by Macronomicon
Then it happened again, accompanied by a tearing sensation that went from the back of his skull to the sockets of his eyes.
“Motherfucker!” Cussing makes things hurt less, according to popular wisdom, but it didn’t seem to be helping a whole lot.
Underneath the riot of colors were moving squiggles, along with a mist-like vapor in the air that Jeb hadn’t seen before. Then he started smelling and hearing them, accompanied by similar tearing sensations in his ears and nose.
It was at this point that Jeb thankfully passed into blissful unconsciousness, his brain’s natural defense mechanism protecting him from more trauma.
…
….
Jeb sat up with a gasp, his hand immediately going to his head.
No pain. He felt fine. Better than before actually. He could see little spirits of small forest creatures flitting back and forth, fairies staring at him quizzically, weird snake things swimming through the air in the upper branches of the canopy, gently brushing the leaves aside like an errant gust of wind. It might have actually been a gust of wind.
The trees seemed to have faces. Not faces, faces, but he could definitely read their mood. They weren’t big fans of the fire.
Jeb glanced over at the fire, and noticed it was out, having exhausted all of its fuel.
There was a tickle under his nose, and Jeb idly wiped at it, coming away with a hand covered in blood.
To his horror, he discovered that his brand-new brigandine had been covered in blood from a monster nosebleed. Tracing the wetness upward, he noticed a track where tears of blood had rolled down his cheeks from his eyes.
“Goddamn,” Jeb muttered, groaning as he pushed himself to his feet.
He grabbed a washcloth from the supply bin, dipped it and wiped his face and armor off with cool water, all the while glancing around the suddenly wondrous and magical forest.
Was this all here, and I couldn’t see it? Jeb thought to himself, watching silvery droplets form on the tree's leaves before falling to the ground like a gentle rain, evaporating up into the white mist that seemed to penetrate everything.
There were weird bug things that seemed to prey on each other. One of them with a thick carapace and crushing mandibles lunged out of the tree above him to pounce on one that was sipping on a little silver pool on the ground.
“These things aren’t monsters are they?” They looked pretty aggressive, but when Jeb tried to poke them with his sword, the sword simply went through them, and they ignored him completely.
Well, okay then.
I guess we gotta deal with the fairy in the room, Jeb thought, eyeing the half dozen or so winged people who watched him from the safety of the tree.
“I know this is a long shot, but do you guys understand English?” Jeb asked, looking straight at them.
They glanced at each other and pointed at Jeb, then to themselves, seemingly debating something. Then they shrugged and one of them flew down and waved its tiny little hand in front of Jeb’s eyeballs.
Jeb flinched backwards.
“Holy crap, he can see us!” the creature shouted, voice high pitched as you’d expect.
The other five insect-winged people flitted down to him and began performing their own tests, tracking his eyes movement, poking at his sensitive bits. There didn’t seem to be anything malicious to it, like a doctor assessing a patient’s condition.
“Full physical integration. His Myst must be above twelve.”
“I can hear you too.” Jeb said, gently brushing one of them away from his eyes.
“Astounding. The nutter must have dumped all his points into Myst.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Jeb said. “You can talk to me instead of at me, you know.”
They flew away from him and whispered to each other in hushed tones, before seemingly deciding on something.
One of them flew away, while the other five hovered in the air in front of him, their arms crossed.
“Human, you find yourself in the presence of greatness. We are the Mossy-oak-in-the-clearing clan, and given the proper tribute, we would be gracious enough to allow you to stay in our demesne for the time being. Perhaps given a humble enough entreat, we would be willing to sell you useful information.”
Jeb glanced at the mossy oak in the center of the clearing, then over to the MRE’s he’d stacked next to it.
“You guys like M&M’s?”
***Later***
“Sweet Ambrosia!” the leader of the Mossy Oak clan moaned, eyes rolling back in his skull before shoving an entire M&M into his mouth. Their previous haughtiness forgotten, the entire clan gorged themselves on a single handful of the candy-coated chocolates, laying on the grass, moaning with painfully distended bellies.
The individual candies barely fit in the creature’s mouths, but that didn’t stop them from trying. They went bananas for it.
He still had two thirds of the bag left in its original container. A tiny snack for a human was enough to feed a clan of fairies three times over.
“I’m glad you like it,” Jeb said, holding the bag aloft and swinging it back and forth. The fairy’s oversized eyes followed the treats like a hungry dog. “I was actually considering parting with a few more of these, but I want something in exchange.
“Anything!” The head fairy shouted, dropping to his knees, his lips smudged with chocolate. “Anything you need, great dispenser of M&M’s! Do you want my son’s life!? I’ll happily sacrifice him to you, M&M-Lord, but for one more taste of that heavenly concoction!”
Whoah, that’s a little intense.
“What would I need- “ Jeb rubbed his eyebrow. “Answer me these questions three, and receive an M&M…free.”
“Of course, of course.” The leader of the fairies said, nodding and rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Ask, ask!”
“How do I level up?” Jeb asked.
“When two creatures engage each other in a life or death struggle, the System takes note, and awards the victor a share of the defeated creature’s Fate. Once the User has accrued a certain amount, they level up.”
