She must think I'm some kind of monkey, Henry thought, craning his neck backward to take in the sheer, staggering scale of the red giant trees around the camp.
The lowest branches on these behemoths were easily a hundred feet up a massive trunk. One slip, or one flare-up of pain from his injured arm, and he'd be nothing more than a stain on the forest floor.
"Yeah, smaller trees it is," Henry muttered to himself as he turned and ventured further into the forest.
'At this rate, we'll be sleeping in the open air against the wall again.'
He stopped, wiping a layer of cold sweat from his forehead. The camp was already well out of shouting range, and wandering much further into the Hope Forest alone was a death sentence. Just as he prepared to turn back in defeat, he spotted it right behind an abnormally sized red tree.
It was a runt compared to the surrounding titan trees, not even a fifth as tall or thick. It stood roughly twenty-five feet tall, with a solid trunk a foot and a half in diameter.
His brief surge of relief evaporated almost instantly. He stared at the trunk of the tree, then down at the steel of his arming sword. It was a weapon forged for flesh and bone, not an axe meant for logging. Chopping through eighteen inches of solid wood with a standard blade was going to be an absolute nightmare.
It was worse than a nightmare. It was a grueling, agonizing test of endurance.
Every swing sent violent shockwaves traveling up his arms, jarring his wound and making his teeth rattle. The steel bit into the wood one painstaking inch at a time, dulling the edge with every strike.
By the time the tree finally splintered and toppled over with an earth-shaking crash, two and a half hours of pure manual labor had bled away. His hands were red raw, and his uniform was plastered to his skin with sweat.
Hauling the timber back was its own workout. It took another thirty grueling minutes of pulling and grunting before he finally broke through the treeline, dragging the tree into the clearing where Recruit 1 and Recruit 7 were waiting.
"Damn, 14, you're as slow as a turtle," Recruit 7 drawled.
He was leaning casually against a massive pile of leafy, thin branches, looking entirely too well rested. Henry let the tree drop to the dirt with an exhausted, earth-shaking thud, his annoyance flaring past his fatigue.
"Can I get some help here?" Henry panted, glaring at both of them. "Also, do you have any idea how hard it is to cut a tree down with a sword? The edge is so fucked right now, I doubt it could even cut a piece of paper."
"You what?"
Recruit 1's voice cracked like a whip. It was the most emotion Henry had ever seen her display. She marched over, her eyes wide with a volatile mix of horror and fury. "Did you actually use your blade to chop wood? Let me see your sword."
Henry drew the ruined weapon from its sheath and handed it over. The edge was an absolute disaster, chipped, warped, and blunted to hell. Recruit 1 stared at it as if he had just handed her a dead animal.
"14, are you stupid?" she hissed, her stoic facade completely shattered. "Why would you use your sword to cut down a goddamn tree?"
"I didn't have anything else to cut it with!" Henry shot back, too tired to be intimidated. "What did you expect me to do, bite through the trunk?"
Recruit 7 snickered from his pile of branches. "I mean, it's a fair point. What was he supposed to use, 1?"
Recruit 1 looked between the two of them, genuine shock replacing her anger. "You guys knew we were heading into a forest for a survival exam," she said slowly, enunciating her words as if speaking to toddlers. "Did you seriously not ask the instructors for an axe and a whetstone before we deployed?"
Henry and 7 exchanged a flat, deadpan stare.
"I didn't know we were supposed to ask," 7 muttered, his smug smile faltering slightly. "I thought the instructors just issued us exactly what they wanted us to use."
Recruit 1 pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a long, suffering sigh. "You two really are idiots."
She turned on her heel, marched over to her supply pack, and unbuckled a side pouch. She pulled out a sturdy steel hand-axe and a rectangular whetstone. Walking back, she shoved the axe against Henry's chest, followed immediately by her own pristine arming sword.
"I will try to salvage your blade," she growled, her eyes narrowing into a lethal, promising glare. "Do not mess my sword up 14. Or else."
She pivoted to recruit 7.
"7, go with 14 to get the rest of the timber we need. If you two move as slow as 14 did for this first piece, we won't have a roof before nightfall, and we'll be screwed."
"Don't worry," 7 replied, flashing a wide, arrogant smile. "I'll keep us on track."
Henry scowled, slipping Recruit 1's sword into his scabbard and feeling the weight of the axe in his off hand. "Whatever," Henry muttered, turning back toward the treeline. "But you're cutting down the next one."
