Omnimage

by Simon Archer

  It should have been dead, though. I had, like, an additional eleven points to my ‘Strike’ score. Did that not apply to weapons? What the hell? Why wouldn’t the damn ‘strike’ score not improve my damn strikes? Eh, a kill was a kill. I’d have to discover how that worked another time.

  While I would have simply smacked it twice over again to finish it off, the other crabs’ screens had come over to me, just about as close as the one who’d pinched me was. I had more than enough health to survive this battle long enough to kill all of them, but I didn’t know when I’d have gotten more health, or even how. I couldn’t have afforded to waste health points on every fight just to finish them quickly. So now was the time for butt scoots.

  I scooted on my booty, keeping the crabs away from me while I came up with a strategy. A strategy quickly came to mind when I realized that they all moved at the same pace, all determined to make the straightest path from themselves to my person. I curved my butt scooting to place the one I’d already damaged in front of the others and got up from my bottom to my knees, ready to swing.

  As the hurt crab approached, I gave it two swings. The mystery weapon clacked against stone, the two red ‘-5’ symbols flashed, and the crab’s analyst screen changed to the same one the primal rat had when it died.

  Bam! One down! And, just like the primal rat, it only needed the one level of hunter skill to crack it open. Maybe I could have gotten that level in hunter after all if it didn’t take too long to just cut open in this fight.

  I can’t properly use my skills as a hunter on the beast until I am out of combat.

  Ho, boy, there I went again. Hard ‘no,’ then. God, those thoughts were a head trip every time. My hunter skill was literally giving me knowledge directly into my brain, as if I already knew that. I recognized that I didn’t, but I still felt like the knowledge was a no-brainer.

  Weird.

  The next one approached, and I took two more blind swings. The first missed, the second hit, and I felt another pressured pain in my thigh as the crab pinched it in its massive claw. The first negative popped up, my health knocked down to twenty-two, but I kept on swinging against it, now with a definite place to strike. Three strikes in, and the claw finally let go, having died just like its friend.

  Damn, these things were pretty easy, honestly. I’d only lost four health, and I was close to kicking all of them to the curb with just a club. After so many swings and hits, I’d determined that the weapon I’d discovered was, in fact, a large femur bone. Hey, it was sturdy, and it got the job done.

  Flashing before my eyes, a blue analyst screen flashed open in front of me for just a moment:

  You have adjusted to the feel of the new weapon

  You may now use the Orc Femur Bone (mace) with your Strike bonus

  Gladiator: Your special training allows you to use your Strike bonus to improve the damage along with the accuracy of your melee weapons

  Warcaster: This weapon counts as an arcane conductor for you

  Spellsword: You can cast enchanting-type spells on this weapon when you hold it

  Gladiator Skill increased to: Lv 2

  +2 Strength, +1 Endurance

  As quickly as it came, the screen was gone just the same.

  Oh. Oh! OH! That was a nifty mechanic. People couldn’t have just picked up any old weapon and started swinging with their full potential until they actually mastered it. However, it also let anyone determined enough to keep a weapon around train themselves on the job. I was willing to bet that there would have been bonuses related to mastering certain kinds of weapons, the most obvious one being that adjusting to the weight of new ones of the same type was easier to do.

  Also, MOTHERFUCKING ARCANE CONDUCTOR, BITCH! I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I was pretty damn sure it meant ‘wand.’ FUCK. YES. And I could enchant this weapon, which could only have meant that I could have had a fire mace. Or whatever kind of mace, but a fire or radiant weapon was probably also going to give off light, and my eyes were getting hungry for light again. I was just one step closer to finally getting my spells cracking. Oh, boy, once that first spell flew out of this bone, that was going to feel so damn good.

  Even barring the exciting possibilities of magic, my attacks with this weapon were that much better now that I was mastering the weapon. I was almost right about my strike bonus, but not quite as I expected. But, since I was a gladiator, I got to use that strike bonus for damage anyway, which was an edge I had over non-gladiators. My strike bonus was already more than twice the health of any one of the crabs if I remembered correctly, and I only had one crab left to deal with. Chump change. This thing was so screwed now.

