Master of Puppets: A LitRPG Adventure by Eric Ugland

Author:Eric Ugland [Ugland, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2024-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Forty-One

Hiking back, we once again angled away from the wall, heading toward the trash mountain instead, and then curved back around until we were making our way east toward the Safe Place.

“What are we moving around?” I asked Not-Terrence.

“Hrm?” he replied, focused on something behind us.

I glanced around him, trying to see what he saw, but it just looked like the normal landscape. Nothing was moving, but if I’d learned anything from being around Not-Terrence, it was that sight wasn’t the only sense I should be using. So I tried to ‘feel’ for any magic or something else behind us.

Initially, I got the slime balls since they were very close to me and they had a defined sense to them. I think, and it was very much a total guess at that point, it had to do with the manner in which they were, relatively speaking, so insubstantial. There seemed to be little between them being raw magic and being living creatures.

Reaching beyond them, I got an arcane whiff of Not-Terrence. It was more difficult to discern what he was—there was a certain fuzziness to him. Different from before, like he was hiding something. Beyond him, I could detect quite a few things, but nothing distinct. No discrete forms, and certainly nothing large enough to take note of. It was more like there were small magical signatures here and there throughout the soil.

“Is there something following us?” I asked.

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?”

“It means I do not know, but it is likely.”

“I know what perhaps means.”

“You doubt my confidence?”

“It’s the lack of it that gets me.”

“I am not all-knowing.”

I wanted to make a pithy comment about that, but it didn’t seem like the time. There was always the sense of constant and perpetual danger, without any real rhyme or reason to it. That was what made it all so difficult to deal with—you assumed something was wrong but could never really see a concrete reason why you’d assumed that.

Like right now, I could tell there was something in the woods staring at us. And by woods, I meant mold. Something out there wanted to eat us, but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t sense it either, beyond that weird, niggling feeling in the back of my skull that there was something out there that wanted to get me.

And it's not exactly like you can make a plan of action based upon that. There's no way to defend yourself against a feeling, except to go find a place that is safe. But what does that even mean? Maybe I needed to just focus on something else.

“Dude, I need a name,” I said. “I gotta call you something. I can’t just keep calling you Not-Terrence. Otherwise, that’s going to become your name.”

“That is not how names work,” Not-Terrence, the nameless nogarno, replied.

“Do you want to be Terrence?”

“No. That is not my name.”

“Well, if I keep calling you that…”

“Again, not how names work.”

“It’s how nicknames work.”

“If you feel the need to give me a nickname, who am I to stop you?”

“You could just tell me your name.

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