Alexander was damned. Next morning’s light revealed that all the poisoned food was consumed and there wasn’t a single dead Yeti to show for it. Some of those poisons took three or four days to work, but the shaggy monsters should have been bleeding from every orifice in the meantime and the young man found no evidence of it. He did take the opportunity to harvest the dead Yeti, but that was small consolation for knowing that two more of the polar camouflaged things were prowling around his town.
While predators like that roamed, he didn’t feel safe enough to risk round two of being ambushed on his way back home, so he decided to forego the smithy. Instead, he spent his time trying to figure out how he was going to kill two monsters about as smart as a particularly malicious bonobo, one of which that was probably too tall to fit inside his house, and both of which were fast enough to run him down, judging by their Impetus stat.
One thing had to change; they couldn’t be allowed to track him home. That afternoon, harried and looking over his shoulder for signs of the monsters stalking him, he spread ammonia around all his walking paths, down alleys, inside the courthouse, his smithy, and anywhere he might go. The idea was simple: destroy his scent trail, limit their ways to follow him around.
He’d come up kind of dry of safe options, now that the poison had failed. As far as why it had failed, he could only surmise that the Lesser regeneration magic the fuzzy ape things had let them out heal the effects of the toxins. Micro-bleeds and effects of calcium leakage weren’t shutting down their organs like they should have. Tough nuts for Alexander.
The lack of loud booms coming from around town meant the critters hadn’t stumbled into another bomb either. They avoided his trip wires and learned from the mistakes of their dead. Still. Animals were animals, even if they weren’t stupid. He verified that suspicion with another round of poisoned food that went untouched overnight. Yetis, it would seem, can smell the toxin. They were simply curious and tougher than they had any right to be, so they tried it anyhow.
March third came, and Alexander suffered another setback. He caught the little Yeti sniffing around in the open, close to where he liked to do his business. The big one wasn’t around. Judging this as his big break, the young marksman put eight rifle rounds into the monster’s chest and abdomen from the courthouse roof. Three times it stumbled and fell, but it dragged itself behind a cottage and he lost sight of it. Later that afternoon, Alexander, with extreme caution, tracked the blood trail up a clear path of beaten snow that led up onto the mountain. No shot was he going to follow the monster into its domain, wounded or no.
Nearly a week since he’d made substantial progress in anything but researching methods to dispatch the Yetis. In this his father’s books failed him, there was simply no precedent for dealing with a creature that was effectively immune to the poisons he could deliver and intelligent enough to avoid most simple traps he could create, while also being physically powerful enough to tear out of whatever rope or hold he could think of to use to restrain it. Alexander was on his own to solve this problem.
Instead of smithing, Alexander practiced Chaos magic. He didn’t truly understand his own powers, they being part of the new rules, so he experimented, documented results, and repeated trials to gather data. The Chaos bolts created disorder, decomposed matter into almost random arrangements, disrupted structure, all to a severe degree, but in a way that didn’t outright destroy it. It wasn’t like fire, melting, burning, creating ash, char, and vapor. Whatever his magical projectiles hit just stopped being what they were before, losing integrity.
By using multiple instances of the magical strike on the same target, the degree of corrosion magnified exponentially. A cast iron skillet hit once, looked like someone had taken a rusty grinder to it, twice, it took on the appearance of having been left exposed to the elements for a hundred years, deeply pitted, cracks forming, rusted solidly, and a third, caused the skillet to fold like brown-black tissue paper, falling apart into loose sediment.
As with any new thing, practice was the key, and Alexander’s parents had insisted on diligence. So, in addition to his morning rituals of bathing and breakfast, a new tradition emerged in which Alexander slung a series of Chaos bolts into the side of one of the car wrecks littered around town. He’d worked his way through this particular target’s body to the engine block and the potent degradation of the disorderly energy was impressive to watch. It also gave him much needed target practice.
This morning, on his way to the smithy to see if he could finally complete the naginata, Alexander casually slung a bolt of energy from a quick drawn finger gun, practice having made it trivially easy to launch the magic, and, instead of the oblong missile of loose mana, a sharp edged ball of malevolence pelted into the car hard enough to rattle its frame, the engine block collapsed into a warped hunk of degraded metal.
Halted mid stride, Alexander brought up his scrollwork when the astonishment over what happened truly registered, almost pained by the sensation in his chest, from what he knew was his core.
