Tom shuffled forward, his mind awhirl with possibilities. There were eight kids ahead, and then he could enter the trial.
Today, he was going to be successful. He could feel it deep inside him, this ball of certainty that he had felt before. He had felt it multiple times, in fact, but most notably it happened when he had stumbled on the idea of extracting the racial trait of another species. It was the same sensation, a crystallised nugget of truth that could not be denied. Of course, this time it was not for anything as dramatic as materially updating his species’ racial trait, but still, a breakthrough was imminent.
It had taken him a couple of days to realise, but at the end of the last session he had advanced the skill he had been working on. With time to reflect on his actions, he was certain that he had made tangible progress before running out of time. Admittedly, it was only a little advancement at best, but his intellect assured him it was more significant than that. Perhaps, it was a precursor to something greater, and he had been obsessed with the idea since, to the point where he had resolved to spend his fate on skill development rather than his magic spells.
The event itself, the action, was almost laughably simple, so he was unsure of why it had such weight to it. But it did, and, when he looked back at his memories, he was sure he had been drawing energy away from the butterflies a moment before his hand actually made contact.
He was pragmatic. Years alone in the tutorial had taught him that there was no profit in self-delusion. He recognised that this could easily be a case of false recollections, of a desire for progress creating an illusion of a non-existent event, but overlaying that was the richness of the truth that accompanied the memories.
The air gap between him and the constructs had been no wider than a fingernail. But he could manage that distance, and then practice would extend it to a finger, then to a hand, maybe an arm, and possibly even further. In that case, every centimetre would make the killing of the white butterflies exponentially easier. Then it would just become a matter of storing the energy for long enough to get close to an orange one.
Dimitri’s hand was on his chest, holding him in place for the mandatory thirty seconds. Then he let go, and Tom stepped forward. He reached out and touched the impossibly perfect sphere that changed the very atmosphere around it.
The world shifted, and he was in the cafe. Disappointment flowed through him. He had been hoping to throw himself into the action immediately.
April was across from him, sitting on the same stool as usual. She took one look at him, and then a smile lit up her face. She gave a joyful clap:
“Yay. I was gonna give a prep talk, but it looks like it’s unnecessary. You’re as smug as an oracle given free rein in a casino. From your grin, I’m assuming you worked out that you were manipulating the energy outside your body.”
“Yes. I did it!” He used his fingers on the plastic table to create an excited drum roll. “Come on, there’s no time to talk. Let me at them.”
“Eager much? But I’m not taking away the monsters.” She warned him. “Don’t be overconfident.”
“I’ll deal with them.” He promised.
The angel nodded:
“Good luck, Tom.”
The world shifted, and he was once more standing on the lake’s shore, in the exact same spot that he always appeared. With a quick glance to confirm there was nothing in his immediate vicinity, he moved directly towards the tree line. There could be no mistakes. He didn’t want his progress interrupted by needless deaths.
Four steps was all it took for a monster to emerge out of the shade of the tree where Tom was heading. It could be best described as a duck with a four-part beak that parted to show razor-sharp teeth.
It hooted and charged.
There were only three metres separating them and Tom instinctively stabbed as he retreated from it. It was a quick jab to force time rather than aiming to hurt it. He hit, and it flinched back from the pain and broke off from its charge.
Tom was immediately in his Battle Trance mindset, assessing everything around him. He hadn’t fought this specific species before, but he had watched them combating other beasts, and had investigated the aftermaths of their battles. Out of the local monster population, they were probably the most dangerous foe he could face. They always hunted in pairs and used stealth to flank opponents, with the surprise attack often finishing their foes in the first moments of the contest. Currently, only one was charging him.
His internal alarms went off.
It was a decoy.
Where was its partner? It could not be behind him, given the water; nor to his right - his peripheral vision covered that area perfectly.
He spun to his blind side spear in motion under the assumption that that was where the attack was coming from.
Too slow. He thought. My reaction was way too slow.
The expected second monster was already airborne, flying at him silently. His scrambled desperate reaction gave him a chance, but his weapon was out of position, a casualty of his frantic spin. Instead of taking a more measured approach, he swung in an attempt to smash it, baseball style. For once, when it came to fighting Existentia’s monsters, physics was on his side. The duck was light, and his blow had his mass behind it, and he struck the creature flush on its chest. There was a dull thud, and it was knocked away, flying parallel to the water.
It wasn’t hurt, but this should buy him three or four seconds, which was vital in this type of fight.
