Okay, so swearing wasn’t going to solve the next few minutes, but it gave me something to do as I rallied my wits.
Several shapes ran towards us ahead of a cloud of kicked-up dust, heading straight for the village. Most of those, even from a distance, I could recognise as more squawkers. Behind them, at a loping run, came wolves.
Lots of mouths filled with lots of chrome-like teeth glinted wetly in the midday sun.
I wrenched my sword out of the ground, cursed once more time for good measure, then ran after the spear-wielding guards.
My MP bar still flashed red with just barely a sliver of blue. I desperately wanted [ADRENALINE SURGE] active again so I could close the gap to the iepurran guards. They would be done for against such a number if the night’s events were anything to go by.
It wasn’t until the front guard lowered his spear in a charging position, then blasted forward with an explosion of dust and rocks that I realised how utterly wrong I was. The spear slammed into the leading squawker, punched straight through, and also skewered the bird behind. They howled in pain as the iepurran stopped with a skid on the gravel, lifted its prey straight up on the spear, then slammed them down with spectacular force.
I heard bones crack and snap. Several mechanical components shook loose and splashed around, ripped straight off the monsters.
The second guard executed a different move, something like a whirlwind where they brought the head of the spear around in an arc and scythed two squawkers off their feet. Or, rather, he scythed their legs straight off. The first iepurran leapt forward with short sword in hand and finished the thrashing monsters.
I had severely underestimated these furry guys. They had four glitch artefacts dead before I even reached the fight, and they were already ganging up on a fifth.
The wolf-analogues streamed by the first guard and kept running madly towards the town gate.
A part of me wondered what they’d been waiting for all this time. Another part of me yelled at the first for not paying attention. And a third was doing something productive, getting me to raise the sword just as the first wolf reached me. Two more were right on its heels.
Muscular black bodies. Metal faces. Mechanical jaws. Tendrils that sprouted from their backs and streamed behind them like the tentacles of swimming octopuses.
The stuff of fucking nightmares!
One of them ran past me, almost knocking me over. The chrome tendrils cut through my side and leg like a hot knife through butter and I screamed in pain. The next wolf leapt for my arm. It sunk silver teeth into my raised forearm.
In panic, I activated [ADRENALINE SURGE] before those jaws could lock on and shatter the bone. The world slowed and my MP bar flashed red. I barely had two seconds of time available, and my mind reeled in panic.
I passed my sword from occupied right hand to the left and, just as the effect ended, I slammed the blade down on the wolf’s exposed flank. The edge sliced neatly through the chrome tendrils and dug deeply into the wolf’s side.
It let out a pitiful whine of pain and the pressure on my arm eased slightly. For good measure, I brought the blade up in an arc and carved a blood-soaked chunk of meat out of the monster. It howled and I took the chance to rip my arm out of its mouth.
I ran on fumes, head light with the pain of the bite, good arm shaking with the rush of the fight, when the third wolf leapt for me, mouth open wide, fangs headed straight for my throat. Even if I fell right there and then, it would still reach me.
“Futu—“
I got halfway to a scream when the wolf got smashed sideways. Whatever had hit sent it flying through the air for a good ten meters. A second later a blur ran past me: one of the iepurran guards, heading for the village gate and the escaping wolf.
The one that had almost ripped my throat out was impaled on a spear, stuck fast to a roadside tree, legs kicking uselessly a few palms off the ground. Black blood pooled under the creature, and splashed all around as it thrashed and howled.
“Are you all right, honoured guest?” the remaining guard asked as he came up to me. “I hope I have not stolen your glory with my reckless action. You looked like you could use a helping hand.”
His colleague had just caught up to the last animal. I heard a crack and then a loud whine as the iepurran delivered its killing blow.
“Ah… what?” I stuttered, still staring at the impaled animal. The two guards were spectacularly strong, almost absurdly so. “No, it’s fine. I think it would’ve gotten a good bite out of me.” My arm throbbed in pain and it took me some time to realise I was bleeding like a stuck pig. There were several long gashes running down my forearm and I could barely feel my fingers.
Absurdly, I expected to start healing from the wound, but my head only grew light.
“I think I need a healer,” I said. Then promptly fainted.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
When I woke, I was laying in Eklil’s bed again and my arm had been bandaged and bound in some sort of protective cast. I didn’t feel any pain, which didn’t gel with the day’s events so far.
Fainting was becoming an upsetting habit at this point. First from hunger. Then from a stupid skill. Now I went and got myself bleeding enough to faint. What would be next? Get beheaded and faint at the sight of my headless corpse? Ridiculous.
“You are reckless, honoured guest,” Eklil said from my side. He was perched on a stool and was busy carefully cutting some roots and weighing them on a mechanical scale.
“Not my proudest moments,” I said, forcing myself to sit up, fighting down a sudden wave of nausea. Empty stomach, I had to remind myself. And no water. And blood loss.
I was naked. Of course, the toga would’ve been ripped to shreds. My clothes were laying on a chair next to the bed, clean and smelling faintly flowery. Some iepurran had gone through the trouble of mending my t-shirt. It looked patchwork, but the sight of it stole a smile from me. And a soft sob that got pushed down into its own little box, because the day had enough weird in it without me thinking of why I cared for that particular shirt.
