‘The gods are fickle’, or so goes the expression.

Folklore, scripture, ancient scroll or academic thesis – there are many ways to understand the world around us, but we will never understand it perfectly. Many people may try to convince you they have it all figured out, dear student, but I promise you they do not.

Keep asking why and before long you will hear this ridiculous phrase. ‘The gods are fickle’. It is nothing but an admission of ignorance! The gods are invoked because you don’t understand the true causes of what you speak of, and they are fickle because you don’t understand what rules they operate by!

The gods are not fickle; they are unknowable, and it is likely not to them you should look for answers even if you could know their minds, for I doubt they would deign to enlighten you anyway.

So, with all that being the case my faithful student, when you ask me how a soul-bound skill is born and I tell you that ‘the gods are fickle’, you should just as well stop asking me.

- Recorded verbatim by the Sultan Achidna, reportedly receiving tutelage from Nathlan the Ancient on skill pathways and their alteration.

----------------------------------------

‘Pain and pleasure’ was an old mantra for me. I had lived by it in my long mountain days back on Earth, and so too did I live with it now. You took pleasure from the pain and knew the pain would get you back when you were focused only on pleasure.

It wasn’t a masochistic desire that led me to accept the pain but rather a recognition of worthy trade. Hours of gruelling hiking, running, or cycling to push yourself up the valleys to the peaks, legs groaning in perpetual protest and lungs burning. And yet you learned to savour the feelings, to take solace in the fact that while your body was uncomfortable in so many way, your soul was souring amongst the clouds.

There was something undeniably satisfying about being somewhere incredible that you could not reach except with sacrifice. For me, it was the mountains and woodlands on Earth that I had explored. For others it was the sea or the sky. But either way, putting in the physical bone-weary effort to get to the place you wanted was not just worth the pain, but the very act of being worth it transformed the pain into a positive experience.

Each feeling of strain and pressure in tired muscles was transmitted to the brain and became satisfaction. A reminder that you were earning it. And it built, over and over. More pain, more effort, led inexorably to a greater reward. The dopamine kept flowing, the promise of reward just beyond sight, and it would balance the against the discomfort, hold it just below a threshold of ‘too much’.

It was a delicate balance of course, and if the threshold was crossed and the reward not forthcoming, the mesolimbic system would withdraw its support. The pain would be abruptly shunted to the front of the mind, and you would suddenly question why you were working so damn hard for nothing.

But if you walked that tightrope without falling and made it to your goal without crossing that threshold? So worth it.

In my old life the pleasure would come in many forms; reaching a summit to look out upon a beautiful vista, seeing a trail winding off down to a picturesque village, perhaps a hair-raisingly steep and narrow path to bomb down on two wheels, or even just the soft play of dappled sunlight on the loamy earth beneath steadily pounding feet.

Whatever the pleasure though, the pain would return. Niggling aches, dangerous falls, blisters or sun-burn or bug-bites or thirst. There would always be minor pains to distract from the pleasure, and the trick was to not shut it out but rather let it flow over you. Recognise the pain, experience it, and then focus back on the pleasure. If you were lucky, you’d hit the right balance between the two.

Too much pain and you wouldn’t enjoy the pleasure, but not enough pain would be just as bad. You’d end up somewhere not very special. Sure, you could drive to a summit, but the view would never be as impressive, there would be crowds of people, and you’d never be able to find that feeling of satisfaction of having earned it. Your body might thank you, but your soul would be empty.

The last three days and nights in the endless valley had thrown this delicate balance into disarray though. Other than the corpse whose belongings I had appropriated, I’d not seen a single person. I had not just walked through, but actively lived in one of the most beautiful environments I’d ever seen. Untouched by human hands, the forest stretched for untold miles, blanketing the valley floor in a glorious dappled green. The emerald valley snaked ever onward but each moment felt unique, the mad chaos of the forest ever shifting with new patterns and details.

