“Way grosser than I expected.”
Kaltyr sat in the river near where she killed the overly aggressive fish and splashed herself with water, scrubbing away at the blood she’d stupidly gotten on herself. Moments before, she obliterated the skull of the dino-goose during its confusion born from having its neck so easily immobilized. The bird’s head easily crumpled under the immense force brought down by the rock in Kaltyr’s hand, but consequently exploded from the leftover kinetic energy.
“Well, less of an explosion and more of a splattering.”
Wincing from the relatively large wound on her leg, the girl rose from the river. Water streaming down her body, she turned to look at the spoils of war lying motionless on the shore. Kaltyr had set her enemies’ corpses next to the pile of normal fish she caught.
“Ouchouchouchouchouch…”
With the adrenaline and excitement of battle having mostly evaporated, nothing distracted from nor lessened the agony of her injury. Every moment of every second was dominated by the fury of a star buried within her thigh, burning away at her flesh regardless of whether she moved or rested. And yet, somehow, that strange subconscious of hers warned that not everything was as it seemed…that her wound didn’t hurt as it should.
“And I’m not sure of what to think about that. On one hand, if I’m in less pain, that’s good. But…why am I in less pain? Is something artificially dampening the pain signals my nerves should be sending? I mean, that’s fine if it’s permanent and only affects pain, but if not, pain, or some other sense, might catch me off guard during a fight…”
She gulped, glancing down at the mangled muscle tissues of her leg.
“I don’t want to think about it.”
With a few pained grunts, she shuffled onto the shore, then made her to way the loot. Cringing, she crouched, inspecting the bodies of the twenty-centimeter-long red fish and dino-goose.
“Are these different from normal animals? Because, the guidebook only uses the word ‘beast’ rather than ‘animal’. Is the difference that beasts will attack me? Or…” She thought back to the starry-eyed creature, its pool of mana, and aura of strength. “Or that ‘beasts’ can level up?”
Kaltyr grabbed her head with both hands, massaging her temples as though the stimulus would provide her with enough brainpower to come up with the answer to her questions. She delved deep into her thoughts, poking and prodding memories, turning over ideas, and calling for inspiration. The wind blew, harmless critters chirped, and sunlight warmed her clothing, but only the smell of pungent blood invaded her senses enough to spark a revelation.
“That’s…right…” She released her skull with a sigh, bringing her arms back down to a rest at her sides. “The System Wishes You Good Fucking Luck specifically told me that my questions won’t be answered, so…” Kaltyr moved into a seated position from her previous crouch. “Is there even a point to speculating as though there’s some grand explanation to everything that happens? Probably not. I’ll just call creatures ‘beasts’ if they’re hostile.”
The girl smiled as she plucked a dark green feather from the dino-goose’s fan-like tail.
“Really, I’m just too lazy to think so much. It’s boring! What interests me more is how I can make use of these beast corpses.”
The absolutely stunningly beautiful deep green coat of feathers wrapping the body of the fallen bird shined under the sun, reflecting far more colors than just the one when they caught the light. In all truth, Kaltyr’s eyes were first drawn to the beast’s feathers for their aesthetic value when it appeared, rather than focusing on how dangerous the attacker could be.
“I guess I was really into…uh, what’s the word? Fa…fash…fashion? I was into fashion on my world.”
The girl shrugged at her discovery of another word.
“Aaaanywaaaay,” she stretched the word out and reached for the dino-goose’s corpse, picking at another majestic feather, “plucking these feathers is gonna take a long ti—"
Without warning, Kaltyr’s words were interrupted by a bright flash of white light that exploded from directly in front of her. The large spark blinded the girl, sending her reeling backwards, her hands instinctively moving to cover her eyes.
“Gah!”
She fell, her back hitting the gravel river shore where a relatively sharp rock coincidentally sat. She screamed louder.
A moment of panic passed as Kaltyr’s vision swam and confusion washed over her at the lack of pain anywhere but her leg. When she regained her senses and recovered from the surprise, the girl scrambled to her feet, held in a pained cry from agitating her injury, vigilantly inspected her surroundings, and raised her arms defensively. She remembered that it was called a “boxer’s stance”.
Nothing. She found nothing.
“There definitely has to be an attacker this time, because what else would have caused th—”
Kaltyr’s jaw dropped upon her sights turning to where she left the beast corpses, where she expected to see the bodies.
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“Where’d the bird go?!”
Still keeping a lookout for enemies, the girl slowly crept back to where she sat before the explosion of light…where only the red fish beast and pile of normal fish lied. Where the dino-goose’s headless body once lied, only a pile of feathers resided, the rest of the body nowhere to be seen.
Continuing her vigilance, the girl first retrieved the foldable knife from her pants, which were still sprawled across the river beach, before returning her attention to the missing body.
“I…I didn’t hear anything but my own scream, so how… Did something take the goose? That…”
Very painfully, Kaltyr shifted all her weight onto her right leg while using the injured one to kick at the pile, scattering the some-odd twenty verdant feathers.
“But how?!” She questioned, finding nothing hiding beneath the plumage. “How could ANYTHING have taken the bird while leaving its feathers behind in that instant?!
