Chapter 39

Matter Over Mind

The night—or, at the very least, the Scorching Savanna’s version of the night—descended upon the flat plains. As it did, the four crawled out of the hole in the ground, less than well-rested after having laid down uncomfortably for hours. With the exception of Ethan who slept decently well.

The largest advantage of the 'night' was that the heat dissipated enough so that the visibility increased considerably while the illumination of the sun was still bright enough to shine on the world's surface. After a quick meal in the tent, the group set off on a hunt—the most difficult part, initially, was simply locating the wildlife. As it turned out, the world constituted as 'Savanna' was fairly large and sparsely populated, making it quite inefficient as a hunting ground.

Their first encounter came almost half an hour into the hunt—it was yet another lion, this one a tinge smaller than the one before, though with a brighter mane. The group employed the same tactics as before, with Ethan drawing the monster's attention while the other three dealt damage. The wrench of the plan came halfway through the monster's Health Bar when it suddenly brightened to almost blinding levels; by instincts that were all but beaten into Ronald and Tara, they both withdrew within less than a second, gaining at least ten and twenty feet of distance, respectively.

It was just enough to evade the creature’s follow-up attack—with a bellowing roar, it dispersed a ring-shaped wave of flame around it. It scorched the already scorched ground below even further, growing as tall as five feet at its highest, flaming out with a fanfare at its edges, embossed blow burning in bright red.

Ronald and Tara paused momentarily after the fact, their hearts jumping to their throats; it was the first time they’d experienced a monster commit a truly fantasy attack—it was something that looked like it belonged in a corny movie rather than reality, and yet they witnessed it first-hand. Even its remnants remained effective as they were unable to approach the monster due to the heat that suddenly surged upwards to nearly 200 degrees. Just touching the air within five feet of the monster hurt and burned, and breathing it in would have likely been a death sentence even for them.

The monster entered a period of weakness after—it began to pant and look listless, as though that attack took nearly all of its life with it—making it quite easy of a fight after. The monster died within ten seconds, and both Tara and Ethan shot up to Level 6. Tara's excitement dwindled swiftly when she noticed that she didn't unlock anything 'new', prompting her to move on to the disappearing creature that didn't leave just empty air like the one before it—there was an item lying on the ground.

Ronald approached it excitedly and picked it up: it was a leather-bound vest, deep brown in colour, sewn together rather haphazardly. It didn't seem much but to him, it didn't matter—it was the first item drop that he'd experienced, so he quickly inspected it.

[Eroded Vest]

Level: 1

Physical Defence: 1

+1 Strength

Special Effect: Increase heat resistance by 20%

[Note: Though durable, its age is showing. It is not long for this world.]

Ronald exclaimed softly—as did Ethan. Though the item was virtually useless outside of Savanna, the 20% heat resistance was rather welcome. Almost immediately, and unanimously, the vest went to the confused and embarrassed Elijah who stumbled and mumbled through the words of gratitude before awkwardly putting the vest on. It effectively turned a 100-degree hellscape into quite nice 80-degree weather. And it even turned a 130+ degree inferno into a slightly more bearable inferno.

“Alright, let’s move on,” Ethan called out soon after—there was no time for minor celebrations, as they were just 2 monsters deep into the hundreds they needed to hunt down.

As the 'night' and then the early morning progressed, they found more and more monsters—strangely, all of them were lions, and all of them fell into either of the two variants: ones with the special attack and ones without it. There was no further variety, but that was perhaps for the better as their efficiency the more they hunted them. Bit by bit, everyone's Levels started shooting up. Elijah was the first to cross the major threshold, having reached Level 5. Just like Tara and Ronald, he unlocked two new abilities: Gravity Field and Tempered Shield.

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Gravity Field, as its name implies, creates a gravity field at the designated location of a certain size and strength. As it was just a Level 1 ability, the limitations were quite massive: the field couldn't be larger than 15 cubic feet, and it could only either increase or decrease gravity by 10%. However, timed crucially, even that 10% difference could be a life-changer—Ethan knew as much.

Tempered Shield had a duality aspect to it—cast in isolation, it simply gave the targeted ally a shield that had a flat value of 100 in addition to scaling with Intellect, adding three times the Intellect to the shield’s value. However, if it is used on a person with the active buff of Astral Armour, it doubles the buff's values, triples the shield, and also spreads to the secondary target with 40% efficiency.

