After taking stock of his supplies he made a game plan. He was not currently strong enough to face the Sand Drake. He needed to grind out some levels and get way stronger. He only saw one way to do that—he needed to partake in some good old fashioned guerrilla warfare. He was isolated. That was both a strength and a weakness. He remembered learning about the early days in the American Revolutionary War. The Americans were going up against one of Earth’s largest military superpowers at the time. They had more money, better equipment, and better trained soldiers. The odds were stacked against them. Yet, somehow they had won.

One of the largest contributing factors was their utilization of guerrilla tactics. They would use the element of surprise to catch their enemies off guard. Ambushes were key to throw them off balance, making them much easier to subdue. They would also use other tactics like sabotage, hit and run tactics, and use the familiar terrain to confuse their foes. These tactics used their smaller numbers to their advantage. This is exactly what Alex intended to do with the Zotari.

He had noticed that his experience gain was much larger when he attacked the supply depot by himself than when he was fighting in a large squad. He wasn’t sure if it was anything like the video games he played growing up where your party would take a split of the experience whenever they helped you defeat and enemy, but that couldn’t be far off. David had been higher level than anyone else he had seen in the tutorial and Alex had to assume it was because he either fought by himself more, or didn’t allow anyone to help too much so that he would get the majority of the experience.

Hopefully, with Alex taking out larger camps of Zotari warriors, his growth would begin to skyrocket. He needed it. He would raid their camps, take any supplies he could, and try to set up multiple campsites himself. He didn’t want to lead them right to his camp every time he engaged. He would have to be careful that didn’t happen. He would call this campsite at the opening of the canyon alpha site for no other reason than it made him feel like he was in a spy movie. It made him feel cool. Alex planned some more, humming a spy theme song in his head all the while.

With his plans finalized, he set out to make the magic happen. His first step in his master plan was a little reconnaissance. He had really no idea where he was, he didn’t know where the Zotari were, and he didn’t know where would be the best places to strike. Especially starting out, he would need to be extremely careful. If he attacked a stronghold too powerful for him, his journey would be over before even getting back to Earth. He did not want that. So he would have to do some homework and find the best targets. He also needed to work on his stealth skills. The fight at the supply camp ended up fine, but it could have been so much better if had just stuck to his original plan.

Mainly, he just needed to not be an idiot, which seemed to be a tall order. He really hadn’t considered himself dumb before all of this, but he was starting to get extremely worried. Time after time he caught himself doing things that were absolutely moronic, half the time getting him into serious danger. He needed to work on that. Something his mom always said worried him though. She would see one of his friends doing something dumb and say, “He’s a good kid, but be careful Alex, you can’t fix stupid.” He really hoped that wasn’t true. If it was, he would need to get a lot stronger if he had any hope of surviving this.

Leaving most of his supplies, Alex left alpha site, bringing only some water and food for the next few hours. He picked a strategic, and definitely not random, direction to start his cartography of the surrounding area.

“Left is good. I like left.”

Alex started walking. The Sand Drake den and the adjacent canyon were on the far side of where most of the battles had occurred since Alex’s arrival. It made sense to keep the fighting as far from the Great One as possible so as to not incur its wrath. Now that Alex was moving, he wasn’t sure what he was going to run into out here. He had no way to tell if there were any camps at all. Most Zotari and Saxans were stationed in the complete opposite direction. Alex hadn’t seen or heard the Great One leave yet, so there was no way he was going to go back there.

He hiked for almost an hour with no sign of anyone. He was about to give up, when suddenly the sands started to shift underneath him. It wasn’t the normal shifting either, where the wind changed the landscape over the course of a few hours. No, this was fast, alarmingly fast. He pushed out as fast and as hard as he could and just in time. Two giant pincers shot out of the sand right where he had been standing. Not long after the rest of the creature climbed out of the dune, searching for the prey that had escaped.

“I guess that answers that question. They do have scorpions here.”

Alex was wondering that when he used his imitation of a stinger to distract the scouts at the supply cache. Now it made sense why it had worked so well. The supply depot was far enough away from the action that the local wildlife likely made an appearance more often than on the main battlefields. He looked up at the nearly ten foot tall scorpion. It was the same color as the sand except for its black, beady eyes. If you took into account the height of its stinger, the scorpion was more like twenty feet tall. Alex wasn’t sure exactly how to fight someone this big. The biggest foes he had faced off against so far were the golems and even then, only the lava golem was around the same size. It had even started to shrink during the fight making it more manageable. Alex didn’t feel like he would be so lucky with this enemy. He identified it to see what he was up against.

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Fire Venom Scorpion

Level 29

It was stronger than him. That worried Alex, but he felt like he should be able to handle it. He was worried about its name though. Fire venom seemed pretty straightforward, and he didn’t like the way it sounded. He would need to avoid a hit by that stinger. It would be hard as the reached it exhibited was immense. It looked like this fight would have to be kept to close quarters.