And my enhanced attributes made the pain a minor thing. I could travel twice the speed I could before with half the effort. Food was plentiful now that I had the skill and confidence to catch it. I still couldn’t make the most of my Wilderness Endurance Hunter skill, as I was fairly sure the point was to run down and exhaust prey without having to ambush or use a weapon. The trouble with that tactic is that while I could probably keep any prey insight on an open plain, I would lose them quickly in the forest.

So either I needed to change the environment, or more likely, pick up and incorporate a tracking skill into the merged skill of my Wilderness Endurance Hunter. This was something of a secondary goal for me, but at the moment I was more interested in making it to civilisation. I could always pick up new skills later.

I ate well each night, preparing spits of food to roast over large open fires, and kept choice cuts to break my fast with each morning. I would eat throughout the day whenever I came across berries or other forage to keep my energy up as well, and I found the diet of fresh meat and sharp berries to be very agreeable.

I bathed regularly in small streams and rivers, and with new confidence I strode and ran the trails and paths that criss-crossed the endless valley towards its mouth and the plains below. I had faced an entire pack of wolves and lived, and while there were definitely stronger creatures littered throughout the land, I so far had not had a single negative interaction with one since I arrived. I saw evidence of their existence but since I passed through their domains quickly, they seemed to have no issues with my presence.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

It as an easy three days filled with pleasure and lacking in pain. There was hard work, but it was varied. Hunting as I did with my weapons and ambush tactics kept my mind engaged and thrilled me more than I cared to admit. It was one thing to revel in the hunt, but to experience such satisfaction at success was a little distasteful when that success was intimately wrapped up with another creature’s death. Not distasteful enough to stop me though.

But as it always did, the universe eventually sent pain to balance my days of pleasure.

On the third day I walked into an ambush, and that signalled the end of the much needed holiday. I was ambushed by some sort of tree-dwelling snake. It had two dextrous tails that rattled together as it launched itself down at me, and alongside two massive fangs protruding from its mouth, it also whipped a scything talon at the end of a fleshy string at my face.

It felt very much like overkill, as without my skills I would have been killed outright, enhanced attributes or not. However, the valley had made its mark on me, and I reacted with lightning reflexes. Activating Check-Step, I halted and leapt backwards, my momentum changing in less than a heartbeat and causing the jury-rigged backpack lashed to me to slam into my back from the change in direction. As I initiated the movement, my reflexes were heightened, and I used that state to take in the details I had previously missed.

Rather than leaping at me in an all-or-nothing gamble, the snake’s lower body was actually wrapped tightly around the tree branch above, and after failing to catch me in its first attempt, it was already in the act of winding its body back upwards to perch on the branch again.

I was not about to let my prey go, so I reached out to snag its neck. It tried to dance away, but I had the advantage in speed over this creature when it wasn’t coiled taut like a spring in preparation for a leap. I easily grabbed it, and a quick wrench snapped its neck. A few moments later heralded a faint ringing in my mind;

You have killed a Lesser Horned Leaping Snake (level 6). Experience gained.

That was a surprisingly low-levelled creature to be attacking me considering my size. Weak too. Perhaps it should serve as a poignant reminder that strength is not everything. I, a level 19 creature weighing in at least 80 kilos, was almost killed by a level 6 animal 80 times lighter.

An unwritten rule I had discovered in my first few days was that while the world was far more bloodthirsty than expected, and creatures seemed to have less respect for a predator/prey dynamic – or put more plainly, it was a bit of a free for all with creatures of every type killing each other left and right – most wouldn’t pick a fight with something much larger than them.

Ambush predators were more likely to than others but it was still fairly uncommon, at least in my experience, to be attacked by such a small animal. No use crying over spilt snakes though. I almost activated Heart of the Hills to crush the scathing thoughts my inner critic provided in response to that ‘joke’ but then I worried that without the inhibition provided by that part of myself, I would probably become pretty insufferable.

