That night, Leo and Taylor found their first dead body.

  While hunting for a safe spot to sleep, Leo spotted a large cavity about thirty feet off the ground in one of the giant trees. Other than the camouflage spider beasts, none of the other types they’d encountered so far looked as though they could climb. With his impressive strength and Taylor’s claws, climbing up to the hollow was simple enough, and they clambered into the hollow in no time.

  Only to find that it was already occupied.

  “Lords…” Leo muttered, staring with wide eyes at the corpse of some unfortunate gem holder.

  The woman before them was leaning unceremoniously against the wall of the hollow, her glassy eyes staring at nothing in particular. There were a few simple tools here and there, like a flint and steel and some cutlery, but beyond that, she seemed to have been traveling light.

  “What happened?” Taylor asked, tilting her head as she walked over and crouched before the woman. “I don’t see any injuries.”

  “Maybe poison? The spiders would be able to climb up here without issue,” Leo proposed, doing a quick search around the room. Something was off, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  “Spiders wouldn’t just leave her like this,” Taylor pointed out. “Remember our fight? It tried to wrap me up with its web. Probably would have dragged me away somewhere. And no bite marks, either.”

  “That’s not the strangest thing,” Leo said, the strange itch in the back of his mind finally snapping into focus as he realized what was bothering him. “Forget belongings, she doesn’t have any sort of pack with her. Do we really think she came all this way and ventured into an unexplored, tier 22 colossal plane with nothing more than a fork and knife? No map? No gear? No change of clothes, for crying out loud?”

  “So she lost her pack?”

  “Or someone took it from her… After they killed her,” Leo said coldly, nearly a hundred percent certain that’s what had happened. Sure, people could be reckless every now and again. But just the thought of coming into this plane without any sort of equipment was almost unimaginable to him.

  “Another gem holder did this?” Taylor asked, looking more surprised than anything. “...Why?”

  “Could be all sorts of reasons,” Leo sighed, leaning against the hollow wall as he thought back to all the warnings his parents had given him growing up. “Could have been for her gear. Or maybe they wanted the gems within her core. Perhaps she just pissed off the wrong group of people and they followed her until she let her guard down. No way to know, really. This is another reason why my parents always stressed the importance of having at least a partner, if not a team to explore the planarverse with. Without someone to watch your back…” Leo gestured to the woman’s corpse, as if that said everything.

  “Do you think it was that guy who chased after us into this plane?” Taylor asked, actually going through the woman’s pockets.

  “Maybe? We’re pretty far from the rift we entered through this morning. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. We were already planning to avoid people before this. Now we have an even better reason to do so.”

  “Lies.”

  “Huh?” Leo asked, giving his partner a confused look. “What do you mean?”

  “Lies,” Taylor repeated, holding up the woman’s hand. “I’m not the best at reading. But I recognized the word.”

  Moving closer, Leo blinked as he spotted what Taylor had found. Sure enough, the word ‘lies’ had been hastily scribbled on the woman’s palm, hidden by her closed hand until Taylor pulled it open.

  “Okay… that’s weird,” he admitted, wondering what must have possessed the woman to write that one word above all else. Only now did he spot the quill and overturned vial of ink beside her. She must have had only a split second to write down her thoughts before she died, and she chose that word above all others for some mysterious reason.

  “Think it’s a warning?”

  “I don’t know what else it could be. The question is, what is it a warning for? Maybe she was a member of a group and they backstabbed her and left her for dead? Or maybe she thought she’d found some edible plants and ended up poisoning herself. Technically, there’s a chance she wasn’t actually killed after all. Someone else might have found her dead body first and helped themselves to her gear. Not like she would need it any more.”

  The two of them were silent for a moment, each lost in their thoughts as they contemplated what might have happened to the poor woman before them. After a few seconds, Leo shrugged.

  “Either way, we should keep looking for a place to spend the night. I feel weird about camping in a location someone else already died in.”

  Taylor didn’t have any objections, so the two of them scurried back down the tree. Leo briefly thought about burying the lone woman, but the sun was going down rather quickly, and he really didn’t want to be out and about when night hit. Many planes had entirely new threats that came out with the darkness, and he didn’t want to push their luck. He’d only just managed to hit a soul rank of 17, which was still five entire ranks below the tier of this plane.

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  Luckily, they managed to find another hollow high up off the ground only a short while later, and this one was free of any bodies. With the memory of the dead woman fresh in their minds however, they weren’t able to relax. Leo took first watch as Taylor rested, and then they swapped a few hours later. Even with the security of his partner being on guard, Leo found it a bit difficult to fall asleep. He knew there were countless ways a Cartographer could die exploring the planarverse, but to finally stumble upon the corpse of one when he hadn’t been expecting it… And one who had died exploring the very same plane he was now exploring himself…

  That could have been him.

