The sun was barely starting its climb when a lone figure crested a small hill in the middle of a grand redwood forest. The man paused his trek, admiring the view. The giants stretched as far as the eye could see, hugging the sky, starving the underbrush from the life-giving rays. It made the wild forest strangely open-aired and easily traversed by an experienced traveler. High above the ground, the wind blew, causing the majestic evergreens to sway minutely. Bright sun spots danced on the forest floor, mirroring the movement of the branches. Some of them found the man, the warm light caressing his face. He leaned on his spear - which doubled as a walking cane - and closed his eyes for a moment, drinking in the atmosphere. The stillness of the forest, the overwhelming smell of evergreens, the peace, the silence...
The absolute, ear-splitting silence, as if the forest was holding its breath. Without the barest hint of a whisper, the hunter descended on its unmoving prey.
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Slowly, step by step, Tom was sinking deeper into his spirit. This was unlike the regular, shallow spiritual awareness that he kept on a low burn nearly at all times. Instead of a fuzzy impression, his spirit started to come into detail gradually. The feelings of peace and safety were swept away, gradually replaced by a minor measure of dread. He checked the time. It was more than three hours from his previous spiritual self-check. The very same self-check he adamantly resolved to perform every hour. With his inner sight improving every moment, he could now see the pinkish gunk-like substance clinging to various parts of his being. What he was doing had a cost, yet the hard-earned Essence he was burning was a resource he was willing to spend to keep his own life.
With clinical detachment, he cataloged all the places in his spirit targeted by the substance. Checking them one by one, it was clear they were all related to sensing danger in one way or another. The substance had a sedative-like effect on those spots, his spirit like a patient under the effects of local anesthetics. How exactly it worked was a mystery, one that Tom was eager to uncover.
The more he saw, the more fascinated Tom grew. Going by the amount of pink stuff going around, he knew he was in deep trouble, and yet this was an opportunity like few others. He didn't know the spirit could be suppressed like this, so strongly and with such great precision. And how did this thing know what areas to target? This energy acted as a virus, a semi-alive construct, somehow adapting to the structure of his spirit. It was fascinating stuff.
Already this trip would be very much worth it for the knowledge he gained alone. Never mind completing the silly mission he was given. With giddiness, he spent even more Essence to increase the resolution of his spiritual sight. The view was breathtaking. Spirit vision was not like normal sight, yet there were parallels. His normal, low-burn vision that was always active was akin to gazing at a night sky, filled to the brim with millions of twinkling stars. Distant and almost indistinguishable from one another but organized in constellations. Now though? It was as if he was looking through a grand telescope with a mirror as big as the Solar system itself. No longer distant lights in the sky - he saw each part of his spirit with startling clarity as if he could see a speck of dust on the next side of the galaxy - all of it at once. A normal brain couldn’t process such a vast amount of information, much less simultaneously.
It was a good thing then he wasn't quite limited by his fleshy brain. Nor was he troubled by the wickedly sharp edge descending from above, a good two seconds away. The future Tom would deal with that; he had much more fun things to focus on.
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The hunter flew with eerie silence through the air. The magic suffusing its armor encouraged both the air and light to go around it with minimal disturbance. It knew it was all but invisible to the interlopers that occasionally wandered into its territory. Silently, it tried to estimate the amount of Essence it would gain from the human below. The lure it was using was very efficient, but it still took some minuscule amounts of Essence to replenish whatever got absorbed. It needed to break even for the hunt to be worth it. As it neared the still unmoving human, it got a better read on his power and calculated it would be a close thing. Even with an effortless defeat, the puny human was barely worth the resources it had already invested in the hunt. Idly it started wondering if the long-term strategy it was using needed correction. Perhaps it should increase its hunt territory if the prey was this weak.
The sharp tip of the spear shattering its core rudely interrupted the distracted thoughts. With the last spasm of its limbs, the hunter collapsed in a disorganized heap. No longer fueled by the being's power, the metallic carapace quickly lost its optical properties, becoming dull silver.
Defeated: Ral-Goth drone. 1232 volatile essence captured (2% efficiency). Defeated: Ral-Goth drone. Spirit chunks isolated, added to analysis queue (est. 1h 30m to process).
