After some much needed rest and a long workout for Meaty, the small group began their trek to the surface. Having geared up and climbed down the ladder and out of Kor’s hut, they passed numerous goblins going about their daily lives. As Snek expected, many of the goblins stopped what they were doing to openly gawk as they walked by.

  What Snek didn’t expect, however, is how none of the goblins gave her a second glance. She had expected them to be curious about her newly evolved form, as her size and coloring had vastly changed, but they only had eyes for Mog. She looked back at the large goblin and took a moment to figure out what about him was captivating the tribe.

  She immediately did a double take. Her first thought was that Mog had somehow grown taller, but Snek realized that the change in stature was actually just a change in posture. Every other time she had seen him, he had been dramatically slouched forward. At his full height, he stood about two heads taller than the other goblins.

  “He’s huge!” Blood said in their mind, and Snek had to agree.

  Meaty was perched atop Mog’s shoulder, and was seemingly responsible for the change as he coached the large goblin through pantomime and visual demonstrations. As she watched, Mog copied the large rat by grasping his crossed arms and flexing his pectoral muscles. This change in posture caused Mog to drop the heavy club he had been leaning against his other shoulder, but he quickly righted it and continued following the rat’s advice.

  Before long, Meaty and Mog were taking turns flexing their chests at each other to the sounds of the large goblin’s laughter and the rat’s loud squeaks. While Meaty’s coaching did little to conceal the goblin’s large belly, it did accentuate the goblin’s enormous shoulders and arm muscles. Snek and Blood were impressed, and she had to pull their attention back to the task at hand to avoid openly gawking at him like the surrounding goblins.

  Mog’s attitude and persona had completely changed in light of getting a new friend, and Snek found it amusing to watch the strange duo bridge their language gap with grunts and flexing. She begrudgingly admitted that the large goblin may not be the villain she had made him out to be in her thoughts, and she noticed Kor smiling warmly at Mog’s newfound confidence.

  Eventually, they made it across the large cavern and entered into one of the numerous tunnels that littered the walls of the massive room. It was not the same tunnel that Mog had carried her through, as that one had been a steep but steady line to the surface. This tunnel had a gradual incline, and slowly wound its way upwards toward the surface.

  Kor paused in the entrance to cast a spell, and a small glowing orb appeared to light their way forward while hovering a couple inches in the air above her walking stick. The small ball of light illuminated the path directly ahead and behind the small group, but did little to combat the lurking darkness of the offshooting tunnels and intersecting paths.

  Snek glared into the darkness as she slithered beside the goblins. Her pit organs and vision couldn’t sense very far into the darkness, but she noticed the light from Kor’s spell reflected back at her from numerous beady eyes following their progress. Occasionally, a rat shaped wisp of heat would stand out to her pit organs, or she’d catch the familiar scent of rodents on her tongue as it flicked in and out of her mouth.

  Surprisingly, she found the rats easier to track and notice when she wasn’t directly looking for them. She pulled up her skills to look for an answer, and realized it was due to the first effect of her Keen Senses skill.

  Snek focused on utilizing the skill, absently gazing ahead instead of focusing on one specific thing, and her senses came alive to her surroundings. She could feel and hear Kor’s gnarled walking stick pressing into the dirt floor of the inclined tunnel, along with Mog’s labored breathing that bordered on being concerning. Meaty was still perched atop his shoulder and was emitting low pitched squeals that she interpreted as somewhat motivational.

  The rats continued to follow their progress through the dark tunnel, sometimes darting back into the offshoots pushing their way through walls, or burrowing into small hovels. It put Snek on edge, and she was happy when they finally left the darkness of the tunnel and slithered out onto a rocky outcropping.

  Their exit was placed high up on a hill overlooking a grand view of craggy outcropping and sandy dunes. She didn’t remember the land outside the cave being this desolate, but that could be attributed to effects of her starvation or Mog carrying her around by the neck for most of their trip through this biome. In the far distance, Snek could see the line of dawn slowly creeping toward a massive forest shrouded in darkness.

  Beyond the dark expanse of the forest, Snek observed occasional flashes of bright red light, but a dark and ever shifting cloud formed a barrier to sight that she could only occasionally glimpse through.

  While the cave opening blocked the view directly behind Snek’s vantage point, she could still see quite far to each side. To the left and along the line of encroaching daytime, a massive shadow protruded out from the night. The shadow was bulky and jagged, and Snek realized that it wasn’t the darkness resisting the light of day, but the casted silhouette of something large blocking the rising sun.