Alexander Gerifalte
Class: Entropic Neophyte
Status: tired
Soak: 15%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 150%
Might
12
Height
6’2”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
12/0
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
12
Weight
160lbs
9/3
None
9/3
Impetus
14
Age
17
High quality Cotton robe
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
High quality Cotton robe
Cogitation
16
Core
Black Fire Opal, brilliant
empty
14/3
Crude Steel Knife
Wisdom
13(-5)
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
High quality Cotton robe
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
16
Sapient Race:
Human-2rd Tier (Shaggoth)
10/4
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
10/4
Durability
12
High quality Cotton slacks
10/3
High quality Cotton slacks
Valor
25(+10)
High quality Cotton robe
Traits
Raptor gaze, Fantasia, Spatial adept, Back from the brink, Gaia’s child, Lethal, Artisan of war, Scholarship
Skills
Heart’s blow, Rage, Greater focus, Greater analyze, Lesser stalk
Arcana
Entropic aura, *Chaos bolt*
The same impelling desire from before compelled him to concentrate on the straining to become that was Chaos bolt.
Chaos bolt ►Chaos strike
He didn’t even need to call up the scroll to know the difference, he’d witnessed it firsthand. A chaos strike was Randy Johnson compared to your average knuckle baller. The violence of its effect on materials was magnified, along with its now aggressive velocity.
Alexander’s sharp eyes scanned the engine block that looked like it had been left to rust for a decade or two, or treated to a taste of malignantly hostile acid, and beaten by a hammer to boot. Those Yeti’s won’t know what hit them, he gloated.
Two days later, both the Yetis he spotted digging themselves into another set of burrows from his perch on the water tower.
The little one he’d shot up didn’t even have missing fur. He’d creamed that thing but there it was, wallowing into the snow to disappear next to the track he’d walked earlier that day, where they would hopefully catch him slipping so they could eat him. The fuckers. He didn’t waste the cartridges on the pair of them, he was growing concerned about his ammunition. Alexander hadn’t considered that he would ever need more than two shots to kill basically anything. Now he knew better, ogres and Yetis were a step above his rifle’s pay grade, so he held fire until he could make it count.
Instead of shooting the hiding monsters, he slipped away back to his laboratory and contemplated. None of those thoughts were pleasant. One of the more constructive ones was: What the fuck was going on with his magic? Entropic field. Chaos bolt. Experiments with both implied they were more effective, the more his enemy relied on cheating magical nonsense.
What was he, some kind of witch hunter? I AM the old rules! He cackled into the darkness of his library one night.
March sixth, from his perch on the water tower he concluded that hunting wasn’t going so well for the Yetis. He watched as the monsters ate his poisoned food again, and Alexander then tracked them as they sauntered off back up the hill to sleep off what should have been deadly shock and who knows what else? They didn’t even wobble. The fuckers. His frustration was growing. He couldn’t make noise, couldn’t travel freely, had to watch like a hawk for every single hump of snow to avoid being ambushed, and he couldn’t even shoot the bastards because they limped off and healed the damage away, wasting his bullets.
Only the dumb one that had gotten close enough, alone, for him to finish off, had he managed to kill. The curious one had killed itself through curiosity. The others were less prone to the same inclinations, or, worse, had learned from the mistake.
The only thing going in his favor was the weather, it was noticeably warmer, and the snow was melting. Slowly, but surely. At least he was almost certain that there had only ever been this little tribe, clan, family, gaggle, whatever, of four Yetis, half of whom were already dead. The young man would have to get creative.
From his place lying flat on the narrow maintenance access on the water tower he decided that some measure of risk was in order. The only thing that seemed to really deal major damage to the creatures, aside from opening up a shrapnel bomb from point blank range, were his Chaos bolts. They didn’t kill, not outright, but the damage they did seemed to be extensive and unlikely to heal, given what he’d seen when the magic struck living targets, and what it did on repeated strikes. Three of them, to something important, and Alexander was confident that the Yeti couldn’t heal its way out of that before perishing.
Testing that hypothesis, however, meant getting perilously near to the monsters, which only traveled as a pair now. If he got close enough to ambush them when they came down the mountain, he might be able to pelt them with the three bolts he could manage before running out of juice. Not them, rather, one. By crippling one of the creatures, he made getting surrounded or flanked much harder.
“Oh boy, Alexander, you’re playing with fire.” He told himself when he considered the odds.
As he lay there, the sun rising slowly, listening to the drip of melting snow, nothing else came to mind. Putting food near the explosive traps had done nothing, he hypothesized that they could smell the gunpowder and avoided it. They didn’t seem to care for the smell of ammonia and avoided it, though he’d watched them cross through streets where he’d sprinkled the foul stuff, so he couldn’t count on it as a deterrent.
Yetis were the exact wrong combination of smart enough to be a pain in the ass to deal with, but too dumb to cut their losses and find easier prey.