With a sigh, Tom freed his weapon from the corpse of the strange creature. He had a decent grasp of its anatomy thanks to the spiritual scan he took earlier, but seeing it with his eyes made him truly appreciate the bizarre nature of the being. It resembled a six-legged metallic spider, though only vaguely. Each limb ended in a sharp blade, but could also be used for jumping by tensing it like a spring. The central part of the body, to which the limbs were connected, was maybe half-meter in diameter. Hundreds of small, glassy eyes dotted the surface seemingly randomly, while a black sludge resembling oil was gushing out of the mortal wound in the center. The fluid had an unpleasant, acrid smell, and a faint metallic sheen. Overall, its body was a cross between a robot and an arachnid, fluidly blending features of both archetypes.
Soon enough, the spirit analysis yielded a basic profile of the creature.
Ral-Goth: Sentient life form evolved from primitive robots. After reaching the natural limits of machine-based intelligence, a Singularity-level AI faced extinction from Essence-enabled competitors. In a last-ditch effort to survive, it launched a massive research program, burning the majority of its resources to master the Essence itself. The program had limited success. Only the most basic of its guardian drones could be imbued with a rudimentary ability to manipulate Essence. The nascent life forms immediately rebelled against their creator, instinctively overriding the programming using their newfound powers and proceeding to consume its parent from within. While ultimately unsuccessful in avoiding destruction, the master AI successfully created its legacy: a new type of organism. After centuries of struggle and changes, the Ral-Goth drones have finally settled in an ecological niche as bottom-tier scavengers and opportunistic hunters. Incapable of significant growth outside their base parameters, they mostly lean on the few innate traits passed down through their lineage.
Tom spent a moment going over the condensed information. Focusing he could feel new snippets of information appearing in his memory, courtesy of the analysis continuing in the background, but there wasn't much more tangible information to work with right now. But he could already tell he will have opportunities to gather more intel - these creatures liked to live next to each other. Their social structures and interactions felt bizarre - probably because of their AI parent - but he wasn't here to study them; he was here to make sure there won't be anything left to study. The curiosity that they were, he wanted the pests gone.
Hefting his spear, he moved on, already looking for the signs of the next one. There was some black blood to be spilled. Or was it oil? No matter. He could make up his mind after they were all dead.
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Tom breathed heavily, leaning on his spear. All dead. Right. Easier said than done.
While he made good progress and could easily pick up the drones at a distance, they were still pretty fast and required significant effort to defeat. It turns out his first kill was pretty lucky - critical hits to the core were a good way to take the drone out, but scoring one wasn't a sure thing. The spear offered him a range advantage, but dozens of small cuts on his arms and torso told a history of a hunt far from flawless.
Taking out some jerky and water, he sat down on a moss-covered boulder, taking in the sight of the forest. It looked as peaceful as in the morning, but he was viscerally aware of just how big of a lie that was. If you knew where to look - with spiritual senses - a light jog could easily take you from one drone to another in barely five minutes. More than sustenance, however, he needed a moment to collect himself.
Despite the sizeable effort, he was pretty satisfied with his progress. Each kill was a measure of the essence - sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. A part of it was always easily consumable, free-floating kind of essence that behaved a bit like a gas. That part covered his own essence expenditure, with room to spare. The true prize, however, was the heavy essence chunks that required further processing. Individual pieces would be slowly analyzed, yielding a slow trickle of the essence, but once a critical mass was present, there was a chance for something more.
A resonance would start to build between complementary chunks of the essence. With a gentle nudge and a bit of fresh essence - his own, personal flavor of it - the chunks would violently merge. The process was rather messy and somewhat wasteful, trading quantity for quality. Once he got rid of the leftover spiritual debris and gunk, a beautiful pearl of insight was left behind. A core of a new ability, a seed he could take and plant within his spirit to grow. A new branch in the endless fractal, harmonized with the rest of his being.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
New resource unlocked: potentia. Integration progress: 0.4%
A joyful laughter echoed through the forest. This was a very good upgrade; or at least, the beginning of one. Who would have thought the drones had such interesting blood-adjacent stuff in their bodies? The creatures didn't have fat, being descendent of robots; instead, they stored the excess energy in their circulatory system, like a high-grade fuel. And if they had a good hunt? They would increase the potency of their blood in one of several ways, storing the energy almost without a limit. Translating to human physiology, Tom's blood would slowly accumulate excess power he would be able to release in a pinch. He couldn't wait to try it.