  The third one stopped in its tracks when I’d killed the second. Instead, it walked itself over to the first one I killed, making some kind of slurping and churning sound. Was it eating the dead one? Oh, that was just nasty… and distracting on its end.

  I’d just become a goddamn mage, and I wasn’t wasting another second without at least some kind of spell. And I was going to start with enchanting the femur with light magic. Pictures of Torlith came to my mind, memories of his gigantic maul glowing as he attacked Zuak’s tentacles. Putting the bone weapon in both hands, I focused on that feeling of pain when the magic seed first entered my body. That was my first and only experience with magic in a visceral sense, and I was going to get it out if it killed me.

  In the corner of my vision, where my health and mana were, I saw my magic score drop by five points. Was this it? Did I do it? I didn’t see anything. The idea was a radiance enchantment, so shouldn’t there have been a light? God, I hoped I wasn’t just pushing magic out of me without casting a spell. Or worse yet, I hoped there wasn’t a magical vampire of sorts draining me around here.

  Quietly, a faint humming showed itself in the void, and my eyes began to hurt. Before I really wondered why, I saw the dim yellow light appear, shaping itself from one place to another until it fully encapsulated the femur bone in my hands. Once it had done so, the whole femur grew to a brighter light, with a tad more intensity at the knob at the top. The light had become opaque, covering the bone’s natural earthy texture and eventually becoming much too bright for my current cave-dweller eyes to look at directly. I twisted my head away from it to lessen the pain.

  The pain was nothing right now. I was a mage, officially and forever, from this point, onward. And I was working practically from rock bottom upwards, with a handful of information from Torlith and a set of screens to read off of as my only knowledge base. Mhm, I was a strong, independent mage who didn’t need no teacher! I was the Omnimage! Maybe not the force to be reckoned with I hoped to be one day, but I had three kills in just five minutes of being here. That was an impressive amount of kills, I thought. Most people went their whole time on a planet without even one kill.

  Once I’d regained a bit of my regular sight again, I realized that my dreams had come true. The light of the bone mace had become like a spotlight, projected from the intense light of the knob, that illuminated the room. The bone being the first clue, I wasn’t surprised that what I was seeing was akin to an underground crypt, with raised stone sarcophagi lining the edges of this stone room. Where the spotlight shined, the indents of removed stone from the walls housed various wrapped corpses in coarse linens and such. The room itself was a good twenty-ish feet upwards, with a stone ceiling just like the floor, and no lanterns or other light source to speak of. It was just me and my femur. Looking back to my opponent, it was about time to test out this first spell.

  What I saw wasn’t what should have been there when I turned the light to look at them. I expected to find two crabs of unusual size with a rock aesthetic to it. That was not entirely the case now. Yes, there were large crabs about the size of a living room coffee table and with an enlarged left claw. Each had a pumice look to their exoskeletons, as if they were carved straight out of a volcano. All to be expected from the name “Pumicestone Crab.”

  The problem was the number of c
rabs that were here. Two of the crabs, the dead ones, were nearly gone, save for their main body that had been opened up and cleaned of most of its innards. The hollow shells had a changed text sprawl on their screens than their more intact forms:

  Pumicestone Crab (deceased)

  Harvested: 100%

  Then, the light shined on the last stone crab, which had gained a bit of heft after its cannibalistic meal. The coffee table size from before had upgraded to a full-blown dining room table. Along with that, it had added more limbs, incorporating all of the limbs of the other two it had harvested onto a crown of twitching legs, almost like dreadlocked hair. The claws of the other crabs had found their places above and below the crab’s head, giving it six arms to snap at bodies with.

