When the shock-and-adrenaline cocktail stopped surging through Nick’s veins, the pain radiating throughout his thigh shot up by an order of magnitude. Searing suffering blossomed into incandescent agony over the span of a dozen breaths.
By this point, Nick’s left leg was drenched in his own blood, completely soaking his blue jeans, although it was already starting to dry. While most of his mind grappled with the sheer sensory overload of the most serious wound he had taken yet, a distant, dissociated portion of his brain began cataloging his injuries with clinical neutrality.
Lost some blood, but not enough for it to start filling my boots. If the bleeding is already slowing, then I didn’t nick an artery. If I was able to walk this far, I didn’t sever a tendon or nerve either. It’s likely a moderately deep laceration with a lot of bruising to my skin and surrounding muscles.
Nick groaned as a lance of pain pulsed from deep inside his leg. Might have cracked my femur for good measure. While he waited for the hurt to subside, riding the ragged edge of panic, he continued to think. He started pondering any topic he could come up with that might distract him from the overwhelming pain of his injuries.
From his position, he wasn’t able to witness the fighting, as most of the melee was taking place a bit further down the hillside and was obscured by the lay of the land. Desperate for a diversion, he tried to follow the progress of the battle with his RTS overlay, using his ears and the movements of the spearpoints to visualize the fight taking place below his field of view. At first, it was just a crude image—a bunch of question marks overlaid across his memory of the terrain. It was completely useless, but Nick kept at it, highly motivated to focus on anything besides the inside of his own body.
He let the sounds of battle wash over him—the screams of the lemurs and the roars of the lizards—the scents of fear and blood riding the breeze. He let the bits that he could see form patterns within his mind, each motion revealing hints of a greater order below. Nick’s awareness of his own body faded into the background, providing blessed relief as his mental model grew sharper and more responsive. As he concentrated, something clicked into focus, like the pieces of a puzzle coming together. That was when the story playing out across his mind’s eye shifted, and then evolved.
Instead of representing the various fighting forces as dots laid out along a two-dimensional map, the scene filled out into three dimensions. It gained clarity and depth, like a complex VR simulation rather than a basic top-down view. Although he knew it wasn’t perfect, Nick could visualize what was happening in the battle below, clued in by the sights and sounds that reached him, but even more by reading the underlying logic to the battle, the hidden interactions contained within the myriad variables playing out all around him.
Watching through his new and improved mental map, Nick saw that the lemurs’ western flank had wrapped up their melee with the lizards. That side of the line had finished their fight faster due to the presence of the Elder and her elite unit. With Bandit at her side, the Elder was presently running past the middle of the line, which was holding its own, over to where the fighting was still fierce along the cliffside—the spot where he had been stationed before being wounded by the crunchers.
Tracking the movements of the lemurs’ army as a whole, Nick was able to deduce the reason why. A cluster of komos has broken through the spear wall. If left unattended, the breach would create increasing pressure on the tribe as more lizards pushed past and fell upon the spear-wielders from behind, leading to the collapse of their formation. But the Elder had no intention of letting matters devolve to that extent.
She was sprinting like the wind while shrieking and gesturing to direct the rest of her forces. Thanks to his strange new ability, Nick could sense the tide of battle shift the moment she arrived.
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The flow of komos pouring in through the break in the line slowed before drying up completely. The panicked cries of the lemur spearmen grew more confident as the furry warriors regained cohesion, some reforming the wall while the others moved to support the elites. Fighting alongside the Elder, the lemurs’ reserve unit surrounded the scattered komos like antibodies swarming a pathogen, guarding the backs of the spear-wielders so that they could focus on the threat coming from the front.
The Elder’s tactic was remarkably effective. A few minutes later, the final reptile that had broken past the line fell dead at her feet. Not long after, the komos abandoned their push to claim the hilltop. The scattered survivors disengaged and retreated down the hillside. The direction of their rout told him that the spiders had completed their operation and had vacated the valley floor.
With nothing left to process, his mental map dissolved, leaving Nick in need of a fresh distraction. Fortunately, he had one waiting in the wings. Over the course of the battle, the spiders had risen to become the biggest mystery on the island. Proving themselves to be far more intelligent and far less hostile than Nick’s initial encounter had led him to believe.
That ambush felt less like an animal attack and more like military tactics. They moved like professional soldiers, waiting until the beasts in the valley were distracted before striking from behind. Fighting with remarkable precision and coordination that could only have resulted from rigorous training.
Their behavior left him with mixed feelings. On one hand, Nick and the tribe had clearly been used as bait, which he was not inclined to regard favorably. On the other, the spiders had saved them. Prevented the tribe from taking severe casualties if not being wiped out completely. The spiders had been ruthless opportunists, but they hadn’t engaged in wanton slaughter. If the arachnids had wanted to wipe out the lemurs as well, they had been given a perfect opportunity. Not that they needed to engage in any fancy maneuvering to defeat the tribe, the weakest force fighting in the battle for the highlands.
The strangest part of all was his encounter with the spider Bulwark and its entourage, which he was still struggling to wrap his mind around. Just before the elite beast had bowed to him, Nick had almost felt like he could understand its intent. The giant spiders had been… apologizing to him. Which was odd, considering what he had done to the body of one of their own.
Weird or not, there it was. It also turned out that the spider colony could climb their way up the mountainside whenever they wanted. Instead, they had joined the rest of the beasts in the highlands. Not only waiting until the gate opened on its own, but picking a fight that they could have easily avoided, losing at least a dozen of their warriors along the way. Whatever was going on, Nick knew that the spiders weren’t acting out of altruism, although he appreciated their intervention nonetheless.
Following that thought, he raised his gaze to the mountain looming above him; to the summit that was hidden from his view. Whatever they saw up there must be playing a role in this as well.
By this point, he had realized that his self-distraction tactic was working. Over the last ten minutes, the pain in his leg had gradually receded. His left thigh still really fucking hurt, but the agony was no longer disabling due to sheer sensory overload. With a groan, Nick summoned the courage to look directly at his wound, afraid that he had underestimated the extent of the damage. He took out his scissors and cut a slit in the denim of his jeans so that he could dress his injuries without taking off his pants, as they would finish falling apart the next time he undressed.
Even that bit of jostling made Nick scream. He used his canteen to wet the fabric around the wound so that he could peel back the cloth without it sticking to his skin. Staring down at the patchwork of cuts and bruises beneath, he could tell what had happened right away. Most of the hyena’s bite had caught the end of his leather coat, which had helped shield his flesh from the beast’s steel trap jaws. Although that area was purple with bruises, Nick’s skin was still intact. But about halfway down his thigh, a fang and two smaller teeth had chomped him directly, creating two modest gashes and one deep puncture, through which blood was slowly seeping out and dripping onto the grass below.
Taken together, it was the worst injury that he had ever suffered. Not counting the foreman’s sword through his chest, as that had been healed by the System only seconds after it happened. While the pain was certainly distracting, it was no longer disabling—at least to the extent that Nick could still move. Still plan. Still think.
It meant that he could still contribute to the battle for the highlands, at least to some extent.