V - 00001.6 – Pathogen
I stared at the notification as a sudden and dull ache crawled up my chest. The pain was reminiscent of pressing down on a terrible bruise. Coughing hard, I twisted around, looking every which way as if I was going to see a swarm of locusts just waiting to descend upon me.
Several moments passed and the pain began to subside, and there was no Egyptian plague, which meant in this specific instance, it was just life fucking me over, not god. I kept glancing around suspiciously before another notification hit my field of view.
[Mutagen has been disabled]
“What the fuck, this can’t be fucking happening. How the hell is a pathogen disabling my mutations? I need to fix this.”
My next words were cut off as another notification opened on my status screen, and I was brought to my knees feeling gutted. Bile rose in my throat, and my senses flared, and the world seemed to dim as my vision went from an inhuman clarity to a weak, paltry blurry thing.
[Selfish Gene has been disabled]
The instincts that constantly informed me of danger and pushed my senses into overdrive were disturbingly silent, and the final kick in the balls was the next notification. I watched my life line fade away as the one ability that kept me alive, made me strong, and made me better was taken from me.
[Parasite has been disabled]
I pushed myself up from the ground, suppressing the crawling sensation in my guts that was reminiscent of a stitch if you gave it a pound of cocaine and a gun, and I sprinted, my feet hammered the ground hard as I leapt into every step.
The world blurred around me as my weakened senses failed to keep up with the speed of my newly enhanced form. Streets disappeared from underneath my feet, turning into the rough asphalt of the main road that led away from Anchorage. I knelt into my stride and jumped my legs, pounding the road hard as I cleared the divider between the road and clearing by several feet.
My feet slammed down to the ground, the grass crushing underneath my feet. Pain bloomed into my joints and radiated out into my legs as I absorbed the impact and kept running until suddenly my senses flared again. The world cleared around me, slowing down to a manageable pace as if I were just walking instead of running at a speed that would horrify Usain Bolt.
[Selfish Gene has been reactivated]
The trees that were approaching me as green and brown blurs slowed down to a beautiful canvas of nature. The closer I got, the more alive I felt. The high density of mana in the air seemed to fill something in me, something I didn’t realize I was without when in the city, but being back in this magical forest seemed to make it painfully obvious.
I began to slow down my knees clicking and the joints in my legs creaking under the strain I was putting them through as my heels and the balls of my feet dug into the earth, tearing the grass from the dirt and bringing me to a halt.
Staring back towards the city from the edge of the forest, I could feel a slight sense of anxiety within me—the idea that there was something in there, in the air, that could weaken me so terribly and so quickly, made my skin crawl.
“It doesn’t make sense; no one looked sick; people weren’t coughing or acting unwell; they didn’t look pale or feverish; there’s no sign of illness in any of them; honestly, I don’t even feel sick; it’s like whatever’s in the air was designed to target my mutations and nothing else.”
My eyes narrowed to slits on the city as I stared towards my status, with two of my mutations still reading as inactive and my quest counter still frozen on two. I turned away from the city and smashed my fist into a tree. My knuckles whooshed through the air and crushed the bark on the tree.
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“Fuck… How the hell am I meant to get the reapers if I can’t even get in the fucking city?”
I snarled softly, my breath escaping from my lips as a growl as a plan began forming in my mind, and a paranoid part of my brain began to nag at me. Some part of my mind just couldn’t get over the fact that whatever this was is only attacking my mutations.
Walking deeper into the forest, making my way towards the lake I had come to call home, the voices in my head clamored for my attention, seeming almost eager to assist me in a way that was rare.
“You need to start hunting; the more biomass you can get, the more mutations you can acquire... And who knows if you deviate far enough from your human biology, you might find that whatever disease is within the city isn’t compatible with you anymore.”
"Hmm, that’s not a bad point.”
Another voice rose in the back of my mind. “We need to figure out how this magic stuff works too; your skill is called mana control, yet we can barely hold on to the energy in the air.”
The thoughts in my head and the voices in my mind continued to throw their ideas at me—everything and anything ranging from me needing to solidify my base and make somewhere for me to really live to needing to master magic. A few of them only seemed interested in finding creative ways to insult me, but those voices were the minority, which was a refreshing change of pace.