“So, standard RPG rules.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Jeb said, shaking his head. “What are the rewards for leveling?”
“An Ability Point.” The fairy said, beginning to salivate.
So I got the equivalent of fifteen levels at the beginning of the test and it’s still considered impossible? Goddamn, this is gonna be tough.
“How do I beat this tutorial?” Jeb asked.
“By defeating the World Tortoise, of course,” the fairy said, gleefully holding out its hands and making a ‘gimmie, gimmie’, motion.
Jeb gave him an M&M, which he immediately shoved in its mouth.
“Anybody else interested in answering three questions?” Jeb asked, shaking the bag.
The leader fairy gave a groan of indignation, but his face was still stuffed with an M&M, so he couldn’t protest too hard when the others came forward, jumping up and down eagerly and waving their hands.
By going through the rest of his M&M bag, Jeb was able to play twenty questions, getting the lay of the land.
The world tortoise was the boss of the tutorial, and it was a kaiju-like tortoise that stood some five hundred feet tall, a walking fortress immune to any and all physical, mental and magical attacks. It was so huge, that one of the fairies said they’d seen a master pyromancer’s empowered fireball splatter against the side of its nostril like a popping zit.
The World Tortoise’s shell was riddled with hives for vicious symbiotes that defended their homes to the death, numbering in the tens to hundreds of thousands. Anyone that tried to go all inner-space on the thing and stab it’s heart directly got torn to shreds in a matter of minutes.
Well, this is hopeless.
When asked what level it would take to kill something like that by himself, the answer was somewhere in the mid two hundreds, with plenty of skills and equipment.
When asked how long
it would take someone to reach that level, the answer was somewhere approaching three hundred and fifty years of dedicated training, assuming rejuvenating elixirs were consumed to keep the User young.
Well, that’s not good.
The forest itself was normally crawling with the tortoise’s parasites, but due to the Safe Zones, they were less than usual. Once the Safe zone was gone however, the woods would be overrun with monsters spawning indefinitely from the creature’s shell. Those creatures could be dealt with on an individual basis, by someone ranging from level ten to fifty.
They rarely moved individually, however.
The good news was that there were more Safe Zones, and therefore more humans out there. They could join forces at some point to try and take the tortoise down.
North, the direction he was originally planning on going was littered with sticky trap plants that, once they seized a man, wouldn’t let him go until they’d been pulled underground and digested. There were also aborigines with poison darts to contend with, a not-so-charming combination. A moment’s inattention could lead to being eaten by a tree or poisoned by frog-people.
To the west were stealthy raptors with steel-shearing talons that ambushed their prey and cut them to pieces before they even knew what was there. Past them were rocky mountains with jets of fire and earth and fire elementals that would crush you or cook you. Possibly both.
To the south was a lake with sirens in it which would lure you to your doom unless your Nerve was above twelve. Even if it was, they possessed elemental magic that made them deadly combatants anywhere near the water, which they never strayed from. A good way to get drowned.
To the East…boars. Or boarlike creatures. Big lumbering masses of meat that charged you as soon as look at you. Physically dangerous, but not particularly smart.
Forewarned was forearmed. South, West, and North were out, so he would go East, toward the boars.
Jeb changed his loadout, grabbing a couple of the biggest spears he could find, the biggest crossbow he could find, a shield and a short sword.
If he could spot the big animal before it spotted him, a bolt to the heart might drop it before it had a chance to gore him.
He remade the fire, despite the tree’s general unease around the blaze, and dropped a bunch of green wood on the flame, creating another rally point.
Let’s try this again. Is there anything I missed this time?
Oh right.
Jeb focused on the pile of MRE’s and held his hand out, focusing on the Myst around him. Move, you fucker, move, you fucker! With a mental grunt of effort, Jeb tried to move the Myst over to the MRE and have it carry the tan package of heavy plastic over to him.
Move, move, MOVE!
Nothing.
Damn, well, it was worth a shot. Telekinesis was the go-to superpower. Jeb supposed he’d have to find out more about what the hell Draw and Output capacity were through trial and error. He couldn’t sit around not doing anything, though. For now, he needed to go get some levels.
Still, it wasn’t like his Myst was completely useless. He’d bartered for a ton of information for the low, low price of a travel bag of M&M’s. In a situation like this, knowledge was power, and his Myst had gotten him plenty of it.
There were probably hundreds of humans getting lured into the lake or pulled underground by venus flytraps right now.
Ignorance kills. Another one of dad’s favored quotes.
Jeb dropped his hand and walked over to the MRE’s, grabbing as many as he could carry in his backpack and heading out.
Why carry so much food offsite?
Because he didn’t trust the fairies not to try to get into them while he was gone. The plastic was tough and he doubted they could get it open, but still. Plus, he didn’t want them to come to the conclusion that All MRE’s had candy in them – they did, but he didn’t want them to know that –. Once he had reached an acceptable distance from the clearing, he started opening them one after the other, taking the different candies from each MRE and jamming them in his pockets before shoving the food back in his backpack.
