Treachery (The Terra Trials Book 1)

by Dan Thomas

  He felt his momentum change downward, bouncing down the side of a steep slope while the world spun around him. In disbelief that he was going to die already in such a stupid way, he tucked his head in, curling up as much as he could as he prepared for the inevitable weightlessness of fall.

  His momentum came to a stop, and he felt solid ground beneath him. He opened one eye, looking up at the inky blue sky with its one solitary star.

  He got to his feet, looking back uphill to where the single Strangler Vine had tangled itself up in the top of a small tree.

  “That could have been bad.” Max grabbed his spear, walking to the base of the low tree.

  Squinting up at the snake-like shape of the Strangler Vine, he grasped the end of his spear and jabbed upward, aiming for the top of the vine that grew out of the dull pod that had once been a bright purple seed pod.

  The vine was a little too high, and even with the long shaft of the spear, Max could only just reach it. Combined with the fact that the spear wasn’t exactly ideal for harvesting vines, it wasn’t until Max’s arm was beginning to ache from jabbing upward that the vine came loose and fell to the ground in a knot of dark green fibers.

  The Strangler Vines were just as widespread throughout Primeva as the Staples, and while that posed a constant danger to traveling through the jungles, they also made the strongest rope, and even unprocessed they made decent cordage. He’d been able to keep an eye out for them earlier, but it was much harder to spot them in the twilight.

  Max slung his spear back over his shoulder and grabbed the Strangler. Being a younger vine, no longer attached to its base, the tension in the fibers gave up, and the plant became supple.

  Max wound it around his arm, taking off his bag and looping it through the strap before putting it back on.

  Max turned at the sound of a tree crashing to the ground some way downhill, followed by a loud roar and a series of whooping calls. The air over a patch of trees filled with small Pterosaurs, framed by the blazing sunset as they fled danger, their flight over the trees a series of acrobatic feats as they dodged around each other before diving back down to the safety of the trees.

  “Awesome.” There was no place quite like Primeva.

  Max stood still for a moment longer, keeping his breath steady and listening to the almost silent forest around him. Aware of how close to dark it was becoming, and how much noise he had been making, Max still needed to be careful lest he end up falling off the food chain.

  After a minute with no sign of movement, he carried on his way, heading steadily back downhill, aware of every noise that he made, moving at a walk to stay as quiet as possible through the sleeping landscape.

  “No time for foraging now,” Max whispered to himself. “Just got to find somewhere to set up.”

  He carried on his trek downhill, the trees closing in around him as the vegetation began to grow much higher and denser in between the thickening trees. Before long, Max had trouble moving forward through the thick undergrowth, especially considering that he could barely see any farther than a few feet in front of him.

  He spotted a particularly dark patch in among the trees that Max hoped was a thicket that he could hide in, rather than a slumbering dino.

  Ducking under a low-hanging branch, he forced his way through the undergrowth, having to stamp down plants in front of him to forge some semblance of a path, while branches tore at his clothes, and twigs like bony fingers snagged at his hair. The ferns gave way to woody Wark shrubs that were covered in sharp, needle-like branches that left him bleeding from many light cuts down his arms.

  Max pushed through past one more thorny plant, and into a small clear area where a large tree had toppled over, falling into the spiny Wark plants. Where its roots had once sat in the ground, they now formed a kind of natural wall, backing the small clearing left where the tree had once stood.

  Max looked up at the low and shadowy tight-knit branches and wide leaves of surrounding trees that reached toward the opening of twilight that had been created by the fall of the larger trunk. This had once been a solid clump of Wark, but the fallen tree had killed off many of the plants, allowing a clearing to form encircled by the shrubs.

  This would do.

  Max crept toward the trunk, shaking off the spiny branches that refused to let go of his clothes as he made his way into the clear space. He leaned against the tree as he reached it, unslung his bag, and dropped it down beside him, kneeling to rummage through for the flint and stone he had found.