Okay, first priority, I want some real food. Parasite is great; it seems to keep me nourished and handle the food poisoning. Mostly, I think if something's been dead for too long, it stops working. But I actually need food to fill my eternally empty stomach. While I love that ambrosia taste, I want to taste something other than fermented grapes with a meaty texture.
Walking towards my hut, I dropped the bag full of clothes down to the dirt floor and pulled out my blades—a large fifth-teen-inch black hunting knife and a slammer silver flick knife for my off hand that I held in a reverse grip.
I broke away from my camp and started searching through the woodlands, focusing on my enhanced senses for all they’re worth attempting to find any sort of tracks. After a few hours of walking in an increasingly wide arc around my camp, I found a track of sorts—a massive set of gouges in a tree that chewed through the bark all the way into the wood, each claw mark as wide as my forearm and easily twice as long.
“What the fuck could even do that?”
“Pretty sure that’s how bears mark territory, Vik.”
“There is no fucking universe where bears have claws that big and humanity survived.”
“Normally I’d agree with you, but a rabbit tried to gore you the other day.”
“Oh… Oh fuck every kind of duck.”
Ha-ha, I think at this rate a duck is going to be fucking you.
Ignoring the very disturbing mental image I was just assaulted with, I kept walking, keeping my senses primed for any kind of movement that wasn’t my own, and eventually my efforts bore fruit when I saw a deer with large bone-white antlers up ahead with its head stooped down and lapping at a small stream.
Crouching down, I began to stalk after the deer I creeped up behind the large animal. Once I was within a few meters of it, I crouched lower, feeling the muscles in my legs coil as my upper body tensed, and then I leapt, launching myself through the air with my arms out wide blades poised to dig into deer’s sides.
My instincts flared suddenly midway through the leap as every sense my body had screamed at me, my eyes went wide as my perception of time slowed as adrenaline raced into my system and I looked for the danger. Then I saw it: a huge wolf that could easily come up to my chest on all fours was also leaping through the air just like me, except I was its target.
Two sharp blades pierced the deer just as two rows of jagged serrated teeth bit deep into my thigh, my lower body was thrown sideways as I lost my grip on my knives, and the wolf tore me with it through the rest of its leap before snapping its head to the right and releasing me, throwing me several feet. My back slammed into a tree branch, smashing it into splinters as I went through it and skidded into the ground.
I coughed wetly and retched hard on my back as I tried to force myself up, pushing my elbows underneath me; despite my retching, nothing came up except bloody foam when I attempted to exhale. The wolf was pacing sideways, circling me, its lips peeled back, exposing massive fangs with canines bigger than my fingers.
More wet muted coughs forced themselves from my mouth, and every move I made to drag myself up to my feet was a lesson in true suffering. I could feel myself choking on the air as my lungs filled with terrible red fluid, and every attempt to breathe brought a stabbing pain to my chest and an ache in my ribs.
I stared the wolf down projecting a confidence I didn’t feel as I stumbled up to my feet, and for its part, it seemed content to watch me die from my injuries without further endangering itself, but its eyes never left mine; it felt as though it was staring into my soul, like it understood me.
I grasped for anything and everything. The voices in my head screamed for my attention, but they were distant and muffled their words, just noise sounding like a choir of demons singing as they prepared to welcome me to hell for my sins. My hands came up empty, stripped of my weapons and anything I could use to save me. I desperately reached for my skills, and they seemed to abandon me in my moment of desperation.
My instincts told me this thing was on a whole other level from me; before it, I was prey. The only ability that I had that answered the call was mana control. The essence in the air slid away from my all except for an inky black ethereal cold. I could feel this deathly energy collecting on the surface of my skin as well as being drawn out from my core. The cold was numbing and familiar.
Reaching and trying to bend the liquid darkness to my will, it answered readily like an old friend that had been waiting for me. The lines of black that accentuated every muscle in my body appeared crawling out of the recesses in my skin, and a bone-deep chill invaded me.
The cold silenced the agony in my chest and made each breath feel shallow. I could feel my heart beat slowing down, becoming a quiet out of rhythm thumping that beat irregularly. Then all at once I lost control of the black energy that was coating my skin and chilling me from within; it pulled within me, soaking my organs, and my chest burned again, screaming agony rampaged as the fight or flight instinct finally kicked in, and I screamed with primal hatred and lunged forward at the wolf.