As the group escaped a fight that got too hot, they were still fully satisfied as this one went on for a very long time compared to their average.
‘I got my tier 2 leveling cycle I think…’
*Ding* Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation reached Tier 4 Level 13
*Ding* Energy: Specialized Cosmic Mist Element reached Tier 3 Level 10
*Ding* Energy Compression: Provided Quick Compression reached Tier 2 Level 95
*Ding* Body Control: Provided Humanoid Body reached Tier 2 Level 100
*Ding* Body Control: Provided Prolonged Body Use reached Tier 2 Level 100
‘Huhu… A level in momentum… Didn’t expect that, not gonna lie, does it come from like 3 weeks of light use from the moment I landed? Anyway, I got a level in cosmic mist, so let’s report everything.’
A level in a tier 3 masteries meant he needed to actualize his diary, so Rune opened his masteries window.
Masteries
Tier 1 Masteries
Physical Fundamental: Reinforcement: Tier 4 Level 42
Physical Fundamental: Fighting Instinct: Tier 4 Level 19
Physical Fundamental: Body Control: Tier 4 Level 20
Energy Fundamental: Fine Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 37
Energy Fundamental: Grand Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 37
Energy Fundamental: Energy Compression: Tier 4 Level 20
Spiritual Fundamental: Perception Control: Tier 4 Level 6
Spiritual Fundamental: Awareness Division: Tier 4 Level 36
Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 13
Tier 2 Masteries
Energy: Specialized Cosmic Mist Element: Tier 3 Level 10
Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion: Tier 4 Level 34
Cohesion: Specialized Endless Adaptation: Tier 1 Level 5
Tier 3 Masteries
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Defense: Tier 3 Level 6
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Structure: Tier 3 Level 6
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Armor: Tier 3 Level 6
Tier 4 Masteries
Energy Compression: Provided Quick Compression: Tier 2 Level 95
Body Control: Provided Humanoid Body: Tier 2 Level 100
Body Control: Provided Prolonged Body Use: Tier 2 Level 100
‘Still 1 level per week for active tier 4. It’s not for passive as I kept it active during site 19, so 1 level every 2 weeks still. 2 levels per week for tier 3, normal. Tier 2 are catching up nicely…’
Wrapping up his actualization, he let his app do the timestamping and prepared himself for the next stop.
It had been 1 week since their departure from site 19, and in his diary about the bone region, he wouldn’t report anything interesting about this period of travel.
The environment didn’t change much, the few unique monsters they encountered had forced them to run too quickly, and as it was still explored territory, they didn’t have anything to do except steadily fighting, surviving, and striving for levels.
At their current rhythm, Rune judged they should be able to reach the minimum safety threshold they fixed for themselves by a large margin before they reached the last line of occupied sites prior to entering the unknown grounds.
Two levels per week for his, and probably theirs, tier 3 masteries was that monstrous in his mind.
A monster appeared in his perception, making him focus on him and think about whether to stop or continue.
‘No, too soon.’
But the fight they just left wasn’t that far behind, only half a minute at their evacuation speed, so he ignored this one and passed it.
However, when the monster neared his bubble, it was like something in it called for his attention.
His “nascent” experience in monster behavior analysis told him this monster didn’t act as it should, and he had more than 50 pages of data about how it should act in his head. Literally in his head.
‘Running away? If it’s a nest-born then I can understand if it was chased by a big meany, but if it’s spawned…’
With the most probable hypothesis his experience told him, he looked at the ground, wanting to find evidence of a massive monster wave or a gigantic hotspot, but the ground vibration remained at a relatively calm state. Nothing scary enough to send a monster running away.
‘Spawned monsters run away when they’re born with an understanding that what they’re facing cannot be resolved by strength. In the bone region, it would be either an environmental strike or a flock of energy lives.’
Environmental strikes were already scary enough to make him slow down. It was a tier 4 zone, so events capable of vaporizing peak tier 4 were possible, and endless adaptation or not, he wasn’t even close to the level of resistance he needed yet.
That wasn’t even talking about his 2 friends.
‘But how could it have sensed an environmental strike? If it was so easy to predict them they wouldn’t be so lethal… So a flock of energy lives? Or something unique to the bone region I don’t know about?’
Reducing his 2nd stage sound absorption intent at the same time he came to a stop, he infused more energy into his larynx energy construct.
“Something’s going on, very low chance it’s lethal or inescapable. We’re going to hover a few meters above the ground and wait for signs that whatever is happening is over. Can you turn on your camera in passive recording mode Arik? There’s a chance it’s a flock of energy lives and I don’t want you two to miss it.”
Soon, a squad of 26 bone monsters appeared in his perception, but neither of them were waiting for each other, so he concluded something was really coming their way and that to evade it they would need a lot more speed than they had at their disposal.
Finding a good recess in the ground, he waited for Arik to give him his turned on camera and went to position it pointing towards the sky with a large angle, then he backed up, let his two friends get a good look at where they were, hovered, and waited.