  Despite the natural skylight, it was almost too dark to see anything. If Max wanted to get anything else done without having to wait hours for the sun to rise, he’d have to create a fire to give him light and ward off the dark, and the creatures within it, as well as the drop in temperature. For though the tropical world of Primeva rarely got much colder than a few degrees centigrade, even the mild nighttime temperatures would be enough to affect Murf with only light clothing, and no Traits to help him brave the climate.

  There were a couple of things he needed to do yet before he could get a fire going.

  Max picked out the gray stone, as well as a chert rock that he had found.

  He leaned over the trunk of the fallen tree, which came up to around his waist, placing the flint rock on it, and opened his character screen.

  His stats hadn’t changed much since he last looked at them, but he only had one need at that moment.

  He opened his Dexterity Trait Tree and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw what options there were.

  (D Lvl 5) Simple Crafting: The ability to work with basic materials to form simple tools.

  (D Lvl 5) Heavy-Handed: 10% Decrease likelihood to ruin anything incorrectly harvested.

  The Heavy-Handed Trait was often seen as a waste of a Trait Point, as most players sought to gain enough Dexterity that harvesting wasn’t an issue, meanwhile the ability to craft even the most basic of things was essential, and so Max spent his point on it.

  Closing the character screen, Max held the flint with his left hand, resting on the log. It was much more convenient to knap flint on your lap, but without a leather pad, or the Adaptive Crafting Trait, it wouldn’t be feasible and would result in Max simply injuring himself, and so an improvised workstation was needed, although this could be anything from a table, a large flat rock, or a tree trunk.

  He turned the chert over, looking for a platform, a mostly flat edge of the rock, which was next to a side that narrowed inward. It was by hitting these edges at the right angle that Max would be able to break off sharp flakes of flint. Meanwhile, the more Traits gained for crafting, the better the quality and accuracy of flint broken off would be.

  The chert was almost an elliptical shape that only had edges that bulged away from the center of the stone, with no flat platforms.

  Max held one end of the chert against the tree at about a forty-five-degree angle, then, making sure his hand was behind the chert and his fingers were out of the way, raised the stone he was using as a hammer rock up into the air and brought it down hard on the center of the flint.

  Max cringed at the sharp ring of stone on stone, which seemed much louder in the still forest than he was expecting. Max looked around him but couldn’t see anything outside of his thicket. There was no way to work flint quietly, he’d just have to be quick and be alert for anything he might attract.

  The chert rock didn’t break with the first hit, so Max brought up the hammerstone again and aimed to hit in the same place. The sound rang out again, but with a deadened tone as the chert split roughly in half, leaving Max with two cone-shaped flint cores.

  “Here comes the finicky part,” Max muttered to himself. His main character had done this process thousands of times, and with the skills he had built up, taking flint-flakes was almost automatic. But he wasn’t playing Holic right now, and although finding the angles for breaking off flakes was second nature to Max, he was hampered by the clumsiness of Murf.

  Dropping one core back into his
bag on the forest floor, he held the second with the flat edge up, the rounded tip of the chert on the wood. He tilted the flint, aiming again for that forty-five-degree sweet spot. Max then struck the hammerstone down onto one edge of the platform with a lot less force than had been needed to split the rock. The hammerstone hit the core and bounced away at an awkward angle, leaving a mark on the dark surface of the flint, but not taking anything away.

  Max repositioned the core and tried again, this time following through more with the hammer.

  He caught the edge of the core and heard the familiar crunching sound of a flake shattering as it broke away.

  Unperturbed, Max tried again three times before he felt the satisfaction as the core stayed in place as the hammerstone took a flake clean off. He laid the hammerstone and the flint core down on the tree trunk and picked up the finger-length flake of flint. It was a little thicker than ideal, but it had a sharp edge and would do fine for what he needed it for. Max unslung his spear and stuck the flint flake into his pocket.