Rather than chalk this up to a weird coincidence, I decided to treat it as an omen of things to come and moved with more caution as I travelled onwards. It turned out to be a good decision, as I was the victim of more ambushes, and drew the ire of more creatures than ever before as I moved. None were of particular concern now that I was looking out for them, and I used my remaining javelin and the wolf-jaw gauntlet – I had created a new one from one of the larger wolf corpses before leaving the glade – to great effect.

I kept trudging, fighting the occasional low-levelled creature until I was nearly killed by a mountain lion of some sort. That was one of the toughest fights of my life, and I emerged victorious but injured. One arm was left hanging limp due to a dislocated shoulder, and various deep slashes marred my chest. I earned another level pushing me to 20, and I invested 3 points into endurance and 2 into perception. After my recent near-death experience, I badly wanted to expand the range and acuity of my senses, although my injuries demanded I use most of my level’s bounty to aid in my recovery.

As a flood of new information flooded into me, my brain struggled to process the sensory data. What I slowly began to comprehend left me more terrified than ever before. I was surrounded. Not by a couple of low levelled creatures, or even a few predators far above my current power, like the bear or eagles, but by a swarm of lesser creatures.

I heard a thousand legs scuttle along the forest floor towards me and saw the rustling of foliage heralding the approach of the swarm of insects with every frantic twist of my neck. Ants were flowing up towards me in a carpet of chitinous, carapace-covered horror. They flowed over the corpse of the mountain lion that had nearly killed me, and a frenzy of movement erupted as massive hand-sized ants set to work devouring the carcass. I trembled with terror, my mind completely overcome with fear. I could – and had – faced my death at the hands of another animal, but I was uniquely scared of insects for some reason.

Not even insects specifically, but anything small, skittering and moving in swarms. There was something fundamentally wrong with multitudes of small creatures with many legs that set me off.

I was aware it wasn’t a rational fear. You could argue – and I did – that fear of insect swarms was probably rational, but I knew my terror was not connected to personal risk or some abstract concept of preservation. I did not feel the same bone-shaking panic at the thought of a swarm of gorillas or wolves or dogs, despite the danger being much higher. A swarm of rats or hamsters was a scary thought, but cockroaches? No. Please god, no.

So when I realised my position was in the centre of an ant swarm, I did what any rational primate would do when confronted with its worst fear. I shut down, completely and without hesitation.

Survival instincts or general common sense would have told me that if I simply sprinted through the swarm I would probably get through the dozen or so meters of forest floor carpeted by ants with only a few managing to cling to my boots. But survival instincts and general common sense weren’t in charge of my brain at the moment.

Instead, I simply stood still, mouth agape and pleading in silence for a quick death. I prayed to gods I didn’t believe in, and even tried screaming for help to the divine being that had apparently brought me to this world. I felt tears spilling over my cheeks, and my back hunched with the force of the sobs wracking my body.

As I watched the swarm approach, moment by moment as if through the enhanced timing of Check-Step, something broke inside me. A dam, some final barrier placed in my soul to safeguard me from strain, collapsed in on itself and everything behind that barrier was released.

I felt that space that was so often full of something, that pool of potential deep within myself that allowed me to activate my skills, abruptly vanish. Drained in an instant. There was no steady trickle, no careful flow of energy through the metaphysical construct of my soul and into the waiting repository of a skill.

One moment there was a space within myself, half-empty and re-filling slowly, and the next there was nothing. No energy, no pool, no potential, and most terrifying of all, no space. But I was not interested in the details of the soul-rending agony that I was in the throes of. I was interested in only one thing – the creeping terror of the swarm carried towards me on a thousand thousand legs. I could think of nothing else, could focus on nothing at all except the pure fear of the swarm and the animalistic desire to get away, to have them leave me alone.

The agony vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and I was left drained entirely. My body was an empty husk and like a puppet with its strings cut, I hit the floor. The final image my eye saw was of a large feline skeleton, completely stripped of all tissue, and a procession of massive ants scurrying directly away from me back into the foliage from whence they came.

.

.

.

Indomitable Prey has gained in Level. Indomitable Prey – level 2.