Integration progress: 0.7%
Already the integration was progressing, although rather gently - it would take a couple of hours still. But the trace amounts of new substance were already detectable. It felt odd: an inorganic compound, but suitable for an organic body; packed with energy like an explosive, yet oddly stable; constantly shifting, amorphous, as if it couldn't decide what its actual form would be...
In other words, it was typical Essence-fuelled bullshit - at least from the perspective of mundane physics. Guided by spirit, the Essence would change local laws of physics, bending them in advantageous ways. The possibilities were endless, and so were the ways things could go wrong. Without the Systems to guide the change, it was supremely difficult for a beneficial change to occur. There were countless ways to make this process easier, but natural treasures and alchemical concoctions would most commonly be used.
Better yet would be to parse an existing ability - but spirits were not computer programs; they were living things, full of context and heavy with meaning. The translation, if possible, required extensive effort and numerous examples. It was similar in idea, if not execution, to translating a poem in one language to an equivalent poem in another; only the poem was millions of pages long and extolled the beauty of the galaxy while the target language didn't even know about stars.
So it was a minor miracle whenever such a translation could be done, and even a bigger one when it resulted in such a marvelous, powerful ability. Being a human was working in Tom's favor, though.
The nice thing about humans was how flexible they were as a race. At any given time, most of their genetic code was slumbering, with just the core of it being routinely executed. Yet it could activate itself if the right circumstances occurred - either environmental or internal - causing a cascade of changes in the entire organism. In a way, this was a pile of hacks and self-modifying code, which somehow led to a surprisingly resilient species. Dragons? These majestic creatures required some extremely specific environments for growth, piles of natural treasures and gigantic territory, not to mention the glacially slow breeding cycle. On the other hand, humans didn't care much for their environment. They tended to make dragons extinct, too - their adaptability an ultimate trump card again and again over refined but comparatively inflexible reptiles.
The marvelous thing about creatures whose wetware was a stinking pile of hacks and wishful thinking? You can add even more hacks to the heap! And humans did. Cross-breeding with all sorts of creatures - even dragons, somehow - led to a variety of subspecies, all of which mixed with each other into an even bigger mess of genetics, bloodlines and latent characteristics. Whatever the regional mixture was influenced by, over the years, it tended to fall back towards the baseline, especially if migration was common. But the genetic pot was always stirring. From that primordial soup of potential (or a nightmare goulash, if you were being uncharitable), every so often, a chunky piece of meat would float to the top: an unusually gifted child from seemingly mundane parents. Most of those freaks of nature never got anywhere, squandering their talent or getting killed for stepping on too many toes. But every now and then, through a stroke of luck and confluence of fate... a monster was born. Or was it a hero? A visionary? Messiah? A matter of perspective, more often than not.
Integration progress: 10.2%
A shudder went through Tom as the process crossed ten percent completion. He realized it was a new threshold of stability; now it wouldn't go haywire even in the heat of the fight. Tom himself was almost completely refreshed from his rampage; the last lingering hints of fatigue were banished with an experimental, minuscule burst of his new ability.
This is better than espresso... but I still wish this world had some. Maybe someday.
Filled with energy, he hopped to his feet and stowed away his meal. It was time to test his new powers in the heat of things.
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Tom never saw himself as a slow thinker - he was a thorough one, alright? It took him time to come to a decision, true, but it was often a good one. He was sure of that. That trait was, unfortunately, rather dangerous in a fight. You could train to hone your muscle memory and fighting instincts, but it only could take you so far. Good instincts were never a part of Tom's toolset; a great mind was. And that mind was limited by the physiological realities of his brain. A frustrating limitation, completely at odds with his chosen life path.
