“Oh, for the love of shit!” Chloe screams. “What in the unholy bowels of hell is that damned thing?”

I tremble. I don’t know what, exactly, but it’s absolutely terrifying. It looks vaguely octopodal, or maybe ameboid? Six… seven, nine, now eight tendrils snake out from a pulsating center. And to make matters even worse, those tendrils split apart and re-form like… Ew, gross! Mouths and teeth should not be in those places, for the sake of basic decency!

The air around it shimmers and distorts as if being bent by a hot fire, making it difficult to get a good grasp of its size. A bit of some sort of liquid drips on the ground beneath its… being. I fear it may be highly acidic. Just looking at it gives me a splitting headache, and I will definitely have nightmares about this abomination for weeks.

If there is one saving grace, it’s that it hasn’t noticed us yet. Or it’s still sizing us up, trying to decide if we’re a meal. On the one hand, I would love nothing more than to have absolutely nothing to do with this… eldritch horror. We could take a more circuitous route around the main road, sneak into some nearby neighborhoods, and make our way back to Chloe’s— to our— home.

On the other hand, this has the look of a predatory creature. If we do nothing, it will continue to hunt. People will be displaced from their homes, if they are lucky. If they are not.

But can we do anything? I’m not confident in the strength of my Skills. Concussive bullets are going to be uniquely weak against a creature with no internals. [Trick Shot] isn’t going to be effective if the creature has no weak spots to target, or if its ‘vitals’ are anything but. It might have some sort of internal core, but if it’s as acidic as I suspect, anything I try is going to end up dissolved long before I reach the core.

“What do you want to do?” I ask. “I think we can sneak around and head home a different way. Or we can try to fight. But I don’t think I have anything effective against whatever that is, and there’s no guarantee we can escape if we do engage it in combat?”

“No. But… I don’t want to just leave people at the mercy of that thing, either. I want to, as much as possible, use this power to heal, defend, and protect others.”

“Do you have any new Skills you think might work?”

“No. Just healing spells. I–” She starts to quiver. “I don’t… don’t…”

I take Chloe’s hand and help her ground herself. “There is one other possibility. I can try to analyze these glyphs and see if one of them is useful in some regard. But we’ll probably be stuck out here all night, there’s no guarantee I'll find one that’ll work, and there’s no guarantee it’ll just squirm around and let us observe it all night long.”

Chloe closes her eyes. “Give it one hour. I’ll keep an eye on whatever that is, and let you know if it approaches in the meantime. You spend one hour with your glyphs, and if you find something you’re confident will be effective against it, we fight. Otherwise, we leave it for now until we’re strong enough to overcome it.”

I sit down and get to work. With the light of the full moon blaring down upon me, I can see every intricate detail of the glyphs in my sketchbook. I start with the first one I jotted down. An elliptical shape with another concentric ellipse contained within, of the same eccentricity and orientation, scaled down to about eighty percent of the outer one’s size. Between the two borders lies a series of runes, the individual components of which I do not fully understand. One final sigil lies in the center, written in a language that looks vaguely Japanese but is unlikely native to this planet.

I activate it with a bit of my [Ether]. Nothing happens. I try from the opposite side, using my [Basic Ether Manipulation] to try to identify any spots that have been drawn incorrectly. I notice a couple of very small corrections, mostly involving needing to reorient the runic circle differently. I activate it again. No response. In reverse? Still no response. Maybe some sort of control glyph that does nothing on its own.

The next glyph looks like a cloud: large, full, and extra puffy. Tiny markings on the interior shape, with plenty of attention paid to the texturing within. My [Tinkerer] skill pokes me with a sense of wrongness as I look over the final version. After a few more seconds, I notice a few errors in one of the curves, which I correct. I get no further indication, and activate it.

