Chapter 4: Escaped Prey

  There are ten major races that are common across the multiverse. This is not to say there are not more, but it took long enough to get a consensus on ten that we stopped there for now. Elves are one of the big ten. Elves are interesting in that they have a biological adaptive mechanism that is not well understood. Elves that live for generations in an area develop minor adaptive changes. These changes have led to the non-standard wood elves, high elves, darks elves, etc. In general, they share many characteristics with humans aside from the adaptive changes and longer life span. Their societies are varied and different across many worlds. On some planets, they are known to be benevolent to all other races, while on other planets, they make some of humanities’ worst tyrants look benevolent.

  -Remarks on elves from a Traveler’s Guild guide to races of the multiverse

  The first thing I notice when I open my eyes is how dark the sky is. On Earth, there were always clouds or lights in the distance. Here I see nothing but black with stars dotting the vast expanse overhead. I look down to see I’m back in my clothes from the party, and the glass shard is sticking out of my side. I cradle the glass, worried that movement could make the injury worse. There is a lack of pain from the wound, which doesn’t make me feel any better. As I stand, a thin line of blood drips from the wound down my leg. I notice the cold, solid surface under my feet. My feet are bare, and the surface feels like cool, unbroken glass. My feet don’t sink in, nor is there a ripple when I move, but strangely, the blood flowing down my leg penetrates the barrier I’m standing on, wafting into the depths below. It’s as though the blood is being diluted in a pool of water.

  I kneel to peer deeper into the murky depths. The dark red blood swirls in lazy eddies around indistinct shapes as it falls deeper, but even the blood, hinting at the shapes of the things below the surface, is not enough to give me a clear glimpse. There are bright stars that pierce the night sky overhead. They burn supernaturally bright, enough that I dare not look too long at one, but even with all their lights, the stars don’t provide enough illumination to show me what lies below.

  I walk forward, eager to find anything that might help me as I feel my life leaking out of me. My view shifts, and I see my staggering form as an outside observer. I slip in my own blood, falling and driving the glass shard lodged in my side deeper. I let out a cry as the glass slices flesh inside me and a surge of warm blood gushes down my side. I try to muster the strength to get up and continue my trek, but with all the blood beneath me, I slip again. Undeterred, I give it another try. I make it to my feet unsteadily and grip the glass in my side to keep it from moving around and causing more damage. Hunched over in pain, I lumber forward.

  Time passes, and the night sky shifts. The sky is so alien that I’m not sure if the movement of the lights could be minutes, hours, or days. Some of the stars burn brightly, while some flicker in and out. I lumber on, but my worry fades as I feel something vital has bled out of me. I am paler, weaker, and my lumbering walk turns into a shamble. My foot slips and I fall again, but this time the surface below me gives, and my knee sinks half an inch into the crystalline flooring. My fall creates a ripple across the floor as though it were a lake. I try to move my leg to free it, but feel a suction from whatever lies below. The solidity of the crystalline substance under my other foot begins to bow as though ready to dip below the surface. I see my hand blindly reach out to one of the stars with all the strength I have left. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something in the dark depths is moving up toward me.

  I feel the area behind me bulge, foretelling something emerging. I cannot summon the strength to turn, but I feel as if something with a vaguely humanoid shape is towering over me. Then I notice everything is frozen, as if time is standing still in a moment. The blinking stars stop blinking, and even the force pulling me below halts. The surface no longer moves up my legs, and even the trickle of blood dripping down my side stops. All the stars dim but the one I reach for. There is still a vast gulf between my hand and the light in the distance, but something tells me it’s my only hope. I feel more than see other things reach up and pull at the legs of the humanoid creature behind me. Questing hands of undeterminable forms pull its left leg down into the pseudo-water until its kneecap is submerged. The creature growls, but it is felt, not heard. The hands don’t go away but wither and shake as though reeling in pain at the feeling. As the hands wither, the creature stops sinking, and its other leg emerges. A resounding thud echoes as its foot slams on the solid surface, but I’m too engrossed in the star. It doesn’t look any closer, but the light is growing brighter, as though it’s reaching back.

  I feel other hands slowly rising from the depths, new hands and old ones that have regained some of their vigor. This time, the creature ignores them as they wrap around its legs and waist. The creature reaches over my shoulder as though about to grasp the star locked in my gaze. I see a black claw-like hand with an arm thicker than my legs and dripping black ichor. A pulse of force ripples in every direction, as though a weight is being brought to bear. The stars grow blindingly bright, causing me to blink tears from my eyes, as more inky black hands surge forth like a school of fish from the depths. I can’t look away from the star burning into my eyes as the hands decide they are no longer satisfied with the creature and start pulling me under to the unknowable depths below.

