CHAPTER 2: FINALE!
WASPS
The Spriggan had little time to react. It tried raising an arm of twisted branches but the stone had a lot of momentum and crashed into the creature's body with a crunch, knocking it to the ground. Lucas reached it a second later and grabbed one of its legs. He pulled the leg up while stomping down into its knee, trying to break it in half like someone might break a branch into smaller pieces for firewood. He heard a swarm of buzzing insects in the air but stayed focused, wrenching the leg up with both his arms while pressing his weight down on the joint.
The leg snapped. Strings of bark peeled back as he wrenched the leg-log free. Bright clusters of pain started breaking out all over his naked body, angry buzzing all around him. ‘It is wasps!’ he thought grimly as he turned on the creature. It was lying down, one arm trying to cover a large patch of crushed plant matter where the rock had hit the middle of its body. Sap was leaking out of the green and white woody flesh. Its other arm was extended towards Lucas with a pale orange cloud of spores puffing out of little buds in its hand.
Without hesitation Lucas started swinging the leg-log with two hands, slamming it down on the prone creature again and again, ignoring the insects and the spore cloud. His head started swimming, his vision blurred. Strange colours started bleeding out of the scene before him. He kept swinging, breathing deeply. The Spriggan’s shape started getting lost in a kaleidoscope of bright colours and fascinating patterns that erupted in his vision.
His thoughts drifted as he marvelled at the beauty of it. It occurred to him, distantly, that this wasn't going to work and that he had only a few seconds left till he was totally lost in delusion. He dropped the leg-log and reached down, picking up the whole Spriggan above his head with effort. Then he slammed it down with all his might over his knee, its body crunched and strained where the rock had hit it. He struggled to lift it again. He had forgotten why he was even doing this now. It seemed very out of place to be acting so violently when everything around him was so beautiful and peaceful.
Without any sense of purpose or idea what was going on, Lucas simply continued what he was doing, defaulting to stubbornness when he had no idea what to do. He slammed it down full force. Splinters of white wood and strands of bark ripped as the Spriggan cracked through the middle. Lucas stumbled back as a mad fractal of colourful energy burst out of its Aura like a psychedelic supernova.
[https://i.imgur.com/8sptgRd.jpg]
[https://i.imgur.com/kUy3rko.jpg]
Lucas collapsed on his back.
“That was close,” he muttered as the insects buzzed away, their cause lost.
The canopy of the forest was a stunning display of shifting patterns and colours. Lucas admired them as he rested, the effects of the spores wearing off after only a few minutes. He had a lot of nasty welts from the wasps. but nothing broken or otherwise damaged. The Spriggan was a pile of splintered wood resting beside him, without its eyes.
‘They would be in my inventory then,’
Lucas moved over to the stream, his body feeling like he had spent too long at the gym. He hadn't had this much exercise for a long time. His feet crunched through the smooth stones as he walked across the river bed towards the water. His thirst built to desperate levels as he looked at the clear water. It looked clean but there was only one way to find out.
His hand trembled as he fought his instincts, taking only a small sip of the icy water. He then sat down on the river bed, still breathing hard. If there was something wrong with the water he should be able to feel it soon, and he could use the rest. Lucas opened his Map to look at his progress. He had been walking in a mostly straight line but the area revealed on the map was very uneven, large areas in open ground and barely at all where he moved through dense forest.
‘It must be revealed by line of sight. Would that mean if I got to a high vantage point I could reveal a huge area? Definitely worth a try, I could just climb a tall tree.’
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He made a mental note of the river he found, closed his Map and opened his Inventory.
‘Two health potions, one badger leather, one...’
He paused over the Weak Nexus of Anger and after a moment of hesitation brought it out into his hand. It was a red orb the size of a large marble that had nearly no weight, he Analysed it.
[https://i.imgur.com/ooMOX5l.jpg]
That was loaded with implications. Lucas wasn't exactly sure what Mana meant in this world. In games it was usually used like a resource to power abilities and spells. The only thing that his tooltips had told him so far was that Mana was related to Auras and was somehow used to power the bodies of creatures. Lucas remembered that the Aura of the Spriggan had given off impressions, a kind of placid curiosity as it picked its way through the bushes. He guessed the badger would have given off an impression of ‘anger’ if he had the ability to see Auras at the time.