If they wanted to call him M&M-Lord and dedicate their lives to serving his whims, who was Jeb to argue with that?
Future bribes secured, Jeb crouched back down and began creeping through the woods, as silently as he could given his armor and weapons.
It was just silent enough, as not five minutes later, he heard a snuffling sound in the distance.
So close to the safe zone!
He crept closer and peeked out from behind the tree that was concealing the creature from him.
Some fifty feet distant, a boar-like creature was digging into the roots of an emerald-green, faintly glowing plant, crunching away at them and grunting loudly enough to cover the sound of his approach.
Boar-like because it didn’t have tusks, but instead a wicked horn jutting out the front.
More like, a pygmy rhino, I guess.
It was faced to the side, and its ribcage was perfectly perpendicular to him.
Not gonna get a better shot than this, Jeb thought, slowly and carefully pulling out his crossbow from where it hung on his waist. He brought it up tight against his shoulder and aimed at the creature, where he expected the vital organs to be.
Just behind the shoulders. A couple years of his childhood spent shooting at foam cutouts of deer were not wasted.
He gave his aim a tiny bit of vertical height, and squeezed the trigger. The yellow fletching streaked across the distance between the two of them and lodged itself deep in the vital zone right behind the shoulder.
Nice!
Fun Fact: The wild Krusker can live for hours with a hole in its lungs.
What the-
“EEEEEE!” the magical pygmy rhino gave a squeal that echoed through the forest before turning to fix Jeb’s dumbstruck face with a pair of furious beady eyes.
“Shit.” Jeb didn’t waste any time reloading the crossbow, tossing it aside in favor of the bigger of the two spears he’d brought, putting it in front of him and putting his foot down on it, driving the wood into the earth, crouching down behind it to keep the spear low and present a smaller target.
Jeb assumed that was the proper boar-hunting posture.
The spear itself was big and gaudy, like it had been taken from someone’s drawing of a spear. It looked like it belonged in an anime convention, but it was solid enough. He’d placed it over a couple rocks and jumped on the shaft several times in full armor to make sure it wasn’t a flimsy dowel covered in paper-mache.
It was solid, didn’t even budge.
So you can imagine Jeb’s surprise when the head of the spear jammed deep into the creature’s chest before snapping off.
“BWA!” was about all the words Jeb could get out before the shaft of the broken spear caught the creature in the chest and sent it squealing up and over his head like a pole-vaulter.
Most of the way over his head.
The creature must have out-weighed him by a substantial margin, because halfway through its epic flight over his head, the shaft snapped again, dropping the creature directly on top of him.
Jeb was instantly crushed to the ground, feeling like he’d just had a disagreement with a linebacker.
The creature squealed and kicked out, one of its hooves crunching his ankle.
“Gah!” Jeb screamed as he rolled out from underneath the creature’s mass, fumbling for his shield and short sword, diving toward them. His right leg crumbled out from under him in a wash of pain, but his left leg picked up the slack, propelling him forward.
He grabbed both his shield and sword and managed to put his back against a tree moments before the creature charged him again.
He interposed his shield between himself and the – what was it called? – krusker, intercepting the sharpened point of the creature’s goring horn.
His shield splintered alarmingly as the horn pierced several inches through the wood, his back was shoved against the tree with enough force to kn
ock the wind out of him.
“Die, you fucker!” Jeb shouted, reaching over the shield with his short sword and stabbing desperately at the creature’s eyes and neck, its horn wiggling in the space between his arm and the shield, bruising his forearm.
He couldn’t quite see what he hit, but after a handful of wrist-shaking impacts against solid bone, his sword slipped deep into something, and the krusker’s squeals went up an octave, it’s thrashing intensifying.
He felt another wave of pain and a ripping sensation from his right leg as the krusker’s hooves scrabbled against the ground, desperately trying to shove its horn through him.
A couple seconds later, the beast went limp, collapsing on top of his lower body.
“Gah!” Jeb grunted as he tried to lever the creature off of him, finally bracing his shoulders against the ground as best he could to finally roll the thing away from his legs.
What he saw chilled him to the bone.
His left leg was trampled thoroughly, but the reinforced leather pants had managed to keep it intact. His right foot on the other hand…that was about two feet further away from his ankle than it should have been, torn off by the creature’s hooves.
“Oh god, oh god,” Jeb panted as the itching pain in his leg began to come into focus.
Squirt! In front of his eyes, a jet of crimson blood shot out of the stump and into the green forest floor.
Shit!
Through the haze of endorphins, Jeb realized that a severed limb was a great way to bleed to death. He’d seen it a couple times, even.
“Oh god, oh, god,” Jeb chanted, tugging off the rope he’d used to secure his makeshift sheath and wrapping it around his right calf, right above the wound. People tend to wax religious when in shock. That or call for their mothers. One or the other.
***
Jeb woke up, cold as a witch’s tit and shivering violently. He peered through groggy eyes at the safe zone.
He was sitting with his back against the mossy oak in the center of the clearing, a trail of blood leading back out into the forest. There was a used syringe of morphine sitting next to him, an empty bottle of antiseptic and coagulant, along with a bundle of bloody bandages.