The team was ready for anything when they burst into the new layer. Castellan was charged as much as it could be, Tartu had several anti-magic Wands of Destruction that he had been churning out as fast as he could over the last week, and even before that. Sally was desperately hoping that she got some downtime to figure out some shit and actually participate in the coming battle, but everyone else was on standby with specific inclinations. The first moments of bursting into the layer were thus filled with tension.

  Sure, it looked like a normal enough place from the outside, but so did the last layer. So did a lot of layers!

  What happened instead was a collective pause as the Dreadnought burst into the skies above the new layer, Quark started analyzing shit real fast, right alongside David, and a dawning horror crept throughout every person on the ship.

  “So I have another theory about all of this!” Mark said, the first to speak. He stood in the air above the deck of the Dreadnought, looking down at the new layer from the bow. The world below looked ‘normal’, until he really looked at it, and then the horror hit kinda all at once, and then it just got worse as Mark kept seeing new badness, all around. Mark had reached his shit-quota a while ago, though, and so he was mostly in a fugue state of acceptance right now. He went right into postulation, saying, “I think last week’s trials of dangerous layers were all because we were headed toward this place, and all of that back there was a part of this ‘Secondary Tutorial’ happening right now. We didn’t get a layer full of kaijus fighting or an anathema layer until we specifically started heading toward Tartu’s target, after all. And this is because Tartu’s target is too special by far.”

  “We call that ‘magical thinking’, Mark,” Tartu said, in the comms. His voice was kinda distant right now.

  “We are rather magical people, so thinking magically does seem like something we should do on occasion,” Mark retorted.

  “Thank you, mister contrarian,” Tartu harrumphed.

  Mark pointed out at the landscape, saying, “You are looking at that, right? Like, you’re seeing that, right? What got us here was not some random roll of any layers. This is fucked up Second Tutorial shit, like how the Tutorial changes based on how well or bad you do, and based on targets? Well we’ve been doing too well, obviously, and so the targets have gotten BIG.”

  Everyone was quiet.

  Tartu said, “Well… The layers of kaiju fights were pretty bad.”

  “All of them were pretty bad,” Isoko said.

  “We just came through certain death, too,” Eliot said.

  Sally finished what Eliot was thinking, saying, “And here’s certain death, once again.”

  Mark tried to see a way forward, but…

  It looked tough.

  “On the plus side!” Mark said, grinning. “I was right about the magical tree!”

  “Off by an order of magnitude,” Isoko said, “That’s not a bloody ‘tree’. That’s an entire damned forest.”

  “Perfect for a farmer!” Mark said, reveling in the dark humor.

  “… Perfect for a Farmer,” Tartu muttered.

  The overall setting of the layer was ‘pastoral farmland’. Rolling green hills, fluffy white clouds, blue sky, mountains to the sides, a river running through the center. It was a valley farmland. A very, very big valley farmland.

  The trees were each 10 kilometers tall, with roots that spread far, tangling with each other like tramlines, except where those roots rose into the air several hundred meters and were tipped with nasty looking thorns. The spear-like roots were motionless right now, but they had been active in the recent past —Or distant past! Who knew!— and the results of those activities were evident for all to see, in the tangled kaiju bodies wrapped into the base of every tree, up the sides of the trees, and all in the roots, like some sort of macabre ornamentation.

  The kaiju bled, all of them, and the river at the center of the valley was dark red with that blood.

  Some of the kaiju were half-entombed by the trees, as though the trees were growing around them, and had been for a long time. Some of the trees merely had bulges on the trunks where Mark assumed some kaiju had been fully entombed. Those tree-bulges were everywhere, now that Mark was looking.

  “And there are even giant spear-roots in the canopies, and kaiju-containers high in the trees,” Mark said, pointing in the general direction of the orchard. The nearest tree was about 60 kilometers away, and Quark had been analyzing the video images ever since they arrived. “Look at that one. I think that’s a bird wing sticking out of that one’s canopy.”

  Silence.

  And then…

  “… yeah,” Isoko said, “That’s a bird-kaiju wing. Flying does not mean safety.”

  Mark felt the vector of the entire team, even Derek, turn around.

  They didn’t want to be here?

  What!

  When they were so close? No way!

  Mark scoffed and said, “So what if it’s a bird wing! The trees probably only react to kaiju-sized things, which means me going in with Tartu toward whichever one is his target, and we kill it. No Dreadnought involved at all.”

