Nathen marveled at his surroundings as he walked through the forest, what brush existed was rather sparse and easy to either move through or step over. The trees were massive, larger than anything he’d seen in real life. They were too big for him to reach his arms around and so tall he could barely tell if they got any thinner before passing out of view behind many layers of old barren branches. Occasionally he heard evidence of some kind of life echoing through the forest but didn’t see anything living until he spotted something moving around one of the massive trees.
It was larger than a simple rodent and covered in brownish fur that blended in quite well with the bark of the trees. Before he could get a better look at it, however, it vanished around the trunk, moving with the rapid ease of an animal evolved for the forest. Eager to see what it was Nathen quickly darted around the tree only to catch a glimpse of it as it once again scurried out of sight. After the third time the creature escaped around the tree Nathen hatched a plan, moving just far enough to cause it to move further around the tree only to dash the other direction and catch it before it realized he’d changed tactics.
The plan worked, for all it’s simplicity, but also quickly proved to be a mistake. The creature was superficially similar to a squirrel, a long fluffy tail, brown fur and four legs. But that’s where all resemblance stopped, as the rear pair of limbs were oversized grasshopper like legs, heavily muscled and nearly as big as the rest of the animal. The body of the animal was that of a medium sized dog, easily three feet in length, not counting the tail as that was as long as the body. Similarly the forelimbs were longer and more bulky than looked natural on a arboreal rodent, while seeming strangely stiff and curved despite the ease with which the creature moved.
“A squirrel… crossed with a grasshopper?” Nathen asked as the animal met his gaze and froze, as if hoping he hadn’t seen it, “a… squirrelhopper?”
As if in response to his offer the creature suddenly began chittering angrily at him, flicking its tail about in what might have seemed threaten to acorns. Before he could say anything more the squirrel-hopper gathered up its rear legs and suddenly leapt at him. In a blur of motion, faster than Nathen had expected it shot through the air past him. A line of fiery pain shot across his cheek and temple as it passed him, the combined shock of the creature’s speed, aggressiveness and the gash torn in the side of his face caused Nathen to yelp, stumble and fall to the ground, which was the only thing that saved him from another cut as the squirrel-hopper shot through the air where his head would have been had he remained standing.
The squirrel-hopper caught itself on the trunk of another tree, once again chittering angrily as Nathen gathered himself. Only now the source of the damage it had caused was visible in a pair of massive talons, one extending from each of the forelimbs, the odd stiffness Nathen had noticed apparently being the presence of the talons being hidden, retracted like a cat’s claws.
“A scythed Squirrel-hopper then,” Nathen snorted, reaching up to feel the gash on his face, wincing as his touch once again sent pain shooting through him, “damn, that does feel real.”
Once more the squirrel beast gathered itself and leapt at Nathen, shooting through the air, but, being more prepared this time, Nathen managed to duck out of the way of the attack. He almost managed to avoid the follow up as the beast didn’t hesitate to attack his back, but one of the massive talons caught his shoulder leaving another painful gash. Neither wound was dangerous on their own, but if he kept taking hits like this eventually he knew his health would run out. Not that he could tell how much health he had.
“What? Trying to scare me into leaving?” Nathen asked as the scythed squirrel-hopper stopped to chitter at him again. Instead of turning to run he drew his sword, holding it before him in both hands and grinned, “as if, let’s do this!”
While the monster couldn’t have understood what he was saying, it clearly understood that Nathen wasn’t planning to run. And it picked up the pace of its attacks. Where before it had only attacked twice, once from the front and another from the rear before Nathen could turn now it began engaging in flurries of movement, dashing from tree to tree without getting close to Nathen before making an attack. Nathen could barely keep up as he struggled to follow the beast, he took several more, long cuts from the squirrel’s talons before he finally got the hang of its attacks. Despite its speed it stopped every few dashes, as if to survey the situation. At first this confused Nathen, why stop when it could have launched chains of attacks faster than he could respond. Surely it could have simply overwhelmed him with dozens of strikes without giving him a chance to recover.
Then it occurred to him, the attacks were preplanned. There was some room for course correction but the time between dashes was too short for even the Squirrel-hopper to make major decisions. It planned each set in advance, relying on its reactions to account for any movement Nathen did. The natural response to the squirrel’s speed was to stop and watch it carefully, try to anticipate its attack and avoid. But that reaction was exactly what the monster counted on, it clearly wasn’t a predator, the attacks were meant to scare another off, not necessarily kill them.