  Snek whipped her head up and back, and could just make out what was casting the large shadow. An enormous rocky island floated amidst the clouds, high above the ground. It was a picturesque view, floating there against the pinks and oranges of the dawn sky, and Snek thought she could make out the branches of an enormous tree stretching out from the floating mass of earth before being consumed by the surrounding clouds. The bottom of the island was a sharp and jagged point that had been cut from the ground below before escaping to the sky.

  “There’s so much…” Snek thought, and Blood nodded. With a short grunt, Kor climbed up to the lip of the cave mouth, and took a spot standing next to the snake. The goblin woman poked her friend and then pointed in the direction Snek had yet to look.

  She stared at the distant but seemingly normal hill that Kor was pointing at. It was over fifty miles away, was mostly covered in darkness, and appeared to be an indistinct green blob amidst the surrounding lush biome. Snek thought it interesting that she could see far enough away to pick out various biomes as she watched the unmoving lump of earth, but eventually she turned back to her friend. If she had eyebrows to raise, she would be raising them.

  “Snek missed it! Look again.” Kor said with mild frustration, and Snek turned back to the distant hill.

  She stared at it to humor her friend, but as she peered at it she realized a stark change. When she had last looked, it had been mostly swathed in darkness. As she gazed at it now, only a slight portion of the hill wasn’t in the light. The line of daylight was not progressing fast enough to explain the change…

  Snek continued to stare at the hill, and after a few minutes, she watched the hill levitate towards the sky as enormous chitinous legs appeared beneath it and lifted it up before scuttling more into the light and settling back down. Snek’s mouth dropped open in shock, and she turned back to her friend.

  “Very big! Gobs avoid when can... Sneaky Hill Crab.” Kor said between laughs.

  Mog also enjoyed Snek’s reaction, as he had joined them on the outcropping while Snek had been staring into the distance. Kor turned to face the forest and pointed at the bright line of daylight that was perpetually moving forward.

  “Light will reach forest before us. Snek will look for trouble. If monsters in forest, will be very different than normal monster,” she said, before beginning the long trek down the hill and toward the forest Snek was born in.

  Kor continued to elaborate as they slowly picked their way across the arid and dune rippled terrain and towards the forest. Apparently, any creatures that stayed in the forest for extended periods of time would slowly mutate - and not in a beneficial way. Yet creatures still occasionally traveled there to give birth, as anything born in the forest was rumored to gain a blessing. Some creatures did this instinctually, while more mentally present species chose to do this with intention.

  The goblin woman’s eyes lingered on Snek when she mentioned the last part, and the snake took her meaning. She had hazy memories of a system notification from before she gained her sapience, and wondered if it had explained all of that to her. She made a mental note for later to see if her system had some log of previous messages.

  Now wasn’t the time though, as they had finally made it to the forest. The daylight had, true to Kor’s words, reached the forest by the time they arrived. Unfortunately, it didn’t make much of a difference as very little light made it through the dense canopy of the enormous trees.

  Meaty scuttled down from Mog’s shoulder, taking point and stepping into the dense thicket of underbrush while gesturing for the group to wait. Snek watched the rat disappear from all senses except her pit organs, before he vanished from them as well.

  As they waited, an ominous presence bore down on the small group. It drifted towards them from the shadows of the canopy overhead and the roots below the earth that supported the trees that scraped against the sky. Snek focused on the presence. It felt like power and obstinance, but also like home.

  The presence called to her, encouraging her to abandon their current goals and slither into the forest. A part of her knew it promised power, and as she considered leaving the group to follow the sensation, a large rat appeared within her zone of awareness and Meaty stepped back out of the underbrush.

  Through a complicated combination of grunts, gestures, and flexing, Meaty conveyed that he had found the correct path to follow. The group moved into the forest, through the dense thickets of plants and wandering vines hanging from the lower canopy. It felt natural to the snake, but the rat and goblins were not as well equipped.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Mog was having an especially hard time, his large form getting snagged and caught on almost every possible obstacle in their path. Sharp twigs dug into his skin, vines wrapped around his arms, and his head frequently smacked into unseen branches. Before long, the scent of his blood and sweat called out like a dinner bell into the humid forest.

  Snek knew that he would be enough to signal their presence to any watching predators, but as far she could tell, there were no living creatures in their immediate vicinity. After a few hours of slogging through the forest, and plenty of pit stops for the goblins to rest, they finally made it to the edge of a large and colorful clearing.

  The canopy parted above the clearing, allowing light to pass unobstructed down to the forest floor and illuminating numerous flowers of various colors and shapes. Kor excitedly began to make her way into the clearing, but Snek reached forward with the end of her tail, wrapping it around the goblin woman’s wrist.

