[Cocoa Tea] = Cocoa Leaves (0.25-0.35kg) + Sugarcane (0.1-0.25kg) + Water (Fresh, 0.5-0.75L) + [Bowl] (Any, 1L) + [Campfire] (Any, 370-380°K)
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4) Natura can only grow with time. It does not recede.
Jay Reis sprinted through the starlit jungle, the alien howls of his enemies not far behind. The red planet beamed mercilessly above.
Just a little longer, he reminded himself. You’re almost there.
His heel graced a moss-capped rock, its surface more slippery than expected. Sky reversed with ground as he flipped upside-down, and his skull struck the softened mud beneath. With a groan, Jay rubbed the pain from his scalp. Stars spun in circles where they had just been stationary.
Before he could stand back up, the sounds of branches snapping and bushes rustling grew too near.
Too little time. Jay rolled through the muck and covered his body, then squirmed through the underbrush. The hilt of his reinforced flint knife felt coarse against his calloused fingers. He held his breath.
The monsters came forth. One by one, Natura’s manufactured enemies crossed the threshold of the clearing.
A pair of verdant wolves led the chase, their alluring mossen manes betrayed by the inhumanity beneath their pale green eyes. Their paws made neither sound nor impression against the jungle floor as they trotted by, noses wrinkled as they sought him out by smell.
Shadowed silhouettes vaulted from branch to branch above soon enough, the main foot soldiers on the march. He’d since learned the names of these creatures. “Mudchimps.” Weaker than a vined coyote, but nimble enough to swing from branch to branch while gripping improvised weapons. With the aerial advantage, they could comb whole swaths of the jungle while being quick to pounce once their target became found.
Jay kept still, praying that his plan would work for long enough.
He didn’t see the granite bear. He didn’t need to, either. The moment it entered the area, its overwhelming presence could practically be cut with a knife, freezing the blood in his veins. Only a low growl heralded its arrival.
Another inescapable fact of this world. His mind seemed to be infused with an instinctive grasp at times against enemies whom he could not defeat. A tightening of the throat. A pause in his heartbeat. Beads of sweat suddenly rolled down the back of his neck. The sense was always the same. Like a tadpole in the presence of a shark. Only when this feeling dwindled did he know it was safe to breathe again.
Jay exhaled, feeling the weight of his main adversary lifted. He still had no idea how he’d take out so many weaker enemies, let alone challenge that giant head-on. But he was in the clear for now.
He leaned into the open.
Only to lurch back into cover when another pair of mudchimps doubled back. They bared their teeth and hissed, jade eyes burning with the magical hatred that powered them.
His heart raced anew. The horde never lost track of him for long. As if they could approximate his life force, they always found a way to reach his current location. Then he wouldn’t be able to hide for long as the search party tightened their grip.
He’d barely survived the last couple of nights for a reason.
Wisps of early sunlight were still weak on the horizon, so he wouldn’t have time to wait this through. Once the sun rose, the manifestations would collapse of their own accord.
The mudchimp scouts poked and prodded every bush but where Jay lay. He slithered into the open before the moment could be lost. Red planetlight glinted on the surface of his flint knife as he held the wooden handle tight.
The first mudchimp never saw him coming. The blade tore through its soft muddy throat while Jay’s free hand muffled its mouth before it could cry for help. Monster ichor gushed from the wound, and it fell without a sound.
The other turned a bit too quickly, but this wasn’t his first day on Annwyn. Between the bonus vitality and his ability to [Dash], Jay could land thrice the hits for every one he sustained. His enemy recoiled with a whine as the final jab took it in the eye.
Snap.
Jay gasped. That was his last flint tool he’d just lost. What the hell would he do if he got jumped again!?
There’s still time. Through the cold and the grime and the darkness, Jay quickly crafted a crude spear, his exhausted hands moving as fast as able without a workbench. Any advantage could be the difference between life and death out here.
But before he could finish, the howl of a distant sentry alerted the main horde to his presence.
Jay weaved together the binding just in time. A vined coyote screeched its battle cry as it leapt into the open, only to have its torso pierced when Jay reflexively used his [Thrust]. His muscles screamed from using his skill on a core-less weapon, but the monster died all the same.
He winced from the energy burn, but other monsters were quickly closing in, and his adrenaline pumped anew. Before they could arrive, he sprinted the opposite way, once again running blind in a blackened jungle.
Hisses and howls were never far behind now that his enemies knew his location. Jay raced onward, knowing that a second trip would spell his death.
The sun continued its slow rise on the horizon. He needed something to buy himself those precious few minutes. Anything to give himself more distance. The moment its rays spilled over Annwyn, the manifestations would dissolve into piles of dirt and grass.
