Claff
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Chapter 38
🕑 Added 2025-04-01 02:39:02 +0000 UTCBrom stood in shock, watching as a giant rock golem sorted through a pile of broken tree branches, seemingly looking for a specific one. It worked quickly, seemingly knowing what it was doing. That was extremely odd, since everyone knew that most golems are actually quite stupid, unless they were being given direct instructions. This one seemed to be on the smart side though.
When the golem found its desired branch, it stood straight, giving Brom an idea of how big the thing really was. From experience, Brom knew that the bigger the rock golem was, the harder it would be to find its core. However, that usually came with the caveat of bigger rock golems being much slower, though they did hit harder than their smaller counterparts.
Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case here.
The giant golem seemed to grow and shrink on command, which was an unusual feature Brom had only heard of before. That meant that this was probably a rare variant monster that was spawned in this Death Zone. It was likely a high rank B or low A monster.
The golem grew once it had found the branch it was looking for. It started out as an easily manageable 6 feet tall and grew to an enormous 30 feet tall in the span of 5 seconds. Brom was suddenly glad that he had the foresight to observe the situation before rushing in to attack. Especially once the second golem made its presence known.
As Brom was watching the first golem walk towards a nearby tree, he heard a small thunk as something red dropped to the ground. After firing off a quick Inspect, Brom saw that it was a Resource Berry, and by the color, it was a Health Berry. He was tempted to try to sneak by and snatch it off the ground before the golem noticed it, but as he contemplated doing so, a second golem appeared from the ground.
It started off as just a plain golem hand, but quickly grew two legs and two arms, all attached to a torso. Brom strained his eyes, striving to see if he could spot the golem’s core while it formed from the ground. It was important to know where these things were in a battle. He was unlucky to not spot it.
The golem that picked the berry up waltzed on over to the one holding the branch, growing as it did. When it reached the first one, it was about 20 feet tall and handed the berry over before walking back to the base of the tree. A few more Health Berries promptly fell to the ground, which it picked up and brought back over to its ally.
Brom was very confused as to how so many of these berries were falling from the giant tree in the middle of the clearing, but just jotted that down in his mental notes. He continued to observe this ridiculous situation. And it only got more and more crazy as he watched.
For over two hours, the two golems spent their time sorting through the dwindling piles of branches, using the Health Berries as a sort of healing potion to reattach them. As the piles of branches got smaller, the golems were able to work more quickly. They made their way through the trees around the clearing, fixing everyone that they found broken. They missed a few on the outer edge of the ring of destruction, but those were mostly minor branches that were broken. Though there was one branch that Brom would have thought they would get, they completely ignored it. He made sure to note that.
In fact, as he watched, it appeared that they ignored everything outside of a certain area. He made the mistake of not paying attention to where he was walking at one point while taking notes, and he stepped on a small pile of dead leaves. The noise it made was definitely audible, and the golems noticed it since they froze for two exhausting seconds after he made the noise, but they went back to work after that and barely paid it any attention.
Brom was tempted to experiment with how far their perception went, but he wasn’t interested in a fight right now. Two golems at once, with the extreme possibility of more, wasn’t something he was paid for. All he needed to do was gather information about the area. He was plenty capable of doing that from the shadows.
Brom continued watching the golems work until they completed their project, and when they were done, about 60 feet of woods outside of the clearing had been cleaned up. If it weren’t for the occasional stray branch outside of the diameter, Brom would never have known there was a tornado here without seeing it with his own eyes.
When the two golems were done with their work, they walked over to the ground around the giant tree in the clearing and filled in the large divots that their formation had left. When they were in their inert state, Brom wouldn’t have known they existed. That honestly freaked him out a little, since he didn’t know how many other rock golems were in the area.
Well, I guess they were earth golems instead of rock golems. Earth golems are the ones who can change size, and rock golems need compacted rocks in order to grow. These looked like they spawned from regular dirt. Earth Golems are also less dense and slightly faster for it.
Brom marked down his thoughts on the matter, including that he couldn’t spot either of the golem’s cores. He made notes about the speed and sizes of each of the two golems he saw. He also noted that at least the bigger golem could form extra appendages at the cost of some of its mass. He saw it reshape some of its torso at one point to help get a particularly large branch back in place. It was quite the shock to see.
As Brom made his notes, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the ground around the giant tree shifted. He had no other way to explain it other than that. He kept watch for a few more minutes before going back to note taking.
