The venom from the funnel-web spider spread slowly across his body, in contrast to its rapid effects.
Hosen's breath was ragged, and his fever skyrocketed until his vision blurred. His mind wasn't there, and his nose bled like a waterfall.
In such a dazed state, he could barely stay awake. Deep in the back of his head, he saw an illusion—hallucination, surely—a beautiful tree in full bloom.
As terrifying as it was, it hovered over the entire forest like a predator, its branches morphed into sharp maws, twisting and stretching with the wind, and its flowers excreted a crimson gas that killed its surroundings with just a single whiff.
Fever leads you to weird places, he thought before his consciousness flew away.
***
He didn't know how long he'd been out. Time had liquified and dripped away unnoticed. Hosen didn't know how long had passed, but the pounding pain in his shoulder told him one thing: he was still alive.
Barely.
"I guess I'm less susceptible to animal venom out of the two of us."
Inase muttered before Hosen opened his eyes. His voice was dry, sharp-edged, but oddly comforting.
"...how long was I out?"
A groan slipped from Hosen's throat. His eyes slid open, and there he found his buddy—resting by the tree, with hair tied back, and arms soaked with blood.
Inase didn't answer right away. Only exhaled sharply, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
The white-hair noticed his shirt was gone, and his long coat was placed over him. His skin, pale like the full moon, was streaked with dirt and dried blood.
Inase's belt clung tightly around his shoulder, stopping the blood flow under its pressure.
"Don't get excited," the blonde muttered, "I sucked the venom out. You were turning… uh... gray…-er."
Didn't even know how to describe the color of someone's skin when he had no color to describe to begin with.
But at least he looked more alive than a few hours ago.
The scientist blinked at the sky, oddly serene. The clouds had covered the blue vastness, but he could tell it was getting dark already.
Around late evening was his guess. The sunlight faintly disappeared behind the horizon.
"How romantic."
"Shut up." Inase snapped, "If you have the energy to make jokes, you can stand up as well."
Measuring his own temperature, Hosen muttered.
"No fever, so I guess the worst is over."
He tried to sit up, only to wince and flop back down. He wasn't going to go anywhere anytime soon.
Though… Along with the motion, he had noticed that he held onto the notebook this entire time.
Might as well write his experience down in great detail.
"The bite of the funnel web spider symptoms:"
He saw it crawl away for a split second before he passed out. He recognized its features right away.
"Venom acts faster than it spreads. Symptom severity disproportionate to onset delay. Shallow, arrhythmic breathing. Blurred vision. Profuse bleeding. Hallucinations-"
Inase glared at him, hands on his hips, baffled that Hosen tried to analyze his own death even in this situation.
"You're not dying with a notepad in your hand, idiot."
"Look at my notes first, idiot." Hosen pointed at what he had scribbled between the crumbled pages. "I had a universal antidote by my belt, idiot."
"Stop calling me an idiot."
"You started it."
Shaking his head, the blonde peeked at the writing, and…
There was a note for Inase to 'check my flasks for an antidote', indeed.
He scoffed. Ain't no way he was going to decipher what these scribbles meant during a tense situation. Especially not when the page was smeared with blood, barely readable.
"If I started looking for it between the hundreds of vials on you, you would be long since dead."
"It's this one."
Hosen unhooked the one placed fourth from his coat, expression unchanged, and drank it down in one go.
To that, Inase rolled his eyes.
This guy was unbelievable! Asking for such a thing under such pressuring circumstances…
"Sometimes it's better to take action rather than to think and look for a solution, dumbass."
He didn't use 'idiot' this time. He knew other words that could replace it: fool, stupid, doofus, dimwit, dunce, nitwit, bonehead... and many more. For this specific one, he had an entire dictionary memorized.
But his short moment of triumph was disturbed by Hosen's groan.
The lingering pain of the bite still made itself known once in a while.
"You alright?"
"At least I can confirm that none of the animals here could create a hallucination wide enough to affect us without any side effects."
They had barely any animals left in their timeline, yet the venomous ones, so that they could experiment with their symptoms.
Animals differed from eldritch horror—one attacked the body, the other tortured the mind. Rarely had hallucinations of the mind poisoned anyone physically before.
Hosen had learnt it through this firsthand experience. He wouldn't be dying right now if an animal could show him illusions without killing him through physical contact.
"What do you mean?" Inase's head tilted in confusion.
"The question of 'what would make us hallucinate?' was stuck in my mind ever since our first encounter with the Flying Plyps. These abominations can't do tricks like that."
He was pretty sure about it.
"Especially not when they're asleep, and not on such a vast scale."
After all, they weren't bitten from the very beginning; they set foot on these lands already affected.
"Which means, it's definitely caused by an eldritch… There's something different hiding in these woods."
Which one was it, though?
Inase blinked, connecting the dots while Hosen was still in a daze.
"It's that damn tree." For the first time, he thought of something smart.
A sigh of annoyance escaped him while he ruffled his hair aggressively. With his back slumped against a common tree trunk, he further explained.
"I saw a glimpse of it through the red mist. Every time we tried to approach it, we were pulled back."
"You saw it?"
"From far away. It was the only thing that felt out of place, like it wasn't part of this world."
Inase shrugged.
Could've said so earlier, the glare Hosen gave him didn't need any translation.
"...you might be onto something."
The white-hair exhaled, defeated. Then, he grimaced as another pulse of heat rolled through his veins.