  The team was silent, and Tartu was thinking deeply.

  So Mark asked Quark, “Which one is his target, Quark?”

  Quark beep-booped then said, “Any of them qualify, but the main ones that match the resonance of the Storm Prism are the ones there, there, and way over there.”

  Quark outlined 3 trees in Mark’s vision, putting up images to the side of his sight.

  Mark looked at the 3 options.

  … All of them seemed pretty much the same.

  Mark said, “I can’t tell the difference between them. They’re all bulgy in the trunk and with giant spear-roots/branches and with giant canopies. Green leaves that Quark says are 4 meters across each. No visible structures on any of them… Huh. Not even any moss? Can’t even see any fruit on them? … There’s no moss or fruit, right? Quark?”

  “I detect no fruiting bodies, sir, and no moss or otherwise.”

  “So no fruit, no habitats, not even any moss. Which means these things move a lot, or they’re self-cleaning or something. Kaiju are not usually clean at all, so…” Mark hummed. “Invisible monsters?”

  “Not detecting any,” Eliot said.

  Isoko spoke up, “I doubt these things would be cultivated like they are being cultivated for there to not be any product.”

  “I agree,” Mark said… and then he thought of Tartu’s goals with Farmer, and he said, “The product is probably mana for whatever reasons... So where’s the farmer?”

  “Maybe even a whole lot of farmers?” Isoko said.

  “Elven farmers?” Derek asked, just to throw it out there. And then another Derek added, “But nothing like this exists back at the Softer Lands, and I’ve been everywhere over there.”

  “The Softer Lands had Nobody Important,” Andria supplied. “So they didn’t need this sort of mana generation?”

  “What do magical societies need mana for anyway?” Isoko asked. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

  Mark had no clue, except… “Maybe Castellan magics?”

  Eliot said dismissively, “Any society that can do this does not need the pitiful magics of Castellan to fix anything for them. If these things are indeed the creations of a society looking to farm mana, then we’re looking at the mana needs of a society sooooo far past what Earth and Daihoon are capable of doing that we might not possess the frame of reference necessary to understand what we’re looking at.”

  Sally scoffed. You could practically hear her rolling her eyes back in the command center as she said, “The farmers probably use this place to keep their homes safe and their needs met; same as anyone.” She added, “And maybe their needs are more ‘kaiju containment’ than anything else. These could be one of those dryad systems that they use in Okuana; you know, with Godking Dominant and how they put out trees as the back line defense against kaiju. These things might be front-line defense. We might be in someone’s ‘city wall’ right now.” She added, “AAAAND, maybe there’s no farmer because the orchard is old and abandoned.”

  Mark went quiet in thought, and so did everyone else.

  Sally softly said, “Send out the drones?”

  Eliot replied, “I could send out the drones, if that is what we want. Right now we’re in a holding pattern high above the orchard, and the invisibility magics are not active. The kaiju trees seem alive, though, and they might not respond kindly toward being looked at, even by very small things, because I’m not picking up any monster signatures in the spaces I’m capable of scanning right now. That means that land down there is completely dead —or cultivated!— and that the trees are likely responsible for that.” Eliot added, “And there aren’t any radio waves or signals in the air for me to pick up; I’m already looking for those.”

  A moment passed.

  Mark clapped his hands and said, “Okay! So we got a few options! One, we leave. Two, we go in, just me and Tartu. Or just me to start. Or Three, we all go and pick off a tree.”

  Tartu said, “Or FOUR, we send out drones, and do some scouting. The trees continue on for a full 500 kilometers in every direction, and further beyond that. So let’s get those drones out, Eliot.”

  Eliot asked, “All in favor of drones? And be ready to bug out if the trees don’t like that?”

  Mark and everyone else gave a quick round of agreements, and soon slots opened up on the port and starboard sides of the Dreadnought and drones, fast and highly communicative, started zipping out into the blue skies. They buzzed by Mark, whirring strong, and then they started splitting off in every direction except for down. Mostly, they stayed in the sky, aiming cameras and scanners downward. Mark saw a few brightspeed crystal hover drones go out, with spikes of shimmering yellow crystal sticking out of their backs, which meant that Eliot was bringing out the big drones.

  The brightspeed drones took off like shimmers of lightning; gone.

  Mark asked, “How close are you going to get to the trees, Eliot?”

