Marco leaned back and tried to get a grasp of his memories. The memory of their own ship's transformations was clear enough, with sails that re‑spun themselves, hull planks that fitted themselves together without a hair's gap, and masts that grew duplicates out of the deck like trees. Those were not minor refinements.

By contrast, the ships on Gulf Isle had mostly grown sturdier ribs, a bit more deck space, slightly thicker plating, or other things of that nature. The captains were proud of their upgrades but they were nothing compared to the way The Foolish Endeavor had practically become a new vessel each time.

“I get it, I think. We've been jumping over multiple upgrades at once,” Marco said finally.

"At least that. People can level more than once off a single kill, you know. Ships are probably the same."

"And if we are at a much higher level, it's going to be harder to effect substantial change," Elisa added.

Riv crossed his arms, nodding his appreciation at Elisa.

“Right. They worked with oak and pine. It was solid stuff, but not special. So when the system rebuilt the ships, it smoothed the rough edges, reinforced what was already there, and left it at that. Incremental. Manageable. Every now and again there would have been a bigger step forward, but rarely. Meanwhile, we've replaced every board in this ship with something special, something unique and priceless. We have to find more unique and priceless things than we have, and that's harder.”

"Well then," Marco said. "We'll have to keep an eye out. Do we have things to trade?"

Gold still had a purpose for them, mostly allowing them to buy food and supplies. For more important purchases, they had long moved past the grade of goods for which gold was a practical currency. These days, they bartered.

"Not really," Elisa said. "Some neat things, but nothing groundshaking. And we'd need the ground shook to get that kind of thing."

“So the good news is the next upgrade might finally be the big change Riv wants. The bad news is we need to find a way to finance it.”

"You got it, Marco. We need to find a strange and powerful artifact." Elisa lifted the strange corpse's notebook out of her bag and looked at it wistfully. "Besides this, I mean."

"What did that end up saying, by the way? I almost forgot about it in all the chaos."

"I have no idea," Elisa said. "All the better reason to get to civilization. I need a library if I'm even going to have a chance at cracking this."

"Excuse me," Aethe broke in. "You said we need loot, right?"

"Sure."

"Then you might want to go that way." She had the ship's spyglass pressed to her eye, almost at a right angle to the course of the ship. "There's an island."

"There's always an island. What's so different about this one?"

"Oh, not much," she said. "It's just that something is eating all the trees."

Marco laughed.

"You all up for fighting a deforestation event?"

They were. He popped over to the ship's wheel and made the turn.

—

"They aren't falling down," Elisa said. "They are just sinking, or something like that. I don't know what to say other than that."

"Can you hit him with the arbalest from here?" Riv asked.

"Who? Why a him, Riv?" Elisa asked.

"No idea. But can you hit him?"

"With the arbalest? Technically yes. Practically, not a chance. It's staying within the treeline for whatever reason, maybe as an instinct. I can't get a line of sight."

"You can still tell where it is though, right?" Marco drew an arc with a motion of his hand. "Can't you just go up and over?"

"Again, I could, but there's always a chance it's not a monster. It could be a person doing that. Or people could be running from it as it does that. You don't shoot where you can't see, Marco. It's a rule."

"I could get us real close."

"Unless you can get us close enough that I can see through solid wood, it's not going to work. We don't have to go ashore, you know. We could leave it be."

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"Well, no," Marco said. "We need the rewards. And whatever this is, it really could be threatening people in some way. We might be the only people strong enough and close enough to help. We'll do it."

As they closed the distance, the scale of the destruction grew easier to see. Acres of forest greenery had disappeared, leaving strange gaps in the canopy they could see from afar. As they neared, those gaps disappeared from their view as their angle to the island's trees became more acute.

Riv squinted at the shoreline.

“Plenty of places to land close. I'm just worried that if we land close to him, he might decide the ship looks tasty.”

Elisa nodded. “We'll go a little further around the island, then. If it's that strong, it probably isn't that fast. We can get back to the ship before it does.”

"And if it's as fast as it is strong?" Marco asked.

“Then we are dead anyway, Marco. Now let's go before we run out of sunlight.”

They adjusted their heading until they found a good compromise between water deep enough for the ever-growing ship and adjacency to a close, convenient outcropping on which to tie their outboat. After that, they were hoofing it.

The island wasn’t big. Getting across it didn’t take very long, especially when getting lost wasn't really a possibility when the targeted part of the island shook with the force of a mysteriously disappearing tree every few seconds. It was no more than a few minutes of walking before they made it there, and in the meantime they worked on formations.

