When a reality away from the nearest cup of coffee, with the only alternative being some car battery acid tea blended by Eklil, I really needed that nighttime rest.
Easier said than done on the eve of a dungeon exploration. Without the new skill to play with, I probably would’ve spent all night tossing and turning in dread anticipation.
Lack of rest made me cranky that morning. I snapped at Tusk for tossing a skull around, then at Crystal when she growled at me for snapping at him. I’m a marvel of an asshole if I don’t get my caffeine medication after a sleepless night.
Probably could’ve just boiled my canteen over a fire and throw in some of Eklil’s blend, but I feared it might eat through the container. Instead, I just growled along as we made our way out of the death field and back into the forest.
And immediately got jumped by a bunch of those deviant headcrabs. We didn’t get five paces into the forest proper before the things rained from the trees and jumped me. Not us, but me directly. They ignored Tusk and Crystal entirely to leap for my face.
I’m an asshole in the morning.
I’m also empty-headed in the morning if I haven’t slept. Apparently, an empty mind is just what the interface needed so it could help me.
The first headcrab to leap met the edge of my blade coming at it in a near-perfect arc, part parry, part baseball bat home run strike. I don’t know when I got my hand on the weapon, I don’t know when I drew it, and I have no fucking clue how I’d been so precise to cut the thing exactly in halves.
I spun and met the second leap with the shield. Chrome claws screeched against the gold, and the headcrab let out a long, piercing yowl as it dropped to the ground, twitching and bleeding from two long, deep scrapes across its body. Its wet, red tongue flopped wildly out of its abdomen cavity.
“Thorns…” I heard myself say as I stomped down. The creature’s shell cracked under my heel in an burst of guts and stinking meat. It was like stepping on a particularly crunchy roach.
Crystal and Tusk caught two of the others. The gnark knocked them out of the air with her staff, and the molerat gutted them.
With that, the ambush group was reduced to only two more specimens. Surprisingly, in spite of their metal claws and the unholy screeches they produced, I didn’t fear the glitch version as much as I did the natural one. These felt predictable, as if programmed how to fight and move, while the real ones were far more feral.
“Get back,” I shouted as Crystal raised her staff to whack another of the survivors. “I have a skill to test.”
“Bad time, human,” the gnark screeched, halfway through casting that amplification spell on Tusk. I recognised the symbols she’d been drawing on the air.
“Perfect time,” I countered and immediately activated [BULWARK].
Like in the night, the shield did not get heavier or visibly larger. But I did trip over it as its now extended size clipped right into a tree.
A headcrab leapt for me. In other circumstances, its angle and speed would’ve gotten it right atop my melon for a tasty snack. As it happened, the headcrab impacted against the shield’s now invisible edge and was sent spinning ass over claws through the air.
First lesson to remember from the experiment: it’s nice when the enemies can’t see your shield, but it sucks a lot when you can’t either. Because I tried to spin and follow the critter with a strike of my blade, which only got me with the invisible part stuck between two trees. It nearly wrenched my shoulder out of socket.
“Shit!” I cursed as I backtracked and fought to get myself free.
Then came the second lesson just as I freed the shield on the very last dregs of my MP. I spun, raised the shield, tried to protect my head. I didn’t get to turn completely before the thing leapt, but I did manage to bring the edge in the headcrab’s path.
I cut the thing in two as I spun. Guts and gore splattered all over my face and chest, hot and sticky and stinking. I gasped in surprise and disgust. The skill deactivated and the corpse, barely still holding in one piece by strands of gristle, dropped hotly over my shield arm.
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Tusk got the last glitch artefact. He clamped his broken teeth like a vice, then shook his toy until parts flew off it in all directions.
Thank fuck the glitch artefacts dissolve to whatever makes them when they die. It took several minutes and a lot of mouth breathing, but I was ultimately clean again and hadn’t lost my breakfast.
[CONGRATULATIONS]
[YOU HAVE DEFEATED: HEADCRAB DEVIANT x2]
No level up, but I wasn’t expecting one, not without skill upgrades.
“Human all good?” Crystal asked. She was picking up the little legs left behind.
What for, I had no idea.
“I’m good,” I answered, still heaving a bit as the last dregs of the stench filtered out into the forest’s crisp air. “We need to be more careful. Would be stupid to get killed before we even get close to the dungeon.”
“Human stupid. Only human get attacked.”
Yeah, I’d noticed. Asking Eternity, who sat perched in a tree throughout the whole event, would only lead to the usual stonewall so I didn’t even bother. Instead, I activated the skill again as soon as I had a full MP bar and tested moving with the enhanced shield. Should’ve done that first thing, but eh… live and learn.
