Hey, it wasn’t totally crazy. Stranger things had happened. After all, just a few days ago, Angela was organizing a protest against industrial pollution in freshwater streams. Smash cut to today, where she would gladly dump a barrel of cyanide into this lake if it saved her ass.
As the Ogopogo continued to contort itself in an attempt to get a clean bite on Angela, she started hauling herself hand-over-hand up the Ogopogo’s back, moving from one dorsal fin to another. Not that she had a plan, per se. But it really seemed like she should be doing something more than merely hanging on for dear life. So off she went, climbing from fin to fin.
Periodically, the creature would get into a decent position to snap at Angela. When that happened, she would simply let go and drop to a lower fin, the sudden change in movement throwing the Ogopogo off its attack. It wasn’t the most complex of manoeuvres, but it seemed to be working. Of course, the Ogopogo hadn’t become an apex predator without a few tricks of its own, and it put one of them on display by simply diving beneath the water in a single powerful undulation.
The sudden movement was so powerful that Angela had no hope of holding on. She was immediately thrown off the Ogopogo’s back and sent spinning through the now-frothy water as she tried to maintain a sense of orientation. Not one to lose her head, Angela kicked her way to the surface and discovered that the course of her struggle with the Ogopogo had taken her back to the base of the waterfall.
“Welp, fingers crossed,” Angela said. With no other options available to her, she switched to a front crawl and swam through the rocks on the periphery of the waterfall itself, her strokes taking her behind the curtain of water on the off-chance she could find someplace to take refuge against the rock face.
As soon as Angela surfaced behind the falls, a big grin crossed her face.
There, behind the waterfall, was a rock wall and ledge, the obsidian smooth and polished in stark counterpoint to the rocks at the base of the falls. But it wasn’t the ledge that excited Angela. It was the large, semitransparent egg that made the ledge its home. There was only one—a little over a metre tall and standing vertically upright—but it was definitely an egg. If Angela had to guess, the moisture of the waterfall was serving to keep it damp. Given the ledge’s lack of accessibility by any means other than through the water, there was no question who the egg belonged to.
A plan formed in Angela’s mind.
Hauling herself up on the ledge, Angela darted behind the egg and dumped the contents of her belt pouch into her right hand as she waited for the Ogopogo to arrive. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wait long.
The Ogopogo arrived in a great plume of water, its predatory eyes quickly scanning the area. When it spotted Angela hiding behind its egg, it let out a titanic hiss, enraged at the threat to its young. The monster’s head snapped forward, trying to get at Angela’s cowering form, but Angela’s hunch that the creature was unwilling to risk its egg proved blessedly correct.
A game of cat and mouse ensued, with the Ogopogo trying to position itself to bite Angela while she circled the egg to stop it from happening. Through it all, the Ogopogo remained silent, focusing its energy on waiting for Angela to make a mistake rather than some useless theatrics. Which sucked because her entire plan hinged on it doing the opposite of that.
“C’mon, you catfish lover,” she taunted. “Tell me about your parents. What rock did they meet under? I assume you’re a worm? It’s just that I’m having a lot of trouble telling your head from your ass, and I can’t do that with worms either.”
Whether the Ogopogo could understand Angela’s words or not, it continued to stare at her unblinkingly. In fact, it had stopped moving entirely. That abandonment of its attempt to corral her made her nervous.
Glancing at the egg, Angela noticed that its semi-transparent, skin-like shell had a sheen to it that made it somewhat reflective. Reflective enough that she could see the faint outline of what was behind her…
Angela dropped to the ground just as the tip of the Ogopogo’s tail hammered into the rock where she had been standing, cracking it and sending chips of sharp obsidian raining around her. A large piece that was nearly a hand wide fell to the ground right in front of Angela’s face, the razor-sharp rock coming within a hair’s width of slicing her open.
It also gave her an idea.
Scooping the chunk of obsidian off the ground, Angela climbed back to her feet and stared down the Ogopogo, the contents of her belt pouch in her right hand and the obsidian blade in her left. Stepping next to the glistening egg, Angela held the razor-sharp stone to its leathery case and grinned. “You know what I love, you Slytherin motherfucker? BIRTHDAYS! Birthdays sure are fun. What do you think? Should we have a birthday party today?”
The creature glared at her but didn’t back off.
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Angela put the sharp edge of the rock against the eggshell, but the moment it contacted the egg, the Ogopogo thrust its head forward and roared in titanic fury at the threat to its offspring.
Just as Angela had hoped.
The moment the creature opened its mouth, Angela tossed the contents of her belt pouch into the open jaws, the small objects hitting the back of the creature’s throat and causing it to involuntarily snap its mouth shut, swallowing the contents in an involuntary gulp.
“Haha! Oh yeah, that was AWESOME! Can you believe that worked?” Angela shouted, grinning maniacally and giving a fist pump. The Ogopogo looked at her in a state of semi-confusion.