But that left it vulnerable, Nathen realized, as it had only an instant to react to anything he did as it attacked as well. To test his theory he waited for the Squirrel to start another attack, but instead of waiting to see where it chose to attack from he scrambled from his position. Sure enough the squirrel shot past where he had been standing a couple times, but didn’t get close to where he’d moved to. This was apparently quite confusing to the beast, as it stopped to chitter at him angrily the next time it came to a rest.
While confused the squirrel was still an animal, and a couple more attacks later, having gotten no closer to getting in another hit, Nathen figured he finally knew the pattern well enough to counterattack. The squirrel-hopper once more started a sequence of dashes designed to disorient him, turn him about, but Nathen had figured out there were a limited number of places the squirrel would attack from. While it occasionally used some lower branches as part of its dashes, it would only ever strike at him from the trunk of a full-sized tree. Presumably it couldn’t push off the thinner branches with enough force to do real damage, and this limited its attack angles. Secondly it never attacked from the tree it started on, not after its first attempts to chase him off.
The trees were large, but because of this they were spaced out, having crowded smaller plants out. Because of this Nathen was able to determine a few possible attack angles the squirrel-hopper could take and, with the right timing, swung his sword to intercept those paths.
While the possible attack angles were limited, they were still many. And it took several tries before Nathen got lucky, between his poor swordsmanship, the speed of his opponent and the difficulty in selecting the right path the beast would take. But he did get lucky, bringing his sword down just as the squirrel-hopper passed through where it thought Nathen would be. While the location was correct, Nathen’s handling of his weapon was poor, with the blade not properly aligned, so instead of cutting the squirrel in half, as it should have, the monster’s face bounced off the side of the weapon, sending the edge into its arm and breaking it.
Knocked off course the squirrel struck the tree it had aimed for at an odd angle, bouncing off with a pained yelp. Only eons of evolution and years of practice allowed it to catch on a smaller branch and keep it from falling to the ground.
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With a broken limb, Nathen thought it would have run away, instead the squirrel seemed to enter into a rage. It gave up any attempt at deception, gathered itself up and leapt directly at him. But, as Nathen had guessed, it was unable to properly push off the small branch, which bent under the force of the jump, and the attack was far slower than any previous one. It was slow enough that Nathen was able to bring his sword around and swing it upwards to meet it.
Against a slower target, following a more predictable line, Nathen was able to properly line the edge up and this time his swing sliced through the squirrel’s good arm before the animal’s own momentum drove the blade deep into its side.
This impact caused Nathen to lose the grip on his blade, both it and the squirrel monster careening to the ground. But the fight was over, the squirrel let out a few pitiful cries as blood poured from its wounds, joining the puddles of Nathen’s that had begun to seep into the dirt, and then it was still.
“Yes!” Nathen shouted, throwing his arms into the air and laughing, “I killed a squirrel! A squirrel monster! A monster squirrel… doesn’t sound as impressive when I say it like that.”
After calming down, and catching his breath, he stumbled over to where his sword and the dead squirrel monster lay. The pain of the half dozen cuts and gashes he’d taken in the fight starting to catch up with him as he cleaned his sword off and sheathed it. With that done he poked the unmoving body with a foot.
“Do I get any loot?” he asked as the adrenalin of the fight slowly wore off, “how do I even loot this thing?”
As if in response to his question an ethereal bluish gas seemed to seep from the dead monster’s body, slowly gathering into a dense sphere of blue smoke just above it. Once most of the gas had gathered, the sphere began to leak sideways, the bluish mist snaking through the air and seeming to trace the outline of an object floating in midair. As more gas made its way to the outline the object it became more solid, more real. The gas turned brown and seemed to solidify until Nathen recognized it as a small waterskin.
The last of the gas made its way to the waterskin and, after another moment hovering in air, it suddenly seemed to become real and fell to the ground before Nathen could catch it. There was still a bit of the bluish smoke gathered in a much diminished sphere above the squirrel-hopper, which hung around for a moment, as if deciding if it should make anything else, before popping, the last of the mist dispersing into the air.
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NEW ABILITY: Looting
What kind of game doesn’t have looting?
-Extract Vituss from defeated foes and form it into desired items
-Quality and type of items created depend on strength and nature of enemy
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“Really? They want to explain that in game?” Nathen snorted as he picked up the water skin, surprised to find it almost full. Taking a long sip of the clear cool water he was surprised when he felt the pain of his wounds deaden slightly. He took another drink while watching a cut on his arm and was surprised to see some faint wisps of blue mist escaping through the wound, and as it did so the gash closed slightly, becoming a bit shallower.
