Stupid kid went and got himself killed. Now Starscream was on a clock. His quintessence organ was mostly hardened webbing and scripts. The organs he had harvested from sacred beasts had rotted a long time ago, and he hadn’t needed to replace them as long as he was riding shotgun to Sunwhisper. Now that he was on his own again, he could feel his spirit energy leaking out drop by drop, and his internal display included an obnoxious, flashing alert.
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Deactivation in 20:34:17
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Starscream had stuck close enough to know when the fight was over and then backed up far enough to not be caught up in the Yosei hunt that followed. The hours ticked away, and he extended his senses as far as they would go and waited for the commotion to die down. The Snow Flowers made a lot of noise when they were caught, and on more than one occasion, he sensed whole flocks of them moving in the woods.
The cold meant nothing to him, so he had curled up in a snowdrift at the base of a tree and waited for silence. With extension curled around him, he crept back to the scene of the duel to check for a body. The cultivators had taken Sunwhisper away. It was too bad, with the knowledge he had now, and a fresh mechanoborg corpse, there was a good chance he could have had himself a very convenient new home.
Instead, he was going to have to do things the hard way.
Starscream’s time in the library had been very well spent. He had scanned the contents of dozens of scrolls and folios, and once they were digested, he had realized that he’d been going about things all wrong. It was impossible to recreate the sciences of Earth here on Hollow. More than that, he’d been close minded in his desire for a new mechanical frame to house his ghost. The materials they had collected from the fallen mechanoborgs were unnecessary. Even the Zaibatsu and their golems, though interesting, were unnecessary.
He was an engineer, but he was also a flesh artist. Why should he limit himself to manufacturing with webs when there was a whole world of organic material out there for him to play with?
Once he was sure that Sunwhisper was unrecoverable, at least in the sense that he couldn’t have gotten to him without dealing with an academy full of cultivators first, he scuttled deeper into the woods, leaving the school and its students behind him forever. The Red Spider had lived a long time on his own, and he could go back to that life if he chose. No one but Janna and the beasts knew that he existed, and none of them had seen him go, or would have any incentive to inform the authorities that he was around. They might think he would come back to help them like Sunwhisper would have done, but if that is what they believed, they were in for an awakening.
Starscream was no simp. He couldn’t have cared less whether Janna lived or died, and the same went for the spider and the bird. They weren’t useful to him, so he pushed them from his mind.
This was a new environment for him, but he imagined the Yosei couldn’t be the only usable resource in the Hylian mountains. He could have caught a few himself if he tried, but he viewed that as a waste of the time that was ticking away in his HUD. Starscream wanted bigger prey.
He could pick out the electromagnetic signatures of the small mammals in their warrens under the snow as well as the birds shivering in the evergreens, but killing animals wouldn’t add one second to his lifespan. He needed a sacred beast, and the students of the Heavenly School of the Azai had no doubt hunted virtually all the available lifeforms to extinction. The mountaintop was too close to the academy, so he set his sights on the nearest peak, and clambered up.
With his talons and his physical attributes, climbing a sheer face or a sheet of ice was effortless. Xanthous Ascendancy would have sped his ascent even further, but he didn’t dare use the technique for fear of draining what was left of his mana or rupturing his already fragile quintessence organ. Instead, he gave himself an hour to get as high as he could before weaving a sail.
Actual spiders did this sort of thing all the time, and there was nothing inherently complex about the procedure. Starscream did a few quick calculations involving his mass, wind drag, and velocity to come up with the size of the sail he would need, and after that, the actual construction was elementary.
Stolen story; please report.
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Deactivation in 15:19:09
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Starscream flung himself off the mountain. What he’d actually made was more hang glider than parachute, and he was able to direct the descent with a few expert tugs of the lines. To some extent, he was flying blind, as his senses at their utmost could stretch to only a few hundred feet with any detail. But it didn’t matter where he was going as long as he wasn’t going too fast to respond to what was in front of him, and as long as it was away from the school.
He was flying down the opposite side of the Hylian mountain range, and he managed to get several miles of overland distance out of the glider before dropping below tree level. The important thing was that he’d avoided the climb down, saving a few precious hours of his quickly dwindling lifespan.
Now well below the snowline, small game was plentiful. He ignored it, looking for signs of megafauna.
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Deactivation in 11:24:17
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The bear wasn't old enough. It had died with barely a struggle, and the dissection had cost him precious minutes only to find that it didn't have a sufficiently developed quintessence organ to make use of. Any animal could become a sacred beast, but the proper conditions had to be met. Environmental mana had to be thick enough that they could absorb it passively, or they had to get lucky and come across wild spirit fruits and eat them before anything else did.
The bear was a dead end, but in the process of tracking it, he'd come across another trail. There were signs that some of the foliage in this area had been hacked down. It might have just been the bear making a mess of the underbrush or climbing trees to look for bee hives, but he didn't think so.
The world within Starscream’s sensorium was incredibly detailed, and he was capable of gathering information about his environment that the traditional five senses could never compete with. The range limit was such, however, that the humans saw him before he noticed them.
"Tree of Heaven! Do you see that?"
Once the first voice reached him, he was able to triangulate the location of its source, and the foragers were added to his mental model of the world.
"It heard you. Shoot it!"
The first arrow went wide. Starscream pulled himself into the canopy and jumped from tree limb to tree limb to close the distance between himself and the two humans. They weren't cultivators, and after loosing another ineffectual arrow, they seemed to realize the kind of situation they were in and tried to run.
He snagged one with a web line to the ankle, secured him to a tree, and chased down the second at his leisure.
The screaming and shouting were not to his liking, but if the noise brought him more subjects, all the better. His only worry was that these mortals belonged to a cultivator who might come to their aid. But from what he had seen of the Blessed Lands, he doubted anyone of importance was going to rush to save them. They carried packs of mushrooms and herbs, and one of them had killed a squirrel. These men were not of value to anyone who could threaten him.
The first one died too quickly for Starscream to finish what he started. He'd learned a lot in a brief time, and the techniques he was applying had not been intended for the purpose he was putting them to.
"Leave me, demon!" The second man began with threats and curses, but they subsided into cries and whimpers before long. Starscream was not engaging in deliberate torture, the suffering he caused was incidental to the pursuit of cultivation science.
Though the man was not a cultivator, he still had a quintessence organ. It was pitifully weak. With only a few hours remaining before he lost power entirely, Starscream was willing to make do. He cut the scripts into the man's skin with the precision of the machine he was, and located the exact location of the man's quintessence organ with bursts of ultrasonics.
The human was bound upright to a wide tree trunk, and Starscream finally silenced him with a knot of webbing across the mouth. He needed to be able to concentrate for what came next.
The scripts accepted his mana, shimmering with a faint, golden light. Then he made an incision just below the man's ribcage and inserted the end of his tail. Nerve fibers extended, questing for the organ he had already mapped down to the micrometer, and the connection was made.
It wasn't the same as plugging into Sunwhisper. There was no meeting of minds, but a map of the man's meridians was added to his HUD, and he knew that he had succeeded, at least in the first steps.
He wrapped the man in a cocoon thick enough to guard him from accidental abrasions and contusion. Then he moved on, dragging him behind like a whimpering battery pack. It wasn't a perfect solution, but Starscream was just getting started.