“Oh, I forgot. You must be wondering what’s going on. ’Kay, here’s the deal: You’re a big boy, right? Hell of a lot bigger than me. But I am, believe it or not, pretty good at estimating weight—just one of those things. I figure you’re probably what, 5,000 kilograms? Maybe 6,000? That would make you say, 100 times my size? But that shouldn’t be a problem because…wait for it… here it comes…”
The Ogopogo’s head suddenly lolled around in a circle. It gave a full-body shudder as it tried to maintain focus on her, then it lurched off to the side where it vomited in a gigantic pile on the ground. That went on for a while, and when it finished, it turned its attention to a spot somewhere out over the water. It peered at the location curiously, moving its head around as though trying to look at it from multiple directions. Then it stopped. And it swayed. And then it fell over sideways and sank beneath the surface of the lake.
“…those mushrooms pack a HELL of a punch,” Angela finished with a fist pump. “Yeah, bitch. If I’ve learned anything in games, it’s that you grab every fucking crafting ingredient you can find.”
Angela looked at the egg and smiled, poking it with one finger. “Hey, no worries, little buddy. I wouldn’t have hurt you.”
The wet, fleshy shell suddenly bulged towards her, the semi-transparent skin revealing a humanoid face pressed against it from the inside. A long-fingered webbed hand appeared beside the face, pointing back at her as the head turned sideways to present a single gaping eye that opened and stared at her intently.
“Eeyah!” Angela shouted, jumping back. “What the fuck? What the fuck! FUUUUCK! That is so fucked up. Seriously fucked up. All’s y’all? SO fucked up.” A full-body shudder ran through her as she walked away from the egg, glancing over her shoulder as she went. The face remained pressed up against the shell, watching her leave. “So, SO creepy.”
With one last shudder, Angela dove into the lake and began pulling herself through the water to the nearest patch of shoreline. She wasn’t wildly happy to be back in the water with the Ogopogo, but from her experience, the thing would be high as a kite for a couple more hours, and if it wasn’t she was screwed anyway.
Fortunately, she was able to make the trip without any surprises or impromptu fights to the death, which was a nice change.
When Angela finally made it to the shore and pulled her bedraggled, adrenaline-ridden body out of the water, she turned and looked out over the water. Then she shifted her gaze up, to the enormous waterfall sh
e’d gone over.
“WOOHOO!” she shouted, raising her arms in the air and staring at the sky. “Yeah, you know it, Tome people. I just took down a Level 42 Ogopogo like a boss. Hit me with that XP!” She stood there silently, but nothing happened.
She sighed. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t kill it. Had to try though.”
After squeezing out all the water she could from her torn and tattered clothes—her pants were practically shorts at this point—Angela set out along the edge of the lake to find the outflow so that she could resume her trip to Palmyre. She stayed well clear of the shoreline, though. The last thing she needed was the irony of escaping the Ogopogo in the water, only to get snapped up by it while she was on land.
On the far side of the lake, Angela discovered a broad marshy area where the water shallowed out, soon constricting into something once again resembling a river. She headed back down to the shore and picked up the pace, anxious to put as much space between herself and the lake as possible. Only then would she feel comfortable finding a place to stop and dry off so that she wouldn’t freeze her ass off again that night.
Not for the first time, Angela wished she still had that book to use as firestarter. But no… it had to go missing, because god forbid she caught a break in this place.
An hour passed with Angela picking her way along the riverbank. She was starting to get tired, but even though she found several good places where she could rest and dry her clothes on the rocks, she kept finding a reason to keep walking. There was always a rogue sound, or no place to sit that was perfectly flat, or a dark patch of trees—always something she could use as an excuse to keep moving.
Eventually, Angela was forced to admit the truth.
She was stalling.
Something had weaselled its way into her subconscious, but she had been so busy with the waterfall and the Ogopogo that she hadn’t processed it. As soon the encounter with the Ogopogo ended though, something had begun tickling at the back of her mind. At first, she’d dismissed it as a mistaken recollection. The further she walked though, the more nervous she got. And the more nervous she got, the less she wanted to confirm her suspicions.
Finally, Angela halted, unable to put it off further.
“Fuck it,” she sighed. “Tome.”
The slabs of rock appeared in front of her, almost crushing her feet when they fell to the ground. She ignored the near-miss, pushing the pile over so she could find the one that held a log of all the messages she had received so far.
Her eyes flicked to the bottom, locking on one of the last entries in the list.
“…first your brother, and now you…”
Sometimes it sucked to be right.
“Bro, where are you?” she said, her lips pressing into a line. “And what are you running from?”
Chapter 17
Awake
Fire ants. Mark must have been injected with fire ants. Not just their venom, but the actual ants themselves. Either that or sulphuric acid. Was that sufficiently low-tech to work in this world? If so, that could definitely be what was coursing through his veins, because it felt like they were burning from the inside out.
At least the rain was cool. He could tell because he was no longer underground, somehow sent back to the surface where he was now lying on his back, raindrops smacking him in the face despite the piece of paper hovering insistently in front of him.
Too disoriented to read, Mark waved the paper aside, only to have swoop back in front of him. He tried again to wave it away, but again it flitted into his vision. Now completely annoyed, Mark grabbed the paper out of midair and crumpled it in his fist, revealing a gray sky so dreary that it practically sucked the colours out of the surrounding forest.
Forest?