  -

  I wake with a start. I inhale with deep, gasping breaths as cold sweat clings to me, soaking into the cloth cover I had taken from the tent. As I take stock of my surroundings, I see I am face-to-face with the ghostly form of Morgana, her dispassionate gaze staring through me more than at me. The color drains from my face, and my stomach drops. Morgana had promised to watch the elf and wake me should something happen. What was she doing watching me sleep?

  “What’s wrong? Why are you here?” I ask frantically as my hand wraps around the sword hilt beside the cot.

  In her dead flat tone, she whispers, “The elf left the camp. I was coming to wake you, but you woke right as I entered.”

  My sleep-addled mind tries to kick into gear, and I think about hunting down the elf, but I reconsider. The dark savage part of my mind, the part built to cultivate fear against the unknown dangers in the world, warns me that she will go back to base and call others to hunt me down. It warns me that I should chase her down and I should eliminate her for my safety. Cold logic devoid of empathy unfolds, suggesting just to be safe, I should drag her back to the ritual site and arrange the site, so it looks like she died with the others. Despite these dark pragmatic thoughts, I release the iron grip on my sword and decide that is not who I am. Even if they are planning to hunt me, I will not be like them.

  A weight I didn’t know I was carrying lifts from my soul when I affirm my decision to let her go. As much as part of me fears the consequences letting her go will cause, another part is relieved I am no longer burdened with the moral dilemma of how to treat her after what her comrades did to Morgana. Deep down, I know I will have to deal with her in the future, and the consequences might be greater than they would be if I hunted her down. I have only delayed the need to kill her when she comes back to find me, but I am not ready to choose to kill someone in cold blood. Everything up to this point has been self-defense, even if entering a dungeon willingly makes my recent encounters flimsy, it still holds. The dungeon boss, the snakes, and the crab were all built by the dungeon to kill. At least that is what I tell myself.

  Despite choosing not to track her out, I am not dumb enough to stick around the last place she saw me, to make it easy for her to return with reinforcements. After putting on a fresh tunic and grabbing a pack loaded with supplies, I leave the camp in the opposite direction the elf left, marching through the early morning and weaving through the alien foliage.

  With a fresh night of rest and nothing immediately trying to kill me, I take a moment to look at the plants and leaves. On Earth, blades of grass were a common phrase, alluding to the way grass could look like sword blades. All around me is an armor of leaves, shapes ranging from spearheads to the wide axe-like blades, twinning daggers, and even vines that look like arrows fired from bows, with leaf-tipped arrow heads. The sense of warfare the plants imparted spurred me on to leave faster.

  As I exit the perimeter of the camp, I get a notification alert.

  I scan the forest beyond the camp for any clue to which direction to tread. In my peripheral vision a lizard wriggles toward me, approaching me from the side. I turn to face it, and as I pull out my sword in my right hand and my dagger in my left. The lizard is smaller than the last one, but this one’s slitted eyes wearily follow the blades in my hands. With the gleaming metal on display, the animal takes tentative steps backwards, reconsidering taking on a creature ten times its size.

  “Listen Lizard, I don’t have time for you. What are you hassling me for anyways? I am bigger, stronger, and my sword is almost as long as you are. You need to pick your battles better.” I convincingly debate with the lizard. I glance at the ever-present ghost just behind me for support, but she is dead silent. I sigh as she stares blankly at the lizard with nothing of substance in her eyes. I am grateful that Morgana is with me, but it is times like this that make me wish she had my back instead of just following it.

  I even slowly back away with the weapon in front of me, trying to create space so I can continue to distance myself from the camp, and the lizard can escape. Instead of taking the out, it bucks at me a few times, trying to fake commitment to an attack, but each time it pulls up at the last moment. Eventually, it loses interest and runs back the way it came.

  I sigh in relief. Killing it may have gotten me closer to the next level, but it would slow me down at a time I need to get moving. I don’t want to fight every living thing in the jungle. If I did, I would get nowhere fast and suffer injuries that I don’t have time to treat, even with my new magic. The growing need to create as much distance between me and the camp as possible sends adrenaline flowing and my heart racing. I act on the nervous energy, jogging away.

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  On the positive side, learning I am now threatening enough to not be attacked on sight by any critter with teeth, no matter how small, is a bright spot in my morning. Even if it was only a small lizard, progress is progress. I remember a famous line I read once that went along the lines of not everything needs to be solved through a fight, choose your battles. I had a friend who liked to say a fly swatter might seem like the only solution until you find a fly on your pie.

