Pan and Apollo breached the trees in their haste to find what had made the crash. The dark and gnarly trees had been toppled in a wide area. Pan scanned the area for what might have caused the destruction.

  “Athena!” Apollo cried.

  “What?” she called back.

  She was standing on the edge of the sudden clearing behind one of the fallen trees.

  “What-… Are you ok?” he stuttered.

  “Well yeah.”

  He huffed at her unhelpful responses. “Do you know what that was?”

  She was looking at the Gravestone Corps card in her hand. “It was four monsters.” She turned it around for them to see.

  Rank up to earn a patrol bonus. Bonus scales with rank.

  Next rank: Polis Private

  Kills: 4 / 10

  “You mean it was you? You caused this-… this-…” He gestured impotently at the clearing. “This?”

  “Well, yeah. There were hobbs, and I drew into that card I bought in town and killed them.”

  “The card you bought in town?”

  “Not that town,” she said, meaning Gravestone, “the other town. From the hub area. You remember, outside of the dungeon?”

  “Oh yeah,” Apollo drawled. “Wait.” He pulled out his tablet and tapped on the page. “Broad Hew” he read from the device, “yeah, that one.”

  “Can I see?” Pan asked. Apollo flipped the tablet around to hold it at Pan’s height.

  The card was a yellow one, depicting a Hoplite swinging a spear of light into the trunks of several tall demons, who reached upwards from the shock of the blow. The text box described an attack in an arc about the front of the player up to three times melee distance away, hitting enemies inside for one stack of damage for each caught in the area.

  Athena had put away her Corps card and had pulled out the poster Triumph had given them. “Yep, those guys counted. We’re four out of fifty.”

  Pan glanced about the clearing. There were four dead hobbs strewn about the aftermath of Athena’s attack. None of them glittered with loot. He had missed the ugly speckled things in his initial excitement.

  “Well,” Athena said, putting the poster away, “let’s go find more.”

  “Wait-“ Pan started, but Athena grunted in frustration.

  “Ugh, I’m sick of waiting. What? What is it?” she asked impatiently, rounding on him, “What do you want to wait for?”

  “We,” he gestured between himself and Apollo, “we thought we might be getting lost. How about we leave some marks along the way?”

  Athena silently swept her arm, indicating the devastation.

  “I mean, something we can leave along the way.” He produced his piece of chalk.

  Athena sighed. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “Great. Let me get my bearings real quick. Now, let’s see. You had screamed while you were standing here, and we came running from that direction…”

  ****

  Athena pulled out the poster again. The stenciled image of the hobb stared up at her.

  “Alright, that makes 22,” she said, “We’re over halfway done.”

  Pan pulled out his corps card.

  Rank up to earn a patrol bonus. Bonus scales with rank.

  Next rank: Polis Private

  Kills: 7 / 10

  I only need to kill three more to rank up, he thought.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The grinding had gone surprisingly smooth. They had encountered six groups, including that first cluster of four Athena had taken out by herself. Pan had gone through one whole hand of cards and drawn another. Using Ditch to permanently get rid of Rose Thorn, he had used Fumble instead of trying out Hex or Stoneform.

  Fumble required him to discard his hand and draw two cards. An effect not mentioned in the text, it also gave him another action. The cards he had drawn were Vortex and Life Drain. And this time he was able to coordinate with Athena and Apollo.

  Instead of blindly playing the card in desperation, the three of them were able to treat the curse with the care it deserved. They agreed he would hold it through the minor encounters, which Athena and Apollo could handle. But when they encountered a big group, Pan could have those.

  The three of them would then encounter hobbs in twos and threes, and then Pan had almost used it when they encountered a group of four. He was glad he had held out, because as soon as the group of four went down, almost twice as many hobbs had charged them from the tree-line.

  “I’m playing it!” he had cried.

  “No, don’t!” Athena replied.

  The hobbs were too scattered, too disorganized. But she had a plan.

  Together they managed to kite the mobs into a group with minimum damage to the party. Mindlessly the creatures snarled and toddled their way towards whichever hero was closest. So moving in an arc would slow their progress and allow the party to herd the monsters together.

  Athena took the aggro, keeping the creatures occupied while Apollo and Pan prepared to use Vortex.

  Apollo explained the procedure to Pan as he tied the rope around the faun’s waist. He would take the aggro from the mob of hobbs, and then allow them to get as close as was safe.