The paper goes damp. I smell the page. Thankfully just water, and not some more unpleasant solvent. Activating it in reverse causes the page to slowly dry out. And interestingly, despite the deformation to the page as a whole, the portion of the sheet containing the drawn glyph resists tearing or warping. Hypothesis: each glyph subtly twists space to make it ‘magical’, for lack of a better word, allowing Ether to more easily affect it, and causing the space to resist damage from physical sources. Not unlike how the glyphs stitched into my [Barrier Gauntlets] resist being moved out of place.

I flip through the book to the one I think is most promising. Third from one the back, shaped like a lightning bolt. Jagged fractals that constantly bend and twist, some continuing down, and some whose trails abruptly end. Easily the most complicated of the ones I’ve scrolled through,with upwards of a thousand individual pencil strokes. Even that understates how many it takes to fully manifest it in its true state. Probably not a finite number, but there’s some room for tolerances when constructing the physical shape.

There are a couple of strokes that are a bit too short as I do the final analysis, necessitating that I re-create the bottom portion of the glyph. I glance up at Chloe. She’s nervous; I can see the small trembles in her legs.

The horror is lurching along through a nearby grove of trees. In its wake, the grasses and underbrush have been reduced to nothing but dirt. It latches on to the tree nearest it, about a hundred yards away, and begins shoving branch after branch into its mouths. It seems to consume organic matter indiscriminately, but given I see a couple of small bricks and pieces of wire sticking out of the ground near it, it doesn’t harbor the same gluttony for inorganic material.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I rush back to work, resketching the glyph, feeling the flow of my [Ether] as I trace the patterns again. I test and retest and make sure that I’m not missing anything that seems horribly out of line. Once I’m finally satisfied, a process that takes a solid fifteen minutes, I activate the glyph.

My hair stands on end. The air around me begins to crackle. Chloe jumps backwards, though it seems more surprise than pain. The page on which the sigil is drawn begins to crinkle and crackle, folding up into a ball-like shape under its own power. Tiny flashes of static electricity arc from place to place on the page, and a few jump into my shirt and jeans, causing me to briefly convulse. Definitely every bit of what I expected just from the shape of the sigil and more.

Lightning… might be effective against that thing. It’s amorphous and appears to be made of some sort of aqueous solution that’s likely highly conductive. But this glyph won’t be effective unless I either find a way to imprint it directly onto a constantly-changing physical form, or have some additional way to direct the lightning. The latter will be safer and easier.

Using my [Ether Bullet] seems the easiest way to launch lightning from a distance. Though I don’t have the tools or expertise to try to sketch the glyph directly onto the BB-sized pellets. I try forming one with my [Basic Ether Manipulation], condensing two points of [Ether] and imagining the shape I want to form. I get a slightly deformed bullet instead; I probably need a far higher rank in the skill, likely even [Intermediate Ether Manipulation] or its equivalent, before I can do so.

That leaves sketching the glyph directly on my [Simple Blowgun] instead. The problem is that the glyph seems to infuse the object itself with lightning, rather than allowing it to flow freely into another object. In other words, a blowgun that shocks you when you touch it, rather than one that shoots electricity. There should be a way to rectify this.

I pull out another sketch of a glyph I believe to be a sort of linking or control glyph, not unlike how prepositions, articles, particles, and similar linking words and punctuation are used to combine words into sentences. In fact, that seems a pretty good analogy for how Ethertech works at its most fundamental level. Individual glyphs are like either words, punctuation, or prefixes or suffixes that append onto words, changing their individual meaning. When the [Unlock] glyph is used by itself, it’s as though I’m screaming a simple command of ‘Unlock!’.

Reversing the flow of Ether within a glyph has the effect of negating its meaning. [Unlock] becomes [Lock], a glyph of [Heat] will become [Unheat], which should carry a similar connotation and effect as [Cold]. As for when, to use the example, [Cold] should be used over [Unheat], will require far more testing and experimentation. Hypothesis: the ideal choice is related to the shape of the respective glyphs. Depending on size or shape, one might be preferred over another. There may also be small meaning differences at times. [Don’t Go] isn’t quite the same command as [Stop], even though the commands and therefore associated glyphs of [Stop] and [Go] should logically negate and contradict each other.