Lucas looked at his own Aura. It had three shifting bands of energy looping through it like support beams or like the patterns of a magnetic field. Remembering from his character sheet that he had three Mana he assumed these might be how his Aura stores Mana. On a hunch, he moved the Nexus into one of the bands. It left his hand to float along the band, slowly orbiting in his Aura. The band, where it ran through the Nexus, took on a red hue.
Lucas gritted his teeth as a sudden onset of Irrational anger boiled up in his mind. Despite knowing perfectly well that it was unnatural in the extreme, he reflexively reached out and grasped at reasons to be angry, as if unconsciously unwilling to accept that he would be suddenly angry for no reason. He was here struggling for his life for no reason he understood. Who had done this? He was covered in hundreds of wasp stings, exhausted and terrified. Was this someone's idea of a sick joke? The rage he was feeling continued to intensify. Lucas ripped the Nexus out of his Aura, breathing heavily, his muscles bunched.
‘What a disgusting object.’
It was disturbing how compellingly his mind was getting ready to start hating someone that probably didn't exist. His problems did not rationally require a person to cause them, it was the anger itself that required a villain to make sense. The feelings had been so powerful that his thoughts were apparently happy to jump to all sorts of conclusions in order to justify the emotion, even knowing it to be unnatural.
According to the tooltip the badger’s Mana had created some kind of imprint of its anger, like making a clay mould of an object, but with Mana and emotions. That would mean that Lucas’s Mana had moved through it following the pattern in the Nexus, like electricity in a circuit board, to come out tainted. Lucas didn't like being angry. Examples of stupid things he had done in anger crowded the edges of his thoughts but he wasn't going to spend any mental energy going over old problems now. With a sigh he forced his tensed up muscles to relax and put the Nexus back in his inventory. Whatever it was, it seemed pretty useless. He took out the Spriggan eyes, small green gems that clinked together in his hand.
[https://i.imgur.com/43aqWkY.jpg]
‘And now my tooltips are engaging in speculation,’ he noticed.
‘Is there someone who is writing these? Am I doing it subconsciously or something?’
The Spriggan Eyes sounded cool but he had no idea how to make use of them. He put one in front of his eye and tried peering through it but couldn't see anything. He put it back in his inventory with a shrug and pulled out the Spriggan Sap.
[https://i.imgur.com/cQgMpum.jpg]
‘Wow finally something that looks useful.’
Mana Psychosis sounded disturbing, he had no idea what that meant, but at least he could do something about it now. The Spriggan was probably immune to all those effects, since its sap negated them. Lucas wondered if his Analyse skill would have informed him of it being immune if he had been able to use poisons. He put it back in his inventory.
Lucas spent another half hour just sitting next to the river, listening to the running water on the rocks and the wind rustling the leaves above. The pain from the wasp stings was subsiding and his state of exhausted anxiety calmed with it. Lucas noticed his Aura was changing slowly too. The bands of force stopped shifting about as nervously and the sphere was more stable and round. When he was confident that anything wrong with the water would have made him feel sick by now he went and drank deeply. It was immensely satisfying, not just his thirst finally being quenched but also his own discipline for thinking before he acted and delaying gratification. It helped him feel more confident.
There were a lot of problems that needed solutions, and a lot of mysteries, but he was capable. During his whole life he had never needed to tap into so much of his strength both physically and mentally. Living the tame inner city life of a university student in Australia was comfortable but benign. He had always known that there was more to him, and had hoped there was more to life.
Sometimes while daydreaming on public transport, or not paying attention to his lectures, he would daydream about being truly put to the test. How would he survive a life or death situation armed with nothing but his strength and his wits? He wouldn't have been able to answer yesterday, but now he could. He didn't feel helpless or lost, he felt determined. Determined to survive, determined to master this strange place. Lucas smiled to himself and his Aura flashed golden for a moment.