Kayden had prepared himself to find anything when he stepped through the veil. “Forest” was a broad category, and he was no ecologist who knew all the possibilities. He didn’t have the time to research the rift nearly as thoroughly as he had his sleeping rift, and so his information was not nearly so complete.

  Still, when his cheap rainboots found hard concrete instead of soft soil, it took him several moments to realize he hadn’t been spat back out the way he’d came. He looked around - still grey concrete, still ugly, but it was dirtier. There were holes in the walls, more resembling arrow slits from medieval castles than proper windows, but they let in enough amber light to see by regardless. Another heavy steel door sat at the end, with another guard standing at attention.

  Kayden walked over to spy out the window just for a little extra info. He saw a forest. The trees were the normal brown and green, had proper leaves instead of evergreen needles. The underbrush looked like something out of a children’s book about dinosaurs - ferns with leaves large enough to fan tropical kings, thick vines wound around every trunk.

  “I get having two boxes for some redundancy, but what’s the point of two guards?” he called to the guard, telling himself it was just to learn more about how rift security worked but really he just didn't want to go into the rift proper just yet. There weren’t nearly enough people in here to cause congestion issues or entice the wildlife to take pickings of a large influx of easy prey, so he was free to stay just about as long as he wished.

  “Box’s gotta have a door,” the man said simply. He was far more casual than the Earthside security - probably because he was around Kayden’s age and his post didn’t have nearly as much exposure to the general public. “And a door’s gotta have a guy to open it. I mean, you try opening this thing, c’mon!”

  The guard actually stepped aside for a moment before stiffening and quickly returning to his post. “Actually, don’t. That’s the sort of thing that’ll get me laid off. It’s like four hundred pounds, though.”

  That got Kayden to chuckle. “So like, every guard who works at a rift has some kind of strength talent? How does that work out?”

  “I got an NDA about that. Can’t have people knowing how to get in without permission. Maybe it’s just plain heavy, maybe it ain’t.” The guard shrugged. “You gon’ go through yet?”

  “I, uh.” Kayden looked down at his legs, finding them unwilling to move. “Not quite, no.”

  Unfortunately, the guard seemed to know exactly what Kayden's issue was.

  “You’re nervous,” he stated, not questioned. Kayden didn’t appreciate the grin that slowly spread across the man’s face when his lack of response acted as confirmation. “Yeah, alright. That's fine. If you’re gettin’, like, coerced into doing something you don’t want to you can tell me. Dealin’ with that’s part of the job. Or I can work you through the jitters. A lot of people go here for their first few delves. You’re good, man. It’s gon’ be alright.”

  “Yeah, but like-” Kayden huffed and caught himself before he could speak without thinking. He was getting defensive. That wasn’t good. The guy was only trying to help, even if he looked smug about it. “This is the second delve for me, yeah. I had to get here in a hurry and I’m not really prepared. Not nearly as much as the previous rift I was in. Shit’s freaking me out, man. I don’t know what I’m gonna see out there.”

  The two men stared at each other for a few seconds. The guard looked truly incredulous, while Kayden’s vulnerable despairing expression morphed into belligerence.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is it, dude? What am I missing here?!”

  “The pamphlets!” the guard shouted, gesturing wildly back towards the seemingly filth-covered rift. “Read one! It’s got all the stuff you need!”

  “Good idea!” Kayden angrily yelled back - for some reason deescalating felt like a cowardly move in the moment. He turned on his heel and marched back towards the rift, going back out and in again with a sheaf of papers crumpled in his clenched fist - much thicker than the ones at the locust cave, which made sense. There were things here other than bugs and mud. He made sure his face was twisted into a furious expression when the guard came into view. “Thank you, I appreciate it!”

  “It’s no problem, that’s my job!” replied the guard, teeth similarly bared in a snarl. “You’re free to stay in here and read if you’d like!”

  There was another pause, then, where they stared each other down like cowboys at high noon, and Kayden was quite proud of himself for not being the first one to break out into laughter. He leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor, opening up the pamphlet to read. It didn’t look to be a too long - there were a lot of pictures.

