Chapter 7 - Greet the Sun

Only two more Armor Spiders wanted to try Mister Grippy.

They came on together, from the same part of the semi-circle, but they ended up fighting each other as much as they did me. Once they were in biting range, they seemed to want to grab onto and bite almost anything, grappling with their buddy while simultaneously striking at me.

It was then that I realized the spiders weren’t actually working together. Sure, they all wanted me dead, and they went so far as to box me in as a team. However, that was as far as their cooperation went. That meant only the brave or foolhardy made the first move and risked everything. Meanwhile, the ones that hung back would be able to take the prize by force afterwards.

Once I got a hold of a piece of spider and activated Devouring Grasp, the fight swung heavily in my favor. Whatever they were using for armor, magnesium according to my combat log, it didn’t take well to the intense heat of activating the Consume part of my core. When I got a hold of a leg and did the Grasp/Consume combo, half of the spider burst into white hot flame, spewing a bitter, metallic flavored smoke that reminded me of nosebleeds. From there it was all about getting clear before I ended up well done myself.

Armor Spider defeated.

You have been awarded 16 experience points. [10 base (+2 level, +6 group, +6 chain, -8 non-combat class)]

The other spider was not so lucky to get away, already tangled with its friend like it was. It caught fire as well, its legs curling in on themselves, dragging the still burning body of the other spider closer. The two went up together, embracing like…

No, I wasn’t going to go there. Spiders were not allowed to get down like that.

Armor Spider defeated.

You have been awarded 16 experience points. [10 base (+2 level, +6 group, +6 chain, -8 non-combat class)]

After that, the remaining nine spiders retreated back into their crevice. One ambitious little guy tried to drag one of its dead friends underground with it, but I put a stop to that by charging at the creature with Mister Grippy. The spiders were not particularly smart, but they’d learned that I wasn’t prey. The monster dropped its corpse and backed away with its forelegs spread way out.

As they retreated, I stood as straight as I could, in a pseudo boxer’s stance with my right arm guarding my face and my metal one slightly out and ready to grab. There were no more takers though. My status had shifted from ‘food’ to ‘not worth it’ in the span of a minute.

As soon as the last monster was out of sight, my strength left me. I wobbled and fell to my knees, my lungs working like bellows. I unclenched my hands and let the adrenaline drain away, leaving me cold and shivering. Sweat beaded on my skin and dripped down my nose to fall to the leaves below.

I knelt there for a few minutes, eyes wide, not daring to blink lest something else jump out of the shadows to eat me. Nothing did, though.

Status Lost: Engine

Status Lost: Mana Overflow

My HP was down to 12, which wasn’t all that bad, but whether from dehydration and undernourishment or from the act of having to bluff a swarm of spiders into submission, I was feeling the strain.

The adrenaline crash had me shivering and drowsy, but there were things to do.

I shook my head and slapped my hand against my chest with a metalic *ping.*

Oh, right. Going to need to set aside some time to come to grips with that soon.

Time was ticking by, and I couldn’t stay here. The spiders could rally and overwhelm me if I gave them time.

But first…

Starting with the least damaged corpse, the one with the crushed brain that I didn’t need to set on fire, I collected my spoils.

Upon closer inspection, the Armor Spiders weren’t actually brown and covered in hair. Their ‘‘armor” appeared to be attached closely to the carapace or maybe grown onto it, then covered in a patina of dried mud that, when I scraped it away, revealed a gray, almost lustrous sheen. The bristles, similarly, were made of metal so fine the gentle breeze could shift them slightly. The spider’s splayed limbs and broken visor, askew thanks to its now deformed head, gave it an almost hung over look.

Loot Armor Spider? Y/N

Again, the light warping rainbow of colors obscured the corpse, and the System did its thing. Once the process was done, the armor spider looked significantly smaller and less imposing, deflated almost. On the ground lay my loot.

Armor Spider Armor x 12: A piece of protective shell grown by a Ralqiri variant of Armor Spider. The metal used in its creation is dependent on where the Armor Spider makes its nest and the availability of material.

Armor Spider Poison Gland: A venom gland of a Ralqiri variant of Armor Spider. Contains highly corrosive venom meant to digest its prey as well as the metals the spider consumes to grow its armor.

So, the spiders made their nests around sources of metal and used it to grow their outer shells. When I got a piece of spider armor and consumed it during the fight, my logs said it was primarily made of magnesium. Did that mean there was more around here somewhere? What could I do with that? Did I want to carry around a bunch of magnesium?

Carefully, I prodded the burns on my face with my fingers, wincing at how tender it was. While the stuff certainly worked well with Devouring Grasp, I wasn’t sure I was ready to carry around something that reacted so violently to me… also the air… and water.

