----------------------------------------
The scream touched Cas like static.
The treetops speared up to brush her nose by the time Cas realized she’d started diving. It was all she could do to pull up into a glide.
At this height, she could see the clearing was littered with bodies, all of them spilling like tic-tacs from the exploded guts of a covered wagon.
Down here, so close to the canopy, the winds deflected against the tree-tops, creating an up draft that allowed her to skate over the forest like an air-hockey table. A twitch of her wings against the constant updraft pulled a dexterously fast turn to the right, towards the source of the noise.
The screaming had fallen silent, but Cas could hear something else..
The noises were… almost human, except made with such energy and unrestrained frothing, that Cas knew that no sane human could have been responsible for their utterance. She knew from experience that human vocal chords wouldn’t make those noises unless pushed well past their painful limits.
Eerily, however, in a single second – as if orchestrated in advance – the bleating and howling suddenly fell silent, all at once. Only a quiet rustling through the underbrush remained.
Cas could hear all of this with perfect clarity. The sounds were so close, just dozens of feet below her in the forest. However, frustratingly, she couldn’t see anything.
The darkness was clear to her, but treetops whirred by her vision, obscuring everything.
Having spent so long at upper altitudes, Cas was unused to obscurity, the only time she’d ever had her vision blocked had been with clouds, and even then she’d been able to track the fox using its aura…
An idea rang in her head. This was combat, after all. Likely, everyone involved was flaring their auras.
And if that was the case…
Cas focused, and the trees faded from her attention.
image [https://i.imgur.com/EpeY9YO.png]
image [https://i.imgur.com/pS1EW32.png]
image [https://i.imgur.com/NZTZWk3.png]
image [https://i.imgur.com/P8igzVB.png]
Her status sheet, as a small kindness, did her the favor of auto labeling their descriptors.
Like with the fox -- at first, she only felt the monsters, their distances and relative positions. Eventually, however, she returned her attention to her sight, and her knowledge was dragged over into her visual field. She could see the cool-blue outlines of their auras. It was as if she were seeing straight through the canopy. In fact, she could even see the fainter, green outlines that enveloped the trees and other plant life. She could see the rustling underbrush and the web of roots that spread into the underground like lightning bolts.
The plants lit up like fireflies whenever a monster brushed past them.
The creatures weren’t attempting to be discreet, to tell by the fact their auras were flaring so conspicuously.
Their prey, however, was quite a different story.
The monsters were intensely still, standing on all fours and staying shock-still as they scanned the environment. Each faced in a different direction, baited breath and queasy anticipation casting a maniac shadow on the tenor of their auras.
To tell by the searching stance the monsters had taken, there was at least one survivor in the forest somewhere to the north, and they were hiding.
Invisibility, as it turned out, could be more conspicuous than sight and Cas, watching the aura of the underbrush, saw – far in the distance– a series of low bushes parting for some invisible figure. It was intensely visible, the unnatural motion of the plants, even before their aura’s lit up in response to the motion.
The monsters, attention honed to the slightest discrepancy, took off as if the flashing branches had been a starting gun.
Cas, being on wings, made for a very unfair race, and she beat them by a mile.
Now closer, Cas was able to focus on the space in the rustling bushes where the figure should have been.
There!
image [https://i.imgur.com/INP2B7E.png]
Despite her best efforts, Cas could only guess that a vaguely bipedal form was running through the forest floor. They, whoever they were, were suppressing their aura’s quite intensely, and looking at the fog of aura that shone through the canopy, Cas couldn’t even be sure that this thing was human.
Racing ahead of the figure, she dove down into the forest proper, and got a good look.
A shock of blonde hair surprised her.
Tabula Rasa.
It meant clean slate… or rather, it meant you approached every new subject without preconceived notions. Cas was a strict adherent . However, that didn’t protect from being surprised every so often, and Cas, as she swooped down into the understory, was assaulted by shock as she lay eyes on the mystery figure.
Cas hadn’t been expecting anything in particular, but still, a woman wearing a full face of makeup and a jeweled gown was a bit much.
More surprising was the pace she was keeping. Her skirt had been deliberately torn up to her knees, and bare feet strode powerfully over the forest floor. She was dead-sprinting fast enough to win a drag race, chunks of dirt tearing themselves from the dirt at the violence of her efforts.
In her right hand, a pair of glimmering heels were held out to the side, and her back was up straight in a corset posture; her entire demeanor seemed to treat her earth breaking sprint like it was light exercise.
