Chapter 17
Reaper's Dance
Travelling through the vortex was a strange sensation–Tara felt hairs on her body stand up immediately, chills rush down her spine, and her adrenaline kick in. It was as though her body saw a predator or a situation dangerous for her life, and raised all the alarms the human body had.
The world around her bled into nothing, darkness surging throughout. All noise disappeared, all colours, shapes, definitions of all she’s ever known… gone. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t call for help, couldn’t seemingly move a single muscle in her body. Anxiety began to crush at her soul like raging tidal waves belting against a shoreline, drowning her.
She was a young girl again, trapped in a prison of nothing, incapable of escaping with her tiny, short legs, incapable of fighting with her tiny, short arms. The weight of everything pressed down like a falling mountain, the gravity of life, death, and all things in-between, breaking her psyche. Just on the verge of fracturing, she felt a sudden warmth surge through her as a sense of touch returned and she felt a hand clasp her shoulder and shake her.
Colours began to surge from the nothingness like ink being spilled outward from an orb, and shapes started becoming whole, their edges straightening, their bodies filling out. The darkness disappeared, the cold turned to warmth, and the anxiety began to fade. She was shaking still, terrified beyond comprehension–but she was alive. She was breathing. Her blood was pumping. Her eyes were seeing.
“Hey,” Ethan’s voice reached her at last and she robotically turned toward him. He stood tall above her with a concerned and pitiful expression. At some point, beyond her control, she had started crying, tears streaming down her ghostly-pale cheeks.
“W-w-w-what was… what was that?” she stuttered through clattering teeth.
“... that,” Ethan said slowly and gently. “Was dying and being reborn.”
“...” Tara curled her arms around herself, crouching down and tossing her head abreast. She still felt cold, despite the warmth. She still felt dead, despite living. She still felt broken, despite being whole. She couldn’t get the sensation of it all from her head–the collective indifference and brutally cold apathy of the universe. Just like everything and everyone, she didn’t matter–not in the abyss that was the perpetuity. She was alone, left adrift in the ghosts of the things she loved.
“One breath at a time,” Ethan guided her. “In, and then out. In and out. In and out.”
He guided her so for what felt like an eternity, but, in actuality, even she knew only a few minutes had passed. Soon, she was on her feet once again, standing, taking in the surroundings for the first time since opening her eyes. They were still in a forest, though one starkly different–the grass below was ankle-tall and brownish-red in colour with yellowed spots across its surface.
The trees ranged from thin to thick, each tall and branching widely, with dark-brown to black bark and entangling roots swimming out from the ground to the surface in an almost spiderweb-like pattern, forming ‘fences’ around. Black mist rolled about freely, though not climbing further than their knees, and the only source of light were the strange flowers that grew near the trees–their stalks were bent to consistently left from where Tara was standing, and were some foot tall with the flower budding into an open lotus with six swirling petals that converged inwardly where a strange bud stood alight, shimmering like a firefly.
It was quite chilly, well below fifty degrees, and the visibility was extremely low. However, something else was different–and Tara couldn’t figure out why. It was something intangible, a feeling that she got, rather than something that could easily be discerned.
“Mana here is thicker,” Ethan, as though reading her mind once again, cleared her doubts. “Passive regeneration is increased. Means squat to us, though.”
"Right," Tara nodded absentmindedly. Ethan was Ethan–calm, collected, seemingly having not experienced what she did. That horror. That chill. That apathy. But he did. He walked in front of her and went through the same things she did, and was fine. What the hell is his brain made of? She wondered, ignoring the other possibilities by choice. “So, what now?” she asked, not even bothering to pretend that he might not know either.
“We make a camp.”
“... with all this equipment? Man, should go sooo smoothly.”
“Maybe I worded that badly,” Ethan said, smiling faintly. “We steal a camp.”
“... whatever. Just tell me what to do.”
“This time around, you won’t have to do anything,” he said as he began to walk eastward. Tara followed swiftly, not wanting to be left behind.
“You sure?”
“... you want to be a punching bag?” he asked with a strange look in his eyes.
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“So, I do nothing?”
“Just watch,” he said dismissively. “Should be a good learning experience.”
The two fell silent and Tara followed along, her eyes curiously wandering about. The forest seemed to ring out on repeat, and she had absolutely no clue how Ethan was navigating. But she trusted him. It was a strange kind of trust, one that should have been born out of necessity, but was really more so out of willingness.
They walked for about thirty minutes when Ethan came to an abrupt halt. Tara followed along and stopped by his side, following his gaze toward a small dip, beyond the patch of trees that would have ordinarily blocked her view. But with enhanced sight, she saw them. Probably in a far worse way than Ethan, but she did see them. Monsters. Unwhole things.
She counted six of them; they were short, stubby things that seemed to walk upright, too. Small heads with one eye in the middle of the forehead, their entire jaws wide maws with sharp, pointy teeth. They seemed to have five limbs–four as per nature's course, and the fifth that was… odd. Creepy. It originated from the centre of the chest, but it could protrude both forward and out through the back. She shuddered at the sight, wondering just how tall worked, anatomically speaking.