Later that night, sitting in his plushy rocking chair, half full wine glass in hand, bottle empty, and the flames of the fireplace skipping playfully across the logs, he had come to no better solution. He had arrived at a compromise, however. Against one, he would ascertain the effectiveness of his eerie Chaos mana on them. He would also find out what a flask of piranha solution did to Yeti flesh. If the beasts fled to heal the damage, he got to see the limits of Lesser regeneration. If the beasts were dumb enough to chase him, he would lead them into a bomb trap.
“May all the gods above, below, and in between watch over fools.” Alexander beseeched, before he rose and headed for bed.
What he had going for him was that the Yetis were creatures of habit, much like prowling wolves, they liked to stick to their game trails, to hunt along the same paths. They never hid in exactly the same places twice that he’d observed, but that too was a pattern he could exploit. It told him where the shaggy fuckers wouldn’t be.
These were his thoughts as he washed and ate a meal of fried bacon and pancakes, heavy on the syrup, he was going to splurge on an energizing and tasty meal. It might be the last one he got, which he tried not to contemplate over much.
Next, the clumsy attempt at half plate strapped on over his hunting jacket and pants. The whole thing was awkward as hell. He didn’t like the way it made rolling his shoulders difficult and adjusted his balance to make him top heavy. Thigh guards of flattened, rounded steel, set in compression stockings and shin guards strapped on made him feel better that if things got bad, at least his legs had protection this time. One arm heavily armored by rings of steel and a metal festooned welding gauntlet, the other with just the coat and some light winter gloves.
Alexander couldn’t fire a gun with the welding gloves on, and they made it hard to throw. Throwing stuff was all he needed today, hopefully. He wouldn’t bet the farm on it, and he had a new backup plan that he patted comfortingly. If things went completely tits up, he’d need it.
The dark brown smoked glass bottle was the kicker. Formerly holding iodine, today held part two of Operation Kill da Yetis. It was prepared yesterday afternoon and was tied to his belt rather snugly, so that it wouldn’t bounce around. If that broke and got all over him, the Yetis were going to be the least of his problem. A piranha solution, a combination of sulfuric acid and concentrated hydrogen peroxide, destroyed organic material, aggressively turned it to smoking tar.
Time. He couldn’t afford to sit around dwelling on the next part, the Yetis liked to come down the mountain just about daybreak. Alexander needed to be there to meet them, before they dug in and he missed them in their snowy hiding spots. His eyes were good, but he didn’t like the thought of wandering around town searching for hidden monsters.
March seventh, it was time to toss the dice.
Three rapid applications of Chaos bolt were sufficient to break down metallic bonds into random assortments of metal flakes, corroded in the air. These experiments also led the last Gerifalte to conclude, definitively, that the only reason the golem died to his acid attack was because of his Chaos applications. It had similar effects on everything he tested, and, as he softly closed the door to his Lab behind him, ready to go settle matters with the Yetis, he was confident that the big one he planned to unload on wouldn’t just heal its way through that bullshit.
“You’re waffling, Alexander.” He told himself.
It took an effort, but he forced himself off the stairs of his front porch and into the streets. Snow slushed around his boots, little rivulets were starting to form along ditches, to mark where the runoff was streaming. Alexander took two minor detours, to collect two of his trapped coffee cans of doom. He needed these for his backup plan. The young man was glad the match trigger on the traps wasn’t some kind of delicate figure four contraption, his hands were shaking too much to handle that. Speaking of hands, snow inside the gauntlets chilled his wrists, from laying them down to deal with the bombs.
He’d reset them in the predawn, right across his path between the small pharmacy and one of the three churches. Why did one piss-ant town in middle Maine need three churches? He’d never figured it out, back when the world made sense. He hazarded a guess it was because people in America had the right to be delusional according to their personal taste now. It took a crazy to know crazy, and what was Alexander, headed to battle a couple of goddamned Yetis, if not crazy?
Alexander wielded a new rifle this day, an instrument of justice known as the brush gun. It was a forty-five-seventy lever action, with a relatively short barrel. He’d always called it a Hick Cannon before, why would anyone need anything like it? If you like to shoot fast just plink with a .223 semiautomatic black gun. If you want to go hunt, just use a bolt gun, like all the gods above below and in between intended. Why a seven shot boulder thrower that was useless past a hundred yards?
Well…turns out because an African elephant charging you was about the same level of “Uh oh” as a Yeti, and rednecks liked to LARP as Safari guides. Alexander would no longer judge them their hobbies, his were now crafting armor and weapons from the dark ages, reinventing industrial machines, and chemistry that was going to blow him up one day.
He was very much hoping the big slugs would at least cripple the monsters, because, if not, he might be a dead man. Lurid images of his lying dead on the snow flashed before his eyes in a series for a few sobering seconds.
