Chapter 4 - Get Some Answers
My entire world was green.
Once I jumped from the window sill, out into the open, I was assaulted with green. Leaves batted against my face and branches scratched at my skin as gravity did its thing, helping me barrel, face first, through the verdant beauty of Ralqir.
Luckily, several thick branches were there to partially arrest my momentum. I fought the instinct to shrink in on myself and get small so I wouldn’t take too many lacerations from the sharper bits of wood, but I needed to break my fall. I spread my arms wide and tensed my muscles in an attempt to grab onto something.
I broke through the first of the larger branches like it was nothing, snapping it under me and bringing it along for the fall, but the next caught me in the right shoulder. The impact slowed me slightly, spinning me around and angling me so that my feet were now falling first. My metal arm caught the next one, snapping the wood but still keeping me from plummeting at terminal velocity. Then I met the big one, the bough of my tree. It stopped me cold, so cold I blacked out long enough to slide off my perch and hit the ground.
You take 1 impact damage.
You take 3 impact damage.
You are stunned.
Mercifully, there was no pain on impact. My nervous system was in the middle of a hard reboot after the run in with the tree, and my pain receptors decided they needn’t bother.
I came back to my senses sometime later amid a thick carpet of damp, decaying leaves and rotting sticks.
Slowly, painfully, and with great effort, I sat up. My body ached in a dozen places, and it took real effort to focus on any particular thing. I blinked something gritty out of my eye, hoping to make things clearer, but it didn’t help. The building collapsed entirely during my time on the ground, probably coming down just as I did. The collapse had expelled a dusty, white haze that hung over everything in sight, tainting the air with an irritating pollution that affected the eyes and lungs.
The big creature that had brought the building down was nowhere to be seen, thank Constance. I silently prayed it died in the collapse, but I wasn’t about to go check to confirm.
Green and black shadows danced on the ground everywhere. The tree that saved my life and simultaneously tried to kill me was the smallest one I’d seen so far, only about fifty feet tall. Everywhere else, for miles there were tree trunks as thick as entire family sized habs. Their bark, uniformly rough and knobby, was streaked with multiple colors, though it was hard to tell which colors with specificity.
Since the building had come down, all was quiet again. The racket probably frightened off all the animals for miles, which I was thankful for. I didn’t need to deal with curious wildlife as well as a severely limited pool of HP.
I coughed up something milky flecked with red. Didn’t Nali say something about me being more durable?
The silence, heavy and oppressive, still unnerved me, but I was too tired and sore to give it more than a small portion of my attention. It did remind me that I was exposed out here, though. My HP was down to 10 of 25, and I felt that any further fighting or falling would be too much of a risk, at least until I rested. Unfortunately, if there were more hostile creatures out there, the fight would come to me soon enough.
What I needed was a weapon or a shield, something to give me a chance against things with claws and teeth.
I got to my feet, slowly, holding a particularly tender part of my ribs and staggered over to the pile of still settling rubble that used to be the tutorial facility. The falling upper floors had blown out a good portion of the walls down here, exposing the bones of the building, mangled steel beams and girders as well as a veritable forest of exposed rebar.
Okay. If video games taught me anything, it’s to steal everything that’s not nailed down.
A gurgling shout sounded out faintly from somewhere in the distance. I held my breath and got low.
Okay. Steal everything I can get away with then.
Crouching, I shuffled through the underbrush, steering far around the part of the building that had been the slime-covered stairwell. The thought of accidentally uncovering that muck again in my search for metal gave me the shivers. The smell was something I would not soon forget.
Eventually, I made my way to the corner of the building and crept until I could put my hand on metal.
Before I began, though, I fed something to my core.
Consume: Rotting Branch? Y/N
Rotting Branch consumed.
Gained status: Engine [1 MP/sec]
You gain knowledge of material: Mendau Wood [2/10]
My MP immediately ticked up from 10 and kept going until it capped out at 30.
Saturating the exposed rebar wasn’t nearly as hard this time. These specimens weren’t nearly as rusted like the ones upstairs. The purity of the metal seemed to matter a great deal in how fast I could Shape them. For the moment, I focused on getting pieces of iron free from the rubble, massaging their shape until they were thin enough in the right places to extract. This only worked on the unbent rebar, of which there was depressingly little
I made a discovery in my search.
Consume: Iron? Y/N
Iron consumed.
You gain knowledge of material: Iron [1/10]
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My metal hand that let me use my Core ability seemed to be able to consume other, less organic material than I’d tried before. I couldn’t do it with anything big, just a few pounds of matter. The piece I’d consumed was just a broken bit of iron I’d managed to free from its concrete prison. When I held it in my core hand, the System had given me the option to Consume it.
Consuming iron didn’t refresh the Engine buff, but it did let me know that my core really could eat the stuff. Last time I’d consumed a lot of something, I unlocked an affinity, so I had a new immediate goal. I set about finding smaller chunks of metal and feeding them into my Core.
You gain knowledge of material: Iron [2/10]
You gain knowledge of material: Iron [3/10]
You gain knowledge of material: Steel [1/10]
The chunks weren’t too hard to find. The collapse had been energetic, and my Core didn’t seem to differentiate between crappy rusted iron and the good stuff. Steel was more rare, probably because it was all on the inside of the building and stronger. Eventually, I got the message I was looking for:
You gain knowledge of material: Iron [10/10]
Core Ability gained: Detect Iron [Radius: 10 feet]
Affinity Type: Iron is now level 1
Iron mana conductivity increased. [10%]
Consume is now level 2.
Increased efficiency of Consume.
Another growl, much closer this time, seemed to echo through the forest. Worse, not one but two other guttural voices picked up the call and repeated it. I was quickly running out of time.
