Chapter 9 - Little Pests

“You know… I am capable of feeding myself,” I said.
Her eyes widened and her posture tightened for just long enough to make me realize I might have come off too sharp.
“Er… not that I don’t appreciate it, of course. Just, well, the crew’s not here right now…”
“Oh… Don’t worry about them. We made sure they took their lunches with them earlier,” she said, relaxing as she continued down the slope. “Didn’t seem like we’d be bringing anything out to them today with how far away the crew should be by now. Not to mention, Darla’s gotten to that stage of her pregnancy where moving around is getting cumbersome.”
“Which is why–”
“And since I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen you eating when we weren’t involved, Danny would be upset if I let you go hungry.” She smiled at me as she set the basket down. She took a moment to smooth out the long wool skirt she wore with long strokes of her hands that I noticed were once again covered in random flecks of colors. Once she was satisfied, she sat down on folded legs on a relatively flat patch of the ground.
I looked at her uncertainly, then back to my work. If something was leeching the soil around here, and clearly still active given how quickly it went to work, then that meant it had to be something nearby. If I could–
“Hellooooooo,” Willow called out, my head snapping back to her as she stared at me expectantly. “Why are you thinking about work when I just brought food? The field’s not gonna suddenly walk away, now wipe your hands off and come eat.”
I rolled my eyes. She was right of course and I knew it. The leeching culprit wasn’t going to suddenly vanish after it suddenly got a bonus influx courtesy of me. Not to mention, the sandwiches she was pulling out looked surprisingly good compared to the usual stews and hard bread rolls I’d started to get accustomed to. No sense working on an empty stomach.
“The bread looks… different,” I said, pouring a dab of water from my skin onto my hands, barely cleaning them before using my shirt as a towel.
“Thomas brought supplies back from Gold’s Lodge this morning,” Willow said, handing me one of the sandwiches. “Actual flour, smoked ham, a few jars of preserves, and enough cheese that I might have hidden some away just to snack on myself… don’t tell anyone.”
I looked down at the sandwich with renewed interest. “Thomas is back already?”
“He wanted to get home to Darla,” she said, her mouth twitching. “Especially after the Steward of Gold’s Lodge put him and Danny in a room with one bed last night.”
I paused with the sandwich halfway to my mouth.
“Apparently Danny tried to cuddle him in his sleep.”
“Oh… Well I guess Darla’s probably going to beat him with a spoon for trying to steal her man, then,” I said, finally taking a bite.
Willow giggled. “Good thing he won’t be back for another day or two. He stayed behind to wring a little more out of the Steward. They got a preliminary agreement for some of the Great Oak lumber the next time Dartigan comes through. It came with enough of an advance to buy some extra supplies, though why he doesn’t invest in a wagon is beyond me…”
“You’d need a big one and the road isn’t even close to finished yet. That’s uh… that’s quite literally putting the cart before the horse,” I said. This time she hesitated just before taking a bite to look at me like she knew I was right. When she did finally go back to eating, a thought came to mind. “Your brother doesn’t do things by half measures, does he?”
“He spent every last coin of our inheritance purchasing the rights to logging here, what do you think?” Her mouth was still slightly full, even as she spoke with a hand hiding it.
I looked across the expanse of my property toward the forest’s treeline and a thought occurred to me.
“Wait, his rights are just for the section they’ve been cutting from, right?” I asked and she shook her head.
“Nope, I don’t know the right term for it… Managed Rights, maybe? He doesn’t own all the land or anything like that, he’s just got the harvesting and replanting rights for everything east of the path we take up to the stream,” she explained, pointing off in the direction as if we could easily see it on the other side of the hill. Then she pointed toward the southern branch of the forest. ”Not exactly sure how the maps got drawn but that long section there that goes almost all the way to the woods around Gold’s Lodge don’t have any purchasable harvesting rights but I don’t think anyone really cares with how much of the stuff there already is to work with. Danny couldn’t believe it, but between this place being out of the way and all the innate hazards or somethin’ like that, most of the other people he’s worked for just didn’t see the point.”
“What kind of hazards?” I asked, my curiosity piqued. Not necessarily at how the lines were drawn for what they could and couldn’t harvest, though I’d have to see if that line stopped before or after my property, but about the forest itself.
Obviously, the place had the potential for monster spawns. It was dense enough, ancient enough, and far enough from the center of the crown’s control that human presence didn’t naturally squash it down. But if there was a specific kind… Well, knowing what it was would be all it would really take for me to be able to handle it before the sun even started to go down.
“That’s the confusing part. We’ve been here for a while and haven’t seen a single spawn or attack,” she explained, her face scrunching as she looked up at the empty sky. “I was kinda terrified when we first got here… Danny slept perched against my door for weeks ‘cause I was afraid one would get in in the middle of the night and drag me out to the forest.”
“You’ve heard too many fairy tales,” I said, taking another bite. “If a duskwolf’s gonna break in, it’s just gonna eat you where it finds you. Waste of energy to drag you kicking and screaming back into the woods.”
Willow stopped right before she could take a bite, staring over at me with a look I couldn’t quite place.