It was simply more of what the core of the Class represented—preventing damage. A flat 100 shield was already pretty remarkable as the starter point as most other shields were around the 40 flat value, but its synergy with Astral Armour was where the ability truly shined. Ethan suspected that it would only grow more oppressive with Levels as there was a high likelihood of this becoming the raid-wide combo to use when there would be a massive overload of raid-wide damage. For now, though, just this was more than enough.

Ronald also ended up reaching Level 6, already knowing that there were no surprises waiting for him, his excitement dulled. It was revitalised, however, when Tara and Ethan hit Level 7, unlocking a new function: Crafting. As the name implied, it was a fairly standardised and easy-to-understand system used to dismantle and craft new items from the monster materials. The excitement fell off quite a bit, however, when it became evident that it wasn’t just a side hustle anyone could do: it was a life’s calling if anything worth of value wanted to be crafted.

An additional part of the functionality that they'd unlocked previously, Daily Quests, remained a mystery as well since it never seemed to have been activated. The two did look to Ethan for answers but he merely shrugged, going for his standard: Gimme a sec while I connect myself to my alien overlords and ask them, which simply meant that it was not a question they would get an answer to anytime soon.

As the ‘day’ started creeping up, Ethan called off the hunt and the group began their hurried return. They were all soaking wet from head to toe, beyond exhausted, hungry, and just in want of a good rest. They’d barely made it to the underground chambers before flattening out and passing out for six hours straight. They’d have likely continued on had Ethan not woken them up, causing quite a few disgruntled curses in the process.

“What’s the plan today?” Ronald asked as the trio sat around a small table inside the tent, eating ham sandwiches.

“The same as yesterday,” Ethan replied. “Go out. Hunt. Celebrate. Like true men used to do it.”

“Can we slow down the pace?” Tara asked.

“No, we’re picking up,” Ethan replied. “We haven’t years to waste.”

“...” the trio sighed inwardly, their expressions downcast. Ethan understood why–even he himself felt it would be better to slow down, but he wanted to get out as quickly as possible because of Layla. In addition to her, he didn’t like the idea of being away from Earth for prolonged periods of time with the intensity of changes occurring that he had no knowledge of. If the butterfly effect of him coming back (and only him, not somebody else) was this massive this early on, chances were that it was only going to get worse and spiral further into the direction he was wholly unfamiliar with.

While he would love to spend weeks inside casually Levelling up, that wasn't a luxury he could afford. Perhaps in the future, once his Tunnel Dome–a function unlocked upon reaching Level 15–was a fully functioning home, he could bring Layla with him and keep her safe against everything, but until then, long-standing Tunnel excursions, especially with everyone coming along with him, were a big undertaking. The only reason, really, why he had to be here was due to the fact that it was a Tunnel with the potential to become a Field. Otherwise, he would have either sent Tara and Ronald on their own or would have left one of them behind to watch Layla.

The group departed soon after, groaning inwardly at the prospect of spending fifteen-plus hours in temperatures that a human body was not designed for. Even the reshaping done by Mana during the process of Awakening only redid the body itself; some fundamental instincts, however, were not overridden. That was why people were still afraid of being cut and shot and punched even if their bodies could easily sustain that level of damage and easily heal back up. It was very similar to some autoimmune disorders in that the body tends to overreact to things it perceives as threats. Just in the case of the Awakened, these things used to be threats.

Some sweating was more than expected, as even the Awakened couldn’t exactly just ‘endure’ 130 and upward degrees of heat, but it tended to breach past ‘some’ into excessive as their autonomic nervous systems triggered heavy sweating to cool the bodies down, thinking they were in the range of ‘lethal’ more so than ‘highly inconvenient’. Furthermore, they’d breathe much more rapidly within minutes, and Ethan often caught them obsessing over parts of their bodies due to something known as ‘phantom sensations’. Due to the rapid nature of the body's evolution and the mind's inability to adjust as quickly, they felt parts of their bodies were burning because that was the expectation inside of their minds.

Within a few days, some of these symptoms would calm down, though never quite vanish–not so quickly, anyway. Until then, though, it was a struggle; Tara, Ronald, and Elijah consumed almost thrice as much water as Ethan did, and it wasn’t because his body was in some way, shape or form a ‘higher tier’ of evolution. His mind was already adjusted to the changes, relative to others. Clearing Tunnels, many would come to learn, was as much in defeating monsters as it was in defeating oneself and the long, exhausting list of evolutionary ticks that human bodies possessed for virtually every situation imaginable.