[You’ve received a Quest: Tree Novice! Sprout twenty trees in the next 90 minutes.]
[Reward for completing the Quest: 5 bonus points to all attributes.]
[Penalty for not completing the Quest: You will lose your other big toe.]
That was new.
At first, Logan was excited. A quest had to be good. Just the name ‘quest’ implied something noble with rewards at the end. The goal was ridiculous, but he’d try it for the reward, but the penalty…. WHAT THE FUCK.
“Are you kidding me, System?!” Logan shouted at the sky. “You’ll take my toe?” The sarcastic creeper had a morbid sense of humor, either that, or it was sadistic as hell. What, was it going to come down from the sky and magically amputate? However it did it, he didn’t want to find out.
Logan’s breathing increased as his heart rate skyrocketed. Panic was overtaking him, making it difficult to think. And the worst part was that he’d started to feel optimistic for the first time since this started. It was crushing to come down from the euphoria of being able to do magic, to feeling like a cog in the machine or an ant in an experimental ant farm.
Digging his phone out of the pocket of his swim trunks, he set a timer for 80 minutes, giving himself an extra ten minutes to prepare if worse came to worse.
Rushing to the next clear spot of ground, he brushed the pine needles away and dug the same coffee-mug sized hole, his torn fingernails scoring lines of dirt. He randomly grabbed a pinecone with open scales and didn’t bother with the rock, slamming it against the hole, pouring the seeds directly into the ground and covering it with dirt.
Logan rested his hand against the dirt and then gave himself a mental slap. This was a nature skill! He wasn’t going to get anywhere if he could think of nothing but losing his toe!
He took a deep breath, opening his lungs, releasing huge exhales as if he were in a meditation class. Incrementally, his nerves calmed, his heartbeat slowed. Logan could do this. He refused to believe the System would give out an impossible task.
Resting his palm against the ground, Logan closed his eyes and visualized the seeds underneath the dirt. Like the last one, there was a seed that had the best chance of success. Logan could see it in his mind. See it sprouting—roots burrowing deep, green sprout reaching for the sun.
Logan opened his eyes when he felt something move underneath his hand.
Success!
Ding!
[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Cycle, at the sprout level! Calculating carbon reduction… 10 KarmaCoin awarded.]
[Quest Progress: 1/20. 82 minutes remaining.]
But most importantly, he could review his stat screen again. With a sinking feeling, he studied the updated karma stat: 136/156.
Shit.
It had gone down again from 146 to 136. Karma must be needed to power the skill, and if it cost ten karma points per sprout… he needed 190 more karma to grow 19 sprouts. That meant he’d be short 54 karma. What happened if he reached zero karma?
There had to be a solution.
Crouching in the dirt as if he were communing with his new tree wouldn’t get him to the answer quicker. Logan needed to grow the hell out of some sprouts.
Ding!
[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Cycle, at the sprout level! Calculating carbon reduction… 10 KarmaCoin awarded.]
[Quest Progress: 2/20. 78 minutes remaining.]
This second one was easier than the first. He was calmer and he made sure to take even breaths, but it was still taking way too long. He needed to get better.
On to the next.
Ding!
[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Cycle, at the sprout level! Calculating carbon reduction… 10 KarmaCoin awarded.]
[Quest Progress: 3/20. 73 minutes remaining.]
Logan scooped dirt out so fast his bloody fingernails resembled mud. He’d learned that if he tried to grow the sprout too close to another tree, it didn’t grow at all, as if it had a tree defensive mechanism. After all, there had to be a reason trees grew spaced apart. They needed enough light and nutrients to survive.
Ding!
[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Cycle, at the sprout level! Calculating carbon reduction… 10 KarmaCoin awarded.]
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
[Quest Progress: 4/20. 69 minutes remaining.]
The next thirty minutes were the longest as well as shortest of his life. Logan jumped from sprout to sprout, growing a small mini forest of the small buggers. At the end, he had it down to two minutes per sprout and he’d started to carry a pile of the seeds in his pocket so he didn’t have to search for pinecones between constant hole digging and meditation.
Ding!
[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Cycle, at the sprout level! Calculating carbon reduction… 10 KarmaCoin awarded.]
[Quest Progress: 14/20. 44 minutes remaining.]
He’d just finished his fourteenth, and as suspected, he’d almost run out of karma.
Karma: 6/156. He stared at the stat for a minute, but it didn’t replenish, or if it was replenishing in the background, it wasn’t doing it fast enough to generate 54 points in less than an hour.
With a sinking stomach, he crouched in front of his latest buried seeds, visualizing the growth of a sprout. Everything was perfect—the visualization of the roots, the…
Logan choked, gasping for breath, feeling as if there was a belt around his neck, an invisible force strangling him to death. He clawed at his neck, scoring into the skin, struggling to get air.
[Drawing on a skill with insufficient karma can cause paralysis and eventual death, Idiot. You were showing such promise, too. Try not to live up to your name.]