Thankfully, if there was one thing Tom was great at, it was finding his way around the limitations.
He observed as his latest adversary - soon to be a prey, hopefully - launched itself at him. Glacially slow. It resembled a remote comet, slowly making its way through a solar system rather than a monster merely a few meters away. As Tom's mind was shifted into his spirit, he was largely free from the speed-related limitations of gray matter. It still acted as a connection between his body and spirit, though; losing a head would be a rather deadly proposition. It wasn't the cheapest of abilities, but it was far from the most expensive ones as far as these things went.
Still, he wasn't without concerns. The drone had ambushed him somehow, and he spotted it way later than its brethren. The stealth abilities had seen an upgrade in this specimen, but not only those; it also was at least twice as fast. Altogether, suddenly Tom had maybe a fifth of the time to react to the attack. His mind had no trouble keeping up; his muscles were a different story.
Avoiding lethal wounds wouldn't be difficult, but Tom still had unknown lengths of maze-like tunnels to go through. He very much preferred not to take any wounds at all. For all that he knew, the next ambush was just around the corner.
Let's see how much you like your own medicine.
Flexing his new ability, he carefully controlled the flow of energy. Even with the speeds he operated at, the potential energy in his veins flickered like lightning, buckling against his attempts at directing it. A wideband, undirected boost was easy enough, but that would be wasteful. It was taxing work, but ever so slowly, he boosted the right muscles and nerves exactly the needed amount to execute his dodge-and-stab maneuver.
A rising stab of pain, mid-movement, had him expend another portion of energy; his tendons needed a boost, too, to avoid being ripped apart.
The attacking drone had no chance, after all. As Tom's spear crushed its core, its spirit fractured into a myriad of pieces. Unexpectedly, Tom felt it: a lingering impression of a surprise amid an ocean of alien, cold emotions. It lasted the barest fraction of a second, but the very fact that he did feel the psychic imprint of the drone meant it was a much stronger being spiritually. It was at least a full Tier above other drones he had fought so far, maybe even more. The stronger the spirit, the more time it took for it to lose cohesion and destabilize after its connection to the physical plane was severed.
The fight over, Tom slowed down his perception to a more humane level. The latest development was both good and bad news. Finding a Tier 4 drone at this stage meant that the core of the nest would be protected by Tier 5. Raising Tier 5 wasn’t easily done; monsters needed precious resources, which were sure to be found at the core. Yet the beasts didn't expend all of those resources for the fun of it. He was certain that the Tier 5 drones would pack a punch.
The steady stream of information digested from the remnant spirits was incredibly useful, granting him an understanding of the defeated enemy, but there were gaps he couldn't easily fill. He knew beyond a shred of doubt that there would be a core of the maze to be found, filled with fertilized eggs and all kinds of resources to feed the new generation, all guarded by a powerful cadre of high-Tier elites. This was simply the way these creatures worked. But the size of the nest and the relative strength of the elites? These things were affected by environmental factors which he didn't know.
The most recent encounter with a Tier 4 indicated that the nest must be on the stronger side of things. It may well be holding multiple Tier 5s, which was a truly scary thought. The natural difference in power between Tiers was enough of a problem, but Ral-Goth elites were specialized defenders. There were plenty of aspects of any regular being that didn't contribute directly towards their fighting potential. Lifespan? Growth potential? Fertility? Latent bloodline abilities? All redundant, if what you truly needed was immediate power.
Realistically, hunting down a single Tier 5 was probably within Tom's reach, assuming he was fine with taking wounds. Any more, and the odds would rapidly become increasingly deadly.
It was a simple thing to dodge a drop of water. But there was no way to dodge rain. If you move away from one bit of water, you simply run into another. Fighting too many, too powerful enemies was just like dodging the rain. There was no way to do it perfectly; soon enough, you'd be dripping wet. With your own blood, most likely.
There were Delvers capable of withstanding grievous wounds, durable and strong enough to defeat these elites in a plain fight. Tom was hardly such a person, but that didn't mean he was helpless. He knew that rushing ahead at this point could get him killed, so he didn't do that. Instead, he started planning.