I look through the glyphs I have on hand, not at all sure what each of them do. However, my [Tinkerer] passive skill points me to another glyph in the middle of my sketches. This one looks like a trio of parallel lines, again with more fine runes in between each pair of them. In a fortuitous coincidence so far, the [Lock] and [Lightning] glyphs both look vaguely like pictographs of their respective functionality, the former kinda sorta looking like a very stylized padlock when squinted at from just the right angle.

This glyph looks like it might just be a glyph of motion based on the same logic. The tricky part will be to combine the two. Based on my observations back at the Tower Gauntlet, I need to link them together with the same miniature sluice etchings. The big question is: what order? I decide upon [Lightning], then [Motion]. Doing it in the reverse suggests moving like lightning. Quickly and erratically? Potentially useful to dodge against extremely fast opponents if the conjecture is correct.

Chloe alerts me that it’s been about forty-five minutes since I started my task. The creature is slowly lurching in our general direction now, though it hasn’t made any aggressive action toward us specifically. I redouble my pace, tracing the glyphs onto my [Simple Blowgun]. I etch the [Lightning] glyph about two thirds of the way down the cylinder’s length, guiding its formation with [Basic Ether Manipulation] to help ensure the structure is properly traced upon the curved surface. It required a bit of adjustment halfway through, but thankfully, Ether seems to naturally want to trace along the paths of correctly-drawn glyphs.

The second glyph of [Motion] is far simpler to draw, taking only a minute or two before I’m confident with its overall structure. A brief use of [Basic Ether Manipulation] to double-check confirms that any deviations from the optimal form are miniscule at best.

I begin the process of connecting the glyphs together. With only two, it’s a simple matter of combining them with sluices, but I suspect that for advanced Ethertech with hundreds or millions of individual glyphs working in various combinations of parallel and sequence, it’s going to be more than a small challenge. One more set of sluices connecting the two glyphs to the near end of the blowgun and I think I have it ready to go. One final look over and I decide it’s time to chance it.

I take a deep breath as I get up. Now for the moment of truth. If I’m wrong about this, I’m putting my life in peril. But this is the calling of a [Planetouched Mechanist], pushing and expanding the bounds of science and Ethertech… Okay, I’m far from the boundaries of both. But relative to Earth, I might actually be.

One more deep breath. I close my eyes. I stick an [Ether Bullet] in the chamber and prepare myself. I have 150 units of [Ether] remaining, and three bullets that haven’t degraded. I’ll fire them consecutively with fifty units of [Ether] propelling each. It better be enough.

The attacks fly, filling the air with a bluish light and the sound of birds chirping as they shoot toward the encroaching aberration. The first scores a direct hit in what might generously be called its lower abdomen, sending ooze scattering in every direction. The second is a bit off course due to the wind and imprecise rifling within the barrel, only slicing through a pair of its legs before lodging into a tree and sending woody shrapnel flying. But the third hits right in the dead center of the creature’s torso. The entire beast ripples once, then twice, then explodes.

Chloe and I make a run for it, but I once again, for the second time in as many days, suffer severe acid burns upon my calves. Nothing that Chloe’s new healing spell can’t easily heal, but painful as sin and as annoying as hell. I grin as three System notifications pops up.

[You have customized your [Simple Blowgun] into a [Simple Lightning Blowgun]. Weapon Attack increased: 25 → 60]

[You have slain an It That Crawls in the Night (Level 16). You have gained a boosted 1,980 Experience.]

[You have gained enough Experience to reach Level 12.]

That… That can wait until morning. We’re both tired, sweaty, covered in slime, and ready to get the hells away from this abomination once and for all. We rush back to Chloe’s place at top speed, and after shivering through the best cold, dark shower I’ve ever had, I have the best sleep I’ve had in years.