  Eliot said, “As soon as the majority of drones get 20 kilometers away from here then some of them will start going downward, and maybe even a few will go right beside the trees. I’m sending the brightspeed runners further than the rest. Maybe they’ll find some elves or something.”

  Mark waited.

  Everyone waited.

  Minutes passed in relative silence; the wind brushed past the Dreadnought, the clouds rolled across the sky, and the kaiju trees down below didn’t do much of anything at all. That was when Mark realized that he saw a lot of kaiju stuck in the trees, but he didn’t see any kaiju attacking the place. Mark also noticed that the trees were all in a sort-of hexagonal-grid pattern. Something tickled his mind as he looked at all of that.

  Mark asked, “The overgrown orchard idea would mean the trees are out of position, and growing wild, right? But they’re not growing outside of their hexes, which means they’re cultivated, and they’re not overgrown at all. So the people who do this should be here somewhere, right? It’s not another 10,000 year old absent civilization-situation.”

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  “Hard to say, Mark,” Tartu said, “The trees are clearly killers, and they might even have their own idea of how they need to grow, so they might uproot other trees. Could be that each tree is a clone of each other, and if one dies then the others plant another clone. There are too many possibilities here for you to make a call like that.”

  Mark hummed.

  Derek said, “I’m not going down there, by the way.” Another Derek said, “I will if you ask me to, but I’m pretty sure I’ll just die and need to cleave off several bodies if I do go down there. You’ll have to pick me up again from Kabberjaw or the Softer Lands.”

  Mark asked, “What makes this different from the Anathema Land?”

  “It’s a bunch of giant trees that probably suck on mana, and I am mostly made of mana,” Derek said. “Andria shouldn’t go down there either, by the way.” Another Derek said, “And if the Dreadnought gets any closer, the trees might recognize the giant mana source up here.”

  “I’m already compensating for that,” Eliot said, cutting off a wave of worry that rushed through the vectors on the ship. “We’re visible, but the mana leakage is almost nothing, so we’re good versus mana sensors. Also, the trees seem to target kaiju and anything that is on the surface. I’m seeing stray monsters between the trees, but not many. They’re small; rabbit and cat types. PLs between 1 and 5. Nothing lives on or near the trees, so there’s not a whole lot of space for the monsters in the open, which is where they all live.”

  Isoko said, “I want to know about where the river goes, with all of that blood from the kaijus pouring down into it. Are things living in the river? Or are the trees using the blood? What’s happening there?”

  Eliot said, “The trees wallow in the blood, soaking it up and dumping some of it back into the river. Some of the rabbit-type monsters eat the blood and the cat-types seem to be… eating the rabbit types— more ‘mouse’ than rabbit. Looks like the river has roots in it that form the bottom of the river… Some monster fish. PL’s in the tier 1 range, just like the cats and mice. The ecosystem here is minimal.”

  Mark nodded, saying, “No real monsters and the blood is only half-used, so dumping the blood in the river is on-purpose as well—”

  “Oh!” Eliot exclaimed, excited, “1,700 kilometers north, up river, there’s a wall! A wall across the entire Layer. It looks like it’s made of perpetually-melting ice and the water melts and forms the river, and the river is what we’re seeing down below. And there’s writing on the ice wall. I’m displaying it now.”

  Mark looked up as Quark displayed images.

  It was the color of the blue sky, but it was obviously not the sky at all. It was ice, and it was a wall so very large it looked like the world simply ended. The trees grew far away from the ice, not wanting to be close to it. Words were carved in that ice. Most of the words were in languages Mark did not know at all, in looping script, or in runes, or in bold print using unknown imagery. But someone did know some of them.

  Derek spoke up, “Oh shit! That’s elven!” Another Derek said, “That one, there!”

  Whatever was happening back in the command center, between Derek pointing and Eliot adjusting, was rapidly translated to the imagery Quark showed Mark. Translations appeared in written text on the images, and Mark imagined that Derek was writing on some tablet somewhere. And once again, Mark marveled at how Derek was absolutely full of knowledge.

  “So I have no idea what this word is, or what this specific meaning is— Oh! This other one is Dominant, from Godking Dominant of Okuana… Huh. Oh. I can… huh.”

  All of Derek went silent.

  Everyone was intensely interested in whatever was going on with him, but Mark felt his many vectors on the ship go internal, elsewhere, as he thought and thought and thought—

  Isoko asked, “Derek?”

  “Dominant’s original language?” Tartu asked, his vector so intense, his voice so soft, that Mark was sure that whatever was going on here was Big.