Two quick jabs from the scorpions stinger nearly caught Alex off guard. Sand flew up at the points of impact. Alex barely dodged the first strike, but was grazed by the second one. His skin began to bubble. It looked just like when that tree had fallen on him in the park. He was getting burned, but there was one problem. He couldn’t feel his energy going up as much as it normally did when he was dealing with thermal energy. It seemed like he was only getting energy from the strike itself and not the subsequent damage. It took Alex a second to realize that this really wasn’t thermal energy, it just behaved similarly.

Now Alex was even more alert. He wouldn’t be able to convert the energy as efficiently with this flow, especially if it kept landing blows with its stinger. Alex squared himself to the scorpion and tried to read it for any indication of when it would strike. The bulbous stinger pulled back for an instant before launching forward at Alex. He dodged slightly to the side before grabbing onto the end of its tail. The scorpion did not like that one bit. It flung its tail back so fast that Alex lost hold of it and was sent flying through the desert.

Alex vision was disorienting to say the least. The sky kept changing places with the ground. They flipped so many times, Alex had no way to tell which way was up and which was down. Finally, he was able to slow his rotation enough to get his bearings. Unfortunately, he was now on a collision course for a dune. He blasted into the top third of the dune and out the other side on the bottom third of it. The entire dune collapsed under the sudden and forceful impact. Alex was left with his head and chest buried in the sand, legs kicking to find enough purchase to free himself. He remembered Cameron being in a similar situation during their tutorial and he chuckled. Well he would’ve chuckled if his face wasn’t entombed in sand.

After struggling for a few minutes he finally managed to get loose enough to push himself free. He looked back in the direction he had come from, eyes narrowed in annoyance. He had no idea how far he had been launched which meant he had no idea where he was in relation to alpha site. In other words, he was lost. He brushed himself off, thankful for the suits ability to keep sand off of him. He would have been chafing for days otherwise. He crested the dune that had been obliterated by his impacting body, and tried to find the path he had taken through the sky. Using the suns location as a sort of waypoint, he started walking back in the direction he had come from. He hadn’t ever been a Boy Scout so he wasn’t sure how reliable his method was, but he was hopeful.

An hour walking through the desert had dashed all of his hope. Everything looked the same and he wasn’t even sure he was still moving in the right direction. He had heard stories of people getting lost in the desert and that they would walk in a literal circle for days before succumbing to heat exhaustion or dehydration. It’s not like Alex could leave marks in the sand where he had been to make a sort of bread trail, they would be gone within a few minutes, the wind washing away all evidence he had been there.

The hours he had spent had netted him a decent amount of thermal energy to spend. It had just been slowly climbing, but he had nothing to spend it on. It wasn’t a lot of energy either, so it really wouldn’t do a whole lot. So far, he had only used his thermal energy as a blaster of sorts. That wasn’t particularly useful in his current situation. Right now he needed a better vantage point. Alex felt like if he could get high enough, he might be able to see the canyon and then he would know which way he needed to be moving in. He had read a comic of a metal suited hero that had a type of propulsion system set up in his suit to allow him to fly. He shot it out of his hands and feet and it allowed him to maneuver while in the air.

Alex felt like he could do something similar. The way he utilized the thermal energy now was great for attacking, but he needed a slow release. He needed to be able to provide a continuous stream of power for his thrust. It would be a more controlled, slightly duller, burst of power where the lasers were highly focused and extremely fast. He channeled the energy into his arm just like he did with his lasers, only now he didn’t focus it to exit his arm in a small area. Instead, he focused it over his entire palm. Also, instead of a quick release he tried for a trickle.

He could feel it beginning to work, but a momentary lapse in concentration allowed all of the energy to release from his hands all at once. Instead of a blaster bolt, he had a thick, continuous rope of molten energy. Below his outstretched hands, he could see, in nearly the perfect outline of his palm, straight into the ground. The sand had apparently been super heated and formed glass. Steam rose up and curled around his legs as if they were tentacles trying to pull him into the depths of the desert.

Not exactly what I was going for, but still extremely cool. Except for the fact that now I have no energy to try again. And it’s getting dark.

Alex took a bite out of his field rations and chased it with a heavy swig of water. A prompt had appeared after he had blasted the sand with his death ray.

You have upgraded a skill.

Concentrated Thermal Blast (Common)- Thermal energy accumulated can be concentrated and fired in a focused blast.

To

Concentrated Thermal Blast (Uncommon)- Thermal energy accumulated can be concentrated and fired in a focused blast. Energy is now used more efficiently and is more potent when used.

Well that was an unexpected surprise. Alex had assumed that he should be able to upgrade his skills somehow. When he had upgraded his armor, it had gone from common to uncommon. Most of his skills were common rarity so it stood to reason that a similar transformation could take place. It didn’t change much of the description, but then again, he hadn’t really changed much of the skill either. It was almost the same thing. He just used a larger area now, which allowed him to send out way more energy than before. He also turned it into a more continuous stream instead of a burst fire. Alex still saw the utility of his previous use, but the new one had its own benefits. He imagined holding his hands to a metal sheet and cutting himself out of a trap or something. He was going to be so cool.