Ch. 52: Rosy's First Trek (2)

After young Rosy started her trek up the mountain, she encountered her first obstacle. A huge canyon that separated the first and second mountains in the range. It circled the entire range. Her first attempt to climb down and then back up ended in disaster. The moment she lowered herself, the cliff crumbled under her weight. She'd needed to use magic in order to pull herself up in time.

The next thing she did was take a deer and tie a rope to its antlers before using a magic spell to blast it across the chasm. Unfortunately, the deer's weight caused the other side of the chasm to crumble similarly to when she'd attempted to climb down.

She attempted to save the deer carcass by pulling it back up with the rope, but found that even though it hadn't hit the water at the bottom of the chasm, it was covered in bite marks, and there were a few small fish with wings nibbling on its innards. She recognized them as winged piranha. 

After the second attempt to cross failed, Rosy realized that the only way around was to jump without aid. As a result of that decision, she ran the entire length of the chasm before finding the spot closest to the other side. It took her over a week before she was able to make the jump, and her weak body hadn't been capable of making the jump without an incredibly strong amount of magic, boosted by her sword. It'd ended up causing her young, developing ankle to fracture under the pressure.

But still, Rosy forged on. She'd crawled for days. She'd sustained so many injuries from the chimeras in the only drinkable water that a normal person would likely have died, but she kept going. The next few mountains were easy crossings, after the hell of the second mountain took its toll.

On the sixth mountain, Rosy found another stream. Following it for a while, she realized that its path threaded through the seventh mountain all the way to the base of the eighth mountain, but the problem was that it was nearly impossible to run alongside it all the way through. The terrain was too rough, even for her to deal with.

Finally, after breaking her arm when a rock came out of the area while she was climbing, she'd had enough. She cut down a tree with her sword and hollowed it out using magic before taking it down the river. Despite the extreme rapids that she faced, it was easier than her trip along the bank had been, and faster as well. Using her magic, she made pretty good time through the seventh mountain, but then disaster struck.

More specifically, a waterfall. Disaster was a waterfall at the end of some especially bad rapids. Realizing that it drained into the river at the bottom of the chasm that she'd broken her ankle jumping over, Rosy gripped a tree that was jutting out of the nearby cliffside and climbed the rocks to the top of it, only sparing a slight glance back, to watch as her makeshift boat splintered into fine pieces as if it'd gone through a sawmill, against the rocks at the bottom.

Getting past the eighth mountain was simple, and though she'd been forced to ride a rock-slide down the latter half of the ninth mountain, it wasn't too difficult for Rosy, either. Similarly, the tenth mountain wasn't too difficult, except for the huge, man-eating worm that had targeted Rosy on the bottom of the far side of it.

Unfortunately, the eleventh mountain had posed a problem. Apparently, thanks to the previously mentioned giant worms, there were tunnels running underground all over the mountain. The tunnels so close to the surface caused sinkholes all over the place. After a little time, one of the sinkholes had opened up directly below Rosy's feet, causing her to fall in. 

"I hate this place." She'd muttered once she'd gotten stuck inside the cave network. Luckily, she'd only wasted a week stuck there. 

Coming up on her first month in the mountain range, Rosy'd finally seen Gryvus right over the tree line upon conquering the twelfth mountain. Just two more to go, then she'd get there, she realized.

Unfortunately, fate wasn't so kind to the twelve-year-old Royal Vampire. She'd run up against the huge wall that was the thirteenth mountain. Things had gone 'downhill' so to speak, from there.

Climbing past the griffins hadn't been too hard. So long as she was fast and quiet, they wouldn't notice a thing. She'd considered killing one of them to bring the carcass to her father, but at the end of the day, she was after bigger fish than that.

After she'd passed the griffins, Rosy'd been incredibly tired. She hadn't slept a full night all month, too scared of failing her father again to do so. Unfortunately, her tiredness had caused her to slip up. She'd collapsed of exhaustion at the lip of the cliff. Normally, she'd be fully capable of registering any kind of killing intent while she was sleeping, but she'd been so tired that she'd already been bitten by the time she woke up in response to the attack.

After killing the panther-snake thing that'd attacked her in her sleep, Rosy had been in pain... and  pissed. Mainly at herself for letting her guard down, but nobody was around to calm her down, so her target had naturally not ended up being herself, but the panther-snake. 

A few hours of hunting the stupid things, and Rosy's bite was blistering red, impressively painful, even for herself. She'd managed to track down the nest, in order to exterminate the lot of them... but she'd only begun the extermination when she remembered her original goal, so she left before killing every single one of the stupid things. Naturally, since she was weakened by the poison, climbing the final mountain had been hell for Rosy, and after that... Gryvus. Upon getting forcibly thrown right off of Gryvus, Rosy'd realized how stupid she'd been. Killing a bunch of innocent bird-people wouldn't change anything. After spending a month healing from the snake-panther bite, she'd stolen a griffin egg and left the mountain range of her own volition. Seeing the egg as proof of her incredible feat, the king had begun to issue Rosy assassination requests.