  Turns out, a lot of things in this rift wanted to kill Kayden. Wasn’t too big a deal, that was sort of their thing. But after hearing about the seventh variant of plant that would kill him in its own unique way, Kayden was a little miffed. There was carnivorous grass in here. Grass! He had to keep away from any green carpet that looked too healthy because that meant it was sharp enough to cut through his boots and peel off his bits to use as fertilizer. That was putting aside the pitcher plants that dropped on top of you, or the fact that every patch of edible weeds had the occasional extremely poisonous black sheep of the family that looked exactly the same, just in case you felt like taking up a new position as fertilizer.

  No wildlife at all, though, besides some bugs that were just normal.

  Still, there was interesting stuff. There was this bush that grew apples - completely normal, Earthly red deliciouses, just on a bush for no reason. That was the exact sort of thing that’d go straight onto the farms were it not for pesky things like basic environmental consciousness. That, and most rift plants needed mana to grow that the Earth couldn’t provide. Yet. Which was something Kayden didn’t want to think about so he went back to reading.

  “Only grab the thin frondy things if they’re wilting, don’t touch the apple stems, keep your eyes on the ground,” Kayden muttered to himself for the umpteenth time. "And on the trees. And check back to see if the path you took is viable both ways."

  He skimmed through the pages again - yeah, that was just about all the precaution he needed. The trees were weirdly harmless compared to everything else, honestly; the issues were all in the underbrush. There’d probably be a lot more of the interesting plants, good and bad, when he went off the path into the unknown.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Ready to go now!” he called to the guard - whose name was apparently Jace - and received a nod in return. Kayden quickly tucked his pants into his boots so his ankles wouldn’t touch any green stuff by accident, made sure his phone could start recording at any time, and left the safety of the box behind.

  Now in the rift proper, the first thing he noticed was the smell. It wasn’t obvious in the box, what with it essentially being a dust collector meant to keep the nasties out, but now that he was out it was potent. Dirt and moss and sap and humidity hit him like a wall. Now that he could look around properly, there were details he hadn’t noticed - pollen hung visibly in the precious few rays of sepia light that managed to get through the greedy boughs of the trees. Every plant with leaves had flowers blooming, like the new growth of spring, and Kayden had it on the good word in his pocket that in here that growth never truly stopped.

  Through the dense litter of underbrush was a packed dirt path, just wide enough for Kayden to spread his arms out without his fingertips touching greenery. According to his map (also in the pamphlet, which he hadn’t even realized would be a feature - why didn’t he think these would be useful, again?) the first truly unexplored no man’s land was a good ten minute walk down, and then he’d have to veer off.

  And so he went. Kayden hiked through the wood, making sure to kick any weeds sprouting up in the path and reinforce humanity’s thin proof of dominance over this foreign slice of hostile nature. Occasionally he’d see one of those pitchers slowly growing above, or a suspicious bit of grass encroaching on his territory, and he’d make a note to tell the guard about it when he left. This was a rift people actually cared about maintaining and making more profitable, so apparently there were a few guys who went in here and just gardened. Most of the safe area had been properly pioneered, and the goal was to drive the more dangerous stuff extinct, if possible. Sometimes a rift closed if it stopped being dangerous enough. It was a hard balance to strike.

  A street sign off to the side caught Kayden’s eye - “DANGER!” it read. “RIGHT OF PATH LEADS TO NO MAN’S LAND. NONE HAVE RETURNED. THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR…” and so on and so forth. There was even a creepy little unknown PSA monster gripping the edge of its infographic and glaring at the reader. Very nifty. Kayden took a deep breath, very consciously changed his posture to something more casual and unaffected, and stepped right past.

  He thought he had internalized how difficult it was to go off the beaten path. He had forced himself to overestimate it - to take how bad he thought it would be and double it, just so he wouldn’t be blindsided. He was still far, far off.

  The change was instant. Smooth walking turned into an awful game of hopscotch - Kayden teetered across fallen logs growing over patches of knifegrass, tip-toed around looming pitchers waiting to drop down and digest him, looking up and all around for anything waiting for him to block the light so they knew they’d found prey. The trees were supposed to be mostly safe, so long as you didn’t climb into the canopy, but even if the worst of them was 'bark structured in a way that easily causes splinters', that sort of tiny pain would add up if he screwed up.

  Some shrubs he could brush past without issue, so long as he was careful not to let the barbed surface of their wide leaves make skin contact. Others he had to completely go around, not daring to get within touching range unless forced. Kayden felt uncomfortable even letting the mushrooms in his line of sight. Very few of those were catalogued in his pamphlet, but he wasn’t stupid. There were DNA melting fungi in the real world, let alone this funhouse mirror realm of reality meant for demons.