I got dressed in silence, finding that I wasn’t in as much pain as I thought I’d be. The arm had begun throbbing, but it wasn’t anything too bad. I could move my fingers and even felt it when I poked the tips with my sword. Small beads of blood formed in the cuts and they stung. So, no immediate nerve damage from the tussle.
“You should rest,” Eklil said. “Ielup will be cross if she sees you walking about. She was already very cross with me for not keeping a close eye on you.”
“I saw a lot of monsters approaching the town,” I said. “How long was I out?”
“Not much more than a bell,” he said, still not prying his attention away from his work. “We are aware of the threat and have taken measures.”
“Eternity,” I called out as I struggled to pull my t-shirt on.
The dragon materialised with a puff of smoke. “Yes?” it asked, unconcerned.
“Why did the monsters attack now?” I asked. “Why not last night? Why are the coming here?”
Eternity flapped its wings and landed atop my head. I couldn’t feel it, naturally, but did get the sense of a presence nestling in my hair.
“There is a thirty hour cooldown after a dungeon’s re-initialisation. At the thirty hour mark, the dungeon sends out a pulse with the purpose of self-checking. The glitch artefacts are drawn to the pulse.”
“And do they need to get back in the… well to reinfect the place?”
“Simple proximity to the centre point is sufficient for reinfection.”
“And that would generate more monsters?”
I was getting a handle on how this worked. It wasn’t enough to clear the dungeon, I also had to clear the surrounding area of all the monsters it had spawned or the cycle could repeat. Fix the root cause and then clear the damage caused by the initial issue… maintenance engineering at its most basic form.
Eklil came to stand by me, the old iepurran looking apprehensive.
“Our guards are quite strong, honoured guest,” he said, with almost exaggerated patience. “You should rest.”
Ah, but there in lay the problem. I gave him a rueful grin.
“Your guards are stupid powerful.” I lifted the sword and got it into its scabbard with some difficulty. “If I don’t get out there and do some fighting, I’ll lose out on all the levels I can gain here.”
I still hadn’t looked through my messages, but I had caught glimpses of some of them when they had come on. Mostly, they all dealt with me gaining proficiency with the sword and with my athletic abilities—apparently, not falling on your head while running down a hill counted as a defining moment in my traversal evolution.
“You… mean to fight the dungeon spawns?” Eklil cocked his head to the side and his ears laid back. “Why? The problem that required your help is solved. We can handle ourselves from here.” Was that a hint of anger in his voice? “Your help is appreciated, but not necessary.”
“I haven’t hit my head,” I said, missing the edge of annoyance in his voice. “I just want to practice more. And, if I’m careful, the monsters aren’t really that strong.”
“Ah.”
He had a particular way of saying a lot in a single syllable. This seemed to encompass a whole message that went something like “My guest has lost his mind and I don’t know how to politely restrain him until he comes back to his senses.” Maybe he wasn’t quite wrong about that, but I still wanted to go back out.
I tripped over my feet as I looked for my boots, reminded again that my only food of the past thirty hours lay in a ditch. My stomach growled with enough noise that it echoed.
Eklil handed me some of the same morning food after I got my boots on. I wolfed it down like a man possessed, all the while itching to go back and try again. Everything hurt. My head throbbed and my stomach knotted painfully as it got fed. My wounds itched under the cast, as if they’d been healing far more than an hour would’ve allowed.
But through it all, I still wanted to go and fight. I briefly wondered at that as I chased down the meal with a cup of tea.
When running after the squawker I had felt alive. Full of vitality. Felt as if I had purpose. It was an interesting high. Maybe the village didn’t need me to help protect it, but I wanted to chase the high.
Something was changing in me. I admitted the realisation and stepped out, still sloshing tea in my mouth before swallowing.
Eklil followed suit. “I will accompany you today, honoured guest,” he said. “To help with your training, if I can.”
“How come those three last night got hurt?” I asked as I headed for the other village gate. There was a cluster of four red dots on my map, somewhere out in the nearby silver forest. “Your guards were really strong. How did they get hurt?”
Eklil let out a small cough and a grumble. “Cowardly ambush. The monster you slew had hid beneath the water and, in the dark, it surprised poor Kleopt. He screamed and the others came. The other monster ambushed them while they were going down to the river bank. They fell and were easy to pick off.”
So, no matter how strong one was in this world, they could still be brought low by some careful mischief. One more annotation to my ever-increasing list of things to be careful of.
My [HEAVY STRIKE] and [PARRY] skills had both gained a level. I could see now a little star above the skills in my list, with four others greyed out. The star was copper in colour. So, five stars to reach a next threshold, given that all my skills were marked as [INITIATE]. Well, that was achievable.
I had also gained a level in something called [SURE FOOT]. No surprise there, given the run down the hill.
But the most important lesson of the day was that I now knew I effectively had access to a single system skill at one time. I couldn’t turn off a skill once activated, which meant that I had to be very careful about my MP use and how I approached fights. [ADRENALINE RUSH] was really strong, but it wouldn’t be enough if I ever ran into something much tougher than I could cut.
I needed to learn more. And I could only do that, for now, by fighting. As it happened, I really wanted to do just that. Because otherwise I had a lot of time to think.
Thinking was a dangerous pastime.
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