“What?” I asked, raising a brow at her.
“Is thinking up the worst possible version of things a hobby for you?”
I considered that for a moment. “I’d think something being efficient would disqualify it for being the worst…”
“It is when I’m the one being eaten!”
“But… you weren’t eaten,” I said, cocking my head to the side. We stared at each other for a few moments before she started to laugh.
“You are so strange…” she said, shaking her head and taking another bite.
“So… no monsters in the village then?” I asked, choosing to push us back on topic since she was seemingly okay with letting it drop.
“None at all. Not even the kinds you can trap and eat like swiftfoot hares.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Those little pests would destroy my fields,” I said, my attention shifting back to the forest again.
What sort of forest didn’t have pest-level monsters in it without a dominating force present? Though I’d only seen a serpent once or twice, Dawn’s End just to the north of the forest was largely devoid of all but the barest of life too. With little around it that mattered, I’d never actually looked too deeply into it though, especially since, well… I knew that the serpent I’d dealt with was big enough to explain away suppressed spawns.
The point was that I’d done my research. I’d scoured the land for every beast with enough power to matter and never in all that time had I heard of a spawn ruling over this region. It was just a bunch of big trees. Sturdy ones sure, but with the abundance of ones that were easier to cut, haul, and refine elsewhere in the world, why would anyone have really bothered with these?
Had there been something I’d missed? No, that was a stupid question. Nobody could know everything, no matter how long they had to study and explore. I’d obviously missed something by brushing this place off time and time again.
“Have you guys asked anyone about it?” I asked, noticing Willow was in the middle of a slightly too big bite. She tried to hide her mouth as she quickly chewed, her cheeks puffing out just a bit.
“Sorry, you were staring off into space again, thought I had a minute,” she said, still trying to finish. Once she had, she shook her head. “Danny thinks if someone finds out this place doesn’t have monsters rampaging around all the time, someone might try to come in and undercut his claim. Like I said, he only bought the rights for logging and replanting. The forest is just too huge and actually purchasing all of it would’ve taken the kind of coin only a regional lord might have, or… well I guess the crown would too… you know what I mean.”
“Ah… and if someone did purchase the land rights, they could bury his logging claim in enough paperwork to effectively make it useless,” I said, eliciting a nod from her. “Hmm… Is there anything that’s at least seemed hazardous while you’ve been out here? Or maybe, unusual that you’ve noticed?”
“Hazardous? Not really,” she said, tapping her chin for a moment. “Unusual? Well there’s you, but I don’t think you came from the forest… Hmmm… why’re you so curious anyway? Thinking about buying us out and renaming the place?”
“Maybe,” I shrugged, waving my hand toward the trench. “I think whatever the system’s classifying as a hazard is the reason the soil around here is so bad. It’d be a waste of time to plant a field if everything would just end up dying. So humor me. Anything unusual at all? Was Daniel always a big, burly man or did he magically become one after one day of work out there? Did anyone show a noticeable change at all?”
“A change? Like they were being infected?” she asked and I waggled my hand uncertainly. “I mean, not that I can think of… I guess most days everyone would come back downright exhausted, but I just figured that’s cause they were chopping trees all day.”
“Yeah, that’s not a great indicator. Especially since all their gear is in such bad shape.”
Willow’s eyes went wide at the mention. “It wasn’t actually that bad before… I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’ve been struggling, but nobody’s tools were in bad shape when they first got here. Danny’s was really expensive, other than the land we purchased and the logging rights, it was the one thing he really bought himself. But you’ve seen it… it’s not as bad as Bram’s, but it’s not in good shape at all. Could that be something?”
“Actually… yes, yes it could be,” I said, a thought finally occurring to me.
There was a gust of wind that rustled the thick canopies of the great oaks. The trees were actually larger than any great oaks had the right to be, and if my growing suspicions were right, it explained where the leeched essence was being taken. I ate the last bite of the sandwich before brushing the crumbs off my hands.
“I hadn’t exactly gone for a walk because I didn’t want to run into any monsters… but if there’s a lack of them, I think I’ll need to. Can’t exactly leave this alone if I want my ale to be good.” I was starting to get to my feet when Willow scrambled up behind me, her eyes going a bit wide.
“Wait, what? You’re going to go in there? What if the monsters just don’t come out this far? No offense, but what’s a level four Alchemist going to do about it?”
“Run probably. But really, I don’t think it’s necessary,” I said with a shrug, though I wasn’t exactly happy with the conclusion I’d come to. “There’s only a few things capable of causing leeching effects in both plant and human life, reducing tool durability, and draining the Manasphere enough that monster spawns stop.”
Out of everything in my inventory, the few things I’d picked up over the last few weeks were almost exactly what I needed. Between the Lion’s Dawn thorns and the Stoneboar, I was relatively confident that I had an answer for my soil problem. Though… there’d be other issues that were bound to appear once I played exterminator. But I couldn’t let myself worry about that; not when leaving them alone would make anything I did here a complete waste of time.
I sighed.
“The forest has a Mana Nymph infestation.”