Feeling that she was in too much of a rush for answers, Kaltyr calmed herself with several deep breaths before assuming a new defensive position with her knife. She had one, unlikely, hypothesis in mind, but as it seemed too ridiculous to be true, the girl resigned herself to watching her environment for a little while longer in case the disappearance of the dino-goose was really the result of an enemy.
……
“Run along, now. I don’t wanna have to kill you.”
Kaltyr faced off against a cute squirrel that hung from a branch not too far from her.
“You’ll definitely die if you attack me!”
Feeling slightly threatened by the rodent three times the size of one of her fists, the girl added an edge to her tone, hoping that the change added some weight to her voice and changed the beast’s mind about what it seemed ready to do.
Up on the little branch, the squirrel with a streak of red running down its back surveyed the area, nodding and bobbing its fuzzy little head as it seemingly noted all relevant details. Kaltyr swore she saw the squirrel analyzing its chances of killing her as it turned from looking at the wound on her thigh to the fallen creatures she laid on the ground.
“That’s right, li’l guy: I’ve killed before and I’ll do it again!”
Kaltyr brandished her pocketknife with a few slashes and jabs at the air in front of her while loudly grunting…which seemed to work, as the adorable squirrel turned around and scampered off back into the dense forest canopy as quickly as it first appeared.
The girl vigilantly waited a few minutes for the rodent to suddenly jump out of a bush in case the retreat was a fake out, but it did not return, presumably on the hunt for easier prey.
“Phew!”
Sweat droplets forming on her forehead, Kaltyr released her breath in relief.
“Even if it weren’t level 1…” She recalled sensing the pool of mana residing within the squirrel. “The idea of fighting it is still more terrifying than anything that dino-goose could possibly do.”
The dinosaur goose thing was an easy enemy to defeat due to its apparent lack of intelligence and large, easily handled body. It was almost too simple of a task to kill it, as not only did it fail to take advantage of Kaltyr’s openings when the fish beast attacked, its long, vulnerable neck was, quite simply…an off button. Essentially, all the girl had to do was reach out and press it for the fowl to self-destruct with how weak of an enemy it was.
“Not only did that squirrel seem pretty smart…” She imagined it scurrying around her. “…but would I even be able to hit it? Even if the damned fish didn’t take a big ol bite out of my leg I don’t think I’d stand much of a chance of matching its speed. Squirrels are nimble little fuckers.”
Kaltyr sat herself down with a grunt, finding that she was getting used to the constant thrumming of pain in her thigh, and put a hand over the fish beast’s corpse.
“Scales.” She said, bracing herself by squinting her eyes and shielding her face with her other arm.
Besides her hand quivering and the sound of her breaths becoming apparent…nothing.
“Okay. Now I’ll…”
She lowered her outstretched arm, letting her fingers fall onto the slick outermost layer of the fish, making physical contact.
“Scales and bones.”
Nothing.
“Yeah, I imagined that I wouldn’t be able to get more than one ‘thing’ from it. Scales!” She repeated, still guarding against the surprise from last time…and rightfully so.
Exactly like with the dino-goose, a bright light exploded out from the fish, still blinding Kaltyr despite how much she squinted her eyes and covered most of her face with her arm.
But this time…I didn’t overreact.
Kaltyr sat still and rubbed her eyes for a minute before her vision finally cleared, at which point she lifted her eyelids to find that the beast she killed in the river was replaced by a neat stack of red, paper-like sheets. Overjoyed at having her hypothesis so easily verified, the girl gingerly lifted one of the red sheets, feeling its texture between her fingers with a huge grin plastered over her face.
“Scales…” She brought the sheet closer to her face, eyeing the individual scales that linked to make it up, before turning back to the stack to count the total number of sheets. “And there might actually be more scales now than the fish had covering it. It didn’t have this much surface area, surely.”
Kaltyr spent a little more time running her fingers along the perfectly smooth and rounded shapes, searching for flaws or indications that they once wrapped a fish. When she found none, she returned the sheet to its stack before stuffing the entire thing into one of her cargo pants pockets—which still lied nearby. Then, she placed herself next to the stack of regular fish she killed.
“If I saw everything correctly when I…looted? Looted feels like the right word. When I looted the fish, then I should see it again when I loot another corpse.”
Kaltyr once again placed her hand atop a fish—though, a regular one, this time—and turned her head away from the corpse. She made absolutely sure that the angle at which she turned was obtuse enough so that the initial burst of light couldn’t blind her. The girl took in a deep breath, watching the lazy river to her right slowly meander its way downhill, and primed herself to act quickly.
“Flesh.”
The moment the word left her lips, the world seemed to take on a ridiculously high exposure as the pure white of the flash that came with looting reflected off all nearby surfaces.
NOW!
With a violent jerk of her neck, Kaltyr faced forward again, catching the fish’s transformation without having been temporarily blinded. During the briefest of instances, she watched as the animal’s shape—still releasing plenty of light, but not too much—morphed. Its size shrunk as it lost mass and layers of its body disappeared in an instant. Scales, eyes, fins, gills, tail…gone.
But the most ludicrous detail of it all remained that, along with the flashbang and transformation from fish to pile of fish flesh…multicolor confetti and glitter exploded out from where the creature once sat.
Kaltyr blankly stared at the area around the fish fillet, watching with pursed lips as the hundreds of sparkles and confetti disappeared after a mere few seconds of existence.
“All that’s missing is fanfare!”