The creature stank! I almost lost the tea sloshing around in my stomach when it crashed into me and I got a full whiff of its pungent odour. Decayed meat coupled with a trash bin that had been cooking in the summer sun with its lid closed for five days straight.
The only bit of luck that graced me was managing to, somehow, bring my elbow up just before the creature impacted, interposing my bare arm between its fanged mouth and my head. I had elbowed it in the tongue and, judging by the desperation with which it waggled its feet trying to grip me, we now shared suffering.
If I could, I would’ve gripped the tongue, but that was asking too much. It was too slippery and thrashed about wildly.
I let go of my embedded sword and burst forward. The headcrab—that’s what it was, I didn’t care for whatever name Eternity had it categorised as—weighed a good twenty to thirty kilos and it was all I could do not to topple with it atop me.
Instead, I ran forward, eyes closed so none of its thick, sticky spit blinded me. The tongue lashed around my arm, trying to wrap itself around my throat.
We hit the first tree with all the momentum a five-step sprint could gather. It was enough to get a growl out of the creature. My elbow dug deeper into the soft, muscular tissue that made up most of its mouth. It dug a claw into my shoulder, but two of its other legs loosed their grip on me. Pain came almost as an afterthought as I struggled to remain upright.
I spun in place and slammed us against another tree, trying to shake it off me.
Another, smaller shape grabbed hold of my right leg and began aggressively climbing me. I rammed my knee into the same tree and felt the crack of teeth and hard shell. The weight dropped off.
The creature trying to eat my whole shoulder yowled as I kicked at its smaller version. For all that noise, it didn’t get off me.
“Fuck off!” I growled as I blindly tried to slam myself against another tree.
For a frighteningly long moment, I didn’t feel anything when I thrust myself sideways. I only felt myself going off-balance, then toppling.
No. No. No. No. If I knew anything about grappling with any aggressive animal it was that you were as good as dead if it got you to the ground. It’s hard to defend yourself when you lose a whole degree of freedom of movement.
But we didn’t fall all the way. Instead, we hit something hard and the creature screamed a high, piercing shriek. Right in my goddamn ear! Its grip fully unclasped and I continued falling.
The ground hit me hard, but my adrenaline was spiking. I rolled the moment I hit, bruised my ribs against some exposed roots, but found my way back to my feet in time to see the creature pulling itself off a broken branch. Entrails snagged on the broken wood and shockingly red blood spurted from the gash in its side.
That could’ve been me… A wrong twist and I could’ve been the one impaled there, bleeding to death as an Oresstrian headcrab happily slurped the brains from my cracked skull.
More were coming. They were forming a living carpet of dark shapes on the ground, leaping between roots towards the larger one. At least they weren’t coming after me.
My MP bar was halfway full. My backpack had held surprisingly well and wasn’t even loose on my back, but I expected I may have broken at least a few things inside.
Most importantly, I saw my sword… right in the middle of the swarm coming for me.
“B?ga-mi-a? picioarele!”
I ran towards the weapon, trying not to snag myself on more low-hanging branches. Just as the first of the creatures got near enough to grab onto my leg, I activated [ADRENALINE SURGE] and took a precious heartbeat to figure the path forward.
They were all barely moving as my heart thundered in my chest, the beat of it like a drum in my ears.
Like crossing a river, I told myself as I decided on doing something spectacularly stupid. This river had teeth and claws.
I jumped.
And I Mario-ed the first headcrab to paste as I landed atop it and leapt again to the next. Their bodies, now that I had a better view—and feel—of them, were almost flat and covered in bristly hair. I didn’t slip as I landed on the next and crushed it. Then the next. Two more skips and I reached my sword, grabbed its hilt and yanked as hard as I could.
The blade came loose from the wood with a dull scraping noise.
I wasn’t going to let the big one live. Not for any excess of bravery or anything, but it had taken a good taste of me and I couldn’t risk it tracking me after this. It was as good as dead—I hoped—what with the large rent in its side, but the risk of dealing with it again was too big to ignore. Already my MP was down to almost nothing when I turned and saw the monster trying to crawl away, the army of smaller creatures gathering around it like a protective wall.
No. Not like a protective wall at all, I realised. They were attacking it. Some of them were atop it, trying to rip into the wound. Okay, this could work. If I killed it, I’d be giving the little cannibals something to gorge on while I got the hell out from their territory.
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Normal speed resumed after one more crushed headcrab. Just in time for me to jump and bring down the sword on my quarry.
I brought the sword down two-handed straight between the creature’s eyes and got a feel-good shot as the [HEAVY BLOW] skill trained up. The blade cracked carapace like paper and then passed through whatever internal structure the monster had, to punch out through its belly mouth. Half its tongue fell off like some gruesome severed appendage. It squirmed and splashed blood everywhere.
The big headcrab died without another sound, its legs giving out from under it. All the smaller ones not busy eating their crushed fellows rushed forward and swarmed all over the still bleeding corpse.
For my part, I hauled ass without even looking at the notifications that had popped up. I had gained a [HEAVY STRIKE] level, but I wasn’t going to stop and celebrate. I ran as hard as my legs could carry me without losing footing.
I brained myself on a couple branches, but the pain was nothing compared to the image of one of those things landing atop my head and biting down. Even the pain of where their daddy-thing had scratched me got washed out in the rush.