Still, the monsters were faster, their encroaching howls growing closer and rising to feverish, excited pitches with every passing second.
It was louder than Cas had ever imagined it would be. It was almost painfully loud and sudden, the growling and gnashing of teeth. It was like something out of a horror movie.
And, much like a horror movie, right on cue, the woman stumbled and crashed against the dirt floor. She slid for several dozen feet, heels skittering off into the underbrush as her hands scrambled for purchase, scrambling back to her feet, moving barely twenty paces before – seemingly for no reason – tripping again.
It was almost comical, watching such an intensely competent figure just trip over an obvious root, not even catching herself properly against the tree that was right there.
However, the second fall called for an explanation.
Cas looked closer at the woman’s face. A mask of fear distorted the bold lines of her eyeliner, and her eyes bounced against the dark borders, looking everywhere and seeing nothing.
Darkness. Cas looked around, noticing how thin the shadows looked underneath such a thick canopy, appreciating now just how little a human must have been able to see in the conditions.
Again, the woman’s feet skipped a beat as an intense chorus of howls reached her, just a hundred paces back where they were loudly tearing their way through a thicket of bushes, leaping easily over every obstacle and treating the darkness like Cas had been.
Cas took off, shuddering the branch she’d been sitting on just as the woman passed under it.
Now more familiar with the woman, Cas grabbed hold of her aura signature like it was a fishing line, letting it slide between her sensory fingers as she flew up to two hundred feet, stopping just before the distance broke her line of sight.
The monsters, bright as they were, were clearly seen even from this distance.
With all the major players in sight, Cas took an overview of the situation.
Again, a horrifying shriek as the woman stumbled, her bare toes just slipping past the claws of a creature, her dress tearing in its stead.
That, Cas realized, hadn’t been a lucky escape. From her vantage point, she could see the hesitant motions of the monsters. They weren’t really attempting to go for the kill, rather harrying the woman as they spread around her.
They were going to encircle her, Cas realized, seeing the flanks of their formation spread out like giant wings.
The monsters were at a disadvantage, having to run a larger distance in order to apply their tactic, but the woman – despite her speed – seemed to stumble to a halt with every step, and her avenues for escape were rapidly closing.
Cas, despite herself, was only human, and the human reaction here was to do something. Cas wanted to dive again without thinking, to insert herself into the situation and help somehow.
But, Cas squashed that part of herself. A long life had trained her doubt emotions when they promised impossible results, and the woman’s situation was looking beyond impossible.
Taking stock of the situation, Cas was fifteen pounds heavy. Her only advantage in this situation was flight, something that couldn’t be used effectively in the middle of a forest. This was even before you considered the monsters had a combined 26 levels over her at the very least.
Fighting was no good in the circumstances.
And… that seemed to be it.
It hurt to put it to herself like that. What was she supposed to do now?
The woman screamed again. Cas didn’t know why, she’d been looking up at the stars as the facts assembled themselves into terrible shapes in her mind. The woman… the woman with a diamond dress and well done makeup, and enough care about her heels to carry them along while running for her life.
The woman that could carry along with perfect posture while running times that would’ve broken her state’s track record back on earth.
The woman, despite her otherworldly origin, was just like so many girl’s Cas had made friends with back on earth.
She was fashion conscious. That was obvious. In fact, she was perhaps a bit too concerned with her looks if she was holding onto her heels, but Cas had learned from college not to judge a woman by her makeup.
Often the fashionistas could be the kindest and bravest and smartest girls you ever met. At least, they’d developed one skill and hobby… that was one more than most people. A flush of shame came to Cas, the sharp memory of the embarrassing and terrible assumptions she’d made about her first real friend Jen stabbing into her mind.
Maybe the woman was just like Jen. Maybe she, too, used makeup and nice clothes as an outlet. Maybe she hoarded clothes and over-valued money for the same reason, had she grown up poor, too?
The assumptions came naturally to Cas. They moved on their own and populated her mind from the moment she first laid eyes on the woman. They crafted a familiar, freidnly personality that endeared the woman to Cas.
Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t seen a person for so long, or maybe it was just that the woman truly did remind Cas of Jen, but… she felt like… not a friend… not an ally either… but, like someone Cas just knew.
She felt human.
Maybe that was why Cas was looking up at the stars, because she couldn’t bear to watch as the woman screamed again.