One of the other mysteries of this clearing was the giant tree. He could almost understand the golems wanting to clean the area of debris; he liked having a clean home himself. The odd thing was the tree seemed to know exactly when to give the golems more of its Health Berries to aid in their mission, and that it was willing to give its berries at all. From what he knew, trees that could produce Resource Berries guarded their fruit jealously and very rarely gave any out. Only a few elves that had developed a rapport with the trees in their royal grove, or whatever it was, were able to regularly get any. Yet this tree seemed to have an endless supply of them and gave them freely to the golems. It concerned him how closely linked they needed to be to the tree in order to have that sort of silent relationship. It could be an odd sort of variable if a fight were to break out.
After Brom finished making his notes, he went back to watching. He’s already gained a good amount of information for the day, but he had a feeling that there would be more to get soon enough.
He did a few slow laps around the clearing, making sure to keep well outside of the zone he marked as untouched by the golems. He wasn’t sure why that was such a clear line, but he made sure to keep to it. When he crossed the part closest to the road he came from, Brom saw something unusual happening at the base of the tree.
As he watched, a human looking foot started to take shape. It appeared to be made of a dull gray bark. The longer he watched, the more of a humanoid body started to take shape.
It started with a single foot, out of which sprouted a calf, then thigh, then torso. A second leg sprouted from the bottom of the torso, followed by a couple of arms and then a basic head. It was almost as if Brom was watching the birth of a dryad. He almost bowed his head in humility, as this was an extraordinarily rare event. But he just had to keep watching.
The longer he looked, the more detail appeared on the wooden body. What initially was just the rough shape of a human body slowly started to become more refined. The legs, previously made of rough bark, were now smooth and toned, as if belonging to a runner. They were human, but more elegant.
Then between the legs smoothed out, as if on a doll for a child. They definitely didn’t need to see such things, and Brom was glad he didn’t have to see it either.
After the lower half was done, the torso came next. He watched as the rough bark compacted and smoothed itself out into a subtle 6-pack. Then came the pecks, which lacked nipples, but again, he wasn’t complaining. Overall, it was a beautiful piece of work. The arms came next, again being toned enough to look healthy and active, but not large enough to look strange for the proportions.
Finally came the head, and with it a face that looked... Off. It was as if it were being made by someone who had seen a human before, but not for a long time. The eyes felt far apart, the eyebrows too high, and the mouth was just a bit too wide. It was unsettling. Then suddenly, it all shifted, and it was a perfectly normal face. It was almost like someone was reading his thoughts on the matter.
When the face was finally made right, the bark that would be its hair started to elongate, and slowly but surely, vines started to form. The vines were made of the most vibrant green Brom bad seen. Actually, when he thought about it, it looked like the same shade of green as the vines in the tree above it.
Will this tree be the base for the dryad?
Brom was under the impression that dryads were connected to strong trees and were considered protectors of nature. They weren’t necessarily violent towards monsters or humanoids, but they would dispatch any who brought harm to any tree in their chosen area. That meant that Brom needed to be extra careful about returning home.
Sure, the two golems he saw would be a bit of a pain to take out, but his main concern was that these weren’t the only monster’s to be created in this Death Zone. So far, there has been a strong affinity towards nature-based monsters, which might lead to treants being created, making the whole forest a potential paperwork nightmare for the future.
The thing with treants was that they were known to ignore the stronger adventurers, keeping up their tree disguise until they could perform a sneak attack on the weaker members of the groups. They were known to cause a whole lot of damage in a very short amount of time, which usually leads to a lot of deaths to new adventurers and the clients who hire the adventure guild to act as bodyguards. That causes a giant headache for him as the guild leader.
Brom continued doing a few laps around the area but couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The only things that he thought were noteworthy were the monsters he already wrote about and their behaviors. There were the occasional Orc group that walked by, but they walked right through the clearing, going so far as to ignore even the newly born dryad. That was odd, but not completely out of the ordinary for Orcs to ignore something that they couldn’t eat.
Brom was about to turn around and find a spot around a mile or so away from here to camp when he saw something else extremely weird happen.
The dryad started to dance. It was moving weird, almost as if in a dance, though not one that he had seen before. It looked as if the creature were swaying its hips back and forth, sticking its arms straight down and alternating which arm went behind it and maintaining an opposite pace to its hips.
When the dryad was done with its rather ridiculous dance, it turned to face the tree and started walking to it. As it approached, a throne made from the same wood as its body started to form from the ground. As Brom watched, the seat and armrest popped out of the ground and started smoothening out. The backrest started off as a basic plank but quickly developed a series of intricate lines and curves that had Brom thinking it would be a throne fit for a king. No normal Dryad would have made such a throne since they usually spend most of their time hidden in the canopy of the trees they protect to get a better view of the area around them.
Okay, there’s definitely something odd going on around here. Maybe I should extend my trip a few days and stay on the lookout. This might be interesting.