  After jogging for what feels like half an hour, I take a sip of cool, crisp water from one of the canteens I took from the camp to try to calm my nerves. I feel a side stitch from pushing myself harder than I have in years. Once I have gotten my fill of water, I continue to march into the foliage. I frown at how light the canteen feels despite having just opened it for the first time. I will need to make finding a source of fresh water a priority. Normally, fresh water was one of the greatest concerns when survival camping, but it is now doubly vital since I can use it with my healing magic. I might be able to use gray water to trigger the magic, but medical training instilled over years cringes at using dirty water to heal a wound, knowing how much trouble infection will cause in the wilderness.

  I look to see Morgana still with me. She silently scans the forest as she hovers behind me, never straying far from the spot just over my shoulder. Now that I am in the jungle running from an unknown number of enemies, I start regretting some of my actions. The nagging feeling that I should have tried to find where the elf went or find a cave to hide in instead of going into the camp surfaces stronger than ever. A million tasks to increase my chances of survival flicker through my head. I think back to my youth, going camping with my father and the things he taught me about surviving in the wilderness. Water, food, shelter, protection… and the list goes on.

  Water is my most immediate concern, and I fortunately stumble onto a stream amid my blind trek through the woods. The stream is small, but it looks clean and fast-moving. I start by dipping my hands in to wash my face and taste it. I swish the water in my mouth to find the water tastes sweet and fresh. I eagerly cup my hands and take a large drink of water.

  I reach for another handful of the water when I see the surface ripple right before my hand touches it. I pause, wondering if there is something below the surface that I missed, when a familiar blue window pops up.

  I reach out again to that strange power, like using a muscle I previously didn’t know I had. It feels like when using the healing power. I see a patch the size of my palm ripple on the surface of the stream.

  Sure enough, when I reach out again, I can feel the surface of the water bulge into a dome the size of a golf ball. I pull more, and it lifts from the water, before I overextend and lose all control. The golf ball-sized water falls with a plop. I look down at my mana and see only a few points missing. It isn’t as useful as my ability to heal, but training the ability will cost much less in terms of mana, and I won’t need to have an injury. I pull up more water, testing what I can do.

  I learn I can manipulate the water through the air without any problem if I do not pull too much volume or the water out too fast. Manipulating water to spin inside the stream instead of lifting out of the stream costs practically no mana. While I am not sure how this would be useful, it did make me curious about what else I might learn if I keep testing. I pull water from the bottom of the pond to the top and notice that it also costs little mana. Despite the low cost, after half an hour, I look up to see over two-thirds of my mana bar gone from all the experiments.

  I am tempted to keep playing, but I stop short of bottoming out my mana ready, in case I need it. Notifications flicker in the corner of my vision, and I smile as I read the level-up notices.

  By the end of my experiments, I can easily manipulate a baseball-sized water globe to float in the air. If I pull an amount the size of a softball, it is clunky and slow to move. I want to test out shaping the water into other forms, besides spheres. I’m not sure what I will use this power for, but the more flexibility it has, the greater the options. Could I split the globe and control multiple globes? I know I need to continue investigating later what this newfound power can do. I also want to learn more about why I can manipulate water without an issue, but still have trouble animating the dead. Knowing I have wasted enough time and need to continue to create distance from the camp, I reluctantly top off my canteen before moving on.

  In about another hour, the trees start to thin out, as the heat bears down on the baking sand. The sound of water becomes louder, and salt becomes palpable in the humid air. In the distance, I see a sandy beach, like a carpet before the sparkling blue ocean. I take off my sandals for a moment to feel the hot grains of coarse sand below my feet. I shuffle my feet left and right, to bury them in the cooler sand below the hot surface. I close my eyes, breathing in the gentle cool breeze, trying to capture a moment of peace, like I am back home.

  “This would be the ideal vacation spot… if I were not being hunted on an island filled with monsters.”

  I turn to Morgana, “Did you ever travel to the beach?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I used to love to go to the beach with my family. My father used to tell me that I wasn’t really having a beach vacation unless I got sunburnt. The most ridiculous thing I have heard.”

  I chuckle, “I tried to tell my dad that if you were relaxing at the beach, and having fun, that’s all that mattered. In the end, we were both right in a way.”

  I lick the salt off my lips as I find the words, to fill the silence, “As a nurse, Maria made it her mission to stop him. She used to bring an entire bag of sunscreen, sure that my father was going to get skin cancer. I guess in the end it didn’t matter.”

  I let the lie sit on my lips. Despite the seeming futility of beach vacations with people who are no longer in my life, I’d never admit it aloud, but I’m glad for those times.

  I shake away the memories, “Old memories are nice, but you and I will make new memories.”

