Arriving in total darkness in the stone hollow atop Dead Man’s Hollow, Rin took a moment to drink from his rapidly depleting waterskin. The storm had passed, and night had fallen, but he didn’t dare light a fire with the threat of assassins nearby. On top of that, he was hungry. The rations he’d stashed from Percy were dwindling pitifully low, and he longed for something heartier.
Fortunately, the stigma of being haunted meant hunters had long avoided the hilltop. It was teeming with small game, even after dark. It was a trivial matter to transform into a bat, locate an unsuspecting bunny, and descend from the night sky like an angel of death. At the final moment of his dive, he imagined tiny pants on the bat’s legs that stretched into deadly metal spikes, piercing his quarry’s skull in an instant kill. The creation awarded him a new Memorable Outfit which he named Leg Spikes when nothing more original sprang to mind. Within a half-hour, Rin had skinned two rabbits and was roasting them over the smokeless flame of another Memorable Outfit, Fire Sleeves.
His belly full and appetite sated, he considered his next steps. The impressive monsters displayed in the Cursed Temple beckoned him with the promise of power and freedom. With their abilities, he could explore anywhere in the kingdom without fear of harm. All he needed was more flowers and more Charisma. And that meant conquering the next dungeon. He was more motivated than ever to get going, but first, he needed a firm understanding of the monster he’d just acquired.
He changed into the Scout of the Undead and brought up the status sheet to pore over his boosted attributes.
Rin Cartwright
Level 32 Scout of the Undead (Death Type) [CURSED] Level 6 Potato Farmer
Attributes:
Strength: 33 (+20)
Dexterity: 60 (+55)
Perception: 101 (+86)
Stamina: 91 (+76)
Toughness: 65 (+57)
Current HP: 650/650
Recovery: 70 HP/min (+40)
Magic: 82 (+72)
Current MP: 810/820
Absorption: 71 MP/min (+66)
Charisma: 30
Inherited Abilities:
Life Detect: Grade E
Silent Flight: Grade F
Teleportation Retreat: Grade E
Death Ray: Grade F
The stat boosts were welcome boons, particularly in Perception and his two mana-related attributes, Magic and Absorption. He supposed that made sense for an Undead Scout, a monster geared for surveillance, evasion, and stealth.
The boy balked at the odd numbers littered across his stat sheet, resisting the desire to even them out to nice round numbers. It didn’t matter—he couldn’t act upon the desire even if he tried because he had no unspent attribute points to allocate. Even if he did, it would have screwed up his human stats when he reverted his form.
He launched into the night sky, finding the skeletal wings surprisingly adept at flight despite their lack of feathers. There was something magical at work. The bony limbs should have had no purchase against the air, yet they were even more efficient than his leathery wings in bat form. It made the raven form perfect for long-distance flights, particularly at night.
When he activated its Life Detect ability, the entire hillside lit up with dozens of lights, each a rabbit, rat, or bird of some kind, hunkering down in their homes for the night. With a mere thought, he dialed up the sensitivity to distinguish creatures as small as mosquitos. It had the adverse effect of limiting the ability’s range, but that was just as well. The ocean of lights denoting insects would have blinded him senseless otherwise.
The Silent Flight ability worked precisely as advertised, and the Death Ray shot out a lance of purple light from the raven’s mouth, inducing an accelerated rotting effect on its target. Rin limited his practice to shriveling several nearby bushes, not having the heart to use it on a living animal. It seemed a fairly weak attack with a range of only fifty feet, but from its effect on living plants, it was sure to inflict significant pain on an enemy.
Finally, he activated the Teleportation Retreat ability and was abruptly given a prompt in his mind’s eye.
No restore point found for Teleportation Retreat.
Concentrate on a specific location and activate the ability to create a restore point.
Rin did precisely that, then leaped skyward and flew due east for a few seconds before activating the ability a second time. He found himself instantaneously standing at the precise location from which he’d taken off. He tested the ability several times, launching from different points and at various angles, proving that his return location was always where he’d placed it. Setting a new restore point was as easy as focusing on a new spot while activating the ability.
Predictably, when he activated Teleportation Retreat from farther away, it cost more mana, which made Rin wonder if there was a limit to its range. He subjected this theory to a simple test, firing dozens of death rays to empty his now formidable mana pool before activating the teleport.
The result was that he traveled in the direction of his return location, but if his mana bottomed out before he arrived, he was rudely ejected from the journey with a throbbing headache. When he spiraled to the ground, he narrowly avoided crashing into the rock formation housing the temple’s entrance and decided to call it a night.