  He stayed low and headed for the rough path of crushed vegetation he had made, stepping as quietly as he could over the soft ground. He still couldn’t hear any movement, but that didn’t do much for his nerves, as the nocturnal hunters were built for silence.

  As he came to the edge of the thicket, he took another moment to sit on his haunches, breathing in the humid night air and straining his hearing as he stared into the inky blackness. Max could see the shapes of ferns and large leaves around him, but he could only see in grayscale, and only a few feet out at that.

  “Come on, Max, now’s as good a time as ever.” He sighed and stalked out.

  Chapter Twenty

  Pez’s mantra of if you can hear you, something else will, came to him as his low-level feet somehow managed to make noise even on the mossy ground, and the plants rustled softly as he waded through them.

  After a couple of steps, Max stopped and reached out to a thick stalk of a fern. He grabbed at it a couple of times until he had hold of it, then followed the main stem to one of its smaller fronds. He slowly bent it down toward the ground. Holding his spear like a staff for stability with his free hand, he lifted his foot and rested it on the stem he had bent, sliding up toward where it was attached to the base of the plant. He shifted his weight, putting pressure onto the stem until he heard the quiet, wet snap of the green plant. He then laid it down over the top of the forest floor litter, pointing toward the direction he had come from before plucking off the large serrations on one side of the stem.

  Lowering his spear and holding it out in front of him again, Max carried on, carefully flattening a plant stem every few feet in the same way.

  After a tense minute of crawling through the undergrowth, Max could see the shape of an upright tree trunk, which he made his way over to. Once at the base of the tree, he reached out and touched it, feeling the rough, sandpaper-like bark that was from an Uknuk tree, a common tree without any use other than construction.

  Leaning against the tree, Max slowly stood up, feeling his way up the pitted bark. He couldn’t feel anything but the bare bark as he got to his feet. He leaned forward, moving his hand around to the other side of the tree when he felt the texture change to a soft, fuzzy material, which Max was fairly sure was a clump of Shrow lichen. It wasn’t a great tinder, instead, it was much better suited for felting into bandages, but it would burn with a bit of effort, and he didn’t have many options.

  After slinging his spear back over his shoulder, and keeping in touch with the Uknuk tree, Max slowly moved around the tree until his hand was around head height and in front of him. He then reached into his pocket to grab the flint and scraped down the coarse bark, which made a scratching sound at the friction, and into the Shrow, which came loose easily.

  Max stuffed the fuzzy lichen into his pocket, then felt around for another lot of Shrow, and was relieved when he found some just a bit lower. With the scraper already in hand, he began working on cutting away the lichen as quickly and quietly as he could.

  A stick snapped somewhere behind Max. He ducked down and spun around to face away from the tree, grabbing his spear. There was a loud snort from somewhere off to his right.

  Max closed his eyes and held his breath, tuning his ears into the silence of the forest. The heavy breathing continued. Something was smelling the ground. There was a little more rustling, then Max snapped his eyes open as he heard heavy footsteps.

  Holding his spear out in the direction he thought the sound was coming from, Max breathed out through his mouth, taking another controlled inhale as he listened to the rustling and footsteps getting quieter.

  Max stayed where he was even after the sounds of the creature had receded into the pitch of night.

  “Ooo-kay,” Max blew out, swinging his spear back over his shoulder he reached up and pulled away the loose lichen, it would have to be enough for now.

  He crouched back down low to the ground, putting his hands down in front of him, feeling the thick covering of plant life carpeting the forest floor. He began to move around the base of the tree, crawling on all fours. Almost immediately he felt something hard lying on the ground. Placing his hand out, he gripped the cylindrical object, the rough texture giving it away as a branch. He moved it over to lay against the tree trunk and carried on rooting around, only going out to an arm’s length away from the tree as he gathered up sticks, placing them gently in a pile.

  Once Max had made a pile of various-sized branches that he could still fit in both of his arms, he unrolled the Strangler Vine Coil from his bag.