"In my fever, I also saw a vision of a tree. Its flowers gave off red gas that killed everything around it. The red mist. Ugh-"
He winced again, hand to his shoulder. It still felt hot and pulsating, and exhaustion crept onto him again.
Seeing him fading again, Inase stood.
"Let's pause for now. It's getting dark."
He stretched, spine cracking, then headed off to collect branches for a fire.
A cue to rest. Hosen leaned back, his vision still hazy, but at least not blind.
The shapes in the forest blurred, shadows stretching unnaturally as dusk fell. The atmosphere was relaxing enough that he could fall asleep at any moment... until one of those shapes moved.
It was too fast to be a leaf in the wind, too solid to be an illusion.
Hosen squinted an eye to see it more clearly.
Two white tusks. Brown, round body. Short legs. Hooves.
Hosen's eye twitched, realizing it was,
A wild boar.
His body tensed immediately, but he was too weak to rise.
"Hey—"
He warned his buddy, rasping with a weak voice as a result.
The blonde turned just in time to see it charge.
"Dodge!"
Without a second of hesitation, they scrambled—Hosen rolling aside, Inase darting behind a tree, met with the hard impact of the boar's deadly tusks.
"Great," Inase muttered, his knife already glistening in the dim evening afterlight. "I was just thinking I missed adrenaline."
The boar tore through the leafage like a cannonball wrapped in fur and rage. Its ivory hooks glistened in the dying light.
Inase's body moved before his mind could catch up. He pivoted, shoving the lying Hosen out of the path.
"Gah!"
The wounded man thudded to the ground with a grunt, just as the beast stormed past. He wished the other were more careful when tugging him... But alas, it wasn't a perfect time to be complaining.
The boar turned around and snorted steam like a forge. It charged again.
Inase gripped his knife tightly. He didn't run. He planted his feet. He wasn't scared.
"Come on, then."
The animal lunged with a growl of rage, hooves churning up soil
Closer.
And closer.
The beast's tusks were centimeters away from hitting him.
A second longer—
"Inase!" Hosen screamed, concerned it was already too late.
But the blonde managed to step aside last second, twisting his hips, blade whipping across the boar's side.
Blood sprayed in a satisfying trail, but Inase only clicked his tongue. A shallow cut, not enough to kill.
The beast screeched in pain, wheeled, and came back, faster, but this time... it directed toward the scientist this time.
With wild eyes and a foaming mouth, it was eager to pierce the weak man on the ground—an easy target, barely able to move—and throw him with its sharp tusks like he weighed nothing.
"Let's try something different-!"
Noticing it, Inase stood in its way fearlessly. A dangerous, unhinged smile crawled onto his lips, as if he enjoyed it.
He lowered his stance. Dug his fingers into the dirt and steadied himself.
The boar stumbled, bleeding, but still it charged. It wasn't giving up.
Neither did Inase.
He waited. Breathed once.
Then moved.
Not away. Not aside. Forward.
He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't dodge. He only lunged.
While dropping his shoulders, he squared his jaw, and—
SLAM!
His head met the animal's hard skull with a sickening crack that echoed through the trees.
The collision was brutal. Inase's forehead drove directly into the boar's skull like a battering ram, stopping the beast mid-charge. Its legs folded, and its body staggered.
It let out one last, stunned squeal—
—and then collapsed, dead weight thudding into the earth with a lethal concussion.
The man, too, hit the ground, heaving heavily.
Behind him, Hosen wheezed, wide-eyed and pale.
Dust settled.
"..."
After a moment, Inase groaned, pushing himself up with one hand—the other rubbed his now-throbbing forehead.
"Ow."
He blinked slowly, then looked over at the twitching corpse beside him.
"Worth it."
"You're insane."
"That I already knew since the moment I was born."
The blonde wiped his face with a bloody sleeve.
"You're welcome."
His buddy had no idea how to respond to that. Silence followed, only disturbed by Inase's tired breaths until…
Growl.
Hosen's stomach stole all the attention.
"You? Hungry before me? That's unnatural." Inase laughed.
"I didn't eat breakfast, okay?"
The other muttered grumpily, arms folded tightly around himself. At least a hungry stomach meant that he was steadily regaining his strength.
Thus, Inase crouched by the boar's corpse and casually sank the knife in its belly.
"Dinner's here."
***
The two sat near the flames. Smoke rose into the starless sky as the forest breathed around them—always watching, always listening.
The fire crackled and hissed as boar meat roasted unevenly on sticks. Well, at least Hosen's half. Inase munched on raw meat like a goblin. He just couldn't wait a few more minutes.
"You know," Inase said, staring into the fire, "we could always burn this place down," gnawing a big chunk.
"And then, if we keep teleporting back here, we'll burn with it." Hosen glanced at the other with dubious eyes. "Bad idea."
"Hmm… Here I thought it could be fun."
Inase carelessly bit into the raw meat without a worry, to which Hosen raised a brow, listing in his mind the hazards of what that guy was eating uncooked.
"You're going to get parasites."
On the other hand, his meat was at least nicely roasted by the fire—parasites and bacteria sterilized.
"You're going to get boring."
Scoffing, the blonde thought Hosen could use a bit more risk in his life… aside from the venom thing, of course.
And so, they spent their evening like this... and eventually, they leaned back against opposite trees, eyes growing heavy. They had fire, warmth, and full stomachs to keep them satiated.
Even if the eldritch tree still haunted the edges of Hosen's mind, branches like maws, flowers like poison... they could always take care of it tomorrow.