Lorcan had stopped jumping through the treetops two hours ago. His drill instructor had cautioned him to not alert too many monsters at once when entering the deep gorge. The ground here was no swamp and with almost no sunlight reaching it, the undergrowth wasn’t a problem as well. His new friend Vokari was following him, silently switching from gliding to walking on all six limbs.
Lorcan knew most cultivators walked through rivers of blood to reach the top. He had been in several wars, but most of his levels still came from cultivating by meditation. He had killed, but he knew his fighting experience was severely lacking for his level. This time he was alone. Alone against the wildness.
He held a spear he’d bought at the system store in the monastery. He’d tried again to use the spear he’d taken from baron Skorr, but had found the D-grade weapon still sealed by the system in his Cosmos Sack.
Some hundred meters away he could see a mammal with huge wicked claws slowly crawling along the ground. According to the dossiers he’d studied, that would be a Brskr, a F-grade monster. He didn’t use [Inquisitive Spatial Perception Eye], to not alert the beast. He crept cautiously nearer, until he was in striking range. Twenty meters behind the beast he concentrated on the Dao of dimensions and stabbed with a two-armed vicious strike. It let out a deep roar, but instead of turning around and attacking, what Lorcan had expected, it raced away with unexpected speed. Lorcan started to follow but his hexasquirrel bit into his leg clothes to stop him. He looked down. Vokari made a complex gesture with four arms and sped away. Lorcan stood there, uncertain. Then he heard a loud screech. And another. Then a choir.
A barghest-sized insect came in sight, its meters long wings faster than he could see. It’s face mostly consisted of two giant insectoid eyes and a wicked mouth-sting. It was on him within one of his frantic heartbeats. He reflexively used [Evasive Spatial Shift]. When the insect turned, he stabbed it from a dozen meters away. It dropped and clumsily crawled away. He used his [Inquisitive Spatial Perception Eye] to analyze it.
Steel-Stabbing-Wasp (Level 48)
A few levels below him. That should not be problem in the F-grade. Then the screeching of wings got louder. More insects came in sight. Dozens. He sighed. At least he wouldn’t have to hunt for more enemies.
One of the wasps saw him and sped up, sting pointing forward straight at his heart. He waited for the last moment, then he dodged without any use of skills or Dao. The wasp missed him by inches and he slashed its wings with a two-handed swing. The insect dropped, but disappeared. He looked around and saw it diving at him from ten meters above. He dropped to his knees and planted the spear upright on the ground. The insect beast speared itself right up.
He looked around. Other wasps shimmered away and reappeared all around him. He swallowed. He couldn't keep track of them all at once. A few would stab him in the back and that would be that. Or could he? He concentrated on his ocular skill and the connection he’d forged to the Dao. It was either the worst moment to try something like this, or the best. His sight got hazy, then he stopped seeing. But he wasn’t blind. He felt space around him. Concentrating on Cosmic Energy, he could sense the beasts as glowing embers, moving around and through space. He stood still and looked for the first beast to enter his range. Then he started to move. Walking, almost dancing, in an unpredictable pattern. He stabbed and slashed in ever more complex moves. While his dexterity was good, his intelligence stat started to shine here. With his evolved race, it even exceeded the normal maximum value for F-grade cultivators. Imagining the surrounding space, getting used to a whole new sense, tracking all moving bodies inside his sphere of vision, it all just fell into place. Heartbeats later it was as if he’d grown up with this kind of sense. Plotting a course to avoid getting hit while simultaneously getting in range to strike was Childs play. Evading the wasps attack wasn’t easy, but doable. Hitting them worked fine. But when he hit, his blade only left shallow wounds on his opponents. Multiple hits were necessary to kill even one of the insects. He needed more strength or a better combat style. Maybe just a better weapon? He wasn’t sure.
More enemies swarmed around him. Blinking, shifting through space, displacing their position. He found a rhythm and danced through the mass of insects. Untouchable. His spear whirled ever faster, ever more precise. He lost himself in the complex interlocking arcs and spheres of movement. He tried different cuts, different thrusts. He remembered his training with the guidance of his [Spear Mastery] skill. Then it just… clicked. His swings finally got the correct edge alignment. Powered by both arms and movement down to his feet. He felt a headache coming on fast. His use of the Dao used little energy and since he had connected the pathways correctly, it was also efficient. But after an hour and dozens of dead insects lying around him, forming obstacles and distractions, his Mental Energy began to falter. And he was still surrounded by angry insects. Some of which seemed to finally understand his rhythm and tried to counter it. He grinned. That only made it better training. If it got too dangerous, he could just run for it. The insects were fast, but he could use his movement skill to escape. Probably. He faltered a step while trying to calculate the odds. Now that he put his tremendous intelligence on the task, he got a quite accurate assessment. Which… wasn’t as good as he’d expected while going with his gut feeling.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He kicked at the ground as hard as he could while using [Strike of the Five Ways]. He targeted the inside of one of the wasps. It felt like he himself got hit by a wet towel. Before he could return to his evasion maneuvers, one of the wasps managed a glancing hit at his arm. The swordlike stinger ripped open his upper arm. He grimaced. That really hurt. He didn’t have the endurance of a pure warrior class to just shrug off damage like that. He went into pure evasion and got a healing pill out of his Cosmos Sack. The healing energy took only seconds to close the wound. When he could detect no more bleeding he again went into the offensive.