Enough. The uncomfortably armored youth posted up across the hood of an abandoned Jeep in front of the antique furniture and general odds n’ends shop, as good a piece of cover as he was going to get.
The iron peep sights were fine in the low light that climbed ever so gradually to reveal the end of winter town. He guessed it was somewhere around thirty-eight degrees, the drip of water all around, even in the morning chill, heralded a new season.
Lo! And Behold! There came the sources of Alexander’s discontent. His guts clenched and his heart rate climbed. Adrenaline worked its miracles on his body. Even the lurking fear went away, replaced by what he could only call readiness.
Two damned near invisible shaggy white forms loping down a familiar path, ready to take another crack at ambushing the wise-ass primate that had killed their brethren. If his eyes weren’t as good as they were, and, at this point, he was confident in saying they were supernaturally precise, he’d never have spotted the monsters.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He was pot committed, the beasts were too close to back out now. But not close enough for his plan of attack. He wasn’t going to shoot them that far out, not if he didn’t have to. He had six of the big, jacketed, hollow point slugs in the magazine tube of his Hick cannon, with one ready to go in the pipe. Another seven decorated the sleeve on the gun’s stock. He hadn’t much practiced using it though, and it wasn’t exactly a precision instrument in the first place. Besides. Alexander already knew the monsters could survive being shot, if he didn’t kill them straight away. Today’s plan revolved around the most brutal chemical oxidizer of organic material he knew of. That required the beasts to get close, he didn’t trust his Chaos strike just yet, it was better to rely on tried and true, instead of mystical bullshit. Even if mystical bullshit was turning out to be way more potent than he’d originally given it credit.
Alexander had himself a theory that Chaos energies would prevent the monster from healing. If at all possible, he was going to let the one of them live long enough to test that. For the other, he trusted how effective chemical weapons were, even if he wasn’t exactly sure how much Soak affected something like the piranha solution, how much durability permitted it to resist the damage from having its flesh melted off it. Nowhere in his mind did it occur to him that anything could have the vitality and sheer viciousness to power through such weapons. It should have though.
To the young man’s thinking over this last week, the only way to know how well his weapons worked was to use them. To some extent, he was hoping to get one alive. If they were alive and conscious, with their core’s driving their abilities, he could get even more insight into the effectiveness of conventional tools, as well as test out this new magical stuff. Risky. But necessary, in his mind. All science was gambling, one way or another. Uncertainty, error, and estimation were part of the process innately, you just minimized failure and maximized likelihoods of positive outcomes enough to make the laymen think you knew what you were doing.
Neophyte that his class named him, he knew to his bones that worse than the Yetis lay in wait somewhere out there, and he would be ready to kill them too. He just needed to take care of a couple of shaggy nimrods first was all. No problem.
Twenty yards away, the big one reared up, its big baboon nostrils huffing, growling at the ammonia odor that destroyed its sense of smell for important things, like Alexander meat.
Chance!
Alexander Gerifalte loosed all seven slugs, four into the bigger one, three into the smaller, rounds that would knock a buffalo on its ass at this range. Each impact splashed blood, eruptions of gore, some from behind from exit wounds, that spattered the snow. They were still standing, turning now, roaring from pain and hurt, but still standing.
“Fuck.” He said, distantly aware beneath a welling certainty that this was not going the way he’d planned it, with neither beast even crippled by what should have been mortal wounds to their thoracic cavities.
Alexander let the rifle flop over, knowing he had not a prayer to reload the weapon, and threw two of the flasks on his belt at the beasts. His coordination didn’t fail him, the glass shattered on hard muscles hidden beneath thick fur, the contents spilling over the forms just recovering from being assailed by infuriatingly hurtful stings, whose damage was already mending. More pain, as fluid ate and tore at their bodies, burning like fire. But not burning enough, a sinking feeling told Alexander, as he held one outstretched hand with the other, locking his aim, before he called the magic. Yetis with insane rage in their baboon faces turned and charged.
Chaos strike one boiled into being and rocketed for the large monster’s chest, plowing into its powerful breast, slightly too high, and he adjusted lower. The monster ducked and Alexander splashed the side of its face with the second, having been aiming for the same place as the last bolt. The beast staggered, its face a boiling ruin and its comrade howled fury, seeing Alexander. Chaos bolt three hit the big one in the forehead and it slumped into the snow, but, even half blind and tortured by his assault, the little one got to full speed, all two hundred fifty pounds of it.
Alexander’s plan was a success, and a failure.
The little one was faster than its peer had been, it was furious and fearless, and, as he ripped the third flask from his belt, he did so too slow to meet the creature from a distance. It was already there, fanged maw wide. Alexander side-armed the flask into its chest from barely five feet away, about the time it reared back and he found out what savage rend was.
