Trouvaille | Technoblade x Reader

Chapter 3 - The Temple

Nighttime noises descended upon the forest as the sun dipped away. You'd made good time so far, but the Butcher Army was surely tracking you by now. You weren't sure where you were headed - north, maybe? - but all you knew was that the more distance you put between yourself and Actium the better.

Underneath your foot, a large branch cracked loudly. You lurched forward as you tripped, but your hand caught on a sapling, and you managed to right yourself. You clutched onto your sword even tighter as an explosion boomed in the distance.

You had been in the forest a few times, but never for this long and never this far from home. You were well aware of the monsters that roamed the lands after nightfall, but you had only ever killed a few slow zombies and a skeleton or two.

Actium, like many towns in the south, was protected by magic that kept hostile creatures outside of the town's border, so you had never really dealt with the hordes of monsters that formed after nightfall. Creepers were always something to be scared of, but you were infinitely more worried about the spiders. Something about their spindly legs and their beady red eyes sent unpleasant shivers down your spine. Still, your real enemy was not a monster but the men who were hunting you. Spiders were nothing compared to them.

You shuddered, and not just because of the cool night air, and adjusted the bag on your back. If your pace increased, no one was there to see it.

*****

By the time that the moon was at the peak of the sky, you began to hear distant voices and a few barking dogs. They were gaining on you somehow.

Belatedly, you wondered if they had horses. It would surely give them the advantage. There was no way that they could navigate the forest on horseback, though. The undergrowth was barely sparse enough for a person to navigate much less a larger animal. That left one option: speed potions.

You wondered if a death worshiper like you had made the potions for them, or if they had stolen them off of a corpse.

Your fingers fiddled with the speed potion in your pocket, but you ultimately decided to wait for the real battle before downing the potion. Your only hope of taking down all of them was to use all of your potions at once. You needed to buy yourself more time, but how?

Your mind raced as you stumbled through the darkness in a half-jog. You knew that they were using dogs to track you, so you needed to throw them off your scent.

Glancing up at the seemingly endless branches above you, you contemplated climbing up and hauling yourself from branch to branch. You would lose valuable time if you did that, though, and there was no guarantee that the dogs couldn't track your scent if you were in the treetops.

What you would give for a stream.

You travelled onward, praying that some body of water would show, but none did. You were about to give up hope when you heard it: bullfrogs.

Veering away from your presumably northward path, you headed toward the noise. Hopefully, the creatures would lead you to a significant body of water, and you could throw the Butcher Army off your trail.

It felt like an eternity that you were searching for the source of the bullfrogs, and by the time you stumbled across a stone structure, the forest had gone fearfully silent. The sound of your heartbeat pounded in your ears as you fumbled around blindly with the stone pillar sticking out of the ground. Your hand brushed something wet, and for a moment you thought that it was simply water, but when you removed your hand, it came away sticky with blood.

The scent of iron filled your nose as you recoiled, nearly tripping over your own feet in your haste to get away. You hurriedly wipe your hand on a tree trunk and ignored the way that the bark scrapes at your hand when you wiped it off too forcefully.