  Also, it wasn’t a pumicestone crab, according to the analyst text. Now it was:

  Pumicestone Crustaceous Corpsemonger, beast Lv 5

  Health: 20/20 Magic: 0

  Armor: 16 Aegis: 10

  Abilities: Earthen Armor

  Yep. Glad I just discovered magic. This was going to get bumpy.

  10

  In what evolutionary scenario would a crab have ever developed the ability or the inclination to start eating other crabs and using their body parts as their own? How did that ever come up? ‘Oh, predators? Let me just eat my dead friend and wear his corpse! That’ll allow me to absorb his power and use its limbs!’ That was just stupid. Well, it wasn’t stupid if it worked, I guess.

  Was this the secret ability from before? What did that Earthen Armor ability say, now that this shit had happened? I’d have imagined that seeing the ability with my own eyes would qualify for it to be revealed for me. I brought up the description for the ability, ignoring the unchanged text, and went straight for the bonuses at the bottom:

  +9 Covert

  +9 Armor

  +9 Aegis

  +9 Resistance to slashing damage

  + Cannibal Corpse (secret ability): temporary bonus to all scores for corpses eaten, based on corpse scores and freshness of corpse, enhanced increases and fewer drawbacks if the corpses belong to the same monster species (Revealed)

  -9 Resistance to explosion-type attacks (Revealed)

  It was a better battle crab in every way, though I wasn’t sure that the math lined up quite right for its health and armor, but hey, the crab’s stats were its stats. What was I going to do?

  Wait, when did I see that bottom one happen? That didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t used an explosive or a bomb spell yet. My first spell ever was just now and was mostly a glorified glowstick. Even so, it was clearly an enchant-type spell, if I was right that enchanting had to do with weapons, and it didn’t even touch the crab with it. Did just casting it count as an explosive? No, how would that have even worked?

  Wait, did I level up my analyst skill again? That thing seemed to jump up like crazy anytime a new screen popped over a new monster. I was going to get a lot of levels with that one, which I was fine with. If it was gaining experience while I was just casually living my life, then I was happy to let it do its job.

  But there hadn’t been a screen telling me that a skill had leveled up yet. Was there another skill at play here that I was just not conscious of? I hadn’t gotten my second level of Hunter skill quite yet, so it couldn’t have been that.

  As I turned the blurb off to focus on the fight, another blue analyst box blipped into existence right in front of me. Not to downplay how happy I was to see it, as always, but the latest little splotch of text seemed to have shown up just prove me wrong, as if it wanted to make a damn fool out of me:

  You have witnessed a monster use its secret ability

  The secret ability will now always appear on the description of the ability that had hidden it previously

  Hunter skill increased to: Lv 2

  +1 Cunning

  Mundane-class monsters are more likely to reveal their still hidden secret abilities earlier if they have any to use, and it is possible for them to do so

  Analyst skill increased to: Lv 11

  +2 Intellect, +2 Sight

  A thing aura now outlines invisible creatures within a radius of 10 meters from you and will remain outlined, even through walls, or if they move outside the radius until they drop their invisibility. This outline does not return if they become invisible again outside of 10 meters from you, but otherwise acts as any other invisibility.

  Job skills came with special benefits outside of just increases to my stats. The hunter ability was confusing, but I could see why it would have been useful. Seeing invisible monsters was fucking awesome, though. A thirty-foot area where no one could magically hide from me kicked ass.

  I wondered if there were any others I wasn’t aware of simply because I couldn’t see my fricken profile yet. Not that I was still bitter. Goddamn it, I hoped that I would have gotten access to it soon. It was killing me that I didn’t know how my abilities were working yet. What if I could cast spells this whole time, but I didn’t know about the ability that let me do that?

  Anyway, now that I solved the mystery, it was time to fight this corpsemonger. Seeing that I still had more health than the mutant crab five levels above my own, I was confident that he was going to be a chump.

  I had planned to wind up a solid swing, but the multi-armed crab shifted its weight into me like a bullet train, slamming me into the wall behind. I gasped as it knocked the breath out of my lungs and saw a big, whopping, red ‘-24’ float about in the air. Though my armor had turned that twenty-two damage down to twelve, that still left me with a lot of health to dick around. I couldn’t have taken another hit like that. I had to end this fast.

