Chapter 13: An Escape?

She looked at me, like as if I had found something actually useful.

"Have you considered the fact that it might not work on that b*stard?"

"You got any better ideas? Can't hurt trying?"

"Yeah… fair point.", she said. I am pretty sure the only reason she even agreed to this was because she must have realized that David's corpse was absorbed in some way or another.

"But what if it isn't really a living thing? What's the backup plan if the poison doesn't work?", she continued.

"If the poison doesn't work, then we are fucked. There is no backup plan, at least none that I came up with.", I said. "Wait a minute. They can be non-living things too?"

"Of course they can. Matter of fact, they are non-living most of the time. Or else each one of us would be carrying a pouch of cyanide everywhere."

"Yeah… I guess…", I said, now looking at the firewood. What if my little plan really didn't work? I really didn't have a backup in that case. I guess we could wait for the rescue. But seeing as two days had passed and no one had even come over here, it was safe to assume we were on our own.

Maria made it sound like a few-hour job. We were here for more than two days. There should have been someone coming over here. There wasn't even a single sign of anyone near the big tree. If anyone had entered this place, they had to go through the giant tree… right? 

Ah well, future me problem. I shouldn't be thinking about this now. Best to try and execute the plan, and then think about all this. 

"How exactly are you going to execute that genius little plan of yours?", she said trying to stand up.

"That's a good question. I was going to ask you."

"Oh my, you are going to ask me? I didn't know I was that important…!", she said, sounding as annoying as possible. I would have socked her in the jaw if not for her injuries.

"Oh shut up and listen will you?", I snapped back.

I explained my plan to her. She seemed to roughly approve of it.

"Have you thought about what would happen if you, I don't know, you burnt down the entire damn forest by mistake?", she asked.

"The forest was already up in flames while you were asleep."

"They were what now?", she said, in surprise.

"Yeah. And this forest doesn't burn down. The trees here can only keep on burning for a limited period of time before going back to normal."

"Is that right…?", she said, taken aback.

"Yup. So I guess you know what that means…?"

"Alright then, let's go and kill that son of a bitch.", she continued

"You recovered yet?"

"Yup, good as new.", she said, very obviously lying.

"Then shut up and stay there recovering, or help me gather more firewood. This much isn't even remotely enough.", I almost snapped back.

"Alrightly then princess…", she said.

…

The next few days went by a lot faster than I thought. Yes, the next few DAYS. 

It certainly didn't feel like it to be honest. It was still a pretty damn long time, but with another person accompanying me, it felt a lot more bearable. The chance of me going legitimately insane was pretty low now.

Collecting firewood was certainly easier and faster than before, and with Maria's help and my newfound nihilism control, we could chop down whole trees at once. We tested out that the anti-flame property only applies to the live trees, not the chopped logs. 

We talked a lot, while we were felling trees. There wasn't much to do anyway. Keeping each other company was the only thing we could do, to keep both our sanities intact. 

Over the course of the conversations we had, we talked about a lot of things, but most of it was about our personal lives, particularly the lives we had led before this thing about gods entered our lives. 

She was from a lower-middle class family, in Latin America. She was part of a neighborhood full of child delinquents, which also meant she was a treasure trove of stories. Her stories ranged from shoplifting from a large stores, to running away from the mafia. I honestly had a hard time believing her, but even if her stories were not true, they were quite entertaining if anything. 

I would like to think that we had gotten closer over the course of these few days, but her tone made it seem like nothing really changed. Some part of me felt slightly hurt, but ah well. I could worry about that after surviving this ordeal.

Soon enough, we had roughly gotten our quota of firewood. At this point, we had enough wood to make a village feel jealous.

Welp, it was now or never. It was time to execute the plan.

We started out by laying a large portion of our twigs and logs around the tree. I noticed the tree looked slightly more gray, like a piece of volcanic rock. Huh. This could either mean that the tree grew weaker due to our previous onslaught, or that it grew stronger, like tempered steel. It didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, so I decided to just ignore it.

Our plan was largely the same as the first plan we formulated. I lit aflame the jungle around it. We lay in wait in an area where we had no trees near us, until the tree woke up.

It took surprisingly long for the tree to realize its precious forest was burning down.

Then we light aflame the twigs surrounding it.

In case you didn't realize by this point, we were trying to poison it with carbon monoxide. The burning of the forest would reduce the oxygen level of the area, and the burning of the logs and twigs would create carbon monoxide.

All of this would work on paper. We ran away from the giant tree after lighting ablaze the logs and twigs as fast as we could. We didn't want to get poisoned too after all.

We could hear the howling of the tree. That was expected. What wasn't expected, was the fact that this time, the entire forest was going up in flames. It was a fully-fledged wildfire.

Maria looked at me, looking like as if she was ready to strangle me. I looked back to just keep on running, previously from the poison gas and now from the trees.

The fire didn't stop spreading. If we didn't have nihilism to enhance our bodies, we would have been cremated alive a long time ago. But we still weren't fast enough. The wildfire was slowly gaining on us.

I was now just following Maria, hoping she would know what to do. My legs were sore, and my lungs felt like dying. My throat was dry, and I felt like I was going to collapse at any moment.

Maria seemed to have noticed this change in my speed. Just as I was about to collapse, she grabbed me and carried me all while still running. This just made me realize how athletic she really was.

That lasted about 2 minutes, before she dropped me on the floor unapologetically. 

"What the-", I said, sitting on the floor, after she dropped me.

We were in an area of the forest that was already burnt down. The trees were still standing somehow, but they were black as ash, It reminded me of those creepy trees you would see as a Halloween prop.

"I thought you said the trees would burn down?", she scowled. She looked like she had just run a marathon, and in all honestly, she kind of did. 

"… They didn't last time I tried…", I said.

"You tried to burn the fucking trees? ", she said, ready to rip my throat out.

"Uh… yeah…", I replied, "But they didn't burn the first time either!", I protested.

"Yeah I know-", she stopped. She looked around. The trees were burnt down, basically just turning into ash trees. But that wasn't why she stopped.

As the trees were burning, we slowly started to notice something. It was the end of the endless trees. We watched as the trees burnt down to reveal, a few houses and straw huts at the end of it.

The lack of trees made us see everything in the place. This place wasn't repeating, or even infinite for that matter. It was just a labyrinth of trees. And we had just burnt down the labyrinth. The surviving parts of the village were now visible, at the end of this very long path of burnt trees.

No words needed to be exchanged to understand how big a deal it was. I looked her in the eyes and grinned. She was trying to hide her joy, but I could sense her happiness.