  Shaking his head, Leo forced those pointless thoughts out of his mind, managing to get some actual rest before long.

  The day-night cycle of this plane was a bit longer than what Leo was used to, which meant both he and Taylor were actually able to get closer to a full night of rest, despite ensuring one of them was awake at all times. When the sun finally came up again, Leo couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief.

  “Man, I really thought something was going to attack us during the night.”

  “We were attacked. I killed a spider at one point,” Taylor said offhandedly, munching away on some jerky for breakfast.

  “What?! Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “Didn’t need to,” she shrugged. “Managed to hear it coming this time around, now that I knew what to listen for. I actually got the jump on it. Not very strong beasts if you surprise them. The body is down there on the forest floor. It fell when it died, and I didn't want to risk going down there during the night after your earlier warning.”

  Leo was glad Taylor actually headed his warning for a change. While the body may have been there at one point, the two of them weren’t the only hungry campers hiding within the forest. Something had torn the spider to shreds during the night. And even more creepy, it had to have done it in near total silence. Otherwise they would have heard the sounds of feasting from up in their hollow as they stood watch.

  “Let’s make sure we’re not on the ground when night falls if we can help it,” Leo muttered as he looked at the carnage, getting a quick nod of agreement from his partner.

  Their second day was spent further exploring the plane, jotting down notes on the various magical beasts they discovered and any changes in terrain. Along with another giant beaver and two more of the spiders, which seemed to be the most commonly encountered beast thus far, they were also beset upon by a trio of burrowing beetles that exploded out of the ground, one of which nearly impaled Leo in the gut with its horn. It was only thanks to his evolved reflexes he managed to intercept the attack with his gauntlets, and he and Taylor made rather quick work of them.

  The beetles ended up being Grade 14 magical beasts, each holding two different gems. One that gave a powerful lunge attack, and a repeat of Minor Tremorsense.

  Not only were the beetles easily defeated… They didn’t taste very good either.

  The two of them managed to cover quite a few miles that day, and even ended up finding a small lake in the center of the woods. The water was incredibly clear, enough so that Leo could actually spot some sort of large eel slithering around far beneath the surface. While his dreams of actually getting to take a bath in this new plane were dashed, the discovery of the water at least helped restock their food supplies.

  While they certainly ate far more magical beast meat than the average gem holder, Leo refused to let the foul-tasting beasts completely fill up their diet. Taking advantage of the regular game that came out of the forest in search of water, Leo sent Taylor hunting, watching with amusement as his partner launched herself like a natural predator at a lone deer that had emerged from the forest. With a soul rank of 17 herself, Taylor was far faster and much more deadly than any common predator, and she easily dragged the deer back for him to start on lunch.

  “Taking down normal animals is no fun,” Taylor complained as she watched him skin and prepare the deer with speed that could only come from years of practice. “Where are the dangerous ones? You know, the ones that would be hunting the deer instead of us?”

  “Staying far away from you,” Leo chuckled, picking the best cuts of meat for their meal. “Regular predators, not magical beasts, have some sort of sixth sense that helps them stay clear of gem holders and magical beasts. Normal humans have to worry about things like big cats attacking them in the forest, or wolves coming for them in the dead of night. But those types of animals turn tail and run the other direction when they get a whiff of us. Magical beasts, on the other hand, seem to be attracted to us. Place a regular human on one side and a gem holder of any rank on the other, and the magical beast will always go for the gem holder. Nobody really knows why.”

  “Neat,” Taylor said, licking her lips as he finally tossed a piece of meat into the pan and it immediately began sizzling. “How-”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s done,” Leo said, shaking his head. “Want to try and find us some berries or something? I love meat as much as the next person, but variety is the spice of life. We can’t just eat meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t complain,” Taylor said, wiping the drool from her mouth as she all but forced herself to turn away from the sizzling venison. Reluctantly, she did what Leo asked of her, heading back into the forest in search of something to compliment their meal.

  After she vanished, Leo smiled, focusing on the familiar act of cooking while he thought back to just how much Taylor had changed since he’d first met her. While the woman was still rather feral, the fact that she’d gone from grunting out one or two word questions and answers to speaking in full sentences most of the time was pretty remarkable. Sure, it had involved quite a lot of teaching her vocabulary, and he was pretty certain he had an almost permanent bruise on his arm from how frequently she punched him when he used a new word he just expected her to know. But it was nice being able to hold full conversations with her.

  “Now if only she didn’t like eating magical beasts quite so much,” Leo muttered, basting the meat in an attempt to add as much moisture and flavor as possible. If he could keep making each regular meal they ate the greatest thing Taylor had ever tasted…

  Maybe she’d stop making him eat every single magical beast they killed one day.

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