The six creatures sat around a fire, with a few thatched huts sporadically built around the trees. Some tools lay strewn to the side, such as a hammer, a sickle, and a spear, and they all wore loincloths covering their crotches. Primitive intelligence, pack hunters, bipedal creatures…
Tara wanted to ask, wanted Ethan to explain, but she stayed silent. She didn’t know if the creatures could hear her if she made an abrupt sound and how much that would mess with Ethan’s plans. However, considering that, after indicating she should just stand there for the time being, he sauntered forward without bothering to disguise the noise he was making in any capacity, she figured she could have just asked.
The creatures were quickly alerted to the new presence and began calling out with strange noises. Suddenly, a notification window appeared next to her.
[Your party has encountered Waeul’s Camp. Bonus Reward for clearing the Camp: A Random (COMMON) Item]
No such notification appeared when they entered through the tunnel. No, perhaps it did, and Tara was simply too out of sorts to notice it. Whatever the case was, she dismissed it by simply swiping it to the side and focused back on the front, where Ethan was just about to engage with the six monsters.
She didn’t expect Ethan to lose–she didn’t even expect him to struggle particularly too much. However, what she witnessed went beyond that–it was like watching a trained adult face six rushing naked toddlers. There was no hope.
The first creature jumped directly at Ethan who simply lifted his right arm and grabbed the thing by its head. A singular flex of the fingers pushed into the creature’s skull, demented it, and then completely ruptured it, causing green blood to spray out in droves and the horrible sounds to deafen the forest. He swung left with his arm and hit the approaching creature at his flank with the corpse of his companion, causing both to explode at impact in a shower of blood and gore.
Suddenly, several protrusions appeared at Ethan's back–whips concocted of dark-green blood, each some four feet long, and they all lashed out in unison, piercing through the skulls of three creatures with no effort, killing them. It all took less than six seconds in real-time, and it turned Tara's blood cold. The last creature whimpered and wept, its tiny, stubby legs crumbling under the weight of cold, apathetic, unflinching death. She could have sworn she'd seen tears in that single eye, but she couldn't have been certain–as, just then, a green-dyed whip stirred through and ended another life.
Six corpses–whole and unwhole–were scattered about the camp, and the perpetrator stood untouched by the fire. She could barely discern the indifferent expression from the distance, but it was close enough for her to know that Ethan… wasn’t right. In more ways than one.
A string of notifications stirred and woke her from her daze, informing her of many a thing–nominally that she'd gotten enough experience to reach Level 2 and had unlocked a new feature: Pocket Inventory.
[Pocket Inventory: a personal, Law-Locked spatial storage. It can store up to 16 individual items. Items past a certain size may occupy multiple slots. You may retrieve items from the inventory during combat (with 1s cooldown between each retrieval) but may not put any items inside the inventory.]
“Bo!”
"AAAAAAAAAHHH!!" Tara screamed out in terror, slipping backward and falling to the ground. "J-Jesus, fucking, Christ! Why… WHY do you keep doing that shit?!!"
"Ha ha ha," Ethan laughed candidly at her reaction. It was like he was two people rolled into one body–a cold, apathetic, seemingly perfectly moulded killing machine… and a charming, boyish man with a propensity for lame jokes. "Dunno. It's funny?"
"Ha ha. Glad you had a fucking laugh!" she cursed as she held herself up and got off the strangely wet ground. "Goddamn, I'm all wet now. Don't–say–a–fucking–word!" she quickly growled through her teeth before Ethan had a chance to make a joke.
“... man, you really needed that, huh?” Ethan said, fixing his hair slightly. It had grown somewhat, reaching his shoulders already. “So, what’d you think?”
“What? Oh, you mean what did I think of your absolutely psychotic mass murder that looked like someone threw Hulk into a preschool class and told him to go ham? What did I think of that?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Oh, I thought it was just swell.” Tara sighed and took a deep breath, calming herself down. “It… looked effortless.”
“Because it was effortless.” He replied.
“It would have probably taken you a second to kill that zombie wolf thing, wouldn’t it?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“I’d kill myself if it took me a whole second.”
“...”
“Man, you’re no fun,” Ethan sighed. “Anyway, help me clean up the bodies. We’ll stay the night here. Tell war stories around the campfire, bond, become BFFs, all that jazz.”
“... or we could do literally none of that?”
“Works for me.”
As Tara helped him clean up the bodies, she played with the newfound function, tossing a hammer into the ‘inventory space’. It was rather easy, actually, as she only needed to faintly allude that the item in hand needed to go to inventory, and it would vanish seemingly into thin air just a moment later. It was beyond convenient–and she could only sigh at the fortune, and many fortunes to come, as she was also informed that other features were waiting for her as she continued to level up. Greed was intrinsic, she realised, because she wanted to claw out through the forest immediately and hunt down the monsters to unlock those features as quickly as possible. But she couldn’t–not yet, anyway. For the time being, she was the eye that bore witness to the beginning of something she felt deep in her bones would mark the future of mankind.