Mark bolted up and looked around in shock. The solid wall of fog loomed only 5 metres away, but against all reason, he had somehow been deposited outside of it.
Or had he? The ground he was lying on was the same kind of scorched earth that was everywhere inside that cursed place—there were even some old weapons scattered nearby—making it feel more like he had been moved to the very edge of the fog, and then it had receded, leaving him outside its boundaries.
The moment Mark’s mind closed on that idea, he scrambled to his feet and grabbed his staff from the ground, sprinting away from the gray mists as fast as his feet would carry him. When he hit the woods, he didn’t even slow down, barreling through the underbrush without a care for the sound he was making, continuing until he ran out of energy and eventually collapsed onto his knees.
Even though Mark’s lungs were heaving for oxygen, his mind continued to race at full tilt.
What was that place? What was that thing?
Just thinking of that spasming sphere of power sent a shudder through Mark, an echo of that strange warping sensation that wouldn’t let go, leaving an uncomfortable sense of association in its wake. As though the memory had sunk into him and didn’t want to be forgotten.
A growl rumbled Mark’s stomach, and he remembered just how hungry he was. It had been days since he had eaten, not to mention however long he’d been unconscious. Still… he felt like he should be hungrier than he was. His mouth was tacky too, a product of his thirst, but not as overwhelming as it should have been.
Weird, but no weirder than anything else that had happened inside that fog.
“Okay, Mark. You’re out,” he said to himself. “That’s all that matters. You’re outside the fog. Just get your shit together and make a plan.”
After a moment’s consideration, he decided that despite everything, his goals were fundamentally unchanged. He was still lost in the woods, and he still needed to get to Palmyre. With that in mind, he stuck the butt of his staff into the ground and used it to push himself to his feet.
That was when Mark discovered two more things that had been changed by the fog. Considering the nature of those changes, he couldn’t comprehend how they had escaped his notice.
One, his leg was healed. Completely. Taking off the bandage revealed a patchwork of scars but no injury.
Two, his staff had changed. Where before it had been nothing but a broken branch picked up from the ground to use as a makeshift crutch, now it was the faded yellow of aged ivory and covered in hair-width whorls that crawled all over it in a seemingly random fashion, the thin lines a shimmering prism colour akin to the look of oil on water. Literally crawled, as Mark realized upon closer inspection. It was hard to see, but the lines were slowly drawing themselves in some spots and erasing in others. It left the staff with a vaguely unsettling feeling that reminded Mark a bit too much of the spectre he had fought in the fog. Still, it wasn’t unsettling enough to throw away. Mark had played enough games to know that you didn’t throw away unique items out of hand. Plus, the splintered end had hardened into something like obsidian and was now razor-sharp, so he wasn’t going to get rid of an actual, viable weapon while he was still lost in the forest.
Mark’s eyes tracked the length of the staff, starting with the obsidian edge and travelling down as he absorbed every detail of the strangely altered weapon. When his eyes reached the point where he was holding the staff, he caught sight of his own hand, and his eyes widened.
All across his hand, where it had been burned by the spectre’s collapsing energies, were the same moving lines that traced the length of his staff. Mark pulled back his sleeve and discovered that the lines stretched halfway up his forearm, their bizarre shifting pattern tapering off right at the spot where his arms had been free of the spectre’s twisting form, leaving no doubt as to their origins.
“What the hell?” Mark said. He shoved the notification page he’d been ignoring into his pocket and switched his staff to the other hand so he could better inspect the one with the marks. Oddly, when he let go of the staff, the lines disappeared abruptly, leaving clean flesh that looked perfectly normal. Even his fingernails were no different than when he entered the fog, despite his distinct memory of them being torn off in that cave
. In contrast, the hand that Mark had switched the staff to now boasted its own swirling lines, the markings blooming forth the moment his flesh touched the wood.
Mark grabbed the staff with both hands. Sure enough, the lines were now visible on both hands. A quick tap on his leg where the pants were torn off showed that the effect was limited to the hands that had been inside the spectre when it was destroyed, which matched Mark’s expectations.
Out of curiosity, Mark placed the staff on the ground and let go. Sure enough, as soon as his skin was no longer in contact with the wood, the marks vanished from both his hands and the staff.
“Okay then,” Mark muttered. Then he grinned. For better or for worse, he was bonded to a mysterious magical weapon of his own making, and damn if that wasn’t pretty cool.
With everything else settled, Mark was ready to cope with whatever was written on the note that had appeared following his emergence from the fog.
Come to think of it, Mark couldn’t recall seeing any notifications whatsoever when he was in there.
Now full of curiosity, Mark pulled the crumpled paper out of his pocket and flattened it out so he could read it.
It was immediately clear that this wasn’t like the other notes he had received.
EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION:
What were you thinking? What were you THINKING, going into that fog? And then you got out? Are you some kind of lunatic savant? And then there’s your Tome… what the hells happened in there? I’ve been doing this job for a long time, and that is some serious stat movement. What’s worse is that I didn’t even get to mock you as it happened! Now I’m stuck with no idea what went on in there, and your Tome doesn’t even have events properly logged!
Arrival: Legends of Arenia Book 1 (A LitRPG Story) Page 19