Evil, sarcastic fucker! With a gasp, Logan took in a gulp of air, the restriction around his throat fading until he was left with his own self-inflicted scratches. In the ground, there was nothing but dirt, no signs of a sprout, and he got the sense that something was wrong with the seed he’d tried to sprout, like a mutated sickness.
With a feeling of dread, he pulled up his stats and reviewed his karma: 0/156.
Oh shit.
And he had less than forty minutes to figure this out.
Karma, karma, how did he get more karma? It had showed up in his stat sheet after he’d received the [Life Cycle] skill, and he refused to believe it was static. The System let you upgrade your attributes, so why not this one as well? When he’d received the skill, it had given him twenty bonuses to his intelligence and wisdom attributes, and he suspected they were somehow related. Intelligence was at twenty-six and wisdom was at twenty-four, but how did that equate to 156 karma points? Logan had a suspicion and there was only one way to prove it.
He needed to kill something.
The problem was that when you wanted monsters, they were never around. He knew exactly where he could find one though. The dilemma, lose a toe, or possibly lose his life? He would never get anywhere by being cautious.
Logan turned on a dime and then backtracked, sprinting full out. How much time did he have? He was about to reach for his phone, but paused, blinking, as the System accommodated him.
[Quest Progress: 14/20. 31 minutes remaining.]
Thanks a lot, you creepy fucker. Logan skidded to a stop in front of the base of the hill, back to where he’d started. Up above, the spider rat was still at it, endlessly scrambling up the cliff face and then falling back to the ledge. There was no way up and no way to reach it that wouldn’t be suicide.
There had to be a solution. This was the same cliff that was connected to the one just beyond Martin’s Convenience. Kids didn’t always come to the cliff from the water, so there must be a path up. There was nothing from where he came, but what about in the opposite direction, closer to the direction of the store?
Either way, he couldn’t waste any more time. Logan took off, jogging blindly into bushes and overgrown grass, searching for… a path.
There was a path! It wound around the hill, climbed up, and then wound up the cliff face all the way to solid ground. Logan powered up the path, his legs straining, calf muscles burning. Holy shit, was that the store? There was no mistaking that sign.
“System,” he said, panting, “how much time do I have?” Logan powered past Martin’s Convenience, looping around and entering the mushroom clearing.
[Quest Progress: 14/20. 26 minutes remaining.]
He had one chance at this. Logan had to kill the spider rat with time to spare. There was no guarantee this would even work, but if it did, he needed enough time to sprout six more trees.
Logan backtracked to the shredded noxious mushroom next to the cliff face. The difference between then and now was night and day. The spores had dissipated, and although it was close to dusk, the sun still illuminated the whole clearing. The mycelium veins had turned bleached white, and each footstep crackled, as if he were stepping on a pile of brittle bones. Among the remains of the shredded mushrooms, the four corpses had begun rotting in the ninety-degree heat, flies swarming them and small insects crawling up their limbs.
Logan had no time to be respectful of the dead, jumping over one body and darting around the next. He slowed and crept up to the cliff and peered over the edge. The spider rat was still at it, scrambling at the edges of the cliff fruitlessly, its rat tail swinging behind it. It reminded him of a fly endlessly bashing itself again a window to get out. At the same time, that thing was no fly and looked even bigger and intimidating up close.
Logan backed up and peered around the clearing, the ticking timeline ever present in his mind. He scanned the clearing, looking for a weapon. The discarded cleaver, the dropped crowbar. The spider rat was too strong for both.
His only chance was to let gravity do what he couldn’t. There was a large boulder close to the pine tree on the edge of the cliff, and Logan used the crowbar and his increased strength to pry it out of the ground. It was too heavy to lift, even for him, but he could roll it. End over end, the boulder making deep scars in the dying mycelian, Logan pushed it closer and closer.
The spider rat was still unaware of his presence, still mindlessly trying to climb.
Logan pushed it over the cliff.
The spider rat screeched, the boulder slamming onto one of its long spindly legs and snapping it in half before it came to a stop on the shelf. But other than damaging a leg and making it angry, it had no effect.
He was running out of time.
Logan’s adrenaline was through the roof, his hands shaking with tension. He scanned his surroundings, looking for anything that could do damage. Tipped over on a side, a rotting pine tree had fallen, the width of the trunk the size of a manhole. The other end was narrow and sharp, and it might do the trick. It was hell on his hands and by the time he’d rolled it, he was covered in decaying bark and crawling insects.
Logan threw it over the edge, the sharp end first.
A loud boom echoed through the clearing.
Logan popped his head over the cliff, ready to—
Oh shit.
The log hadn’t hit the spider rat at all. Instead, the pointy end had lodged between the boulder and the cliff face, the trunk at just the right angle for the spider rat to climb. With clacking noises, it scaled the trunk, using its claws to dig into the bark for traction. Crawling insects poured out of the trunk, attracted to the spindly legs and latching on to its fur. A stench wafted up the cliff, like rotted meat mixed with wet hair. The spider’s red eyes glinted with glee as it got sight of him, its mandibles flexing and exposing razor-sharp teeth.
It was coming for him, and there was nothing Logan could do to stop it.