  “Ah… Sorry,” a few different Dereks said, and then the one down in the command center began to buy time for everyone else, as he started with, “Based on what I’m seeing, all of these other languages are half-warning, and half-magic, and the language that Dominant of Okuana uses is one that is tied way, way back to old texts that he won’t speak on anymore, and that he tries to hide whenever they’re found. I only know about it because I’m a nosy… uh… Well anyway! I can’t speak it— We’re not speaking it in the original language, if you can, Tartu.”

  “No magical-language-speaking now! Check!” Mark said.

  Tartu’s vector flexed and twisted as his thoughts went crazy.

  A golden vector touched him, forming the figment of Verdago, and then other, differently-colored gold vectors touched everyone. Andria and Pluta. Eliot and Hearthswell. Sally and Drakarok.

  Freyala stepped into the side of Mark’s vision, though she was down there in the depths of the ship as well, with everyone else.

  And then the gods faded into the background.

  Elsewhere.

  Here, but still not really here at all.

  … Had they been here at all? Or had Mark imagined that?

  Tartu said, “I’m not speaking it at all. I don’t know how.”

  Derek felt the world focus on him as he said, “I can’t speak any of these languages, but I can do some cross referencing if you give me some time, and I can probably translate the big text based on both of the languages I do know.”

  “You have time! Do it” Mark said, “But I wanna know how you know elven, first.”

  Derek collected himself and said, “The elven ruins at the Softer Lands are rather degraded but there are still some things there. Monuments and junk. And the people at Kabberjaw know elven— Well. They don’t know elven. It’s sort of like how some people on Earth know Latin. The history of Kabberjaw is pretty fascinating, and that floating castle at the very top was hard to get to, but I got there! It has text like that loopy script in the middle of the ice wall. That’s the elven. Storyteller Ena Raptor-kin at Raptor was very helpful in telling me what it all meant at that castle in the sky, by the way. Lots of ancient histories there with her.” Derek added, “I want to show her these pictures and ask for her help. Can I do that?”

  Mark tried to recall someone named ‘Ena Raptor-kin’, but he didn’t— Oh. Mark asked, “She’s that old lady who the people at Raptor were saying she claimed to have ties to the ancient houses of Kabberjaw, or something?”

  Mark never met her, but apparently Derek had after they had left.

  “That’s her,” Derek said, “She and the Skull Priests of Stronghold have some bad blood between them. Kabberjaw is still a mess, but now it’s a mess with proper electricity and lighting. The streets haven’t been this safe at night since before the Reveal. Safe from the shadows, anyway. They’re very happy, but they’re also gearing up for fights.”

  Mark was glad about the stability of infrastructure, but not too happy about the fights brewing. Mark said, “Sure, you can show her. But tell me what you think it says right now, first.”

  Derek said, “Okay so… I think it says something like…” Derek took a breath. Another Derek said, “ ‘To whomever —reading this, presumably—: We lived, we died, we protected our slice of heaven from the nemesis— It’s not a proper name. It’s literally just a word for ‘bad thing’ and ‘usurper’; I think they didn’t want to put any emphasis on it at all— If this monument still exists, know that we have guarded our heaven well, and that this forest guards one of many gates. If you harvest, then you have an obligation to protect the gates, too. Call forth’… something like ‘ice’… ‘Call forth ice to quiet a tree, and take its power with mercy, and then leave. All usurpers will be dealt with harshly.’ That last ‘usurper’ was the proper word for ‘usurper’, unlike that first word.” Derek finished with, “That’s a butchered translation, for sure. Horrible, horrible job. I’ll ask Ena about it now, though. She’s still asleep and there’s a lag between bodies. 15 minutes.”

  Mark said, “I’ll wait for the real translation before we start ‘using ice’ against a tree… Why were you uncertain about that translation?”

  “Because the Dominant words say ‘cold storm’ but the elven words say ‘Ice’,” Derek said, “And so there’s probably a lot of missing context.” Another Derek said, “Every language has deep context, and this one skips over a lot.”

  Isoko had a sudden idea. She asked, “A Winter Aurora? Or does it mean cold storm? Because I can do an ice storm, for sure.”

  Eliot said, “I think we should leave the layer and swing around the wall to see if there is anything on the other side of the ice wall.”

  “If we even can swing around the wall?” Sally asked. “Something gives me the impression that we can’t do that at all. Like… it’s a Wall.”