Reverting to human form induced a sudden spell of weariness, and he hobbled inside the hollow in a fog. His final magical act of the night was to conjure an outfit of glorious puffy wool that cushioned him in every direction like he was stuffed inside the fleece of an oversized sheep.
He was out within seconds.
The following morning arrived in a flash, heralded by a glorious sunrise beaming him right in the face through the hollow’s ancient doorway. His muscles and mind were greatly refreshed, and he took off into the air in raven form, circling on invisible thermals and examining the surrounding hills for miles in every direction with his boosted perception. Convinced the coast was clear, Rin activated Life Detect, divebombed a rabbit, and skewered himself some breakfast.
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Once he was stronger, he’d return to the temple to charm its remaining monsters, a prospect that thrilled him to no end. But today, he was itching to move on and discover what remained of the elusive earth dungeon.
After landing, he stashed his things in the Monster Pack. The weight of the swatch book and waterskin made it heavy enough that he didn’t dare risk flight, so he turned into the Level 11 Trundler. Before setting off, he glanced at his list of Memorable Outfits and saw a new outfit had been added overnight. Its autogenerated name made him groan aloud.
Not baa’d for sleepwear
He renamed it to Bed Time.
Seriously, where is Craven getting these lame puns? Does he not have anything else to do?
His outfits were multiplying, and he was thrilled with his progress.
Memorable Outfits:
Smash Hat
Fire Sleeves
Monster Pack
Leg Spikes
Bed Time
The list highlighted the ability’s incredible potential, and Rin promised himself to add more outfits during his next training session. For now, he’d lingered long enough.
He blazed down the hillside in trundler form, activating Lope before easing into a plodding trot when he reached the road.
He worried he was following too closely in the assassins’ footsteps. They could end him in seconds if they spotted him in this weak trundler form. He tried to dismiss the thoughts as paranoia, but his anxiety snuck out in his labored breathing. He was relieved when he turned north onto the abandoned game trail, knowing the men were far less likely to be nearby.
His trundler form was perfect for running for long distances. Even so, the trail was so overgrown that it challenged his footing and wiry branches constantly whipped at his face, hindering his progress. He soon changed to human form simply because he was more used to it, and it would be equally as fast.
What am I doing? I should just fly there. The raven has a much higher level than the bat, and it might be able to carry the Monster Pack. I should just try it.
He transformed and took off into the sky, struggling momentarily as he adjusted the pack’s sizing before beating his skeletal wings and soaring skyward.
This is so much better!
The overgrown landscape fell away beneath him as warm morning thermals lifted his body and soul, his dead bones warming pleasantly to a stark white in the light of day. As he ascended, he spied the Quiet Woods on his right as a sprawling carpet of dull greens and browns. The main road was a ways behind him, meandering westward through verdant fields dotted with stately broad-reaching trees. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t spot the ambling silhouette of the tailors’ cart or the two assassins.
The swatch book came to mind, and Rin attempted a quick experiment with his wardrobe ability. He imagined a special covering for his wings made from the scales of a Northern Sky Drake—a wind-enhancing material. To his surprise, the material doubled his speed and dramatically smoothed his flight, and he ended up wrapping his entire skeleton in the stuff. The creation joined his Memorable Outfits with the name Flight Suit.
Unfortunately, a rudimentary summoning of the magical material was all he could do. He attempted the mana weave Horace had shown him, but the relentless wind tore it apart into long streamers that dissipated before his eyes. His second attempt also failed, and he decided experimenting with the new technique was unwise hundreds of feet in the air.
Refocusing on the ground far below, he was pleased to see he’d come so far so soon. According to the dungeon map, or at least as much as he remembered, there was first a chasm called ‘The Narrows’ before approaching the village. After that, the trail was supposed to deposit him at the earth-type dungeon, though Rin had no idea how. Much to his growing excitement, he spotted the chasm within the first thirty minutes of flight and passed it after another ten.
Unfortunately, the trail petered out to become indiscernible from the air. From this point on, the only landmark was an unbroken swath of evergreen forest, plowing heedlessly into the stark cliff face of the nearest Steppe mountain.
He swiftly backtracked to the point he perceived the trail to end. The winding path collided with a narrow stream. From this height, the water reflected the sunlight like a blazing thread of gold before vanishing beneath the tree canopy. Fluttering to the ground, a quick change into human form told him he was unobserved, and he took a moment to reclothe and fill up his waterskin.