The original razor-teeth duck, the one he had stabbed, was coming back for attempt number two. Its mouth was open, a deadly maw large enough to take a chunk the size of a softball out of him. The threat was real. Tom had witnessed one of the mutated ducks bite a lizard-dog’s leg right off, and not down low either, but rather next to the torso, where it was thickest. A single chomp that had severed everything - and the skin and flesh of a lizard dog was far tougher than his own.
Half a second was all he had, but that was an eternity in battle. He placed his blow more carefully. From observation, they had an insane amount of vitality, so trying to bleed them to death with stabs would be futile. This was a battle of attrition, and crippling mobility was the path to victory. Warily, he controlled his counterattack, and used the bladed edge of his spear tip.
The blade came down as planned on the wing joint. He felt heavy resistance that abruptly gave way as the weapon sheared through the feathers, flesh, tendons, and hollow bone.
A thrill of relief went through him. He had suspected that, with the creature’s other host of advantages, its resilience had to be low to compensate for its rank, but he still hadn’t expected his counter to be so outrageously successful. He had hoped to disable the wing, but removing it entirely was better.
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Tom side stepped away from the monster. It attempted to follow by flapping its wings, but that had the opposite effect it was hoping. The single wing knocked it off course and sent it careering out of control.
He was safe from it for the moment, so he turned to face the second creature. It had recovered with frustrating speed, and was already too close for him to use his spear effectively. Options flashed through his head even as he swung the butt of his weapon to knock the dangerous head away from him. It was basically at his feet and without considering the wisdom of it he wound up and punted it like you would do with a football ball. The bird was lifted off the ground and sent crashing into the lake; it splashed and then bounced at least once, the way pebbles did when you threw them to skip across a dam surface. It was disposed of, for now. He turned back to the other creature in the fight. Unfortunately, it was already becoming acclimatised to its missing wing, and, while moving slower than usual, it was wobbling toward him in a mostly-straight line.
Tom pounced when it half tripped and hacked off the other wing.
He heard the other one explode out of the water as it burnt some sort of skill. He tracked it out of the corner of his eye and performed a forward roll as the uninjured one went flying over where his head had been. Then he stood and spun, unleashing a savage downward cut to lop off one of its wings as well.
Both monsters were now struggling without their primary source of mobility. Their threat level went from deadly to nothing more than a nuisance. Tom couldn’t afford to take it easy, though, because the missing appendages were regrowing at a visible pace. They would be restored to full functionality in less than half a minute, if given time.
He wasn’t about to afford them that luxury, and he set about cutting them into pieces. This course of action was helped by them continuing to pursue him relentlessly. If they had run away to buy themselves time to recover, Tom knew he would have been in trouble. But their suicidal focus on slaughtering him made their demise a certainty. This was a weakness of them being monsters, but one he was happy to exploit.
He went to work, slicing off regrowing wings, then legs, and then redoing those cuts when they regrew back to a functional state. He attempted to hack off a head, but the skin over that area rebuffed his blade. Apparently, the species had extra armour protecting the location of what would otherwise have been a critical weak point.
Only once their regeneration slowed did he go for the kill.
Panting heavily, he thrust the spear in and left it in the middle of the creature’s body, right through the heart. The wound tried to close, but there was nothing it could do with the weapon still inside.
Finally, the second of them stopped moving.
He quickly checked his surroundings, particularly upwards, then stared at the nearby tree line and measured how long the battle had taken. It had gone on for minutes, and the bloodshed had occurred in the first seconds. Worse, he was covered in their almost human-like, burgundy-coloured blood. The stink of copper was an issue that would attract attention.
Tom could stay and fight off the coming monsters, or…
He glanced back at the water. It was warm and, as far as he could tell, not populated with threats. Carefully, he retreated into its depths, walking backwards and crouching until everything but his face was covered. A human wouldn’t be fooled, but the monster species that inhabited the area were not that perceptive - at least, in the visual sense.
Four separate octolegs emerged from the tree line.
Tom tensed. If he had waited a moment longer, he would have been exposed. Very conscious of how bad his hiding spot was he held himself perfectly still.
The monsters were all the same species. They wouldn’t fight amongst themselves. There wasn’t going to be a life and death battle as a convenient distraction to hide his presence. Tom wished he knew more about the octoleg’s physiology. Hopefully, they had terrible eyesight and relied on other senses like heat, smell and vibrations - all of which the water would hide.