  Feeling along the length of the vine until he reached an end, he grabbed the pile of sticks in an awkward embrace, and lifted one end, wincing when some clattered against each other as they fell to the ground. Max then placed the vine beneath the pile, laying them back down.

  Pulling one end and feeling around for the rest of the vine, he fumbled to tie a knot by touch alone but managed to get something that held, making sure to pull it tight.

  With the bundle more manageable now, he lifted the sticks and wrapped the remainder of the Strangler around it several times, tying it off again.

  Nearly there. Max stowed his spear and picked up the bundle, tucking it under one arm, and then began feeling around a little way away from the base of the tree again, gingerly grabbing out at plants and feeling down the stem until he found one that had a frond snapped and bent away from him. Feeling along the stem, he could feel that the one side of the stem had been stripped of anything leafy, and he knew it was one of his markers.

  Max began to move in the direction the frond lay, crawling slowly and reaching his free hand out in front of him to feel for any obstacles, but even so, he was caught off guard a few times by leaves that he couldn’t see brushing suddenly against his face or tickling the back of his neck. Max fought the urge to jump away or swat at anything for fear of making any form of noise.

  After a moment of stalking forward, he began to worry that he had gone in the wrong direction when he felt a lump underfoot. Reaching down, he could feel that it was another broken stem lying in the same direction he was moving.

  The sound of something crashing through the canopy above shook the still air, but Max kept moving, fighting his urge to get up and just run. He continued to creep forward as the commotion above stopped. Feeling out for the next broken plant stem, he decided that he might take Chopsticks’ advice and spend some time unlocking more Traits in the Primal tree, night vision, or an even better sense of smell would make this ordeal much easier.

  After what felt like forever crawling in the darkness, Max took one last step, reaching his hand out only to recoil when he planted it on something spiky. He had reached the thicket of thorny plants.

  Max shifted his stance, standing higher and putting one foot forward, the woody stems of the thorn bushes cracking despite how delicately he stepped. He took a second to listen out for anything moving around him before taking the next step, then the next, and before long he
was clear of the thorns and back in the relative safety inside the thicket, the ground underneath his feet feeling loamy once more.

  Max shuffled forward, equipping his spear and holding the butt end of it out in front of him, moving it from side to side until he felt it connect with something solid. He leaned down and reached out, feeling the coarse surface of the fallen tree.

  Max then took a step back and five steps to the right, crouching down and laying the branches on the ground. He pulled two sticks out of the bundle, placing them on the ground to his side a hand’s width apart. He took two more and stacked them on top of the first two, repeating until he had stacked four or so sticks high.

  So close, Max thought. Being able to function in the dark was something that he had learned to do after being stranded out in the wilderness so many times, but it got old fast. Especially without a higher-level character.

  With that done, Max grabbed one last stick from the diminished bundle, then took five steps back to his left and another forward, catching his shins on the bottom of the trunk.

  He had no iron for a flint and steel, and he wasn’t going to try to craft a bow drill in the dark. Max would have to use the brute force method of fire making—a Fire Plow.

  Resting one of the sticks he had on the trunk, he reached into his pocket and felt around for his flint scraper, careful not to cut himself on the razor edge. Grasping it tight to make sure he didn’t drop it, he placed the cutting edge against the end of the stick and began shaving off pieces of wood until the stick felt like it ended in a point.

  Max then ran the scraper down the trunk, cutting a shallow slit into the bark around a foot long which he then, after a few attempts, lined the point of the stick up with. Applying a mild amount of force, Max began to rub the stick along the slit he had made. At first, the stick kept slipping from the slit, but as he scraped the stick against the trunk, he could feel a deeper groove forming as the wood wore away, the friction making a rasping noise. A nearby player would almost certainly identify that sound as a player desperately trying to get a fire started. Max hoped there were only animals nearby, who would be deterred by the uninviting barbed plants between them and the sound.