Will looked down at the village below him in dismay. He had found civilization, sort of. The entire village was swarming with fur coated hunters like the ones that had shot at him earlier. Will pulled back from the ridge and sat down to think. He didn’t know what their problem was, though if this were some lost enclave of primitive people, his helmet might be throwing them off. But he didn’t want to show them his skin, not as it was.
Koma yipped softly and Will lifted a hand to scratch him on the head absently. Did he try to approach the camp anyway? If they were just actors or primitive campers, they probably wouldn’t shoot. But they had some sort of exploding arrows too. Will tried to knead his brows, but the helmet got in the way. None of this made sense. Will popped his head above the ridge to get another look, and an arrow slammed into his helmet from the direction of the village.
Will fell back, rolling down the ridge before he sprung back up and started to run. Behind him, a flood of hunters flowed over the ridge, and arrows started to rain down upon him. Will dashed behind a tree for cover, but didn’t stop running. He wanted as many trees between him and the hunters as possible.
But the hunters were not so easily shaken off. Every time he turned a corner, every time he rounded a tree they were behind him. The only thing keeping him going was the odd stamina provided by his concept. He remembered that some hunters could follow their prey for dozens of miles. Were these hunters so persistent? Will dodged another arrow and kept running. Even if they were not so persistent normally, there were somewhere north of twenty of them. They could keep this going for far longer than he could.
It was fortunate for him that the forest began to darken with the oncoming night. The shadows did not seem to grow long like they might have in a town or city, rather the gloom grew thicker, the cold more oppressive.
Will climbed a ridge and threw himself over the side as an arrow carved a trench in his right arm. On the other side he found a hollow that was deep with shadow. Will threw himself inside without hesitation. He heard as hunters came over the ridge, and he did his best to cram himself into the farthest corner of the hollow, wishing for the shadows to wrap around him. He felt the star inside him react, the one that felt like springtime. He had a stupid idea, but he had no time to try another. He grasped the springtime star with his will and pulled on the energy it released. Will nearly gasped as a flood of energy came through, and using his will, he cast it outward, into the shadows.
The shadows moved. They gathered around him, crawled toward him. It was intensely disconcerting, but Will did not move. Eventually the shadows stopped enveloping him in a deep gloom that would entirely hide him from the outside. And not too soon either. Will could see the hunters from where he hid as they skulked around. They spoke quietly in their unknown language, all while keeping their bows strung and arrows nocked. One pointed at a spot on the ground and they discussed for a moment. Will saw with horror that he had left a clear footprint in the icy loam of the forest floor. The hunters fanned out, looking for more footprints, and Will scrambled to distract them.
Will’s hand felt around and landed on a rock. He waited until all the hunters had their backs turned, and he threw it with all his might. The hunter’s heads whipped up at the noise, and quick discussion ensued. All but one ran off. The last hunter stood there, bow in hand, eyeing the hollow where Will was hiding warily. Will barely held back a curse. That had been his only plan, and it had almost worked, but he didn’t believe for a second that he could face this hunter in combat. A single arrow would be enough to kill Will.
But he did have another option. He felt sore in a way he had never experienced before, and instinctively knew it was from overusing his will to control the stars, but he had no other choice. If he could extend the cold field and make it colder, he could just freeze the man where he stood. Will reached out to the cold star within him and pulled like he had with the springtime star. Power did not come rushing out. It seemed that the two stars were fundamentally different in a way he did not yet understand.
Instead, he pulled on the springtime star, and fed the energy into the cold star. The world around him started to crackle and pop like rice krispies. The tree above him started to groan as though it was in pain. The hunter pulled his fur close, looking around in panic. Then the tree exploded.
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It was as sudden as it was deafening, and as soon as Will got his wits together he ran. The tree was wobbling from side to side, but would come down soon, and Will wasn’t going to be anywhere close when that happened.
After an hour of running, Will collapsed, an unfamiliar fatigue setting deep in his bones. He sat up against a rock, no trees this time, and looked at the system chat box. It had been spammed with new messages, and so he looked at the oldest.
Skill nucleation detected.
Stabilizing…
Stabilizing…
You have gained a new skill.
Skill: Shadowmeld
Level 1
Skill: Shadowmeld has risen to level 3.
Will looked at this message with confusion. He had Skills now. Capital S Skills. Like a video game. Will could feel instinctively how to use the skill. It was a lot like what he had done in the hollow under the tree. He would pull on the springtime star and feed the energy into the shadows around him. It would take a lot of shadow to do anything, but he felt that he could do more with less as he became more experienced.
Skill nucleation detected.
Stabilizing…
Stabilizing…
You have gained a new skill.
Skill: Mana Manipulation
Level 1
Mana manipulation huh. Is that what this energy was? Mana? Was he really in a video game? Will went on to the next notification.
Skill nucleation detected.
Stabilizing…
Stabilizing…
You have gained a new skill.
Skill: Concept Manipulation
Level 1
You have trained!
Wisdom +1
You have slain Big Game Hunter Level 10
(Level approximated)
You are now level 5.
That hit Will hard. The hunter was dead. Will hadn’t meant to do that. He just wanted to scare the man off. But then the tree exploded. Had one of the hunters shot the tree while his friend was nearby? That didn’t seem right, and none of their other arrows had exploded. Except the one that hit the tree he had slept beneath. It was then he remembered something he had heard before all of this. He had been on a cruise with his parents after his father had made it big. It was when he had tasted the glacier water. Someone had said that trees that got too cold could explode as their sap froze.
Will buried his head in his hands. What must they think he was? He hadn’t meant to blow up either tree, but here he was, having just killed someone by doing just that. This cold aura was intense, and he needed to be careful with it.
It made Will wonder if he could suppress the aura while still gaining the benefit of the cold resistance. If he could do that, he could at least go into a town without freezing everyone. If there was a town that didn’t shoot at the sight of him. Which meant that he needed a change of clothes at the very least. He couldn’t go around in black leather with a black helmet like he had been.
Which meant that he had to train up these new skills a bit, and see if he could gain any more. Then he had to find clothes, and finally he supposed he should go find this secondary repository. The system had already been useful, and he wanted the full functionality.
With that, Will fell asleep, Koma curled up beside him.
Over the next several days, Will practiced his new skills Shadowmeld grew in levels quickly at first, but then dropped off. Will found that it started to level up again when the hunters came perilously close to finding his location, and he had to use it to sneak around them. He found that he could make the shadows semi-material, muffling any sound he might make. In the end, his skill rose to level 13, and he figured he would need some more intense circumstances or expert training to get it higher. He also worked with Mana Manipulation and Concept Manipulation, but they were far more difficult, as they strained his will. Will did find that he could retract his cold aura with some effort, and that gained his Concept Manipulation a large boost, but both skills remained fairly low. Mana manipulation only got to level 5 and Concept Manipulation got to level 7.
Will tried a number of things to gain new skills, but only got one. Manasight was odd. It was visual, but it didn’t overlay his normal vision. He could still see mana even if his eyes were closed as long as he had the skill activated. Even more trippy was when he realized that his Manasight could be 360 degrees around him. It was sight because the information was visual, but it acted more like his sense of his body. It was thoroughly weird.
He didn’t manage to level it up even once.
Finally, he was ready to try a raid on the village.