"Oh c'mon man, that was pretty good for my third-ever fight!" came the response from Symon.
"Oh I see now, you're just being rude to make up for giving me helpful fighting advice earlier... you do care about me!"
"Sure, sure. Thanks for the advice anyway, it did help."
Symon rolled his eyes but acquiesced -- he wanted to see them too.
[ Status:
Name: Symon
Class: Cursed Healer
Strength: 0.70 {+0.03}
Constitution: 0.92
Acuity: 0.73 {+0.01}
Intelligence: 0.73
Will: 0.99 {+0.01}
Vessel (Vitality): 2/8
Abilities:
Idealise (2): Consumes Vitality to return a living target to its peak state. This ability automatically applies to the wielder and cannot be disabled.
Seize (5) {+1}: Absorbs Vitality from a target and stores it in the wielder's Vessel. This ability automatically applies to valid targets and cannot be disabled.
Essence Bond (0): Permanently bind your essence to that of a spirit's.
Passives:
Poison Resistance (0) ]
Symon was pretty pleased with the solid improvements across the board, especially to his strength. He wasn't sure if it was just a placebo, but he could have sworn his heavy metal club was just a little easier to swing. His healing was lagging behind his vitality drain, which in one sense was a great thing because it meant he wasn't getting injured too often. And yet, it had the downside of meaning that when he really needed healing, it wouldn't be as effective as it could have been.
He didn't think that was a problem he could fix any way other than taking injuries while fighting, which he intended to keep to a minimum. Either way, he was happy with the results of the fight, especially because it had healed his sunburn and fixed the perpetual dryness in his throat.
He was beginning to realise just how temporary this fix was; his magic healed the issues caused by dehydration instead of generating water out of nowhere. His body was still telling him he was thirsty, he just wasn't being negatively impacted by his dehydration -- at least as long as he had vitality remaining. He was already working on a solution for this by hopefully finding some water where the still distant trees were, but he needed more vitality to tide him over in the meantime.
To that end he resumed his journey, paying close attention to the base of any nearby dunes for any hidden centipedes. The heat was still uncomfortable, but the spare vitality at least made it pain-free.
"Hey Keelgrave, what do I have to do to get a heat resistance or something?" Maybe magic could make things easier for him.
Damn, that centipede venom must have really messed me up if I got poison resistance, good thing I was unconscious for most of it...
"Is there anything a little less dangerous?" Symon would rather have a resistance before he almost died.
"Everything from before I woke up in the desert is completely blank," he lied with a casual shrug.
Symon begrudgingly realised Keelgrave had asked a good question. He'd been so excited to meet someone he could talk to that he hadn't considered how strange it was that he could even communicate with them in the first place. In his defence, he'd been attacked by said individual almost immediately after -- which tends to disrupt such questions -- and he'd just never returned to the thought. Symon only spoke English, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to call him extremely untalented at learning new languages, as proven by years of Spanish classes resulting in almost nothing. Why was it then that he could communicate with Keelgrave?
"I'm just speaking English... aren't you?"
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
"It sounds like you are... how else would we understand each other then?" It wasn't like the native languages had been downloaded into his brain when he got here or anything, he still only knew English and how to count to six in Spanish.
"Huh, neat. So this isn't a magical translation from that Ledger status system thing?"
"Keelgrave! Christ man, I don't want to hear it," he said, screwing up his eyes as he tried to move on, speeding up his marching through the sands as if to run away from the conversation.
----------------------------------------
Symon had come to begrudgingly admit that Keelgrave might have had a point earlier -- killing the massive centipedes wasn't actually that difficult. As long as Symon kept an eye out and didn't allow them to get the drop on him, they usually went down to just a couple good hits from the pipe. It was splattered in green bug fluids but was holding up remarkably well -- it hadn't deformed despite him repeatedly slamming it into centipedes, and occasionally the sand, not that he was particularly physically strong.
By the fourth centipede of the day, he'd got things down to a science. The trick was to take things slow and to not panic; trying to finish the fight in a single hit while the centipede was still buried distrubuted too much of the blow into the sand, allowing the centipede to unburrow mostly uninjured. No, instead Symon had learned that it was best to wake the centipede up by stomping loudly up to it, and only attack it when it was mostly out of the sand.