  “If they get a hit in on you, it’s not the end of the world. We don’t have any more potions, but you’ll heal,” he had said.

  Once Vortex was cast, it would create a small black hole just above him. It likely wasn’t exactly a black hole, but details from the fight in the grove were fuzzy for the three of them. Athena had the wind knocked out of her and Pan was being digested by a mimic. The rope would allow Athena and Apollo to reel him in from a safe distance while the event horizon of the whirlwind would draw in the hobbs.

  Their plan had gone off without a hitch.

  “That’s some curse,” Apollo had said. “Maybe don’t get rid of that one yet.”

  Pan scoffed.

  “No, I’m serious,” Apollo said, “It’s a good one.”

  “I’m getting rid of all of them,” Pan said levelly.

  Athena, who had been oddly quiet since the clearing save for talking strategy in the fray, spoke up. “There’s no reason not to think about it strategically, Pan. What order do you want to remove them? Have you categorized the curses by usefulness?”

  He opened his mouth to respond, but then closed it. He hadn’t done that yet. He started to undo the rope tied around his waist.

  “Here,” said Athena, kneeling down beside him, “let me.” She conjured a knife – a tool card – and cut the rope. The rope disintegrated. The knife disappeared.

  That is to say, most of the rope disintegrated. Pan curiously held up the part that didn’t vanish, studying it.

  “Weird, that,” Athena said before dropping the matter and moving away.

  After a moment’s consideration, Pan thought he understood. The part that vanished was the shorter end from the cut. He began winding the remaining bit around the crook of his thumb and around his elbow to save it for later.

  He made the guide marks with his chalk and joined the siblings as they wandered deeper into the forest.

  Five more cards floated in front of Pan, with Life Drain discarding itself after he had run out of actions.

  Pox, Forgetfulness, Wicker Man, Gibberer, and Mirror.

  Pox again, he groaned in the recesses of his mind. The nausea associated with the Infected debuff set in. If he played Pox, a copy would be added to the discard pile for everyone in the area around him. If he discarded it, it would give him another stack of Infected, doubling the duration of his nausea.

  All Forgetfulness did was make him discard his hand.

  Gibberer and Mirror he had seen before. The former stated it would cause Gibbering Mouths to sprout in an area from the caster for a duration, and Mirror would duplicate a random enemy.

  Wicker Man he hadn’t seen before. It showed the form of a vaguely human effigy constructed of black wood as it burned inside all-consuming flames. There was also, Pan noticed on further inspection, a dark shape in the chest of the effigy which looked like a face contorted in agony, as dark as the surrounding fuel.

  Pan was studying the picture so intensely that he failed to see a vine stretched across his path. It caught his hoof and sent him to the forest floor.

  He cursed, the nausea worsening the whole experience.

  “Hold up,” he called to Athena and Apollo.

  His eyes went to the creeper he had tripped over.

  “But that can’t be right,” he muttered. He held up the coil of rope he had been carrying over his shoulder.

  What he had taken for a vine was actually more rope. And worried he had somehow tripped over his own length of rope, he held it up to see it was all there.

  But stretched at hoof-level from tree to tree was a taut length of rope. As his eyes traced it through the woods, he found more threads of brown hempen rope coiling around the trunks like guitar strings about a post.

  He scrambled to his feet.

  “Apollo! Athena!” he said to their backs. They were in another argument, Apollo gesticulating and Athena carefully trying not to see. “I think we’re heading into a-“

  Before he could say the word trap, it sprung. Apollo left the ground, flipping sideways and hitting his head on the ground before rising left foot in the air. A green card named Snare flashed as this happened.

  As Athena conjured a weapon, coils from the tree she backed into wrapped themselves around her, restraining her as though by elastic bands. Another green card, this one named Entangle, flashed for her.

  Pan skidded to a stop on the rough stony ground, hoofs grinding slightly. A roiling mass of what looked like tentacles boiled forth from among the trees ahead. Loops of brown woven hemp waved and frothed in a great tangled seething mass as it came into view.

  A great featureless humanoid shape, barrel chested with great loping arms, walked stiffly from the mass of coils.

  It looked and moved like a robot, but one wrapped entirely in rope.

  No, Pan thought, this thing is the rope. It’s some kind of…rope elemental.

  And it was advancing on the suspended and unconscious Apollo.