  Before it had time to react to me, I slammed my bone mace right onto its back. The yellow light flashed as the knob of the femur cracked into the back of the crab, shattering the pumice into pieces. A red ‘-18’ flashed, followed by a blue ‘16’. I assumed that was the magic working its… magic. From the five damage the femur was doing before to thirty- four now had me giddy for swinging this thing around like everything was a pinata.

  The damage that was flashing was not the damage that was landing, however, and I had only managed to bring the beast down from the twenty health it had before down to twelve. I needed two more hits like that in order to finish it off, but I had to keep it from crushing me before that happened.

  To make matters worse, once I’d smacked down on the corpsemonger, the light magic had gone out on the bone. Good to know: enchantments were only good for one hit at this level. If I was going to live, I had to re-enchant this bone to hit it again, then repeat it once more, all while not getting hit.

  Or I could have charged up a big bomb, overcome that defense, and take care of this in one shot. That was going to take some time, since I’d never done it before, and also distance, so I didn’t get caught up in the explosion. Now was a good time to see how good my acrobat skill really was, then.

  After picking itself up from crashing against my stomach, the corpsemonger quickly reeled itself back into position to try for another ram. As soon as I wasn’t pinned to the wall, I jumped over the battering crab, simultaneously preparing to shatter that crab apart with some fire.

  Fire element and bomb type, that was the key. Should I have added some more elements to this as well? I didn’t have a limit, so I could have gone crazy with it. Then again, tight spaces and crazy explosives didn’t get along very well, and who knew how far underground I was. I wasn’t going to bury myself by being an idiot. A smaller explosion would have been fine.

  I landed behind it, escaping the curling legs on its head that tried to grab me as I flipped over it. As soon as I did, I got down on a knee to stabilize myself for what could have been a nasty boom. The kick on this bad boy had to be tremendous for someone who’d never used one before. My favorite corpsemonger turned around on a perfect axis, recalculating its position to smash into me once again.

  The tip of my bone mace was glowing with power, and an intense, red orb of energy inflated
into existence just above the knob. Now that I had an arcane conductor, magic was getting pretty easy. Plus, remembering both the pain from getting the magic seed and the way Torlith used magic helped me understand what it took to cast spells. My magic reserve had dipped another few points down, but I had plenty to spare after that. It wasn’t much more expensive than the radiant mace. Who knew why I had so much magic to use, but I certainly wasn’t complaining. This fireball was more than worth the nickels and dimes.

  The ball launched forward a powerful, tremendous, marvelously stupendous five feet before bouncing on the ground twice, then rolling to just in front of the crab behemoth. After that, it just… sat there. Like an expensive lump of coal. I should have gone with another enchanted strike. As the crab had completely reversed its position to face me, it rushed forward again, hurtling towards the end of my life.

  As soon as it had brushed against the red ball, the spell detonated, blooming into a dome of flames that filled the room, creating an unexpected sonic boom as the rapid expansion collapsed the air into a larger concussive wave. I was thrown against the wall as I watched the large, blue ‘-23’ flare into existence, reminding me that I was probably going to die here. Wait, no, my aegis was much higher than that. I’d forgotten. This level of magic was nothing.

  As I’d slammed against the wall, I saw a red ‘-23’ in front of me, which I knew was bad news. If I was doing the math right, with the first two crabs, then the mutant crab slamming me, and now this, even with the ten damage mitigation, I was only barely alive, and now needed to learn how to heal.

  Before that, I had to confirm what happened to the crab abomination. Or, should I say, what was left of the crab abomination. There were parts of it in so many different directions, it might as well have been a new coat of paint on the walls. There were sections of pumice leg and arm sections just littered about like volcanic debris, along with wet spider guts and blood. Needless to say, the death display for the corpsemonger was inevitable: