“So, do you think we are close to leveling up?” Caleb asked. “Like getting our first ring or whatever you see?”
Jeremy looked between himself and Caleb, who were both plain green colors and Zanie, who was tipping into yellow. “No.”
“What?” Caleb pouted. “It’s been weeks, though.”
The wind gusted through the limbs above them, making their crowns sway and knocking down the leaves that had begun to senesce, likely because the change in day lengths had the trees confused as hell, rather than any natural progression towards fall. It was still several weeks too early for the leaves to drop, and the ones that had were not brown or red but green with perhaps a little yellow. Two of the boughs creaked and scraped against each other. Jeremy frowned at them.
They had decided not to take a nap when sticks kept tumbling out of the branches overhead, just on the off chance that a limb might fall on them. Their luck had held out pretty well, all things considered, but Jeremy was not about to push it. So they trudged through the woods to find the next town where they might get a hotel and stay the rest of the day and the night if the dark clouds rolling over the horizon heralded the storm they looked like they might.
“How much does it take to level up? Didn’t you say that nurse had a ring?” Caleb kept pouting. “And that was a week ago.”
“I think it takes a really long time or a lot of really concentrated effort. All she was doing for days and days straight was healing spells. Probably hundreds, maybe even thousands, so it makes sense that she would have gotten better more quickly.”
“I just want to know what it means.” Caleb groaned. “What’s the point of the ring? What’s the difference between level zero and one? What will it be like?”
Jeremy wondered the same thing.
“It might just be a placeholder.” Zanie offered, “Like with an abacus.”
Caleb made a face. “What?”
“Old accounting tool,” Zanie waved her hand like the information was unimportant anyway, “I’m just saying that maybe ‘leveling up’ isn’t a big deal. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but as we practice more, we are able to do more spells than we could before without exhausting ourselves. Right?”
“That’s true,” Jeremy said. He’d done the math, “About two more spells each time we shift colors completely.”
“So, we are either becoming more efficient at spellcasting, the way that experience usually makes you more efficient at things, or we are increasing our capacity to store …magic or energy – “
“Mana,” Jeremy offered.
She snapped her finger at him. “That. We’re increasing the size of our reserve. Or the speed with which we replenish it. Or a combination of all those things.”
Caleb rubbed his forehead.
“Anyway,” Zanie continued dismissively, “Whatever it’s actually doing, Jeremy is only seeing a representation of it somehow, right? That manifests as the visual light spectrum – red to orange to green to blue and etcetera – so maybe the white ring is just because there’s a limited amount of steps in the spectrum, and so there needs to be a placeholder, like the one in the number ten or the two in the number twenty.”
“I doubt it's that simple, somehow,” Jeremy said, “but I guess we’ll find out.”
“Why are we talking about math?” Caleb complained.
Zanie shot him a saddened look, and then her eyes popped open wide. “Did you hear that?”
Jeremy had. Still echoing through the woods was a tremendous crash that drowned out every other sound, from the rush of wind through the creaking trees to the sounds of their footsteps through the brittle leaf litter. They stopped and looked around.
“A tree fell?” Caleb asked.
A tree had fallen, but not because of the wind.
Several hundred feet to their left was a creature that looked unlike anything Jeremy had an existing schema for. The goblins had fairly obviously been goblins, dragons were dragons, and so on, so far at least. Except for the strange old god, but he thought that might be in a separate category altogether. This thing, however, was some type of strange creature that he could not even label as a hybrid of species he was familiar with. But his mind tried its best.
It had a long body, shaped something like a centipede, with legs protruding beneath the length of its figure. The legs were hair-raising not only because of their number but also because they looked rather humanoid, something of a cross between a chameleon's foot and a primate’s hand on the end of them. These poked out beneath a layer of thick, coarse hair that covered the entire creature’s body. The only other features visible were a pair of massive, shiny black eyes and thin yellow-tinted teeth poking out from what seemed to be the head.
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The head towered above the rest of its body, which was wrapped around the trunk of the tree at least six meters high, where it lay at an angle against a neighboring tree that had interrupted its descent. A portion of the creature's body was braced against the ground. It looked up and down the length of the tree, chittering madly, and began to rock it as if trying to bring it down completely, knocking more dirt from the exposed root ball and shaking leaves from the limbs. For some reason, it wanted to get that tree on the ground.
“Okay, um.” Jeremy looked around rather desperately, but there was nowhere to hide in the middle of a stand of trees that had barely any underbrush, let alone a nice safe cave or something. And the creature apparently easily pulled down trees, which meant no climbing those. “It hasn’t noticed us, so we should quickly – and without panicking – get out of here.”
“What’s its overlay like?” Caleb asked. “What level?”
“Are you kidding me?” Jeremy looked anyway. It was blue, with no ring. At the perfect level for them to take on, probably, but literally, every hair on Jeremy’s body stood on end because of its strange appearance.
“About the same as us,” he told Caleb, “But no. I’m still dead on my feet. Haven’t had my nap yet.”
He wasn’t as dizzy as he’d been when he first cast the two life-sense spells, but he was still tired nonetheless. Caleb and Zanie had each cast it only once, but he was certain they felt the effects, too.
“Besides,” Zanie whispered, “we don’t know if it’s even a threat. Seems to have a problem with trees, but maybe not us.”
“We’re out here trying to gain experience,” Caleb argued.
Just then, a gust of wind whipped past them, catching their clothes and hair and flapping the fabric all over the place. It carried their scent right over to the creature, which stopped its wrestling match with the tree to stick its head in the air and scent the breeze. Then it looked right at them.
“Oh great,” Jeremy muttered. He lifted the strap of his M4 over his head and held it at the ready as the creature unwound from the tree and crawled toward them, its body moving smoothly like a rippling ribbon because of how well coordinated the strange legs moved beneath it. It stopped about ten feet away and reared up, legs waving about as it chittered.
Then, nothing happened. They stared at each other across the distance. Jeremy and company froze in place because they weren’t sure what it was going to do, and the creature kept its distance for some unknown reason. For long enough that Jeremy started to feel antsy.
“Do you think it’s like a bear, and we should make a bunch of noise to frighten it away?” Caleb asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeremy said, but Caleb had already decided this was his chosen course of action. He jumped up and down, waving his arms, and started hollering, ‘Go away! We’re dangerous. You don’t want to mess with us! We’ve got guns.” And whatever else came to his mind.
The creature reared back, legs flailing even more wildly, and chittered. Caleb dropped his arms with a huff. “You guys aren’t helping.”
“I think you’re just making it mad.” Zanie hissed.
“Maybe that’s its greeting.”
The creature reared up a couple more feet, then opened its mouth wide, its long needle-like teeth and coarse hair parting to reveal a bright red gullet. Jeremy moved his finger to the trigger just in time to fire as it lunged for them. Zanie and Caleb fumbled to get their guns in front of them, falling back several steps while screaming in horror. A couple of bullets caught the creature in the mouth and body, enough to startle it into lowering down on its front legs instead of following through on the lunge.
“We should have just backed away silently!” Zanie hollered. “Now it’s going to be really mad.”
Bright red blood oozed out of the bullet holes, dripping down the hairs and plopping onto the leaf litter. The creature shook its whole body like a dog shaking off water, as though the bullet wounds were just irritating little signs that it could fling away, but instead, it just flung blood everywhere. Zanie shrieked again.
“Keep firing on it!” Jeremy shouted, lifting his gun to do exactly that. “Do either of you remember that blue fire spell?”
“No,” Zanie and Caleb yelled back in tandem. This meant that Jeremy, as exhausted as he was, would have to try and cast it because it was their most intense offensive spell at the moment. But then their bullets began bouncing off the air in front of the creature, ricocheting back toward them. All three cursed and ducked. It had put up a barrier of some kind, the same that Jeremy often used, most likely since it was not visible. It chittered and began advancing forward again. Bullets were barely phasing the creature anyway, so Jeremy dropped his gun and thrust his hands out in front of himself.
If bullets couldn’t go through the barrier, then not much else would, but maybe it could be pierced by the same type of material that the barrier was made of, just pure magic or mana, as he’d begun to think of it when there wasn’t an element attached to it. He cast a spell, including the rune for manipulating ‘mana’ and the little additive rune that turned it into a projectile. The runes burst into the air in front of his palms and hopefully did something to the barrier. He saw a ripple go through the air, akin to a heat wave.
“Try shooting it now!” He shouted. Zanie and Caleb peppered away, but the bullets still hit the barrier and ricocheted off, and they all cursed and ducked.
“No, wait, look!” Caleb pointed to where one of the bullets had grazed the region of the creature’s body below where its eyes and mouth were – its neck, given the location, although there was not any difference in circumference between it, the head, and the body to deem it a separate body part. This created a little spout of blood that had not been there before. Caleb shot a few more times, and the bullets caught the creature in the body. It reared back and chittered louder, more shrilly, mouth opening wide in the same way it had before it pounced forward the last time.
So, maybe just doing enough general damage to the barrier had been enough to take it down, not needing to do a specific type of damage. Jeremy put a pin in that thought and lined up the runes for the blue fire spell in his mind. He cast it just as the creature lunged forward, pushing the spell forward like he was tossing a ball through the air so that it would land in the creature's mouth just as it exploded into a fireball of scalding heat and blue flames.
The creature screamed. A wave of dizziness closed over him, far worse than any fatigue he’d felt after casting spells so far. It tunneled his vision, and he could barely hear Zanie screaming something at Caleb, her voice garbled and faint. Then everything went black.