Despite a constant stream of bickering echoing through the canopy, the duo actually managed to find a productive rhythm.
To Henry's genuine surprise, Recruit 7 turned out to be an exceptional tree climber. Scaling the rough, red bark of the giant trees like a squirrel, 7 was able to reach the lower canopy and hack through the joints of massive branches, sparing them the impossible task of hunting down more of the rare, smaller trees.
With gravity doing half the work and a proper steel axe in hand, which sliced through the fibrous wood exponentially faster than a ruined sword, their efficiency skyrocketed. In just three hours, they had dragged four massive, usable logs back to the perimeter of their camp.
As they hauled the fifth through the minimal underbrush, the distinct, sharp scent of woodsmoke hit Henry's nose.
They broke through the treeline, expecting to see the skeleton of their shelter taking shape. Instead, the clearing was still bare of any structure. Recruit 1 was crouching next to a crackling fire, rotating thick, heavy slabs of the Fire-Mana Lynx's severed legs on makeshift wooden spits.
"Good," Recruit 7 groaned, dropping his end of the heavy branch with a dull thud. "I am absolutely starving. How is it, 1?"
Recruit 1 tore a chunk off a charred piece she had already cooked, her expression completely impassive. She chewed for a long moment, swallowed hard, and gave a faint shrug. "It's edible."
Driven by hollow, aching stomachs, Henry and 7 dropped to the dirt, grabbed their own skewers, and took greedy bites. Almost instantly, both of their faces twisted into identical, visceral scowls.
7 beat Henry to the punch, spitting a piece into the fire. "This is the toughest piece of meat I've ever chewed in my life," he gagged, looking at the skewer with sheer betrayal. "And it tastes horrible. Like burnt copper and old boots."
Recruit 1 didn't even look up from the flames. "The mana mutation makes the muscle fiber incredibly dense," she stated dryly. "And yes, it tastes awful. But it's all we have for now, and it's packed with raw energy. Eat it."
She gestured toward the pile of logs they had just hauled in. "We need the calories to get this shelter built before we lose the light. Once the walls are up, we can focus on securing a reliable water source and hunting for actual prey."
The cold logic of her words didn't make the meat taste any better. Henry and 7 chewed through the rubbery, foul-tasting flesh purely out of survival instinct, forcing down just enough to quiet the painful rumbling in their guts.
As soon as the miserable meal was over, the brief reprieve ended. Henry picked up the axe, and the grueling physical labor began once more.
The miserable meal did exactly what Recruit 1 promised; their productivity skyrocketed. Figuring out that they could scale the trees right on the edge of the clearing eliminated the agonizing, long drags through the forest.
For the next four hours, they fell into a punishing but highly efficient rhythm, harvesting six massive logs an hour.
By four o'clock, they had hauled thirty logs to the edge of the camp.
Throughout the afternoon, Recruit 1 hadn't touched a single piece of wood. Instead, she had spent hours meticulously digging a massive, perfectly spaced circle of deep, angled trenches into the hard-packed earth.
Henry and 7 exchanged more than a few confused glances over the growing craters, but neither of them wasted breath asking questions. The labor demanded all their focus, and despite her lack of communication, neither doubted her competence.
With the sun beginning its descent and the shadows of the Hope Forest lengthening, they pushed for one final, desperate sprint.
The threat of spending another night exposed to the elements fueled their exhausted muscles.
In that final hour, running on sheer adrenaline and spite, they managed to sever and drag back ten more logs.
Panting, drenched in sweat, and covered in red bark dust, they hauled the final piece of log through the treeline. Both of them stopped dead in their tracks.
The clearing was transformed.
While they had been out hunting for the last batch, Recruit 1 had gone to work. The massive logs had been hoisted and seated into the angled trenches, and the dirt had been packed down hard to lock them in place.
The heavy timbers slanted inward, their immense weight resting against one another at a high central apex, creating the skeleton of a massive, super-round lodge. It was a rugged, imposing fortress of wood, perfectly utilizing the sheer size of the titan-sized branches.
The final log slipped from Henry and recruit 7's raw, blistered hands, hitting the dirt with a thud.
Henry stared up at the towering structure, completely forgetting the searing pain in his arm.
"Holy..." Henry breathed, wiping the sweat from his eyes. "She sure knows how to build."