CHAPTER 8: PART 1 OF 2
PSYCHOSIS
Lucas’ wounds were healing quickly. He slept for a long time after the pain had dulled into a background discomfort. The Arach’s came and went. He hugged his dead spider when they scuttled past, but quickly went back to sleep. He understood their behaviour a little better now. They had never come to investigate his hole in the rock and he was confident they never would.
He pushed the dead spider aside then, after a moment's hesitation, stored it in his Inventory. All the best parts of his Badger were now gone, but he managed to dig some meat out of the crevasse between the bone joints. His emotional meltdown from yesterday was playing over in his head. From the other side of a good night's sleep it all seemed very alien. He had felt like a boat without an anchor, being tossed about helplessly in a storm of his own emotions. Something important had changed. He could still ‘feel’ the promise he had made, as if that moment had been engraved into him. After a moment of introspection he realised his Aura had changed. He could feel his passion rising as he studied the new pattern. With a deep breath he drew strength from it and started planning his next moves.
He needed to be powerful and dangerous. Increasing his Strength, Agility and Spirit, was a good place to start. Moving from 3 to 4 Strength had boosted his capabilities dramatically, and all it took was some vigorous exercise. The Arachs would pass by any moment, so Lucas checked the progress of his stats while waiting.
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Agility was looking good. Strength was going okay, considering he had already increased it once. Spirit had barely moved. Lucas wasn’t really sure what he could do to increase it. Using Stealth and Analyse didn't seem to be getting anywhere.
Right on time, the skittering mass passed beneath. He climbed down into the main tunnel and started experimenting. The wounds on his feet had healed well enough that moving on them would be unlikely to break open the new skin. He started with basic exercises he had learned in gym class. Periodically he would check for progress on his character sheet, but his percentages were moving.
After experimenting for a while he found that making small sprints in the pitch black had a significant impact on his Strength and Agility, but especially Agility. His Map’s 3D model made this possible, but progress was slow. Adding new territory to extend his run required careful planning and testing.
Lucas was studying a series of ledges he planned to add into his runs. He was zooming-in with his Map, twisting the perspective of the 3D model, when he had an idea. He adjusted the alignment of his Map’s 3D model so that it overlapped his view, as he surveyed the cavern, creating a first person perspective. Placing his hand on a rock formation, he repositioned and zoomed the map in and out until it aligned with the physical structure perfectly in his field of vision. It was a bizarre experience, the shape of the rock in his hand matching perfectly with the outline of it in his Map. It made him feel as if he had stepped into a virtual reality. The rough colourless outline of his Map's 3D construct seemed to have physical substance. This would work as long as he kept his head perfectly still but, the moment he turned, the Map would move with him and fall out of alignment with the cave walls.
Standing very still, he attempted to mentally ‘detach’ the Map from his perspective. It worked perfectly. The Map stayed aligned to the cave walls no matter where he looked. The result gave him goosebumps. The map now perfectly matched the physical structure of the cave. This changed everything. The parts of the cave he had not mapped were clearly shown as missing sections in the 3D landscape. Lucas took his time exploring, finding it satisfying to paint his Map with every detail he could reach. Now, with his entire run mapped out, the cave runs became vastly safer and more efficient. The work made him hungry quickly, and his badger was quickly running out of easy pickings. His attempt to gut it without a knife before he cooked it had left a number of organs in place, so he took to the eyes, heart and liver to supplement his dwindling supply of meat. It was vile, but he wasn't eating for the taste.
Lucas had not been an athletic person in his old world, so he had a lot to learn about the ways he could rely on the balance and strength of his body. He stopped now and then to add new sections of the cave to his Map, attempting to integrate them into his runs. The Arachs were due to return, but he decided not to retreat to his alcove. He found a recession in the rock off the main path and pressed himself into it, activating Stealth when the skittering noise started. There he hid, watching as an avalanche of large Auras passed him. They dragged several forest animals though the cave, none of them dead. The victim's Auras swooned with dazed confusion. Lucas figured they had been paralysed and were being dragged deep into the cave to be eaten alive.
He was getting used to the rhythm of these enormous spiders. They came and went like clockwork so he could work around their daily pattern. He would activate Stealth when they passed, pick at his badger carcass when hungry, sleep when tired, and get water when necessary, but otherwise focused himself completely on his cave sprints. He began to develop a new understanding of his body, and he used it to continually improve the efficiency of his runs. He pushed himself hard, bending into corners, vaulting over mineral formations, and hitting the ground running to maintain momentum. As the repetition stacked up, every movement was studied and adjusted for efficiency. The limits of his body were defined, tested, and pushed against.
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Such demanding exercise exhausted him quickly, but he would simply rest as long as he needed and push the limits all over again. His body recovered supernaturally quick from exhaustion but his mind did not. When his will to continue hit a wall, he allowed Caleb and the Slavers to seep into his thoughts. This activated the pattern in his Aura that he had been branded with during his dark dreams, causing fresh rage to boil his blood. Burning ambition evaporated his exhaustion and his body felt hot with power. Again and again he pushed it to the limit.