Aethe, not Elisa, was the one to push for practicing what she called formations. Marco took the lead for strong individual targets that they thought they could take out quickly. Riv took the lead for targets they thought would charge at them, but could also be stopped. Aethe stood in front for uncertain terrain or uncertain situations. It all sounded simple enough, but knowing who would move in what direction when various inevitably complex things happened was harder. Practice was meant to make all that work smoother. Nobody had loved the idea when Aethe had proposed it, and it made going anywhere more time-consuming and troublesome at first. Since then, it had become second nature and stopped slowing them down, and had helped them avoid disaster more than once.

"Something that eats entire trees seems like Riv work." Aethe said. "Agreed?"

"He's sucking them straight down somehow. What if he falls on me? Or take me down with him? This is uneven footing, Aethe. Unforeseen circumstances. That's your territory," Riv said.

“You have a point,” Aethe said. “I say we just gang up on Marco and make him do it.”

Marco raised a hand before anyone could laugh at the suggestion. It was meant as a joke, but it was the right answer, and as the captain, he was the person who had to settle on it.

“Fine. I’ll take point.” Marco tried to make clear that this wasn't a joke. “We don’t know what this thing is, or how it’ll react, or even how we will react to it. That means I move first. If something happens, I’m the one who takes the first hit.”

Riv didn’t argue. “Then make sure you keep your eyes wide open, Captain.”

Here and there, they started to encounter places where trees had been sucked away. There wasn't so much as a broken root left in any of the bare spots.

"There's not even any depressions," Elisa said. “If you rip a tree out of the ground, you leave a hole. If you suck one down underground, you probably leave something too, although I don't know what. What could be taking these trees without leaving anything at all?”

Marco set a deliberate pace, forcing himself not to slow down or to hurry too much out of fear or impatience. He kept his hand on his sword as he did.

The actual solution to the mystery turned out to be something you had to see while it was happening to understand it. After passing another ten or twelve treeless, barren patches, they finally stumbled on one that was being unmade before their eyes. The tree was normal when they first approached, then groaned as it started to fall straight down the plane of its own trunk. That would have been bizarre enough, but the real issue was that it wasn't falling into anything, exactly.

“What's happening to it?” Riv stared with the rest of the group. “It’s not pulling them down. It's like it's falling into a storage space.”

"Except not that, either. Or at least not in any normal way." To Marco's surprise, Elisa was smiling now. "The good news is that whatever's causing this, he's not causing he from right here. And I'm guessing I know what this is now. Keep looking, Marco. We should find him soon."

"Him? You agree with Riv now?"

"I think I do. Get ready to see a legend, of sorts."

Elisa took the lead after that, which Marco only reluctantly let her do because of sheer curiosity. If she thought it was okay, it probably was. The theory proved mostly out when a few minutes later they stumbled on her target.

"Kuzai?" Elisa walked up to a dozing man and talked much louder and more suddenly at him than Marco would have liked. "Kuzai the pulper?"

"The what?" Marco stepped forward the slightest amount. The man didn't look all that tough, but he did have a small, cheap-looking club on him. Looks were deceiving often enough that he couldn't trust the apparent weakness.

"Relax, Marco." Aethe patted Marco's shoulder affectionately. "I think she's right about who this is, and if that’s the case, we don't need to worry. You would already know that if you had paid any attention when that old lady was talking in the bar a couple days ago."

"I tried to!" Marco really had. He had been exhausted already that day, and the old woman had spent close to an hour talking about how expensive paper was lately, for some reason he had either forgotten or not heard in the first place. He had bigger things to deal with at the time, and Elisa had let her down easy with a ‘we will if we can’ sort of excuse. "She was talking about paper."

"She was talking about pulp." The man on the ground stretched. "There's a difference. Paper's only one use for wood pulp, though it's admittedly the big one."

"Wood pulp?"

"That's right." The man bowed slightly. "I process trees into pulp. I sell that pulp for the production of paper. And I really have been missing. The ship that brought me here never returned to pick me back up. I figured someone would have come to find me by now, but nobody did."

"Any idea why?" Marco still didn't know what to think of the man, but usually when people got abandoned, there was a reason.

"No idea." The pulper shrugged. "And I've long ago gotten much more pulp than I need for my order."

"Then why are you still destroying trees?" Riv asked. "That is you, right?"

"Oh." The man's eyes widened. "Oh. Darn. I forgot I had that running."

He lifted up his hand and snapped. The omnipresent grinding and crumbling sounds that had filled up the island up to that point were suddenly gone.