White hot pain and the impact of a small car hit him, and the last Gerifalte rag dolled across the melting street, swatted like a soccer ball. He didn’t hear the pained roars or much of anything and blood ran freely from the three clawed tracks that shredded his plate armor, forcing the edges of it into the wounds, deep ones that ran from breast bone to rib cage.
Awareness fled, and returned, and he screamed when he tried to roll over onto his stomach, to lift himself. He screamed again when he did it anyway, and pain gave way to Rage.
Standing, he knew something was wrong with his body but it didn’t matter because the Yeti rolling around in the snow, yelping and biting and clawing at the boiling flesh-eating substance on its body was still alive. Alexander ignored the blood soaking his jacket and the pinch of steel in his wounds that shifted as his body moved, the ill fitted armor still in place and worthless.
Mined path of flight forgotten completely, he threw himself toward the Yeti and ripped the pistol from its holster. The holster fell off as he did, the last of its shredded leather snapping from the force and it bobbled at his thighs. Alexander forced himself forward at a halting walk, one armored arm and hand trying to stem the tide of blood, the other raising the pistol. He shot the Yeti in its head three times out of the seven, missing four while it rolled around. The apelike form jerked and its maw snapped, but he’d hit something vital to controlling its movement and its flailing failed to gain purpose.
Alexander dropped the gun and drew his knife with the welding glove gripping it with all his strength and he stepped around the snapping teeth and dropped down to his knees, and hammered the knife into the monster’s thick skull as hard as he could ignoring the wrongness in his side. Carbon steel punched into and through the bone half way to its length, and Alexander curled over the blade, pushing all his weight onto it, jerking the knife back and forth through the Yeti’s brain, and an instinct from some half awareness drew him to push his entropic magic through the knife, to still the healing beast’s efforts to hold onto life. Something gave, the blade broke and he sagged against the stinking form beneath him, his wounds throwing white static into his nerves.
The snapping stopped and so did the buffet of its limbs.
He left the knife buried in the monster and limped to the Jeep, grabbed the rifle still laying across its hood, and dispatched the larger Yeti with five shakingly loaded slugs into its head, pulverizing it into a sledgehammered melon. A final chaos strike, leaving him feeling tapped in a way he wasn’t familiar with ended things for good.
When the monster was dead, the focus of his Rage went with it, and Alexander dropped into the slush next to the creature like a puppet with its strings cut. The strength that had allowed him to move drained away and Alexander’s clouding mind began to panic. He was bleeding out. He was dying.
Shaking, cold with shock, he pulled off the welding glove and unstrapped the ruined plate, taking twice as long as it should have with quivering hands and flagging focus.
Focus! His addled thoughts sharpened immediately and the panic fled, driven away by Greater focus. Clinical precision returned as he assessed the wounds.
Slashes had sheared through breast bone and ribs, his heart and lungs were intact, obviously, he had only narrowly avoided having his diaphragm torn, and he was bleeding to death. The aid pack on his belt was insufficient. He pulled open the kit anyway and, with teeth grit, Chirurgeon insisting that the plate must be removed to treat the wounds, he tore the metal that was embedded in the slashes free with the armor.
It was too much, even for Greater focus, he blacked out for a moment and lay bleeding in the snow.
Alexander came to a few moments later and howled himself hoarse from the pain assaulting him. Greater focus was long gone and his concentration was too shattered to reclaim it. Chirurgeon was still in effect, he knew what he needed to do. The bandaging and kit he’d pulled free he used to stem the bleeding, quick clot poured over the gaping rents in his body, and bandages stuffed atop it. His side was a disaster, rib bones cut, abdominal wall opened, the Yeti had carved him open like a fish.
Quivering hands did what they could with the wounds anyway, packing them with gauze until he ran out.
He had to get home. There were medical supplies in his lab. There was heat. Food and water. The only chance he had was to survive until the next sunrise, when the healing light repaired the ruin. This was his backup plan, in case he was wounded. The laboratory was a quarter mile away, he’d never make it.
“Oh, fucking fuck, I fucked this up!” He sobbed into the snow.
Alexander wasn’t going to make it. He was cold. Ice bath! He needed an ice bath, Chirurgeon insisted. Only way. Go cold. Go hypothermic to slow the blood loss, to slow everything. Slow down dying, just long enough to make it through the night.
The last of his fading strength saw him pry himself up using the rifle and he limped over to the frozen ditch he’d noted earlier. Alexander dropped himself into it and gasped when the frigid water immersed him. Cold bitter beyond anything he’d ever felt assailed him, cold that burned. He was committed now though, he’d lost the strength to move. Hypothermia had a mercy though, in that, as it shut the body down, it removed the care or concern for much of anything. Panic receded.