Yeah. No thanks.

It also occurred to me just how lucky it was that I didn’t blunder into a colony that used something like tungsten or iron. If circumstances were even slightly different, I’d be dead of my own carelessness.

Especially galling was all the experience I seemed to lose from being a non-combat class. What the hell happened to 80% of my base experience? Did it just vanish into the ether? Would I be level 1 or even 2 by now if I was a flavor of warrior or mage?

My only saving grace were the multiple bonuses the System was awarding me for special circumstances, but I couldn’t count on that to continue.

I shook my head. I just needed to roll with it.

Consume Armor Spider Armor? Y/N

Status gained: Engine [+6 MP/sec for 2 minutes]

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You gain knowledge of material: Magnesium [4/10]

I repeated the process for all the corpses, Consuming all of their armor. The two that had died in a ball of fire didn’t have any salvageable loot on them according to the System except:

Spider Meat x 2: Overcooked meat from an Armor Spider.

The prospect of eating meat from a giant spider didn’t appeal to me, especially considering what the System implied about their habit of digesting metals to grow their armor.

What would that even do to their bodies?

I decided to err on the side of caution and leave the meat behind. I buried it and the two venom glands I had received in a hole about a quarter mile away from where we fought. I didn’t have a way to carry anything currently, and walking around with a corrosive sac of venom in my pocket did not appeal to me in the slightest, especially not in the front pocket. While it would be cool to chuck a venom sac at a big nasty and watch it work, I had no way to guarantee it would burst upon impact.

Unfortunately, my consumption of all that magnesium and its massive +6 MP/s was also enough to give me Mana Overflow again. Twice. That was a rough ride, forcing me to sit down, back against a tree and do my best not to explode. I could feel all that potential inside of me, burning to do something. Eventually, the thought came to me to activate Devouring Grasp and just let my fist clench for a while, and that alleviated the symptoms somewhat. Then it was just about riding it out until the 2 minutes of the Engine status ticked down.

Skill unlocked: Conduit

Your current skill level is 1

Conduit: Your body grows more able to conduct mana freely and direct its flow. +5% resistance to mana overflow. +5% speed of mana flow when using abilities.

My suffering netted me an affinity for magnesium, at least, and then some. The next tier was going to take an additional 50 pieces of the stuff, so that wasn’t happening today. Magnesium Affinity gave me the ability to detect magnesium within ten feet, which I was starting to realize was the bog standard F grade reward, but it also gave some additional mana conductivity, whatever that meant. For the hundredth time, I wished I had a working tutorial to help me out with some of this stuff.

Experimenting as I continued my trek toward water, I willed Detect Magnesium to life, but I had to stop moving soon afterward due to the ability being extremely disorientating. It wasn’t that the world looked different to me. Visually, everything was the same. The giant trees, the ever present green blanket covering the sky, the mottled browns of the forest floor, all of it was the same.

No, what I was ‘seeing’ wasn’t with my eyes, and my mind had a hard time processing that. I had magnesium all over me. It glinted painfully in my new perception, not so bright that it was blinding, but as if someone was using a signal mirror to get my attention. My shredded shirt and filthy pants shone with little flakes of magnesium probably shed from the spiders that had tried to wrestle me down. There was even some dusting in my hair, the presence of which forced me to stop and reorder my brain around being able to ‘see’ the top of my own head. What’s more, my bones sparkled. Yes, I could see.. Or sense… the vague outline of my bones.

I brushed all the magnesium bits off of my body that I could and watched it sail down to the forest floor and filter into the soil. That didn’t stop it from being extremely visible, despite it being obscured from my normal vision. Looking away didn’t help either. It was all too much for me to process.

When I deactivated the ability, everything went back to normal, that is to say, green and alien, but at least I could blink that uncomfortable reality away every now and then.

With this new knowledge, I filed my Detect abilities under ‘weird but probably useful.’ A part of me wished I had saved a piece of armor to see what that looked like under the effects of Detect, but my reasons for consuming it all were sound.

I resisted the urge to rub the blisters on my neck and jaw. No one likes being on fire, especially me.

—----------

Hiking ever downward, pausing to check every crevice I passed now that I knew what could be down there, my pace was a slow and cautious one. The humidity jumped up at least an order of magnitude, but the temperature remained the same temperately cool I was used to by now. My blood felt thick in my veins, and I’d stopped sweating sometime in the past hour even with all the moisture in the air. My steps also became more difficult and less careful. I just didn’t have the energy for it.

Then I heard something beautiful: the sound of rushing water. Close.

I smacked my lips and tilted my head to try and pinpoint the sound. The desire to rush in and drink until I was full to bursting was strong. So strong it nearly overrode my good sense, but I wasn’t so desperate yet that I would risk my life for a drink of unsanitized water.