To his immense relief, they ate the corpses, then retreated into the trees within five minutes, clearly feeling exposed on the shoreline. A disturbing thought struck Tom. He hoped that their desire to return to the forest was because of the aerial threats and not concern about monsters lurking in the lake. Despite his mind warning him that something dark and nasty was creeping up from the lake bottom, Tom stayed in the water for a few minutes longer to allow the octolegs to get far enough away that him emerging from the lake wouldn’t attract their attention.
Once he decided that sufficient time had passed, he rushed to dry land. He glanced worriedly back as he did so.
Nothing stirred. There wasn’t a single suspicious ripple; not that a monster of the deep would create anything like that before they struck from ambush. He shivered.
It seemed innocent, but a large part of him shuddered at the stupidity of retreating into the water when he didn’t know whether anything was in there. There were more monsters than he could imagine that might lurk in the deeper water, and all of them would have killed him. Then again, trying to fight off four octolegs would have been suicide, so maybe the gamble had been worth it.
Tom forced himself to stop dwelling on possibilities. He had a job to do.
He had been rehearsing his plan in his head for days just for this moment . It was time to develop his skill, and the moment he looked for a target, he spotted one. It had settled on a flower that was just springing back up from when either he or one of the monsters had stepped on it in the earlier fight. He approached cautiously, and then watched, amused, as it beat its wings, completely oblivious to his presence. The wings looked so lifelike, and despite their artificial nature, they were almost identical to the butterflies he remembered from earth.
He shook his head. That similarity had been created by April deliberately. Carefully, he crept closer, then paused just outside its detection range. He had a job to do. Then, while he was staying lightly on his feet, his hand snapped forward rapidly to decrease the distance between him and the butterfly. As usual, it took off from the flower the instant he breached its detection distance, but Tom didn’t panic. He just observed its motions and followed it with his outstretched finger. He was too slow to grab it, but, as it flittered upwards, he kept the pressure up, attempting not to catch it, but to get close enough to touch it. The entire time he was linked to the precognition energy within it, trying to draw it from the construct into his fingers.
The energy he was tugging on gave slightly. A tiny slither arced across the air that separated the butterfly and his finger.
The butterfly’s flight faltered.
For two beats, its wing stopped moving, and it fell like a wet leaf, flipping and spinning a little, but mostly being subjected to gravity. It regained control before hitting the ground, but it took precious moments and most of the height it had gained had been lost before it stabilised its trajectory. By then it was too late for it. Tom was already kneeling and cupping both hands over it.
It was caught.
He held it in place without actually touching it. Then he focused on drawing the energy out of the trapped creature.
The power flowed, and through the cracks between his fingers he watched as the butterfly burned up. Desperately he kept track of the energy and attempted to hold it inside himself, but the moment it entered his skin he lost contact with it.
Tom frowned.
That had not gone how he had imagined. At least, the last step had not. On the other hand, he was pushing boundaries, so he should have expected success and failure to go hand in hand. Still, despite the undoubted success of remotely extracting the energy, he felt empty. He had been hoping to store the stolen power as well.
He did not lower his head. He had hours to do this.
His fate was regenerating, and his pool was full. Carefully, he built the image, then invested a single point to help increase the range of his absorption.
All of his focus was on the butterflies. He tracked them down one after the other, and, to his relief, he didn’t run into any monsters. His range increased to a knuckle, then to two knuckles, then a full finger-length.
The butterfly he was stalking stood no chance. None of them could escape anymore. His hand dived in, and before it took off and got within range, he drew a tiny amount of energy out of it. That had the effect of stunning it. The construct tumbled out of the air, and, as it was still close to the ground, trapping it was trivial.
There was a ding.
He paused for a fraction of a moment as a thrill of excitement went through him.
Then he suppressed the emotions. He wasn’t done. Whatever skill he got was probably on the level of Heal Scratch – in other words, trash that was not worth worrying about. Tom could feel it in his gut. He knew what he was capable of, and he was positive he could push his manipulation of the precognition energy even further. Plus, he hadn’t even achieved the basics of what April had tasked him with. She wanted him to be able to kill orange butterflies, and he hadn’t taken out even one of them yet.
He could feel the nervous tension in himself, the desire to do more. Now was not the time to reflect on his gains. Instead, he had to push everything further. There was more to do. He had to kill both types of butterflies, and maybe also train his spear against monsters. Not that he had seen one of them for a while, which he was surprisingly fine with.
There were skills he wanted to develop, and he didn’t need near pointless distractions.