’t rely on burning the vine, he instead swung the ball of foxfire into the nose of the wolf, hearing it yelp in pain as the fur ignited. His relief was short-lived however, as the wolf simply shoved its nose into the sap ahead of it, immediately extinguishing the flame. Another attempt to ignite the wolf’s face did not succeed, simply setting some sap smoking.
Turning around, he looked carefully, finding some other branches he could jump to. He knew that as a fox, he could jump quite far, and that he was lighter, so he hoped he would be able to get to places the wolves couldn’t. Clearly these ones didn’t care about if they had to climb or not, so he had to make them fall. Spotting a branch he thought was barely thick enough, he sprung towards it, sailing clear over another smaller branch along the way.
As he landed, he slipped slightly, barely keeping on the branch, and almost lost hold of the mana stone in his mouth. As he adjusted his footing, he saw the first wolf jump to his old perch, the branch bending significantly under its weight. Quickly, he turned and examined the branches around himself, finding another a bit higher up, and jumped towards it. This time he landed much more smoothly, and threw his foxfire towards the branch he was just on, switching it to an illusion of the branch being slightly closer to the wolf than it actually was.
As he expected, the wolf jumped towards it, passing through the illusion and falling to the ground far below. Unlike what he expected, however, the wolf simply spread out its legs, large flaps of skin billowing outward and catching the air, letting it glide safely to the ground. A second wolf appeared, jumping from the vine to the first branch, sniffing carefully. It closed its eyes and leapt, landing on the hidden branch just to shatter it upon landing, fragments of the branch cutting into its skin as it fell far less gracefully than the prior, landing with a sickening crunch far below.
A third wolf appeared on the vine, this time avoiding the branch and climbing higher and higher. Able to guess what it was planning, Niphru quickly moved his illusion over himself and made it appear that he was lower down. The wolf hurled itself from the vine, limbs stretched wide as it glided towards him rather than the illusion. Reacting quickly, he flipped it back into a flame and threw it at the gliding wolf, catching it in the side of the head and rolling it down the side of the body.
The wolf let out an unearthly howl of pain as its limbs twisted back to its body, smothering the flame, then snapped back out, its face still aflame. It missed significantly, but managed to land on a further tree, immediately rubbing its face against the bark to smother the flames.
The wolf looked around a moment, then simply jumped off the tree, gliding back towards the ground. A moment later a series of howls ran out in the distance, echoed from below him. Niphru stayed still in the tree as he heard numerous footsteps racing off into the distance, still on edge from the close call.
After a few minutes, he finally calmed down enough to start moving again, looking around for some way to get to the ground. He couldn’t find any path he thought would support his weight back towards the vine, and he couldn’t glide like those mutated wolves could. He also certainly didn’t want to splatter on the ground.
As he found the next branch to try jumping to, the tree he was standing on shifted, tilting to the side, causing him to lose his balance and stumble into the trunk. A short distance away, an eye opened. And then another. And another.
As dozens of eyes began opening on the trunk, Niphru realized the tree was still tilting, and reached an angle he could run on. He promptly began to sprint down the side of the tree as quickly as his legs could take him, hearing wood groaning behind him as the tree started to bend as well as tilt.
Far more rapidly than he thought possible, he was on the ground again, sprinting back towards the barren path as the tree reached the ground and began to move its branches like legs, propelling it deeper into the forest.
Niphru finally reached his den, rapidly digging it deeper and hid at the bottom, terrified of what he had seen, his illusion up over the top again. Eventually he fell into an uneasy slumber until the evening.