“I’m going all-out, so unless you’re hit, don’t react to what my 4th stage might do, and I’ll deactivate it if it really comes to it.”
After he said that, he used his all-out intent and hoped it was enough.
More monsters started to pass by where his perception was able to see, leading him to wonder if what he supposed to be a flock of energy lives had already surrounded all the direction and was actively using something like a hoarding hunt tactic.
Not having to split his focus for anything, Rune kept the majority of his attention on the behavior of the monsters. He saw how they went from mild panic and scrambling away at their maximum speed to what he interpreted as true panic with no time to care about what was happening.
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And finally, he was proven true when a big army of bone monsters entered his sphere at the same time as multiple extremely bright things.
‘Energy life…’
Then the top of his perception sphere was totally occupied by bright spots that seemed alive as they plunged into the big army of bone monsters that started at an extremity of his perception and exited on the opposite side.
‘I’m so freaking smart to have chosen this recess… I hope the camera will survive.’
As additional security, he stopped hovering so high and neared the ground. He stopped only half a meter off the ground.
A flock of energy lives hunting wasn’t a ground-breaking event in his book. He was sure even if he was detected, they would be too stupid to all attack something they didn’t see, leaving only the single energy life to enter his haven and be dealt with as quickly as he could.
With nothing to do but wait and see, he put to memory the appearance of this energy life. A single central orb of not-normal energy surrounded by layer and layer of normal energy, itself surrounded by a cloud of energy that morphed around and allowed them to do… Anything.
He saw some that grabbed, some that flattened, some that pierced, some that cut, this cloud of energy was the swiss knife of the physical energy world.
When a bone monster stopped moving, all the energy lives tried to get a piece and not even a bone was left a few seconds later, and the cycle kept repeating.
Even when the bone monster army defended itself or counter-attacked in fake unity, the damaged energy lives only had to survive a few seconds and join back the extremely dense flock up high to be safe and be ready to come back a minute later.
With stars in his eyes, Rune could only compare what he saw as a flock of shooting stars that could only be evaded, not stopped. From 1 kilometer high all the way to 10 kilometers, the limit of his perception, it was filled to the brim with tier 4 entities that cared about nothing.
‘It’s so magical.’
Unfortunately, it was all too short as the bone monster army quickly passed by, and with it the flock of energy raptures. A few minutes after he didn’t see anything else, he scattered his cosmic mist bubble enough for Arik and Astryde to recover their perception.
“Welcome to the after-flock land! As you can see the area has changed a bit, but with Rune’s Airlines you don’t have to worry about anything! Your safety is our most treasured reason to live!”
Letting the two take in the sight, he reached for the camera that hadn’t been destroyed or even touched and gave it to Arik, who took it wordlessly and started to manipulate it, turning off the passive mode and switching it to its active mode.
A digital screen appeared on the side, and while they didn’t have eyes to see, they could focus on the colored pixels and form the image as if they still had.
If they couldn’t, then connected screens wouldn’t have existed to begin with.
Arik and Astryde weren’t just “slightly curious” about what just came to pass. For them, nothing took place, absolutely nothing, but clearly, the changed land told them something massive took place.
Rune let them discover by themselves as he occupied himself by bringing up his bone region diary and starting to write with his still hot ambers of feeling and memory. He didn’t search for complexity as he only took a few minutes to fuse keywords with what he wanted to talk about.
When he finished on his side, his two friends were in the same “stars in their eyes” state as he had been a few minutes prior. That only ended when Arik got a data chip and made an additional copy of the recording.
“We never know, we never know,” he justified himself by saying that while there was no need, making the situation a bit funny.
“I’ll record and transmit this place for the people that are interested in studying energy lives in action, let me just get my tower,” Astryde on her side made a very smart comment and got her own ether tower out, activating it and using her connected screen to add a description to this set of coordinates.
“One writes, one records, one transmits, we’re a shock reporter team deep in hostile territory! Wait, we're affiliated with Undecided Company, so we’re the official Undecided field-reporter team!” Rune noted the fact that the three of them had very different reactions to the same situation.
“Short but intense, when I have time I’ll edit it with the rest of the epic moments I recorded. I’ll do that next site, it’ll make a hell of an entertainment,” Arik was lost in his own world after seeing the video and talked aloud his thoughts.
“Make sure to include the part where I put the camera down, seeing a moving skeleton will hype the thing even more.”
Arik turned his head, shocked or impressed by the spontaneous advice, “You’re really an entertainment genius when you want to.”
“It’s in my blood!”
Soon after, the ether tower sent the alarm that the scan was over.
“I’m finished, should we rush to the next site now that the path is clear?” Astryde announced she was over while suggesting a clever plan change.
Though she was a bit wrong, and Arik was there to make her understand that.
“Do you really think we’ll gain more than a few days if we do that? Getting to the next site with the path that has been opened up would mean the site has been razed.”
“Ho,” she realized instantly that her thoughts shortcut, while clever, wasn’t true, “I withdraw what I just said, let’s hope the path isn’t clear at all. Let’s go?”