  Kor paused, took a step back and nodded. They had discussed having Snek scout the area ahead of time, so as Kor sat cross legged at the edge of clearing and Mog rested upon a partially collapsed trunk, Snek wound herself up a tree to observe the scene from the lower canopy.

  She watched their group for a moment - Kor quietly mumbling to herself and picking through the flowers that were within reach, checking the petals, stamen, and roots with her wrinkled green fingers. Mog was yawning as he leaned back and settled in atop the elevated log while Meaty rested in the crook of his neck.

  Snek sent Blood images of the serpent from her vision seamlessly and silently moving through the lower branches of a tree’s canopy, and it was quick to employ the new method of traversal as they quietly moved around the edge of the large clearing. Whenever they reached a gap in the branches or any other inconvenience, Snek would reach out with her telekinesis and shift a branch or vine into a more convenient location.

  They continued on silently for a time, before a light popping sound indicated that they had a system notification. She pulled it up as Blood continued through the trees.

  Their progress around the edge of the clearing became much quicker, and Snek could feel the activated skill prodding their body to make minute changes as they passed through the trees. The upgraded skill all but eliminated the moments where they would need to stop and consider how to proceed, as the insistent prodding of the skill anticipating the patterns of branches in a way that bordered on precognition.

  When they had traversed nearly a mile around the edge of the clearing, a low keening whimper caught Snek’s attention, and they wound their way up to a higher branch with better visibility. From the new vantage point, they gazed down at a small pack of quadrupeds that had nested down on top of a bed of flowers and loose vegetation.

  The creatures were unique to Blood, but reminiscent of various vessels Snek had been grafted into during her evolution. While none of the three creatures initially appeared to be of the same species, Snek attributed that to the mutations Kor had mentioned earlier. There were two adult creatures and one infant, and Snek observed the newborn for clues as to what the creatures’ original forms were supposed to look like.

  It was a small, fur covered canine. The pup was the source of the tiny yips and whimpers she had heard, as it struggled to feed from the monstrosity that must have its mother. The mother licked a sheen of viscous goo from the pup's tan fur. The birth must have been recent, as the pup hadn’t opened its eyes yet - a minor blessing, as the mother in question would be a traumatizing first sight for the tiny canine.

  The mother looked nothing like the puppy. Where the newborn had delicate and matted fur, the mother was completely bald. Its hairless skin was covered in small abrasions and smeared with tiny pinpricks of blood where the hair must have been violently torn from its body. Long stalks of skin rose up from numerous spots on its body, each ending in a circular eyeball that twisted and shook as they turned to look in each direction.

  The skin surrounding the canine’s actual eyes had knitted themselves shut, seemingly replaced by the countless eye-stalks. As she watched, the mother used two of them to adjust the puppy to the correct position for it to continue feeding.

  The other dog - presumably the pup’s father - was also mutated, and was also vastly different in appearance to its mate and puppy. It still had fur on the parts of its body that were not covered in thick bony plates. The power of the forest had caused the canine’s bones to grow and extend, pushing through the creature’s flesh to stick out at random angles or fuse with other bones in a mock exoskeleton.

  Many of the wounds caused by the dog's bones pushing through its skin appeared to have clotted, but reopened slightly whenever the dog moved. Snek watched as it did just that, and new blood and bile welled up from the wounds before dripping down and mixing with the other stained and matted fur. Whenever the dog moved, it let out a low-pitched and pained growl that would startle the puppy and cause a multitude of the mother’s eye-stalks to turn and glare at its noisy mate.

  The strange and demented scene took Snek by surprise, and she stared at the contrast of the adorable puppy against the abominations that were its parents. She was wrapped around a large branch as she observed the scene, wondering what the puppy’s blessing could be, when a deep cracking and rumble echoed across the clearing followed by an enormous boom.

  The sound of the tree falling to the ground was accompanied by Mog’s surprised yelp. The majority of the canine mother’s eyestalks turned towards the sound, and the bone-armored canine quickly stood up and growled in the direction of Snek’s party. It howled, and then completely vanished from sight.

  Stealth forgotten, Snek whipped her head around frantically, looking for the bone dog before it poofed back into existence about fifty feet across the clearing in the direction of the rat and goblins. It can teleport? Snek marveled before the realization that her friend was in danger slammed into her.

  She turned back to look at the remaining canines, her jerky movement having caught the mother’s attention. It stood, the pup falling from its body with light yelp, as all of the mother’s eye stalks turned up glare at the snake lurking in the tree above its nest.