Now that Rin was on the ground, the trail became more apparent. The earth around the burbling stream was moist, littered with animal tracks of all sizes. There were also tracks from something decidedly monster-like, with circular footprints as big as dinner plates and a terrifying stride. The monster tracks displayed no discernible digits and sank eight inches deep into the soil.
Something big lurks nearby. I’d better keep my wits about me. The sooner I find this village, the better.
Rin retrieved the walking staff from his pack and tramped forward, sighing as he entered the noticeably cooler zone beneath the trees. The trail roamed between trunks, its surface a springy bed of evergreen needles that bounced with each step. The trees became more mature and well-spaced, with fewer and fewer branches at ground level. The effect created a surprisingly open area beneath the boughs. It was as if Rin had entered another world entirely, one steeped in green shadow and distinctly different from the mountainous terrain he’d grown up in.
The trail was easily navigable now, and Rin’s pace ate up the miles until at last, he arrived.
The village was little more than ruins—a dozen dilapidated buildings clustered around an obscenely large fir tree in the center of a clearing. The residences should have been able to stand the test of time as their walls were built from sturdy stone blocks. But something catastrophic had occurred with many of the structures obliterated by some impact of overwhelming force. The ground between buildings was strewn with stray blocks, and an abundance of creeping moss smothered any walls still intact. Oddly, the fir tree at the village’s center was unharmed.
A haunting blanket of silence hung over the place. Rin entered the clearing treading lightly, not wanting to announce his presence. He checked the interior of several buildings, finding nothing more than rotting wood and the pervasive smell of mold. Most of the furniture within the buildings had long dissolved into the earth with only a smattering of rusted nails remaining. One particularly sorry structure—the local smithy, if he wasn’t mistaken—contained a single surviving pair of rusted iron tongs.
He returned to the dirt trail that led to a stone well beside the fir. The rope and bucket had rotted away, but the telltale scent of water lingered. It took no time at all to imagine his right sleeve as a long rope that lowered his sagging waterskin into the depths. The water he retrieved was cold and refreshing, tasting of a mountain spring.
The boy sat on the well’s edge, contemplating what he’d found. “What happened here?” he whispered aloud.
While the boy was deep in thought, a distant thud sounded, reverberating through the stone wall and quaking his boots. Another thud followed, then another, and another, each growing louder and closer, to the degree that the needles in the fir tree shook with the sound.
Alarmed, Rin became a lemur and leaped into the fir tree, rapidly scaling its heights with his Monster Pack clinging to his back. At fifty feet, he halted at a small break in the foliage where he could flee by air, if it came to it.
The approaching monster arrived at the tree’s base, peering up at him with indiscernible black orbs for eyes. It was a gigantic ant, a dozen feet long, from what Rin could see from his spot in the tree. The ant seemed ordinary except for three things: its incredible size, its elemental composition of tightly packed soil, and the thick clumps of earth it had for feet that pounded into the ground with each step. There was no subtlety, no stealth, no finesse for this monster. There was only stomping. And it was all the time.
Its clod-like feet meant it couldn’t climb like an ordinary ant, but that didn’t stop it from trying. It raised up on its rear legs and pounded the tree’s trunk, putting it inside the range of Rin’s Identify ability.
Level 35 Dirt Stomper (Earth Type)
It’s only a few levels higher than the undead raven. Maybe I can charm it if I’m careful.
Rin swung down to one of the lower branches just out of reach from the monster’s deadly mandibles and turned human. Thanks to his high Charisma, the ant inspected him with curiosity instead of aggression. The boy tentatively reached out and scratched it on the head, soon discovering its favorite place for scritches was at the base of each antenna. To his chagrin, this monster resisted an instant Charm, just like the undead raven had done.
I need to feed it something. What do earth types eat?
Convinced the monster wasn’t a threat, he dropped to the floor, searching for a tempting treat. At the bottom of his knapsack was a single nut of the kind the trundlers enjoyed. It must have tumbled loose from the pocket of his non-conjured breeches, still stashed at the bottom of his pack. When he offered it to the ant, the creature balked at the sight, staggering back a step as if disgusted.
“It’s food. Go on. Eat it.”
When the ant continued to backpedal, Rin tossed the nut toward its jaws, missing completely and bonking it on the nose.
The monster froze, fixing enlarged black eyes upon the boy. A crimson aura manifested around its body. The beast was enraged, interpreting the thrown nut as an attack. There would be no charming it now, and it stretched its mandibles wide to emit a piercing shriek.
Uh oh.