Observing no reaction from Arik and not objecting himself, Rune gathered the cosmic mist around but didn’t recreate a bubble.
“Ultimately nothing changed, we saw something amazing but we couldn’t touch it. We’re too weak to! Same as when we departed from site 19, I’ll wait until the first encounter before making my bubble again, enjoy the view.”
…
It seemed the path taken by the energy raptors, as Rune came to call them in his diary, wasn’t a straight line. He couldn’t know the precise path they took as he didn’t continue to follow it when it became obvious it turned and had nothing to do with their planned itinerary anymore
All in all, the group of 3 only gained a few days of travel out of their remaining best estimation of 2 weeks before monsters started to appear back on their path.
From there, their routine started again as if the flock hadn’t existed. It just became a sequence of new or familiar monsters, slightly different environments, and the occasional dangerous encounters that broke this same routine to pieces.
And then it all started again, with some routine cycles that lasted a few hours, and others a few days.
It was also approximately around half of this trip that Rune started to feel the end of his acclimatization period. Where before he occasionally had thoughts about the bone region, the way things were here, what all the numbers he saw truly represented, or the possibility of dying in hundreds of ways, he now felt at home.
Once he got to know the monsters, saw with his perception the environment, confirmed his cosmic mist could completely hide him, his curiosity started to take over his wariness, letting him get new ideas and freely experiment with them.
But just as he genuinely began to feel comfortable enough to reduce his focus in fights from absolute to adaptive, the group of 3 reached their objective, site 41, 3 weeks after departing from site 19.
A copy of what they did at site 19 took place before they gained access, and this time the amazingness level was much lower as site 41 was another outpost, and there wasn’t much of a difference between two ruins of an outpost belonging to the same civilization.
“In case you’re wondering,” Astryde started to talk after seeing their lowered reaction level, “There’s no city site in the direction we’re going, only 2 have been found until now and one is south while the other is north, so nowhere near us.”
No one answered her before she left to do her own things.
“If there had been a city site,” Rune put his thoughts to words, “We would have needed to take a month-long break for her right?”
“We’re on the same wavelength,” Arik simply said before leaving to do his own things too, like editing the flock of energy raptures video.
Rune didn’t mind being left alone as his to-do list was always with him. Even without it, he had so much in his mind concerning what he wanted to do now that he didn’t even think about taking a break to read the news or entertain himself.
‘Let’s start with the few projects I absolutely can’t do without taking a break…’
It didn’t take long before he found his own haven isolated from the rows of tents and started on his first long-term high focus project: Phrasing all the insights he had about the bone region itself.
He noted down so many shortened ideas that he feared his memory would reach saturation in a few weeks if he didn’t empty everything.
It was the first time since he started his curiosity-driven adventure mindset, back when he first left the Undecided at the jungle region transition at tier 2, that he feared forgetting things.
As he adventured alone on 3 different instances before, he created his own rhythm where every time he thought or found something interesting, he would stop, clear everything up, and keep his mind totally free when he departed.
He wouldn’t say being accompanied by Astryde and Arik “forced” him to adapt to or create a different approach, but it wasn’t far. A plus amongst the minuses was that with so much swirling in his mind for weeks, it led him to think about things he wouldn’t have if he was alone.
‘Adventuring alone. If the question was asked 100 times, the answer wouldn’t change. It’ll always be adventuring alone in my mind.’
Starting from his mindset, he finished writing everything he could think about it in under 4 hours, then he switched to something that started with a few words here and there on his notes and then expanded to cover more than half of the content he wrote about before arriving at site 41: Monster’s behavior analysis.
With no flora to observe, at least he didn’t find anything coming close to it, and a geology that was too complex and grand for his knowledge base, he was left with only this subject that he started studying years ago.
Such a subject, once he began writing about it, it just never stopped.
He could make endless theories…
About how the elevated monster activity influenced the behavior of all the monsters.
About how being in a tier 4 heartland gave birth to killer monsters that equaled prospects in his mind.
About how the mindlessly aggressive behavior present in spawned monsters was clearly different in its expression compared to tier 4 not-heartland…
And as he wrote about it, ideas about the how and why of the flock of energy raptures and unique monsters emerged and continued to fill his notes with things to write about.
The joy of not having to find inspiration was at the same time present and not really present. His goal wasn’t to make something readable for others, it was just a habit he picked along the years that helped him keep a healthy and curious mind.
He didn’t bother making a detailed plan, he just picked an idea and wrote about it, the rest would come later.
Once the behavior subject was temporarily finished, he switched to the flock, writing about how magical it was, and then to the bone region in general, expanding different real-situation that took place that explained what the numbers forwarded by the IGS really meant, and then to what he expected he would find soon…
Accompanying his mind-clearing writing session, he started to realize that maybe, just maybe…
‘Maybe meditation writing has become something like a half-passion?’
He didn’t feel uncomfortable at this thought.