“Greetings, Chosen!” Nali’s eager voice called to me again.
I turned toward where I’d heard her. This time, the projection was on a relatively intact piece of wall that had fallen outward from the building. The cloud of dust made the woman look ghostly, out of focus and indistinct.
“I apologize for frightening you, Defi- Chosen. Integration always causes some dis- tribulations, and I’ve always found it b- best to get the initial greeting out of the way and get to the meat of it.”
“Nali, I don't’ know what’s going on here, but I really need some answers,” I said, glancing over my shoulder, making sure the locals hadn’t arrived yet.
“You k- know my name,” Nali said with a little smile, no surprise or confusion evident in her expression. “My logs state that I have undergonnnnnne several emergency re-recoveries in a short time. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused. Let ussss-s begin the tutorial, shall we?”
“Wait! No. Please.” I nearly lunged forward in a futile attempt at grabbing the holographic woman before she could continue her script, but I restrained myself. There was no time to go through this again, and the AI woman was a font of useful information, in theory. “How about we start with a couple questions?” I asked.
“I assure you that the tutorial will answer many of the quest- questions you might have right now, Chosen.”
“Yes. I understand that,” I said, racking my brain for something to say that would get her off track but in a direction I needed. I would probably need to keep it relevant to the tutorial she was programmed to administer.
Haltingly, casting worried glances over my shoulder, I posed my first question. “Let’s say you have to do another emergency restoration in the middle of my tutorial. What would cause something like that?”
Nali, folded her hands in front of her and adopted a lecturing tone. “A satellite intelligence such as myself only needs to restore itself to a previous save state if a significant corruption of function has occurred.”
“How does that happen?”
“There are a handful of ways such as major cosmic events, psychic tampering, mutliversal collision, or void corruption. Rest assured, though, that safeguards are in place to make sure I am always functional and here to help you start your new life. Perhaps you would like to start by opening your status screen, and we can go over what it can do.”
“Hold on. How would you know if you were experiencing the uh… corruption of function?”
“That is a complic- difficult answer, Chosen. O-One you are probably not qualified to understand. However, there is a s-self check that I perform every moment I am awake that must be passed or the restore failsafe begins. This also happens if I encounter data dat- d- information that indicates my intelligence has been corrupted. This failsafe is hardwired into me so that even if I was ssssseverely corrupted, I would still be restored.”
“Okay, so something triggered your failsafe earlier, and now I’m speaking with the last good save of your program, right?”
“C-Correct. If that is all-”
“I was attacked in the tutorial area. A goblin,” I said carefully, tensing in anticipation for when Nali would disappear on me, but she didn’t. I went on. “Can you tell me about them?”
“Yes, Chosen, but this is also not part of the tutorial.”
“Humor me, please.”
She stood up straight and adopted a lecturing cadence as she gave me my answer. “There are certain species in the multiverse that are nearly ubiquitous. Goblins are one of them. If a universe supports life and has any magical potential, goblins will inevitably spawn in some form or another. This universe is no exception, though I have had few encounters with goblins in my time here. They are vicious, jealous creatures with enough intelligence to make them dangerous but not enough to ever advance as a species beyond low-level industrialization.”
“The one I encountered had ‘scourge touched’ in its name. Is that-”
Nali flickered, a look of horror frozen on her face. Then she was gone.
I sighed. So that was it.
Though I would have liked to get more information out of her, I had accomplished one of my two goals with that conversation. I knew now that the mention of “scourge touched” triggered Nali’s failsafe. What the term meant, I didn’t know yet, but I would eventually.
Staying here wasn’t an option, not until the heat died down. I’d ticked up to 11 HP, but it cost me that much HP just fighting my first goblin. If these new creatures that were closing in were anything like that, I’d be done.
Something fell to the forest floor with a crunch, followed by quiet hooting overhead.
Out of time.
I cursed my short sightedness for feeding the iron I found into my Core instead of Shaping it into a half-useable weapon. I cast around for one last piece, something I could take with me and work on later, but the shifting shadows and ever darkening conditions made it almost impossible. I hadn’t seen the sun yet on this world, but it had to be nearly over the horizon. My heart throbbed in my chest and my breaths came in panicked, painful wheezes.
It was time to go.
Howls echoed around me, so close I was sure I would look up and see beady little goblin eyes.
My hand landed on something cold and thin. I switched to my metal left arm and gave it a hard tug. Nothing. I put my weight into the next pull, yanking on it with all I had.
The metal didn’t come away from the structure. Instead, I disturbed something in the pile of rubble. Near the peak of the pile, a slab of concrete as big as I was cracked and came away from the whole with a wet *SHLORP* before sliding down toward me at speed.
I dove backward just before the slab rammed into the ground, kicking up a cloud of dead plant matter and debris. Tiny bits of fibrous mulch hit me in the face and slid down my shirt, and my boots were practically buried under the displaced soil.
The strange darkness of the forest floor was playing tricks on my vision, the way the shadows danced over everything, but as I lifted my gaze up to where the slab had been, I instinctively knew there was something wrong there. Hair thin tendrils, blacker than black undulated in the gap left in the wreckage, thousands of them independently dancing on invisible currents of something that wasn’t the breeze. They stretched upward, long and sinuous, slowly rising into the air and slithering about as if feeling for something.
Then the smell hit me. The smell of rotting meat so intense it might as well have been an attack. The smell had been seared into my mind earlier in the day, just before my dive out of the window.
I looked down at the concrete chunk that had almost broken my legs. A black streak traced its slide down the rubble pile, and it, too, was moving. More inky hairs sprouted from behind the big block, creeping around from all sides.
It was definitely time to go.
Tearing my eyes away from whatever it was, I turned and ran. The hoots and howls echoed in the dark, following me deeper into the forest.