The treeline reached an abrupt stop, and the sound of rushing water flowed beneath the grisly cries of his enemies. As Jay reached this edge, he spotted a river flowing at the base of this cliff, well over a hundred feet away.
He gulped at the sight. Would he even be able to survive this fall?
No choice. The Natura-infused fiends breached the underbrush, surrounding this point like an army at the edge of a peninsula. Their pale green eyes watched with glee for the prize they hoped to soon gain.
Only the granite bear stood alone, towering above the others. It watched on with a clenched jaw, knowing what would come next. Its target hadn’t evaded death these past three days for nothing.
As the monsters rushed forth, Jay closed his eyes. His vitality would either be high enough to survive this uncertain drop or it wouldn’t. Staying guaranteed his death, while falling gave him a chance. That would have to be enough.
Jay fell backward, his body plunging deeper into a chaotic abyss.
* * *
The sun shone bright, casting a calm incandescence onto the vibrant forests and roaring peaks of this overgrown island. Annwyn’s flora raised its buds to embrace the sun’s everlasting kiss while animals navigated through quiet meadows and flowing springs as they fed off the island’s bounties.
And at the base of a shadowy ridge, Jay Reis plotted his next set of moves. Though he’d made progress this past day in fortifying his new camp, it was still a far cry from what he’d need to defeat Natura’s current arsenal, much less the boss that commanded them. And that said nothing for his slow but steady drop in Stats.
Name: Jay Reis (Primal Age)
Vitality – 30/30
Hunger – 28/72
Thirst – 11/24 (Sweltering)
Fatigue – 8/16 (Poorly Rested+3)
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Sanity – 82/100
He rubbed the bags beneath his eyes. How long had it been since he’d slept for more than a few hours? Three days? Four? Couldn’t tell. After pulling his trump card on day seven, Jay had spent most of his time running from his enemies instead of defeating them.
True to form, Natura did not fall for his firestorm trap a second time in a row, and now always kept enough troops in reserve to head him off should he have tried to burn them down. That left Jay forced to retreat for the full eight-hour night.
Minute by minute of running through the woods, desperate to not get cornered.
It was only a matter of time before he’d lose that fight. His gear wore and broke, his vitality slowly ticked down through lack of proper nutrition, and spending his daytime sleeping drained his other Stats and did not clear being Poorly Rested.
That was the hardest part. The Poorly Rested Affliction dropped his maximum fatigue by eight points whenever it escalated to another step, and he needed at least six hours of sleep at night, in a bed, in order to remove a step.
So long as he couldn’t beat Natura, his fatigue would only get worse from here.
That, more than all else, exposed the sheer difficulty of his enemy. Jay had read Annwyn’s rules more times than he could count, but it was the fourth one at the top of the Introduction that showed how tenuous this crisis really was.
4) Natura can only grow with time. It does not recede.
No matter what happened, no matter how hard Jay fell, his enemy would never, ever become weaker than before. The second he slipped up just once, it would be over, and with him unable to power up fast enough during the day, a giant wall now stood between him and his own survival. It didn’t matter if he won or lost a battle against Natura.
It would continue to wage a war of attrition that he could never win, like a boot squeezing the oxygen from his lungs.
And yet, Jay had survived until now. There was still a chance for him to turn this around. He just had to come up with his own solution. One that would let him turn the tide back in his favor.
His latest +2 flint spear reached completion, and Jay rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes. This would do well to expedite daytime monster hunting when he could afford to, but without moving it to his growing dead-drop stash of materials, he’d no doubt lose it during the next attack.
He looked around camp and frowned. This ridge made for a suitable location to set himself up, but there was only so much to be done in fortifying it. With the aid of a few crafting stations, he could toss together palisade walls and sharpened spike traps to keep the monsters of Annwyn at bay, but the greatest defense came from the boulders he’d slowly been carving out from the cliff. Should the need ever arise, he could pull a rope and drop a landslide onto his enemies.
But, like the firebomb, that trap could only be played against Natura once before it would adjust tactics.
What am I going to do? The first week had been so pitifully easy compared to this rise in threat. The grind felt so much simpler too. Craft some gear, kill monsters, eat better food, and defeat whatever attacked him.
But the truth was that the longer he remained, the more Natura would rise to defeat him, regardless of how well or poorly he handled this process.
I’m thinking too much. Jay made the quick hike out of his valley, onto the ridge above, and collected his cocoa leaves and lifeberries for the day. The cocoa could be cooked into a tea that made him “Stimmed,” negating the physical feeling of being low on fatigue, and the lifeberries were a necessity to keep his sanity from dropping whenever he ran into more of Natura’s monsters.