“Huh, healing water,” Nathen shrugged before downing half the remaining water. Most of the wounds had almost fully healed and he decided to save the rest of the water for later, incase he didn’t get another skin of healing water after his next fight. Tying the small skin to his belt, opposite from his sword, he started walking again. He didn’t know which way he’d come from, having been turned around in the fight, but also decided it didn’t matter. With a grin on his face, and his injuries reduced to a slight ache, he went looking for the next fight.
*****
Gregory crouched behind a bush, spear out, holding his breath even as his heart raced in his chest. This was his third attempt to leave the safe area, the first two times he’d heard or saw movement that spooked him into retreating to the clearing he’d found himself in. He didn’t know how big the safe zone was, but according to the fairy it wouldn’t last much more than a day. So, with the sun slowly growing lower in the sky, he committed to this third attempt.
He had heard something approaching, the soft footfalls of a large animal or monster, and gone into hiding. Even now he could hear the whatever it was slowly padding through the brush a short distance from him, sniffing at something while occasionally pausing in both for just long enough that Gregory was uncertain if the beast was still there. But, every time, he would once again hear it start moving and sniffing.
Struggling to control his breathing, as minutes stretched on, he forced himself to wait as still as possible, hidden beneath a large bush, as the footsteps and sniffing slowly got closer. He had a moment of panic as he realized it could have been sniffing him out, was it a monster looking to eat him?
After he felt like he’d been hiding for hours he finally caught a glimpse of the creature, or at least of its foot as it came into view under his bush. It was very similar to the feet of a dog, or perhaps a wolf, with three round toes and curved claws. Only it was much larger than any wolf foot he’d seen before, it had to be nearly as big as his own feet, with claws as big as his fingers.
Then he saw the creature’s head as it came down to sniff the ground. It was also canine, with massive fangs barely hidden within an enormous maw. Dark grey fur covered a long snout that ended in a twitching black nose as it sniffed at the ground. While the size of the snout was in line with the size of the paw, it was too far from where the body had to be. The reason for this discrepancy became clear as the monster moved its head around to sniff at the ground, the head was at the end of a long sinuous neck, almost like a snake’s body, only covered in the same dark grey fur as the head. Allowing it to reach out far from where its feet and body were and, to Gregory’s horror, to snake under bushes as it demonstrated with one across from where Gregory hid.
Just as he was afraid it was going to check under his bush a strange sound echoed through the forest, some kind of unintelligible cry, animalistic in nature, and barely heard in the distance. This caused the wolf creature to tense and look up, freezing in place. After a moment, the sound quickly fading out, the wolf monster clearly decided to leave and took off at a light run through the bush, finally allowing Gregory to catch his breath once it was out of earshot.
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NEW ABILITY: Hide
Not all fights have to be taken, sometimes you have to avoid them
-Increased ability to hide all aspects of yourself
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ABILTIY ‘HIDE’ HAS LINKED TO MODERATE FACET ‘CONTROL’
-High chance to stun unaware opponents with attacks
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“Oh good,” he panted, crawling out of the bush. He’d have preferred some survival ability, but at least with this he might be able to get the drop on other monsters. Or avoid them entirely without having to rely on luck.
Continuing on he was much more careful to listen for any movement around him. Oddly, despite the unfamiliar surroundings, he felt far more aware of his situation than he had in the past. Perhaps that was the ‘improved mental abilities’ his facet mentioned. Regardless he made good time, rushing slightly to escape the territory of that wolf monster.
He finally found a small stream just as it was starting to get dark, he quickly found a clear pool and took a quick drink to sake his thirst. With water taken care of, for the moment, he needed somewhere to spend the night. After his encounter with that monster he didn’t feel like any cave or bush on the ground would be safe. Instead he found a tree with some large branches close to the ground and, after struggling for nearly an hour, found his way up and made himself as comfortable as possible.
*****
“How do I log out,” Nathen wondered to himself, waving his finger in the air before him and trying to summon a menu of some kind. The status window didn’t have any button, only displaying his stats, facets and abilities.
“Maybe this is one of those ‘long term emersion’ tests? Like… what was that movie?” he said to himself, trying to figure out why he couldn’t bring up a system menu. Eventually he shrugged and decided that, since this was a test, if he was supposed to log out but didn’t someone would find him and help him out. Otherwise, he’d have to assume he was in a pod of some kind. Not much he could do either way.
He’d fought another one of the squirrel-hoppers, this time getting a couple of kebabs that barely sated his hunger, but with the night falling he figured the difficulty would go up. That’s how it tended to work, not to mention he was getting tired himself. He thought about climbing up to a large branch and resting there but looking the collection of gashes in his clothes from the squirrel monsters he decided against it. Instead, he found a large bush and, with some difficulty, managed to slip under it. With his sword across his lap, he leaned against the trunk of a tree and allowed his eyes to close.