Cas felt ashamed for refusing to look, but what was she supposed to do? Just watch her die? That wouldn’t help her.
She forced herself to look down at the scene. She at least owed her that much.
The forest was growing thinner as the chase continued. Obviously, the woman was heading for wherever enough moon-light poked through the canopy to let her see and run properly.
As a result, Cas was occasionally able to see flashes of the chase whenever they passed through an opening, the near misses and dangerous scrapes. It was much more visceral than the map of glowing dots which had so far abstracted everything away.
The woman was brave, Cas could tell. She was purposefully holding back her screaming, only crying out when surprised by a flank, and even managing to keep silent whenever she tumbled.
Of course, it didn’t matter. The monsters had already locked onto her location, and they were just tiring her out at this point, waiting until she was too exhausted to cause them any trouble before they —
Again, that useless emotion bared its face. That want to help. Cas had felt it a million times before whenever someone dropped a wallet, or she saw a sad child in a charity advertisement. It felt bad. It moved you to action like a cattle prod. And, Cas had thought herself hardened to such feelings but here it was again, a thousand times more intense than she’d ever felt it before and telling her, begging her to do something before she saw this woman turn into a corpse.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
But, what! What could she do.
Cas, with some self loathing, looked away from the scene as the woman tripped again, seeing an open clearing just a mile ahead that the woman would never get to.
It was so frustrating. The monsters had giant holes in their formation, and the woman was fast enough when she wasn’t stumbling. She had everything she needed to escape but just couldn’t use it!
It tasted like bile, watching something so preventable has such terrible-
Wait a minute….
An idea flicked on the lightbulb over Cas’ head.
Appropriately enough, the idea involved using light.
The glow worm solution she’d ingested all those months sprang to mind, like a word on the tip of her tongue, which she just had to speak to create.
The ‘glow worm solution’, was a complex of four different chemicals that – when mixed – reacted to produce a faint light.
Three of those ingredients were a simple matter. Cas could make them using simple sugars. The fourth ingredient was a bit more metabolically expensive, however, requiring her to break down some of the ‘meat’ as her status sheet called it, and which Cas suspected to be its term for amino acids.
Cas couldn’t recreate this ‘meat’ once she’d broken it down for the sake of making glow juice, and, depending on the intensity of the light she went for, she would only be able to keep her light on for fifteen minutes until all her current stock was used up in the reaction.
This was usually a small sacrifice, considering she could always hunt for more, but right now Cas was on a limited weight budget of 15 pounds, and, looking down as the woman scrambled – she doubted she’d have the time to hunt any time soon.
Time was of the essence, and Cas was reluctant to break down too much muscle in the face of these creatures.
Taking a quick glance at the distance, Cas’s eye saw the minute it would take for the woman to arrive at where Cas wanted her. She shouldn’t need more than a minute of light, then, Cas decided, and dove into the canopy.
It felt like butterflies in her belly, as she synthesized the materials inside of herself, mashing them together with a blending motion of her interior jelly. Alongside the butterflies, a serene Christmas-night sensation splurged hot aura through the chemical reactions and – with a flash – lit up her entire body.
Cas had landed on a branch as soon as she entered below the canopy, but she spread her wings wide to their full, six foot wingspan.
Cas wasn’t sure if it was just her night vision, but a whole fifty meters of forest seemed to light up underneath where she flew.
The girl’s eyes immediately flashed up, looking at the winged figure with a dreadful joy of which only the condemned were capable. The monsters reeled back with pained snarls, straying to the edges of where the light was strongest, eyes glowing intensely.
image [https://i.imgur.com/CCuomHO.png]
Cas. shortening her wings, dropped down from the branch, circling in midair and gesturing to the north.
With growls coming from the darkness, the woman hardly needed any convincing, and took off in the specified direction.
The monsters receded from the woman, and – noticing the change of heading – relocated themselves as they prepared to charge her again, though with a different aim this time.
They were obviously familiar with the terrain.
Cas had a better view, however, and she could see the openings in their formation.
Sharply dimming her light, Cas dove below the treeline, shifting to shorter, more maneuverable wings as she weaved between the trunks..
Now moving in a walkway of moving light, the woman picked up her pace, striding confidently over the roots and brambles, flaring her aura unabashedly as she put new power into her legs.
Cas, for her part, merely focused on the flying.