Getting to the village was going to take us the better part of the day, as Crystal put it. Not only was it nestled deep withing the Brightleaf, it was also way over the rolling hills, in an area of the great forest called the Hollow, which was part of the river’s basin. That promised a swamp and I could only groan all the way there.
On the way we dealt with two more ambushes. The first offered up more headcrabs, but by this point I had a pretty good idea how to deal with them. Bait a leap. Cut in the air or hide behind the shield. The thorns enchantment gave back a lot of damage to anything that hit me, which made dealing with the little fuckers all the easier.
The second proved far more interesting, and it didn’t register as an ambush at first.
We found spiderwebs. A whole bunch of the things, stretching among the tress, from ground level all the way into the canopy. They were dense enough to obstruct the light and seemed to go on forever.
Crystal wanted to just power through, the little gnark unperturbed by the sight or the promise of the things. A tingle in the back of my neck had me stopping the her before she got within an arm’s length of the things.
“What, human?” she asked, annoyed for some reason. “This is way. We go forward. Night soon. No lose day.”
“Yes, yes.”
I pulled her firmly back. Did something rustle in the leaves above? I couldn’t be sure.
Tusk grumbled by my side. He snuffled and pawed at the soft earth, seemingly the more sensible of us all.
Something didn’t smell right. And it didn’t feel right.
And most of all, it didn’t look right.
None of the webs, not a strand, moved even a little as we approached. The scene was as still as if the webs had been carved out of marble.
I reached out with my sword and cut the nearest thread. It shattered and took with it a few more strands. They all exploded to shards, like one of those videos of someone breaking Prince Rupert’s tear from the tail end.
“Do you have spiders that spin crystal webs?” I asked, just in case.
Crystal took some time in replying, struck somewhat dumb by the sight and the implications. She reached out a hand and touched the nearest strand that remained, only to pull it suddenly away, yelping in pain. I caught the sight of bright-red blood on her finger.
Something did move in the canopy above. Not enough to stir the leaves, but enough to cast a quick shadow over the webs. I squared my shoulders and readied the sword.
“Get behind me,” I commanded. Tusk growled. “You too, buddy. Something’s coming.”
I wanted to turn us back and try going around the mess of webs.
It was too late. A gasp from Crystal announced what my [INSTINCT REACTION] skill was already whispering in my ear: we were surrounded by webs. Not swaddled, but surrounded nonetheless. I could, maybe, move a couple paces in any one direction, but not more. If not for the afternoon light filtering down through the leaves to reflect off some of the webs, I would’ve walked straight into them.
“Oh shit,” I grumbled, slowly spinning in place, looking for an exit. “You two, stay near me,” I repeated myself.
“We here, human,” Crystal said. “No spiders in Brightleaf. Only small spiders. This not made by small spider.”
I was afraid she’d say that.
My MP bar was full and I had my mental finger on the surge. Boxed in by razor-sharp webs meant that whatever spider, or spiders, wove this shit would try for us sooner or later. When it would lunge, I’d give it hell. The forest was full of things that liked to lie in wait and then attack suddenly. Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, thrice a pattern. It applied here as well as it did in debugging some production equipment.
And I was right about the creature coming for us.
What I did not expect was the blinding speed with which a spider dropped from the canopy, nor the strength of its eight legs as it barrelled into me.
The thing was the size of a pony, heavy as an ox, and moving like lightning. In a single flash of a leg, I felt my abdomen on fire as claws racked straight through my shirt. Had I been a nanosecond slower in dodging, they would’ve yanked my guts straight out. As it stood, it only clipped me.
I activated [ADRENALINE SURGE] and finally saw the glitch. A shudder went up my back when I realised I needed the skill to move at the same objective speed as my enemy.
Four of its legs were chromed and looked mechanical. Its front side, the one where eyes should have been, was also mechanical and covered in several red LED lamps, the front palps replaced by wicked-looking blades. Cross a giant tarantula with a blender and you got this thing.
I didn’t get much more of a chance to analyse what other weaponry it had because it immediately attacked again.
There would only be a minute for me to defeat the creature. There was no way I’d fight it on any sort of equal terms without the surge, but there was a good chance it would kill me the very first moment I couldn’t match it in speed.
And if it had friends, I would be in for a world of pain.
No. Fucking. Pressure.
If you'll read it, I hope you'll enjoy it.
If the whole thing is reviled, I may remove it altogether. Any data is good data to have, as far as I'm concerned.
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