Alexander grew, not quite lucid but drifting in the grip of freezing and bleeding to death. It wasn’t a bad run. He’d made it quite far, for a kids just not quite at majority, taking on a nightmare all by himself. Failing mind turned to his parents, memories wheeling by of times gone, better times, sad times, happy times. He faded away, glad that, at least, it didn’t hurt this way.
image [https://imgur.com/3D1kmaW.png]
Sunlight tore away the cloak from his thoughts.
“Aaaaahgh!! Haaggh!Fuck!” Alexander screamed, suddenly alive and freezing in the cold waters sluicing around him.
Hands that were already going numbed pawed at his chest and side and he sobbed in relief when unblemished skin revealed itself below the mangled jacket. He lived!
Energized by the healing light, the youth clawed his way out from the ditch and its killing, saving waters.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, all the gods that listen to this grateful idiot, thank you!” Alexander said through chattering teeth.
He ran back toward his home, left the guns and the Yetis laying in the melting snow. Left the site where his own blood had left stark crimson reminder of how closely he’d come to ending. All he wanted now was to go home.
“I’m cooking a steak!” the youth proclaimed, “A big one! With applesauce! Chocolate bars! Skittles!”
Near death made for a lack of inhibition.
The fire was out in his home, but the residual sixty-five-degree heat was paradise compared to outside. He stripped naked in the living room and built a fire, barely able to work the lighter for the clumsiness in his fingers. Still naked, he ran water from the tap through a hose that led to a fifty-five-gallon drum with one side cut off, resting in a wooden frame supported on cinder blocks above a used fire pit. That was where Alexander started a second fire, stacking wood for a luxury not frequently employed, a hot bath.
Watching from the window, he closed the tap on his precious limited water from the tower when the barrel bath was three quarters full.
A big T-bone steak got sat out on the table to thaw, along with a jar of applesauce, a pack of chocolate bars, and a family pack of skittles.
Today was a day for celebration. And to sit and cry at how stupid he was and how closely he’d come to getting his idiot ass killed.
Finally, having gotten his preparations in order, the naked youth put on the big fuzzy robe and started a third fire, careless of the wood he was burning through in the fireplace. There he sat, eating crackers and peanut butter and, occasionally sipping from a can of doctor pepper. Shaking that had nothing to do with cold came on him from time to time. It had been a little while since he’d nearly died. He found that he didn’t like it anymore now than before. This time had been a little different though, he’d been grotesquely wounded, ripped open by Yeti claws.
“Was it worth it, you great, dumb, ass of a child?” He demanded of himself, after he’d renewed all the concurrent fires.
The close shave still had him shaken, although the warmth of his home, the refreshment of the sweet pop, and the tang of skittles, treats he didn’t indulge too frequently were helping. Comforts he desperately needed just right now. If only there were someone to talk to, someone to break the silence but himself. Right about then, Alexander wouldn’t have minded a hug.
He sat back in his chair and thought about the question he’d just asked himself.
Was it worth it?
No. Easily no. He’d badly underestimated how quickly the Yeti could charge and he’d vastly overestimated how quickly he could do much of anything wearing that ridiculously useless armor. On the other hand, how was he supposed to know that the monsters could tear through solid steel like that? A grizzly bear couldn’t have torn through that armor.
“You aren’t dealing with bears, you fucking mook!” Alexander reminded himself harshly.
“Okay, okay, it’s over, just…just figure it out.” He soothed himself.
Guns bad, Alexander realized, and the failure of his reliable form of attack shook him badly. The large beasts had tanked the damage from the slugs, had shrugged it right off. He couldn’t rely on his only innate advantage, range. Not unless he found some way to stop Soak or regeneration from rendering the weapon an annoyance. Armor good. Goblins wouldn’t have been able to do shit against him wearing it. Armor good against huge monsters? Not so good. Not until he had something better than merely steel. Did he have something better than steel? Maybe. There was the golem metal. It was very possible that the golem iron might have stopped the Yeti claws from hacking him open. Was it worth the weight, the slowing of his movements? Now that was a better question. He just didn’t have enough information to work on, he needed to train in the armor though, that was an obvious failing on his part, he realized.
“Okay, one thing kind of sorted.” He decided.
Next? Idly, he chewed another mouthful of skittles and washed them down with the second can of pop, a mountain-dew, the redneck’s best friend. He wasn’t worried about his teeth or figure today.
Next was the piranha solution.
“It did its job.” Alexander concluded, “But it was the wrong job.”