He was still at early proficiency at the complex skill and that just wasn’t good enough to circumvent the natural defenses of F-grade beasts. He tried again, this time redirecting his kinetic energy at the back of the head. A crunch sound made even the insects hesitate a moment, while the head dislodged from one of their number. As he’d suspected. Without bones, only the brittle exoskeleton held them together. He cracked his knuckles and went to work. His usage of Mental Energy spiked, as he simultaneously used his [Inquisitive Spatial Perception Eye] powered surround vision, [Evasive Spatial Shift] evasion maneuvers and [Strike of the Five Ways] for attack. With his high wisdom, he had no problem to power it, but his stamina was lacking. Insectoid beasts dropped like flies. After half an hour of fighting, there still was no end in sight, but his reserves were nearing their end. He used an outrageously expensive high level soldier pill and put a Soul Crystal in a belt on his breast, where it touched his skin and allowed him to recharge his Mental Energy. While his fighting style cost tremendous amounts of concentration, it still didn’t fully exploit his mind. Something about this attack was off. He didn’t attack the wasps; this wasn’t a system generated quest or beast wave. Why didn’t those bloody things not break off their attack? The information missive he’d read in the monastery didn’t describe any such behavior. Usually Steel-Stabbing-Wasps were supposed to break off their attack after taking medium losses. And now they’d taken absolutely terrible losses and still came on hard. He looked around with his vision skill, now not only concentrated on his enemies, but also everything else. He stopped attacking and went into pure defensive, which let him rest up a bit of his Dao usage. He couldn’t detect anything unusual. Now he started to get nervous. His arm still hurt, his head throbbed, his resources were low. He'd decided against carrying any escape talismans, fearing it would lower the worth of his achievements in the eyes of the Judgmental Heavens.
With increasing despair, he continued looking for anything unusual. He found no other living beings, no caves underground, no unusual Cosmic Energy flows… His mind’s eye started looking for smaller, subtler traces. And he found them. Tiny streams of Cosmic Energy, all coming from a single point directly below ground level a hundred meters away, almost outside his sphere of vision. He changed his movement pattern to go there and the wasps got angrier as he got nearer. He shifted to the location as soon as it came in range for his evasion skill. Standing directly above it, he could sense its form. A chest, buried just beneath the ground level. He directed some [Strike of the Five Ways] kicks at the earth in such away, as to strike from below. Wet earth exploded upwards. It unearthed a chest made of metal, covered in silver fractal inscriptions. He dropped to the ground next to it and moved it into his Cosmos Sack. It seemed to resist, locking space against being brought inside a spatial treasure. Shards of spacetime, interlocking like random gears of a stuck watch. He stopped his evasive maneuvers, dropped his surround sight and got to work. His mind prodded and turned every part of affected space. Within one heartbeat, he found the primitive sequence and unlocked the spatial disturbance.
The chest disappeared into his Cosmos Sack. He immediately jumped, and not a second to early. Three wasps hit the ground he just vacated, stingers in front. He started running, but not at ground level, which was too uneven and full of roots and undergrowth to reach his full speed. He jumped on a wasp and from there to another. Angry buzzing followed him, but he spatial shifted to another wasp and jumped again. At the edge of the swarm, he shifted again, this time high up into a tree. He jumped toward a bunch of lianas and swung forward. Evasive spatial shifts brought him to the next liana. From there he dropped to a dry riverbed, where he’d seen a mostly clear way.
There he used [Doublestep] to run faster. He’d rarely used this skill since he’d learned his spatial evasion method. Now he realized some facts, his less intelligent self had missed. It didn’t make him that much faster, but it was a true temporal effect. His reaction time scaled with his speed, so he had no problem whatsoever to avoid obstacles. Sadly, it wasn’t a complete increase. He couldn’t move his body faster. After some experimentation on the way, he concluded, it was only his mental speed connected to perception that truly gained a time dilation. His running speed was increased by an effect that basically used his faster neural activity, while also powering the muscles to keep up. Not a true temporal effect. He estimated he could run about three times faster than normal. It was an interesting skill, but he had the feeling, it could be much more useful if tweaked a bit. After his success with drawing his [Inquisitive Spatial Perception Eye] skill himself, he was eager to try something like that again. If he connected it to a fitting Dao of Time seed, he could increase the mental speed up. But that was for another time.
Even running full speed, he was only barely faster than the wasps. But after half an hour, the swarm fell back and disappeared sometime later. He ran for a while longer, then stopped. He looked around but could see no pursuers. Tired, he returned to the monastery.