  “We could scoot along the edge?” Mark said. “I’m pretty sure I could swing that Purpose. Skate the wall and come back in on the other side?”

  Silence and thought.

  Sally was mostly thinking ‘are you fucking crazy’, but she didn’t say that.

  “I’m not that crazy, Sally,” Mark said.

  “You’re just taking unnecessary risks,” Sally responded.

  And then Derek spoke up, “I’m in contact with Ena right now and she’s pretty fucking worried. She says this land is a Gateway and we should not attempt to circumvent the gate at all, which means we do NOT try to get past the ice—”

  “I’m cool with that,” Mark said, grinning a little at his own private joke that no one else seemed to appreciate.

  “—and that my translation is rather correct. She knows three more of the languages though, and I’ll… hold on. I’ll translate some of the runic one, which is the original manawork language? Oh shit? For real?”

  Tartu felt like he was about to explode with need. But he kept himself inside of himself.

  Derek said, “Anyway, Isoko’s Winter Aurora idea is pretty close to the translation coming from the pre-Manawork runes.”

  “What about the ‘nemesis’ translation?” Lola asked, trying not to be too pointed about it.

  Eliot winced.

  Mark called him out on that, “Eliot knows something but he’s not talking because of Castellan secret shit.”

  Silence.

  And then…

  “Dammit, Mark,” Eliot said, “I’m keeping this secret.”

  “Okay fine. I can accept that. But tell me why you’re keeping the secret.”

  “Because!” Eliot blurted… and then he added, “You know how Tartu told us about kaiju that respawn from myth? It’s like that. He won’t share those names for good reason, and that’s why there’s no name up there on that wall; why ‘nemesis’ isn’t a proper noun. Because to know is to bring into existence.”

  “Okay! Then… thank you for looking out for all of us,” Mark said, “And you, too, Tartu. So Derek? Is that really what the ice wall is saying? What’s Ena’s take?”

  Eliot sighed, openly and loudly.

  Tartu said, “I’m right there with you, Eliot.”

  And Derek answered, “It literally means ‘nemesis’ and ‘usurper’ and— Ah. Ena is saying it also means ‘outsider’ and that we should not mess with anything outside of the scope of our exact desires here. Leave the place intact.” Another Derek added, “The flying castle at the top of Kabberjaw, above the nightmare line, has a few big monoliths against that sort of stuff, too. Nothing like that at the Softer Lands, which is probably why the Softer Lands didn’t survive— though that is just a theory.”

  Tartu spoke with authority and desire in his voice, “Let’s not speak of the unspeakable anymore and make a plan to take down that tree on the outside. That third one in the scanners. I’m marking it now so that everyone knows. I feel good about that one, and it doesn’t have any visible kaiju outside the bark… twitching.”

  A shiver passed through everyone except Mark as they noticed, finally, that the kaiju stuck in the trees were very much alive.

  Mark said, “It must be effective if it’s lasted this long… What do you think? 10,000 years?”

  “Probably more,” Derek said.

  “And poor tree number three is at the end of the line!” Mark said. And then he looked down at the forest, at #3, and said, “We thank you for your service and now it’s time to get harvested, big guy.”

  The tree did not respond, though every single person on the ship was worried about Mark taunting the tree.

  Mark told them all, “Oh stop worrying. It’s just a tree! How bad could it be?”

  A collective groan.

  And then Isoko yelled at Mark, and Sally did too, with Eliot threatening to throw Mark off of the ship and Andria reaching out a mithril hand from down below, to pat Mark on the back, to try to say nice things to him to get him to stop foolin’, but Mark just smiled and told them it was going to be okay, and to stop worrying.

  Tartu said, “I’m THIS close to opening a hole in reality and throwing us all back home, Mark.”

  “You’re not the one driving this car, Tartu,” Mark retorted, grinning the whole while. “Watch! It’ll be fine! The ice wall even says we can do it! So come on, Isoko. Let’s spread some frosty wings~”

  “What does that even mean,” Isoko muttered, as she stepped off of the top of the castle, floating down toward Mark. “I don’t have wings.”

  “You should get a dragon-costume with some wings for some HVP show coming up.”

  Isoko’s vector tumbled a little, and she asked, “Oh yeah? I should?”

  “Yeah! It’ll be neat!”

  The vectors in the Dreadnought went a little weird… and Mark ignored whatever had just happened.