  All this while pretending to be unbothered, just in case something smart enough to understand how to ignore things was watching him pass by. A part of Kayden’s focus was always on keeping his face calm, on making sure his heaving breaths sounded more belabored than stressed.

  With the big, exaggerated steps he took to avoid tripping over hidden roots, that he only noticed the tripwire when he looked back the way he came. It was made from strips of more fibrous bark from one of the native trees. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that a thin rope at ankle level was pulled taut at Kayden’s feet, and as he followed the string to its destination he found he’d nearly been brained with a beachball sized clump of all the worst skin irritants the rift had to offer. A strong smack with that would leave you with a rash bad enough to make you scratch through to your muscle, not to mention the thorns making it all stick like dozens of little fish hooks.

  Okay. Noted. Just one more obstacle to watch out for. The real snag in Kayden’s head as he made sure his phone got a good shot of the tripwire trap was that the thing had required intent. No matter how much liberty you gave the ecosystems inside rifts given the magic energy suffusing it all, there was no reason for a plant to thread its fibers together into rope, or tie itself into knots. It would simply grow that way.

  No. Something had foraged the material for this little contraption and dedicated a lot of time and love into setting its trigger right where a human would most likely trip over it. It had put the trap right after a particularly difficult section of terrain - Kayden had had to thread the needle between a patch of super poison ivy and a small clearing of knifegrass through a game trail that seemed awful suspicious now that he thought about it. There weren’t any damn animals in this rift - what had walked a path through the dense underbrush?

  His pace slowed as more and more of his thoughts went to fanciful wonderings. Intelligent monsters were a known factor - Kin, they were generally called, though every rift had its own variant with its own species name. They were a real bitch since they were smart enough to actually adapt to what humans threw at them.

  It was the sort of thing to turn a rift from a place of possible development into a warzone, if peace couldn’t be made. Peace was very, very rarely made.

  Thankfully, these things already stayed in their territory, whatever they defined that as. They weren’t like the Scaled Surgers in Michigan, who were like cold blooded Hun. Even if they turned out to just be incompatible with people as a whole, borders might be established. The worst case could be avoided.

  …oh God, Kayden would get to name them, wouldn’t he? His own little note in the history books, even if it was through three layers of cited sources as a footnote in the database. What would he call them? Maybe he’d do the meme of something-goblins - there were gill-gobs, goat-gobs, flying gobs. No, though. Too cliche, and Kayden didn’t want his first minor claim to fame to be a joke. He’d have to give it more time.

  What if it wasn't Kin? What if that was a trap some hunter had left and never reported?

  More slow creeping through the horrid wilderness. Kayden found one of those weird apple bushes, and ended up having two of them for lunch, though he was careful not to touch the stems since those had tiny barbs and enough cyanide to send him to the hospital. He ate crouching down like an animal, back against one of the few trees he knew to trust. His eyes and nose were red and itchy from pollen, his lips curled into an unconscious snarl. It hadn't quite been long enough to render him feral - according to his still-recording phone, which was at maybe half battery, it had been about an hour and a half - but the stress was unimaginable compared to the locust cave. He couldn't be 'ignored' by a plant too dumb to do anything but detect that something had passed by and react.

  Kayden’s inner ranting was interrupted by the movement of vines in his peripheral. He didn’t move. After a moment of calm decision - the first in a good twenty minutes or so - he forced himself to relax into an uncaring posture. His back straightened, his mouth painfully uncurled from its hateful expression and lifted into a facsimile of an easy smile.

  It was short. Maybe three feet tall. It walked on two stubby little legs, had a pot belly equivalent and thin, long arms that ended in extremely delicate, dextrous digits. It was also made completely out of tangled thorned vines, with brilliant red blooms for eyes and especially wicked barbs for teeth in its facsimile of a mouth. A faint green glow shone through the gaps of its chest.

  ‘It’s a Shrubling,’ Kayden thought, certain as could be in his frazzled state. ‘It’s a Shrubling, and it’s mine.’

  The Shrubling collected a few more of the apples from the bush Kayden had partaken in, including a few that were underripe. When it turned to go, Kayden clasped his hands behind his back, made like he was on a casual stroll, and followed.