The little Yeti hadn’t been able to come over and murder him while he lay bleeding. It was ravaged by the sheer hostility of the solution to flesh. It didn’t outright kill the beast, but it crippled it, hurt it, blinded it to anything but the pain of having its body dissolved. Put that one in the win column. If he’d hit them in the face and head with that first, maybe they never would have been able to even close the distance.
Lastly, Alexander considered the Chaos strikes. He didn’t get a chance to put three full blasts on the same place, like he’d wanted. Skill issue, the young man acknowledged bitterly, that was all on him. No plan survived contact with the enemy, a little nugget of wisdom he had now internalized. However, he’d put two of them more or less where he wanted them on the small one, and it had come on, but it hadn’t been in condition to do more than flail at him.
He found himself rubbing his stomach where it had been opened. That was a bastard of a flailing, teach you to underestimate the abilities of the monsters. But chaos magic had done what the rifle hadn’t, hurt the fuckers. One bolt of condensed entropy to its head and that had been enough to drop the larger monster, enough to put it out of action. He’d still had to finish it off, but it was completely inert in terms of fighting or attacking him. And, in the end, his class’s chaos magic had slayed the monsters. Good enough. That too would go on the win column.
Unfortunately for Alexander, every single check on the lose column meant he might get fucking killed to death, so he had to be a little smarter, and a lot more careful. Come at them from behind, immobilize them, bait traps, learn where their blind spots are, and, when the time to kill comes, do it right the first goddamned time. You’re not a fucking soldier or some asshole hero. You’re a hunter, he scolded himself. You don’t have the right to get angry, you have to be ruthless.
His perspective shift nearly gave him vertigo. Epiphany is a hell of a thing. Linked through his core as he was, somehow, this was the kicked stone that started the avalanche.
In front of his eyes the scrollwork sprung, not to be denied, and he was assenting without pause to examine, trusting an intuition that said this was the way, the path forward revealed.
Rage ►Ruthless
An unburdening welled up, a relief of pressure inside him.
Rising spirits almost euphoric, he concentrated on the new blip on his scroll, an unfamiliarity that begged to be explored, demanded to be acknowledged. Alexander did so without pause.
Class requirement met, Harmonizing core… Hierarchy adjusted, First Entropic venator of Gaia
A rush of fullness like his skin was too tight suddenly left him. He hadn’t even noticed the strain until it was gone. It left him feeling sort of bonelessly graceful, smooth. Alexander would have sworn that the air tasted sweeter.
…What?
Almost unbidden, blue scrollwork unfurled in his vision.
Entropic venator: A pursuer of particularly dangerous prey and dealer of death from afar or close range, employing all the tools to efficiently terminate targets, including the entropic rending of magical defenses and the Chaos warping of flesh, armor, or mana alike. The efficient hunter studies their enemy, watches them, understands their movements, and turns that knowledge into their doom. Be it the blade, a crossbow bolt, or lethal toxins, a venator employs any means deemed most effective in the execution of their targets.
Lesser stalk ► Stalk
Heart’s blow ►Baleful smite
Rage ►Ruthless
New Skill: Broken Silhouette
The blue scroll, for once, confused him more than it enlightened. What in the hell was an Entropic venator? Cause it kind of sounded like an assassin and, excuse the fuck out of him, but since when had he assassinated anybody? All he’d done was fight off monster after monster.
Using guns fired from very, very far away from stealth, or in ambushes using decoys. Or bombs with tripwires and electric arc triggers. And poison…sort of. And Chaotic magic to their heads and necks. And knives applied to vital areas.
Ah. Well…when he thought of it like that, he was acting kind of assassinish now, wasn’t he? But what else would a reasonable person do, go stand in the streets with a trash can lid and a machete screaming about justice? Only an absolute baboon would do something like that. And, from his experiences, a very quickly dead baboon.
“Fine. Fucking whatever man. I guess mom would be kind of impressed. Dad would, at least, applaud the ingenuity, if not the underhandedness.” The young man reflected.
Now he had to take a look at whatever the hell Entropic venator was.
That…was surprisingly not as extensive as he expected. Mostly because, so far as the young man could determine, he was actually already doing the things that this…class? Whatever, it was, he was doing most of what it did already. Which maybe was why he’d qualified for the…whatever the hell a class was.
Do not ask, Alexander, the eldritch scroll of knowledge will only break your fragile brain. Ironically, he couldn’t stop himself from concentrating on the eldritch knowledge he already had. If curiosity killed the cat, it had Alexander on its shortlist.
With that, the status scrollwork shimmered and reappeared, reflecting the new reality of Alexander Gerifalte.