I hadn’t forgotten where I was.

Crouching low, I continued my descent. The ground here was rough. The entire thing was a network of creek beds, washes, and exposed roots where no piece of ground was flat anymore. I could actually see the bottom of these, which made me feel better about clambering over them to follow the sound of the water. What’s more, I was starting to see honest to Constance stone now that I was low enough. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it until now.

My head was still cracked glass, but I remembered home well enough, if not how I ended up here. I could call up parts of my past, which made Ralqir feel even farther from home.

Proxis was all rocks and wind. Harsh but beautiful in its uncompromising, unapologetically brutal nature.You could bet any living thing you encountered earned their way into existence, constantly struggling against the elements and each other. The tan and gold banded rocks were ancient, forever. They were there before you were born, and they would be here long after your entire civilization was nothing but dust. You could count on them to be there and shield you from the wind and airborne sand.

Here, on Ralqir, everything was transient. The sky was a living tapestry of green and the ground was littered with corpses or discarded biomatter. At least it seemed so until now. Now I saw the foundation of the world, and it was something I knew. That fact gave me some comfort.

The water I’d heard was, in fact, a waterfall. Not a tall one, only about a six foot drop from the raised lip of a basin of sorts, a slightly tilted slab of brown stone with a dip in the middle that held a roiling pool. After a short drop, the water continued on swiftly down the hill, in a ribbon of white that ran far into the distance. The ‘bowl’ was maybe a few hundred feet across, its clear water shining brilliantly in the noonday sun which stabbed down through the curtain of mist to illuminate the place so brilliantly, I had to shield my eyes.

So this place does have a sun. Nice to see at least.

My perch, a jagged boulder stabbed through the heart and held in place by a particularly ambitious tree root, was slightly above the basin, up the hill where I could get a good view of everything.

I deduced the basin was some kind of spring, since nothing flowed into it, but it was constantly overflowing to create the river. Strangely, though, nothing came down to drink. Birdsong and insect chirps everywhere, but nothing flew over the water. No land animals either. No cold blooded lizards sunned themselves on the warm rocks.

I didn’t like it, but I was getting to the point where my thirst would be debilitating soon. I needed water to move and to think, and I wanted to see the sun, get into some natural light for a change.

Cautiously, I picked my way through the rocks and trees, careful not to make much noise or disturb the landscape. I landed heavily on the flat stone that formed the lip of the basin, staying in the shadow of the trees in case something was watching. The rock was porous, rough to the touch, and easy to walk on without slipping.

Above, the gargantuan trees reached desperately across the clearing to try to smother the sun like they did everywhere else, but the gap proved too wide for them. The resultant hole in the canopy reminded me of the entrances to flood caves during the dry season back home, where my friends and I could go explore the depths as long as we stayed near the light.

I stalked forward, eyes up in anticipation of the next surprise, but it never came. All was still except for the burbling spring.

Stepping into the sun for the first time since I came here, I felt like I was finally doing something familiar, though water on Proxis would never be in the open like this. I could ignore that for now.

The light was blindingly bright and surprisingly hot considering how cool the rest of the forest was.

So damned bright. Ugh.

Slowly, cautiously, I edged toward the spring, my body tingling with renewed sensation in the delicious warmth of the clearing.

Step by step, always on guard, I neared my prize.

However, before I knew what was happening, my body reached a tipping point of some sort. My exposed skin felt increasingly hot, so hot it felt like I was on fire. My eyes welled with tears, and my vision blurred. Subcutaneous blood vessels burst and roiled inside my body. Everything was a white blur.

Something was very wrong here.

Blindly, I whirled, turning to run back to the trees, to the green, rolling shadow. Everything was light now, incandescent to the point of agony, but I kept moving, sprinting for the safety of the shade. I knew I made it when the cooling chill washed over my skin.

I flopped down on the porous stone, blinking tears from my eyes and willing my log to appear.

You take 1 light damage.

You take 1 light damage.

Status gained: Exposure (Radiant)

Exposure: You are more vulnerable to damage from all forms of light.

You take 1 light damage.

You take 1 light damage.

You take 1 light damage.

You take 1 light damage.

You take 1 light damage.

You take 1 light damage.

The sun… It was poison.

The edges of my vision started to feather with cool, soothing blackness. I shuddered, sighing. Anything was better than the light.

The blackness overtook the rest of the world, shrinking it down to a pinprick, until I felt my consciousness waver.

“It still lives. Finish it quick.” A voice, high and rough, spoke from somewhere nearby.

You take 1 light damage.

“No! It is man. We take it. We take it.”

Then the world slipped away on a tide of dreams.