It must’ve been a good ten or fifteen minutes of blind panic before I slowed, and another five before I stopped to catch my breath. If I closed my mouth to stop panting, I could swear I’d be chewing on my heart. The world spun. You wouldn’t think it, but it gets stuffy in a forest, especially with the sun high overhead, and doubly so when you’re running for dear life.
“Jesus Christ. On a pogo.” My breaths were coming in shallow and quick. There was something wet going down my chest and I realised with distress that it was blood flowing from the shoulder wound. “Fuck,” I groaned as I stuck my sword point-first into the ground, then lifted my shirt.
Where there wasn’t smudged blood mixed in with sweat, there were bruises on my torso. I should’ve gotten myself some armour back in the village. Too bad I’d been feeling too much like I was taking advantage of the iepurran kindness to ask for more than the bare minimum.
I took off my pack and opened it up. Ielup hadn’t wanted to connect via the interface, but she had given me plenty of supplies. I pulled out my notes and looked for a particular one I knew was there.
“Blue flask,” I grumbled as I began digging through the ransacked contents of my bag. “Blue flask. Where the blazes are you?”
Amazingly, I hadn’t managed to break anything in there. All the vials were still in their nice little cocoons as Ielup had wrapped them, and even the foodstuff was still, mostly, in one piece. Chalk one up to iepurran craftsmanship.
That blue flask contained a tincture that Ielup had told me to use in case I got any open cuts. It was both a clotting agent and a powerful disinfectant. I applied it to the shallow gash on my shoulder with the help of a piece of clean linen.
What Ielup had failed to mention was that the thing burned. I screamed the moment I pressed it to the wound. Then I clamped my free hand over my mouth with enough force that I may have bruised my jaw, realising a tad too late that the last thing I wanted was to get more attention from whatever lurked in the Brightleaf.
So, with tears in my eyes, and a lot of cursing under my breath, I treated whatever cuts I could find on me. There was the wound in my shoulder, several shallow cuts across my back, one on my hip, and a couple punctures on my right leg, where that enterprising crab had caught hold of me. They all hurt like a motherfucker when I cleaned them, and continued hurting like two motherfuckers as they sealed with clotted blood.
All in all, I wasn’t going to die of infection… hopefully.
“Eternity, can I see if I get infected with anything?” I asked.
My voice sounded hoarse to my ears, and the back of my throat felt scratchy and dry. Ielup had warned me of possible side effects of her treatment.
“Not as you are, no,” the dragon replied, floating down from the high canopy. “Visual inspection remains viable.”
As usual, Eternity had made itself scarce when I started the tussle. Now it reappeared out of thin air, flying up to my shoulder.
“Insight restriction? Or do I need a skill?” I slumped against a tree and sat on some soft moss. It felt good to rest, though all my senses were on high-alert and my heart kept hammering my ribs.
“Yes. Further functionality can become available with more insight or by acquiring the relevant skill.”
“So which one is it for me?”
“I cannot say.”
I swallowed the obligatory “Fuck you” and, instead, set about rearranging my supplies and getting things settled in the pack. I also checked my notifications just to get rid of the little flashing icon in my field of view. I hate very few things quite as much as I do flashing icons on any sort of display. Let them be solid or take them the fuck away, just don’t have them flashing.
[CONGRATULATIONS]
[YOU HAVE CHANGED AN ENEMY’S DESIGNATION]
[BRAIN HUNTER -> HEADCRAB]
[YOU HAVE DEFEATED: HEADCRAB BROOD MOTHER x1]
[YOU HAVE DEFEATED: HEADCRAB JUVENILE x7]
[YOU HAVE TRAINED: HEAVY BLOW - INITIATE]
[YOU HAVE TRAINED: SURE FOOT - INITIATE]
[YOU HAVE TRAINED A NEW SKILL]
[YOU HAVE UNLOCKED - FIRST AID - INITIATE]
Neat. At least the pain hadn’t been for nothing. I took note of the interface changing the name of the creature from its original to what I’d been thinking. That was a nice touch, I had to admit, which suggested more flexibility than Eternity was ready to admit to.
Still, I had trained a couple skills and learned a couple valuable lessons, chief among which was that I needed to look up when I walked. If I’d been dismissive of Eklil’s warning before, this little tussle had proved that I was an absolute idiot.
I even made a mental note of that, just to never forget. When a plant wizard, who can very literally sprout vines to strangle enemies to death, warns me of the dangers of a forest, it would be in my best interest to listen, take notes, say thank you and kiss their fucking feet in gratitude for their insight.
“Thank you, Eklil,” I said, looking up. “I hope I didn’t seem like too much of a hopeless dolt when you tried to warn me.”
I drank some water. Resisted the urge to spit it out to get rid of the taste in the back of my throat. Then ate something. And I got back on my feet.
Opening the map showed that I had stumbled quite a way away from the straight route to where I’d been going. A skull mark had appeared at the edge of the forest, where I’d been fighting earlier. Beneath it, the word “headcrabs” appeared. Again, neat. Easy to keep track of animals and monsters this way so I wouldn’t stumble about like more of an idiot.
I still had a skill point to allocate. If the pattern repeated, I would get some more MP if I bought a skill, and that would definitely be useful in case I ran against some other creature ready to tear into me. With that in mind, I opened up my skill menu and chose my third interface skill.
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