The trees were surprisingly far apart once you got below the canopy. Even so, Cas found her flight to be more of a quick hop between branches, taking straight lines in open air and stopping very occasionally. With such hindrances, Cas found herself having to sprint just to keep ahead of the woman, who’s pace had redoubled, casting a strobe of shadows whenever she weaved past too many clustered branches.
Occasionally, Cas would dip above the canopy to spot their destination. Whenever she did, she noticed that the woman’s breathing would grow much more ragged and pained, as if calling her back down.
Soon, they were nearing the end of the forest. Even from a distance, the border visible for the brilliant glare of moon-light which flooded in, and the woman’s breathing grew almost ecstatic as she – with a final exercise of effort – released a sprint into the clearing Cas had led her to.
The smile immediately faded from the woman’s countenance.
The moonlight painted the full horror of it in immaculate detail, freezing the woman in place. She skidded to a halt, shooting fearful looks all about her.
A stolid bluff stood in front of her, blocking her way with its hundred foot height, cutting through the forest like a natural fence-line. The base of the rough cliff was painted with dried blood and littered with a gleaming debris field of broken bones and scattered corpses.
The woman turned around just to freeze again. Gleaming eyes revealed themselves in the forest clearing. Her nose scrunched. The smell of them was rotten. She stepped back away from it, retreating slowly as the monsters came into the light.
The monsters were wrinkles and leather, with wide eyes and large ears the shape of martini glasses that danced independently atop their heads. They were hyena-like in figure, with sloping backs that led up to large, ape-like arms and massive jaws filled with black teeth.
The woman didn’t utter a sound as they closed in from all angles. Rather, she just held a betrayed and resolved expression as she continually stepped back, retreating until her back touched the face of the bluff.
It was like watching a scared mouse, one whose instincts told it to stay quiet in the face of hopeless danger.
It was a terrible sight. More than violence or screaming, watching the sheer mortality play itself out on the woman’s face was horrifying.
Cas, as dark as the sky, now, hovered over the scene with a silent mind.
The creatures split up, three of them fanned out to press her against the rock wall, one staying in the rear to cover any escapes.
It was… disconcerting how little Cas was reacting to the sight.
Have you ever heard a baby crying?
It’s a painful sound, more than it has any right to be. It induced anxiety. It was the sort of noise which made it impossible for you sit in peace as long as it carried on. That was one of the costs of being human, however. Evolution designed humans to stress at crying babies… probably helped the babies survive, even if it made adults want to kill themselves as they woke up at three-am to wipe another persons’ ass.
And, Cas mused, perhaps that wasn’t the only trigger that had been designed into humans.
Maybe, there was a special emotion humans were supposed to feel when they saw another person dying.
Maybe, there was a new kind of horror, at the sight of death. Executions used to be public events, after all, and quite popular ones at that. Maybe there was something in the death of a human being that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else.
Cas didn’t know, and if there was, she wasn’t feeling it. In fact, Cas didn’t feel anything in particular at the moment. Not a single thing at all except the racing considerations as she picked her angle.
Cas drifted to the southern edge of the clearing, floating behind the monsters, making sure her shadow fell outside the borders of the clearing. The air whistled softly past as she turned her wings down and fell into a descending turn.
The wind was the only thing in her mind apart from flight paths and light considerations.
That was… disconcerting.
Cas should have been feeling something right now, right? She should have been feeling something special.
After all, she had led the woman into the trap on purpose.
Granted, she’d done that to get her out of an even worse trap, but… hadn’t the decision been too easy? Shouldn’t she be shaking and shivering and throwing up or something? Why was she only feeling scared and ashamed?
“Grahhh!” The woman screamed suddenly. The hyena on her left had lunged; she swung a branch she’d picked up at it, the make-shift bat whiffing past its head as it drew back. Just then, however, the one behind her leaped, grabbing a bloody chunk of her rib cage and snapping jaws shut with a squelching sound.
This time, the scream was loud… so loud. Cas hadn’t even known humans could scream so intensely. She hadn’t known screams could express so much pain.
The woman hit true with her stick, this time, and the branch exploded against the head of the hyena, leaving a jagged stake in her hands as the dizzied hyena staggered back from her scrambling figure. She held the pointed stake one handed now, pointing it assertively at every hyena that drew too close for comfort. The blood that leaked out of her side was almost black in color. There was so much of it, it soaked out like molasses into her glimmering dress. Was human blood that dark?
Cas turned her eye away. Looking on wouldn’t do the woman any good. Cas focused her sight on the rear-most monster. Her wings adjusted by themselves until she was just on the right trajectory.
