[Performance assessed]

[Skills demonstrated:]

[Staff Combat - Basic, Upgradeable. 3/10]

[Ability to effectively use a staff in combat. Grants increased control over weapon]

[Identify - Common, Upgradeable. 6/10]

[Ability to absorb information about a target directly from the system. Skill accessed without system assistance, Grade Increased (Basic→Common). Increases ability to process accessed information]

[Secondary Objective Fulfilled! (Earn a Skill) End of round rewards increased.]

[Title acquired! Complete round to claim.]

The bland voice sat in Ari’s ear, listing out his achievements and rewards as he hustled from the clearing. Not a terrible haul, all things considered. He remembered getting his first skill last time as a reward for the completion of the first round, so he was ahead of the game there, but he wouldn't by any means be unique in earning a skill this early. Some of the monstrously capable people who had made it to the end with him last time had been assessed skills within moments of entering the first round.

He winced as he pushed some painful memories back. He would see them again. There would be no reason why he wouldn’t, right?

The skills wouldn't be immediately very helpful, as they provided more fringe benefits than capability at this point. The Identify skill wouldn't yet provide any help at all, as the current bottleneck wasn't his ability to process information, but his control over his own mana. The staff skill, on the other hand, was worth something.

He spun the seven foot length of wood idly with a few fingers in between steps. Earning the skill didn’t teach you how to use the staff. Not on its own, at least.

Basic weapon skills were… odd in their execution. They didn't add any more force to your blows, but made the weapon itself more responsive to slight motions, giving you, exactly as the skill description said, more fine control over it.

He and his compatriots had studied the quasi-telepathic connection ruthlessly in his past life, and they hadn’t managed to find anything about how it worked, but they had learned how to use it effectively.

And it was effective, especially at high levels of combat.

Not now, though. Now, all he could do was keep walking.

********

Within the hour, he found another stream where he could wash the furrows in his shoulder and bandage himself up. He also rinsed the blood out of his now ripped and dirty t-shirt and light jacket as best he could, then wrung them out and put them on still wet, glad for the day’s heat.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The soil was sandier in a specific direction away from the stream, and on a hunch, Ari decided to head that direction.

Over the course of the next few minutes of walking, he felt the ground firm up beneath his feet, and began to see at first chips of stone, then whole rocks strewn about. Eventually, he found himself at the foot of a small hill.

He circled it slowly, looking for anything telling in the trees and the brush that covered the hill. It couldn't be more than 10 feet tall, but it looked almost impossible to climb just from the sheer density of brush surrounding it.

On his second circuit, he managed to find what he was looking for. He poked his staff at one specific plant, a brown, wiry shrub, then poked it through all the way to the base of the staff. There was a hollow in the hill behind. Hopefully a stone hollow, but regardless, he’d dealt with worse.

It looked to be a decently large hollow, only about four or five feet high, but he’d fit. As he worked to clear himself an opening with his staff and dagger, he took stock of his surroundings. It would be a pretty good place to set up in an eternal forest. There was running water a 10 minute walk away, a defensible position to his back, and reasonably clear sightlines in every other direction. A solid home base.

He was already planning out how he would spend the rest of the round when the trapdoor spider almost got him.

Halfway through clearing the opening, 10 square feet of brush lifted away from the hillside all at once and a spider with legs longer than his staff was lunging at him. Its fur was a ruddy orange, and its fangs and legs, sharpened to vicious points, gleamed like polished steel.

Adrenaline dug his hands into the wood of his weapon, and he managed to tangle one of its legs up on its way to him, and with an application of leverage, it cracked in an explosion of Ichor.

Unfortunately, that meant the spider’s other front claw took him in the thigh.

He buckled, quad no longer able to support his weight, and he rolled as he hit the ground, which saved him a piercing stab from the thing’s fangs. His eyes caught his dagger laying on the ground in a pile of leaves, just out of reach.

Oh, this is going to suck.

He punched the spider in the eyes to buy himself a second, pulping one, and causing the spider to shriek, a sharp and inhuman sound. With his one good leg and two arms, he hauled himself up past the spider’s legs and on to the top of its thorax. As the spider recovered from its pain and disorientation and realized what was happening, it shrieked louder and began trying to shake Ari off.

He wrapped his arms around its thorax and began to squeeze with all his strength.

It spasmed and flailed, trying to bash Ari against the hill, the ground, anything that might get him off, but spiders were light. This massive one probably weighed less than a hundred pounds. There was nothing it could do. Spiders just aren’t built to reach their own backs.

It struggled, it fought, and eventually, it died. Ari kept up the bear hug long past the point where the exoskeleton cracked, until he was absolutely certain that it wouldn't be getting back up.

He collapsed, bruised, battered, and bleeding, rolling off the back of the now dead spider. He allowed himself a moment of laying on his back and looking up at the cloudy sky before he had to deal with any more problems. The clouds rolled by, gray-blue mountains passing directly overhead, close enough that it felt like he could reach up and touch them.

He had walked on those clouds, or at least clouds like them, in a round only a few years in the past for him. Decades in the future for this timeline. Would it play out the same this time? Would he meet everyone he remembered meeting?

[Performance Assessed]

The system message interrupted his reverie.

Right, saving humanity, surviving till tomorrow. Pontificating could wait.