He regularly checked the progress of his stats, getting a feel for what was having the biggest impact. When he powered through his exhaustion and attempted manoeuvres he was not quite ready for; those were the moments that spiked his progress. Agility and Strength were making gains. Spirit was not moving, but he decided to focus on getting Agility over the line for now. Occasionally he had to Stealth and hide from the spiders. Their hunting rhythm was the only true measure of time passing. He was 9 ‘spider hunts’ into this new lifestyle when the popup finally came.
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Lucas was vaulting up a steep incline when everything changed. On instinct he shifted his angle to give himself sideways momentum as he leapt, then used it to run three steps up an almost sheer wall of stone to reach the top. Laughing to himself, he practically flew through the rest of his gauntlet. His body was comfortable and confident with moves that would have sent him tumbling only a minute ago. Lucas wasn't sure if a trained athlete from his world might feel something like this, but to him it felt superhuman. The sense of wonder at his own body's grace and power as he shot through the caverns was the most exhilarating feeling he could remember. After a few happy hours of testing his body's new capabilities he returned to the alcove before the Arachs made another pass.
The badger had been picked clean of any meat by this point, but he discovered that breaking open its bones and sucking out the marrow was nourishing. He would need to find something else soon, but for now it was enough. He started drifting into familiar thoughts of Caleb and the Slavers, as if it was some kind of sleep time ritual. The familiar and demanding anger bubbled up. Feeling exhausted and suddenly sick of thinking about it, Lucas dismissed the thoughts. But, after a few minutes of trying to sleep they returned. There was something wrong with how persistent these thoughts were. Instinctively he rejected them, feeling suddenly indignant that his own emotions were imposing on his will. Fantasies of violence and vengeance plagued him like images burned into his retina by bright lights.
Lucas sat up in the darkness. With sudden and terrible clarity he realised the danger he was in. A pattern was forming. It felt like a groove had been worn into his soul, his emotional energy was flowing into it like water into a riverbed. It had become a new path of least resistance. It reminded him of what he had seen in the Hateful Hominid’s Aura. Every second these emotions would grow stronger.
He tried maintaining a stranglehold on his thoughts, keeping them in static paralysis to prevent the anger from rising. It was like trying to plug gaps in a pressure cooker with bubblegum. His body tensed up and his teeth clenched as the anger forced itself around his resistance. This denial was a lie and it wasn't getting him anywhere.
He felt helpless. And worse than that, he felt like he wanted to be angry, like it was right to be angry. His rational mind rejected this absurdity, but he found himself trying to work around his own objections so he could fully accept the emotional reality. He must be going crazy. Was this psychosis? The word ‘psychosis’ triggered a memory. Wasn't it mentioned on the tooltip for the Spriggan sap?
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Had this been why his Quest System had insisted he kill the Spriggan? Somehow knowing he would end up like this. He pulled it out of his inventory and shoved it into his mouth. It tasted like someone had boiled every herb in the kitchen into a glob of honey, glueing his teeth together as he tried to chew. Within seconds his vision began spinning into mad fractals, similar to how the Spriggan’s Mana spores had affected him.
The anger pressed in. He let it rise, watching as it flowed with his Mana to light up the new pattern in his Aura with fierce energy. The darkness of the cave again became a canvas for scenes of rage and violence as the pattern took hold of his consciousness. However, just as it had been during the battle with the Spriggan, he felt totally disconnected from the situation. Protected from within his bubble of artificial indifference, he watched the scenes playing out.
The tendency of the Spriggan’s drug to turn everything into fractals broke all of the events down into their constituent pieces. From this vantage, like a great puzzle master observing his own mind in minutia, the fit of rage became farcical.
He became like a narrator, overlaying the drama with snarky commentary, pointing out absurdity and heckling his own subconscious. This kind of rational deconstruction severely undermined the power of the visions, and soon they began to dissolve into satire, an absurdist mockery of their previous grandeur. They were a baseless distraction, a smoke screen, but what were they hiding? From his position as supreme observer within his own mind, that too could be seen.
He wanted to be angry, because it shielded him from something far more terrible. A memory, from not long ago, that had been buried in rage. Even now, from the safety of his drug induced indifference it felt threatening. It was the moment he had realised that his memories had been tampered with. His mind and soul had been savagely stripped of having ever loved, or felt loved. All that remained was a gaping hole. It was something so artificially harsh that a human mind could never naturally tolerate it, an open wound that would have bled him out. The anger had cauterised the wound to save his sanity.
The rage was rushing back to cover the wound and bury the memory, but its power was much diminished. He pushed it aside. While the protection of the drug lasted he continued to expose himself directly to the terrible truth, slowly it changed him into what he needed to become.