His eyes traced the horizon. Out from his savage island, and into the vast ocean beyond. It landed on the nearby E-Rank island, still shrouded in a midday fog.
This was the other location he’d recently learned about by eavesdropping on the other Expats and their midday radio conversations. As it turned out, Naomi and all her friends were E-Rank survivors with “Iron Age” technology, and they only chose this island as their base of operations because the daytime threats were non-existent, and they could zip a raft over to the nearest place of their level.
He pierced through the veil with all his might, hoping to glean some new piece of information about the magnitude of this new place. All for nothing. At best, Jay could make out black-colored stone cliffs and oak trees instead of palm. The rest was impossible to make out at this distance.
…Except for the boss between.
Geysers erupted a couple miles off-shore. Tentacles rose, their towering, gray forms brimming with sharpened spikes, still visible despite the distance. A shadow stretched beneath the disturbed area, practically a third island in the making.
His radio whirred.
“Looks like Hurricane Levi is rearing up again,” Naomi said on the other end.
Desmond grunted. “Why won’t the fucking cunt just leave already? It’s been three days!”
“I’m telling you all,” Ben said, “it has to know we’re using the channel. When was the last time a leviathan stayed in place so long time?”
“When was the last time we found an island chain this advantageous?” Sayid countered.
They continued on from there, just as speculative as always.
This monster – the “leviathan” as they called it – was an oceanic monster of D-Rank proportions, with a level that not even they could identify, even when they got the entries into their Guides. From what they could tell, a monster with that power could destroy everything they built without batting an eye, and only by avoiding it completely could they safely ferry back and forth to collect the materials they needed at their own level.
Thus, they deemed it “Hurricane Levi.” A boss monster to be avoided at all costs, lest it unravel everything they had created.
Jay watched the monstrous creature hidden under a curtain of geysers and foam, and returned to work.
This wasn’t his fight either.
Naomi and her friends could do whatever they wanted. Sure, she’d done the polite thing of offering to help him indirectly in the same way that the others helped each other, all to make up for their first encounter. Apparently, there were all sorts of other Expats floating around on different parts of this island, and though working together broke Rule 5 and raised Natura, Naomi and her friends were still the “peacekeepers” of the island, and did what they could to keep everyone else in line.
Not that Jay gave a damn. He’d never been good with people before and almost preferred that he had the chance to be in solitude now. That was why he got into gaming. Games were simple, enjoyable puzzles to be solved. Other people only complicated things, in a way he could neither express nor understand at times. He’d only picked up streaming as a means to an end, and he only enjoyed competitive gaming because it gave him worthwhile opponents.
No, when push came to shove, Jay was a lone wolf. Of all the aspects that made this second chance so enthralling, perhaps none was more than the opportunity to finally free himself from all the emotional entanglements that came back from Earth. Naomi and the others could do whatever they wanted, so long as they left him out of it.
It was better this way.
Snap.
Jay sighed. Another tool broken. Another couple of minutes building a replacement. Like patching holes from a sinking ship, more were forming than he could hope to seal off, all while the tide kept rising.
Jay tossed aside his latest stone axe and gripped his spear tight. There was no way out of it. If he was to be a lone wolf, then he couldn’t spend all day hiding from the world.
He’d have to return to the hunt.
A/N: As requested later, I've added the relevant character details for this chapter onward:
Name: Jay Reis (Primal Age)
Vitality – 30/30
Hunger – 24/72
Thirst – 10/24 (Sweltering)
Fatigue – 8/16 (Poorly Rested+3)
Sanity – 82/100
Main Crafts: Armor Crafting 1, Base Building 1, Cooking 0, Medicine 0, Tailoring 1, Tool Crafting 1, Weapon Crafting 1.
Weapon Crafts: Axes 0, Bows 1, Spears 3.
Armor Crafts: Heavy Armor 2, Light Armor 2, Medium Armor 0, Shields 2.
Armor Skills:
Heavy Armor: [Push]
Light Armor: [Dash]
Shield: [Brace]
Weapon Skills:
Spears: [Thrust]
Armor:
[Fur Helmet+1] (Reinforced)
[Fur Chestpiece+1]
[Fur Leggings]
[Fur Boots]
[Fur Gloves]
Weapons:
[Flint Spear+2] (Reinforced)
[Bone Dart Pouch+1]: Contains 15 [Bone Darts] (Poisoned)
[Wooden Bow]
[Crude Quiver]: Contains 20 [Flinthead Arrows]
Tools:
[Flint Knife]
[Stone Axe]
[Stone Hammer]