Doing this, Symon would stun the centipede on the first hit, allowing him to drain the vitality safely. While the centipedes weren't too common, he still filled his vessel up in good time, helped by not taking any injuries beyond small scrapes. Even with the interruptions, he'd made some solid progress to the trees as well, to the point that he realised the distance was shorter than he'd originally estimated.
In fact, from this distance he realised that it wasn't a forest of trees as origininally thought. Instead, it was more of a tall grassy field interspersed with the occaisonal tree, like an African savanna.
Symon found it quite difficult to judge distances in a massive white desert with no landmarks. Still, there was no way he'd make it to the vegetation at his current speed... but who said he couldn't go faster?
One of the first benefits he'd noticed from his magic, before even fighting the first centipede after he woke up here, was that the healing soothed his muscles, preventing his legs from getting sore even while trudging up and down slippery dunes. Theoretically, he could spend the whole day sprinting without rest -- if he had enough vitality.
That was a big "if", of course, but even if he had to stop to hunt centipedes along the way to refill his vessel he'd be making much faster progress than otherwise. He really didn't want to spend a night out on the sands, so if he was going to do this he'd have to really commit. He could just go back to the collapsed tower, but then he'd be back to square one. He wasn't even sure that there'd be shelter or civilisation at the treeline, but it was his only hope.
He could go back to slowly die back in the tower, relying on others to save him. This wasn't going to happen, both because there was no one else around in the first place and because Symon didn't want to be reliant on others anymore. He'd been so weak and frail in his past life, and he wanted to preserve his newfound autonomy. A hail mary run to safety had a higher risk of him dying earlier, but was also his only realistic chance of long term survival.
His mind made up, Symon's fast walk slowly accelerated. All this loose sand didn't lend itself to running, and it was difficult to maintain his balance even while just jogging, but he persisted. His speed made it harder to spot the buried centipedes, but he was confident that he'd be able to outrun them anyway as long as he didn't step directly on one.
Gradually, his pace sped up. He would charge up a dune, often slipping and scrabbling on all fours, and then practically throw himself down once he reached their tops. He would have chosen to slide down them when going downhill, but they weren't steep enough for that. Still, he felt almost as if he was ice skating with how every step would slip a little as they landed.
He fell a few times, but the soft sand would always cushion his fall. He had the vitality to spare if he was injured anyway, although he'd rather save it for his running.
Symon's rapid movement was sloppy at first, but it didn't take long for him to get more comfortable with it. By the time an hour had passed, he was jogging along at a steady pace and was only down by a single point of vitality. This was pretty good, considering a centipede would give him two or three points of vitality depending on how big it was and how much damage he dealt to it before draining it. He was breathing heavily, but his muscles told him they could work all day.
When he took a quick pause to calculate how long his vitality would last, he found he was completely relaxed, like he'd just stood up from watching TV on his couch and hadn't just jogged through a miserably hot desert for an hour. He was uncomfortably warm and sweaty, but that was all. It had a way of fading into the background after so much time in the heat anyway.
Still, a 'pretty good' pace wasn't enough for him to make it to the trees by nightfall. Symon knew deserts got cold at night, but he wasn't sure how survivable it was; his healing could delay things if it did get dangerously cold, but he wasn't sure if it would last long enough to see him through to the morning. Shelter would be an important next step, once he found water.
But what Symon was most concerned about were the monsters. It stood to reason that there could be nocturnal creatures he'd never seen before, and he'd hate for his first contact with them to getting his legs chewed off whilst he slept. Even if there wasn't anything new, he'd be in for a rough time if a centipede stung him with its paralytic while he was sleeping. He wasn't interested in testing the strength of his poison resistance.
With a shudder, he imagined what would happen if a bearcat found him while he was sleeping. He had no idea what their hunting habits were and would prefer to never find out.
With renewed determination, he set off for his destination at his previous pace, quickly working his way up to an all out sprint. Trees meant water, and water meant civilisation.
It had to.