Half-way through the journey, Cas started dressing for her destination.
The transformation was subtle, but occurred all over, in a thousand different places on her body. Her wings extended outward, losing their previously sleek shape and expanding out into bat-like parachute surfaces. The rudder in her back flexed, molding itself into a cylindrical shape that arced up over her head like a rainbow. In tandem with the change, her interior shifted, jetting the rusty-spearhead up through the rainbow arc, pushing it tip-first out the end of the tail, giving the character of a scorpion’s stinger.
In truth, she was no longer a competent flier like this. Flight was a delicate balance of forces, and that balance was destroyed by the sudden change to her silhouette and off-kilter weight distribution.
That was fine, she’d practiced for this.
Cas was barely gliding now, drawing her wings in for a quicker descent. Just as she came within ten feet, she flared her aura, running it over her form and coating it over the body of the spear-head.
[Item Equipped: Rusty Spearhead.]
[Attack: 23]
[Piercing: 30]
image [https://i.imgur.com/5FjCMUm.png]
Have you ever seen two lions fighting?
You’ll notice that one of them – usually the losing one – always gets on the ground, lying on its back and twisting its body up to attack its opponent from below.
One of Cas’s acquaintances – a guy who went everywhere in a rash guard and had an annoying penchant for inserting himself into other people’s business – once intruded on her animal planet binge to say about just such a lion fight: “oh… he’s taking bottom position”.
Cas had ignored the comment at the time, dismissing it as yet another example of his usual inanity.
She realized later that he’d actually said something insightful. Cas had always thought that the grounded lion had just fallen or been pushed into a losing position. After all, why else you get on the ground? But, on thinking of how her friend had spoken of it, she realized it was an intentional tactic.
After all, the one thing lions fear is an opponent taking the back of their neck. Usually, such an event was followed by a crunch sound and a fulfillment of the circle of life. So, if the back of your neck was so vital, and you were losing, why not use the Earth to protect it?
In fact, after internalizing that fact, Cas started watching lion fights with a new level of insight. The previously random wrestling, she could see now, had always been a fight for position, a fight for who could position themselves over the other one’s neck vertebrae!
Cas, being an airborne creature, didn’t need to fight for that position. The monster’s neck was completely exposed to the sky, and that was exactly the direction she happened to be coming from.
Cas fell like a kite, floating down on ghostly wings and swooping her scorpion tail underneath her with deadly aim.
The blade, charged with aura, slid between its neck vertebrae like a knife through a dead man. It fell in a second, like a puppet with strings unhooked.
Cas simply continued her fall and covered the creature immediately, her form losing all structure as she smothered the body, muffling the death cries as the creature convulsed underneath her, struggling for breath as it’s aura dimmed, then flickered, then died.
Cas had already been drinking the blood that poured like a geyser from the creature’s artery, but, as soon as the aura flickered away, that protective energy which soaked the creature’s body disappeared, and the formerly hard body turned into melting sugar, completely exposed to Cas’s digestion.
Cas immediately started eating it.
PFRTPFRTPFRTPFRTTTTFRRTRTRTRTRTKHRRRRHRRHR
The body frothed and bubbled like baking soda in a volcano, setting her liquid body spluttering as noxious gasses and bone and blood and flesh were all dissolved by the piranha solution which was Cas’s body.
That was all background music, however, to the rolling reel of updates that ran across Cas’s status sheet like a motion picture.
[4894 XP Gained]!
[Level Up: 6 → 7]!
—----------------------------------------------------------
Skill Level Increases
[Shape Change: 14 → 15]
[Shape Change: 15 → 16]
[Shape Change: 16 → 17]
[Absorption: 15 → 16]
[Absorption: 16 → 17]
[Alchemy: 14 → 15]
[Partial Hardening: 13 → 14]
[Partial Hardening: 14 → 15]
—----------------------------------------------------------
New Milestone Achievements!
Shape Change Level 15!
Partial Hardening Level 15!
New Combined Ability: Create Structure
—----------------------------------------------------------
New Milestone Achievements!
Alchemy Level 15!
Absorption Level 15!
New Combined Ability: Rapid Processing
It was a loud and messy process, and it drew eyes from all corners of the clearing. For one moment, both monsters and woman were united in their staring, as Cas’s bubbling, frothing form sputtered blood and chunks and meat in every direction, ruthlessly liquefying their compatriot.
And that’s when the screaming started, from human and monsters alike.