“This might just be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Janet whispered to herself as two pairs of heavy footsteps crunched rhythmically on gravel. Her heart pounded in tune with the steps in a slowly accelerating tense drumbeat.
Janet took a breath. It was a challenge, but she would keep her cool.
This was her first ever deliberate hunt. Her eyes peeled, she watched from concealment as the main cast entered the stage.
Janet was lying in wait crouched in a ditch beside a rocky clearing that was basically a ledge overlooking an open cliff. She was hunting a beast known for its prowess in rocky, earthy, and all ground terrain, so her nervousness rose like a stack of cloying smoke with every footstep.
Her target was a Rumbler Hog. That particular variety of wild pig did not possess great eyesight, which was why Janet thought she had any sliver of a chance against the two juveniles ambling their way towards her bait.
What they did have in place of sight was an exceptional sense of smell. The hogs used their snouts to sniff their way to fruits rich in mana, which made up the majority of their diet. Janet was relying on this to draw them to her trap, and praying fervently that they did not activate their second, more deadly magical trait.
Rumbler Hogs were a popular and lucrative target for commercial hunters. They bred like rabbits – mostly since the jungle was abundant with the fruits that they ate – and were pretty easy to trap. All one needed was a mana-rich fruit as bait, and a good pitfall lined with spikes.
The Rumbler’s meat was considered a luxury commodity. It was rich in mana and unbelievably tender, making it one of the highly-sought-after harvests from the jungle. Some people also described it as possessing fruity undertones when properly prepared, something Janet was looking forward to experiencing herself.
Hunting Rumbler Hogs was a task requiring great skill and some experience. Trapping the hogs in a way that preserved the meat was a major pain in the butt. The mana within their flesh leaked out quite rapidly after death, drastically reducing its quality.
Trappers thus had to be close enough to properly preserve their kills, yet remain away far enough to stay out of striking distance.
Janet did not have a trap prepared. She did not have in her possession the tools to dig a pitfall, or the skill to set one up correctly. All factors were arrayed in such a way that she was at a disadvantage - all but one.
The terrain of her chosen battleground, overlooking a precipitous drop, was the advantage she was relying upon.
Rumbler Hogs were easy prey, yet were also the leading cause of fatalities among novice hunters.
The beasts were named for their ability to generate localized earthquakes with their stomping trotters. Normally, the hogs used the quakes to shake fruit off of trees. When threatened, however, the hogs turned the quakes upon their attacker, be they beast or man.
Many a hunter had lost their footing to the quakes, then had their bodies pulverized by a single stomp as the hogs charged through them.
One sure hit from the pulsing waves of force was almost always a death sentence, especially out in the jungle where high quality urgent care was not easy to find.
Janet knew she didn’t stand a chance in a head-to-head fight. The hogs were a dangerous opponent, even with her new ability. But she was too curious. Her questions had grown too incessant, her doubts keeping her from attaining any semblance of peace.
Once again, Janet had felt herself improve after the incident of near-explosion. Her senses were better, her strength had gone up a notch, her mana flowed smoother and faster, and her reflexes and agility had improved a bit.
She could now do a serviceable training drill with her dagger, and her throws were reasonably accurate, with about half of them hitting the target.
Such rapid improvement was not normal. One could say it was downright magical!
Janet had already suspected that fights brought improvement, and it looked as though surviving dangerous situations did as well.
Janet wanted to improve, above all else. With the new tool in her toolbelt, a bolt that could be fired from a relatively safe distance, she wanted to challenge herself.
Her intention was to face a real fight and win decisively, so she could finally quantify the parameters of her improvement. She was fully aware that it would take a while. But every journey, even life-long ones, required a bold, daunting first step into the unknown.
This hunt would be Janet’s first step, success or fail.
Hot on her trail were pursuers; there was little doubt of that. Ahead in her journey, untold dangers lay in wait. Janet needed courage and power aplenty if she was to meet whatever challenges her future had in store, and come out unbroken on the other end.
She was going to win. She had to.
She had survived thus far solely because she refused to give up, but grit and determination would never budge the mountains obstructing her path. She needed to bolster her will of steel with power. Enough power to make a difference.
Hence the twin Rumble Hog adolescents.
Step after step, the pair walked towards the lonely tree by the precipice. Janet had speared one of her precious fruits onto one of its branches. That was the bait.
The Rumble Hogs reached the tree, and immediately stomped upon the rock to shake the delicious-smelling fruit free. The ledge vibrated, violently. Rocks tumbled off the edge, some soil was shaken loose, and with it dropped some organic debris.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
It was common sense that a dead end was the most dangerous place to face a charging animal. But what if you were shrewd enough to disable their main weapon first?
A few seconds later, there was a crash, heard clearly by both Janet and her prey. There was no stomp after the first. The hogs turned around, the tree and fruit towards their tails and all but forgotten. Their steps were tentative, and their eyes were glued to the rock that any moment could plunge them to their deaths.
Janet emerged from her ditch. Her breath was calm, and her eyes sharp. Balling her hands into fists calmed down their tremors as she squared her back and firmed her resolve.
She did not want to allow the two of them time to panic and rush her as they tried to escape. She was ready.
A quick circling of her mana, and less than two seconds later, it began to rain [Shadow Bolts].
Soundless and weightless, balls of captured night flew forth. The near-blind hogs remained unaware of the approaching death. Their footing was unsure, and Janet might have seen a slight tremble beneath their maroon-tinged coat of fur.
Bolt after bolt impacted the hogs. They all were silent. Some missed, but the majority that impacted performed as intended.
There were muted thumps, like the sound of an explosion travelling under water. Janet felt rippling destruction travel through the hogs. The ripples were like miniature quakes contained within their bodies, wreaking havoc through their mana structures as more and more damage accumulated.