  I listen to the crashing of the waves as the sun presses down on me. Once the moment is past, I explore for a few minutes on the beach in both directions, finding no sight of a land mass in the distance. I hoped to find I’m on a peninsula, but I have the sinking feeling I might be on an island. I make my way back towards the center of the island and away from the oppressive sunlight. If I didn’t have crazy cultists or worse on the island, I think I would have enjoyed a nice, refreshing dip.

  I turn my thoughts to how I will survive the coming days. I think back to my wilderness survival training from my youth, and all the videos I watched on survivalists building huts in the wilderness. I take out the sword and begin by hacking some of the bamboo-like trees in the sparse vegetation where the forest meets the beach, to make shelter later. I’m not happy about using the weapon to cut wood, as it will dull the edge, but it is better than not having shelter from the elements.

  I find a nice shady spot between a few trees where the soil is soft enough to dig but will be hidden from inspection. When I start hauling the wood back and forth, I find one of those smaller lizards barring my path. It hisses at me aggressively as it gets within sword length of me. I kill it with my sword. The swing is clumsy, but I land my strike on the first swing. Once the lizard is dead, I do a cursory glance around for others, but it appears this lizard is a loner. I take the corpse along with me to cook it later.

  After I have a sizable pile of wood and the lizard, where I plan to make a shelter, I take a short break, just to catch my breath. I sip on my water as I look around the area, mentally planning out where I will start with my camp. The area I have chosen is a ten-minute walk from the beach. I need to stay far enough away from inland, where my mysterious pursuers are, to not happen upon me by chance, but far enough from the barren beach to have thick foliage to hide in. The best part about the spot I find is it is near the stream, but the stream weaves through shrubs which I can hide between. This means I will have access to water, but I can still stay hidden from my pursuers. As I rest, I see my mana bar has refilled almost completely, so I decide to test out my darkness affinity. I try to remember what it felt like to move the water. It takes me a few tries, but I feel, as much as see, a minor shift in the shadows.

  It feels completely different than anything I’ve done with the water affinity, but the contrast between the two gives me insight into aqua kinesis. Water is all about flow, and the more I move the water from the natural flow, the more mana it takes. Manipulating water in the stream is easy, and I can move it much faster in the flowing water than over it. That gives me ideas for creating water tubes out of water affinity mana, to increase the amount of control, but also decrease the mana cost. I wouldn’t need to control all the water, just the water on the outside.

  Umbra kinesis is less about where or what amount I try to pull. The deeper the shadows, the easier it is. I also notice that umbra kinesis is slower; it feels more like a stretchy rubber as I manipulate it. I find that while it is much slower to move, the slower I try to manipulate the shadows, the easier it is. I can stretch it like a rubber band with greater force than my aqua kinesis, but it doesn’t have the same momentum. If I stretch and let it go, it melds back into the shadows without affecting anything, whereas if I push the water forward and let it go, it will maintain the momentum: going in the same direction. This training session, I only gain two levels, but I want to keep my mana at least above half.

  Despite the dire seriousness of my situation, the ability to use magic gives me a thrill. I can’t wait to continue experimenting with my newfound powers. I’m tempted to spend my skill points I have saved up, but the early levels in my skills feel easy so far. I want to wait until higher levels, so spending the points will have a greater impact. Energized by my magical accomplishments, I eat one of the dried rations from the elves’ provisions and begin the process of assembling my camp.

  Unfortunately, the day comes to an end far too fast. I decide not to risk creating a fire to cook the lizard; instead, I eat the dry, brick-like rations. I take the lizard away from my camp, so it does not attract any predators, but put it so it is in line of sight with my little hidden area. I work on my shelter for a time, tying the wood together with anything vine-like or any pliable fibrous material. I try to weave in some leaves, so it blends into the forest floor. With the makeshift roof done, I dig a hole in the ground, and in the end, I have little more than a ditch in the ground with a thatch roof that should protect me from most of the wind and rain. I try to reinforce some of the walls with the sticks, so it is less of a sand pit. Despite the crude structure, I feel pride as I look at my hidden island apartment, complete with a roof.

  After eating, I bunker down in the hold, peaking my head above ground level so I can look through spaces in my straw roof. One of the things I keep an eye on as I start to lazily drift in and out of sleep is the dead lizard. Nothing big comes for the lizard corpse, but a couple of smaller scavengers take probing bites. I look at the scene with a sense of curiosity. Once the probing bites reveal no trap, a few more join in the feast. I take the opportunity to experiment with my new powers more. I reach out with my darkness affinity magic, trying to work that new mental muscle. I do not hurt the scavengers, but the movement of the shadows scares many of them off.

  After two more levels in umbra kinesis, I succeed in grabbing a rat-like creature in a dark tentacle. Not sure what to do with it, I let the scared creature go. Exhausted and low on mana, I curl up inside my hole in the ground and shut my eyes, drifting off to sleep.