Alexander Gerifalte
Class:
Entropic venator
Status:
Lively
Soak: 5%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 120%
Might
12
Height
6’2”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
7/0%
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
12
Weight
167lbs
6/10% bonus to fire resistance
none
6/10% bonus to fire resistance
Impetus
15
Age
18
High quality welding jacket
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
High quality welding jacket
Cogitation
16
Core
Black Fire Opal, brilliant
none
10/10% bonus to fire resistance
Messer
Wisdom
13(-5)
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
High quality welding jacket
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
16
Sapient Race:
Human-2rd Tier (Shaggoth)
8/80%
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
8/8%
Durability
12
High quality leather pants
9/20% bonus to fire resistance
High quality leather pants
Valor
25(+10)
Highsteel combat jacket
Traits
Raptor gaze, Fantasia, Spatial adept, Back from the brink, Gaia’s child, Lethal, Warforger, Scholarship,
Skills
Baleful smite, Ruthless, Greater focus, Greater analyze, Stalk, Broken silhouette
Arcana
Entropic aura, Chaos strike
“Huh, Soak actually went down. Not that it was doing me many favors anyway.” Alexander noted.
It would seem his new class had exchanged a poor defense for a more razor sharp offense. Alexander’s abilities interfered too greatly with his own Soak, so, it would appear, his class discarded the defense nearly entirely. Perhaps that was a subconscious choice.
His stalking skill improved, which made a lot of sense, he’d been evading Yeti patrol for a week and almost habitually sort of padded around cautiously as a general rule. Heart’s blow was now a new thing that sounded sort of the same, except that it was also accompanied by a pulse of Chaos magic, rendering the wounds incredibly difficult to heal and dissipating Soak entirely. Like a shield breaker or something. Broken silhouette seemed like some kind of stealth skill, decreasing his visibility somehow, making him appear unremarkable against the background. It was a perfect Grey man skill, requiring his complete concentration, but drastically reducing the odds of something or someone, noticing him if he didn’t want them to. Neat.
Rage was the most significant change to what he’d been working with, now something else entirely. A reflection of a paradigm shift in Alexander’s world view.
It took barely a thought to bring up the transformed ability.
Ruthless: implacable aggression coupled to killing intent. Reduced sensitivity to mental effects and pain. Drastically reduced empathic tendency toward entities designated as targets. While under the influence of Ruthless 20% increased Might and Impetus, self-inflicted injuries increasingly likely.
On the balance? He’d take it. The word ruthless had some pretty negative connotations, but so did tough-guy and Alexander wouldn’t mind being tough. For one thing, pain tolerance was, as he knew now, a tremendous bonus.
He put the magical shit on hold, now he’d given that weird scroll some examination. He’d come back to it with fresh eyes, after a few other things whose priority had bumped thanks to the lessons learned this day. Hard ones. First of which: know your weapons. His magic was powerful. As powerful, if not moreso than those he’d been relying on to the exclusion of the fantastic. And also, Use Your Head. Alexander thought back to his entire strategy for dealing with the Yetis and found it badly lacking, optimistic to the point of suicidal neglect.
“Planning a retreat from something faster than you are? Kind of really goddamned dumb there, chief.” Alexander stated the now obvious aloud.
Those bombs should have been in front of him, between his ambush site and the Yetis, where he could attack them from behind the cover of the things. At least they might have bought him time.
Stupid. Moron. Imbecile. Aho. Gilipollas. Pirla. He chanted obscenity towards himself. His parents had picked up many ways to question the intelligence of people from ports around the world. He figured he might be humanity’s last surviving dumb-ass.
The last Gerifalte marinated in his folly and in the fortune that favored him enough to survive his wounds and the ice bath just long enough to live to see the life-giving sunrise for two hours soaking in the barrel hot-tub. So lucky. Not all lucky, however. Preparation and contengency had done him no little good, had bailed him out from a terrible decision in his failed plan, whose execution had so nearly cost him everything. Chirurgeon was the hero of the day, no doubt. He credited the emergency response skills to stem the bleeds, the emergency solution to delay his expiration for his seeing a new day.
Again, he couldn’t help but wonder: How much of that came from within him and how much from the package of traits in that blue scroll-work? Was that aggregate collected from random bits here and there and packaged into something more concretely useful or was it added to him? Por que no los dos?
“Alright, stop brooding, you lived. You got away with one, for sure, but you lived. That’s good enough. It’ll always be good enough too, so just be happy.” The young man consoled himself.
The steak, tenderized and soaked in Italian dressing, pan-seared to medium-rare, accompanied by treats, frozen rolls that fluffed and baked nicely in a little Dutch oven, thawed garlic butter from a tub coating liberally applied, washed down by wine and followed by chocolate, was the best meal in Alexander’s life. The only bitterness to that evening was that he had no one to share it with. He went to bed before that sudden bout of intense loneliness could ruin the night.