Behind them, towards the hogs' tails was a sure fall. To the front were Janet and her unrelenting barrage of pain. The adolescents were trapped. Escape was impossible.
All they could do was pace nervously about and grunt in frustration and fear. One of the hogs tried to square their thick hoof so it could charge at Janet. It had unfortunately already accrued too much damage.
Forty seconds into the altercation, one Rumbler Hog dropped to its knees, then dropped dead. Janet could swear that she’d heard a pop just before the hog keeled over, but yet again the sound was too muted to tell for sure.
All the bolt-fire was focused on the second hog. It was downed in less than ten seconds.
Not one drop of blood had been spilled in the fight, and the terrain was perfectly intact.
Shadow damage was just weird.
Janet felt a rush of warmth suffuse her body, the pleasurable sensation radiating outwards from her core. She tracked the heat as some settled in her limbs, her eyes, her ears… and as most of it travelled to her brain and diffused into the organ.
She had been right. Fighting was the way forward for her.
Janet went ahead and collected her spoils. Two hogs that weighed approximately 40 kilograms each would be good eating. Good, mana-fortified eating that would help her develop her own mana and very likely strengthen her body as she underwent the training that she just now considered feasible after the fight’s success.
Also, she wasn’t about to spook the next hogs that fell for her bait by leaving evidence of the fate that awaited them out in the open.
Out of mana and devoid of the adrenaline that had driven her during the fight, Janet went back to her hiding place. She decided to meditate as she awaited her next victims so she could check on what changes the warmth had wrought, and hopefully recover her mana and courage before she had to fight again.
First though… she had just dispatched two magical beasts. There should be a sumptuous feast waiting in the Realm of Souls in the form of disembodied souls that were fast dissipating.
Something odd was about. There were no slowly-dissipating souls anywhere in sight.
What the heck?
Janet was certain that she had killed the Rumblers. The pulseless, magically dead bodies were all the evidence she needed for that. Did the missing souls have something to do with the pop she’d heard?
As Janet was trying to make sense of the departure from natural law she was witnessing, she saw within the Realm of Souls as four tiny souls made their approach. Each of the four were the size of a marble, and ever single one had a brown patch attached to the floating ball of light.
Earth-affinity creatures, all possessing of an earth-affinity [Talent]. This had to be a family, given how all the souls possessed the same shade of brown, in the exact same position on the spherical soul, and with the patches being variations of a similar shape.
Janet broke free from her meditation, only to see… Hublet Squirrels.
They were medium-sized creatures known for being great burrowers. Their legs were tipped with long, hooked brown claws, and the fur on their back was darker than in the rest of their bodies. Unlike most squirrels, their tails were long and narrow, and tipped with short, tough, bristle-like fur.
They loved mana to death and would flock to natural treasures and plants that held it in abundance, though they preferred mana crystals to fruits or nuts.
The four squirrels in Janet’s sight were not actually heading for her fruit bait, but had decided to burrow into the rock at the bottom of the tree where Janet had killed the hogs.
Already, they had made some progress. Janet witnessed a marvel of magic as tiny claws sheared through hard rock like a knife through butter. Given just a minute, they would have dug a hole big enough to disappear into.
Janet loved rodents. They had been her only companions for long stretches of time, and she always harbored a soft spot for furry little critters.
Too bad, today was all about her improvement.
Hublet squirrels were named after a famous scientist who had carried out a whole lifetime of research into their inexplicable ability to find mana crystals from kilometers away. He was an Ork-kin named Hublet.
The man spent his entire life in pursuit of that secret, but had died unsuccessful.
The researcher had amidst his failed research made great strides into excavation and prospecting methods for the large-scale mining of mana crystals. He was also the first person to propose and advocate for sustainable crystal mining practices that allowed crystal veins to recover.
Hublet's name was thus attached to a lot of things, the species of squirrel being of least note among them.
Janet loved that she knew that tidbit of history, thanks to her voracious study into ancient texts. Most people thought Hublet to be just the name of a territory, since it was the name attached to the most profitable crystal mines in the central continent. Centuries later, the man's legacy had grown past the man himself.
Anyway, Janet needed to act fast, before the squirrels dug themselves to safety beyond her reach. She deployed her [Mana Constructs - Shadow].
Four distinct rope-like constructs constricted around the tiny beasts, attaching and anchoring themselves to the squirrels' shadows. She then retracted the constructs, reeling in the wriggling rodents towards her hiding spot – they were too tiny and weak to warrant her emergence.
Quick plunges of her dagger into their brains painlessly reaped the lives of the four magical beasts, and yet again Janet felt warmth radiate throughout her body. The distribution of the ‘heat’ was roughly the same, the only difference being that there was a lesser amount than the hogs had provided.
Four beasts, all magical, had provided less ‘improvement energy’ than two more powerful individuals. A theory was beginning to emerge, but Janet still required more data before she accepted the idea as concrete truth.
“More fights it is then,” she sighed as she stored the bodies into her runic tattoo. All magical beasts were valuable, and Janet intended to profit fully from all her kills once she reentered civilization.
Speaking of resource efficiency, Janet dipped into the Realm of Souls. Unlike the previous kills, this time four rapidly dimming balls of light awaited her. She gobbled them up, and actually felt a heat similar to the ‘improvement energy’ percolate through some deeper part of her.
A tiny amount of it reached her core, but none at all made it into the rest of her body. Yet, Janet was left wondering about the link between souls, the energy she consumed, and the reason for improvement after fights that ended in kills.
Most crucially, what had happened to the hogs’ souls?
The question would have to wait. Another set of souls was drawing closer. These ones seemed tentative, hovering about the distance like buzzards around a dying creature. Eventually though, they too entered Janet’s kill zone. Mana-rich fruits were just that good a bait.