Chapter 6: Are you kidding me?

  For the next month, Skylar Kochenki tried to attract any attention he could with his flashlight skill, and tried to sense any new beasts fighting or falling. He had completely memorized the lay of the land. If anything had changed overnight, he would investigate. But, nothing did. So far, his clothes had completely gave way, and he had woven new clothes out of long braided grass. It took an insanely long time, but with his new body, his back never cramped and never got sore from the constant tedious labor of weaving himself a new garment. He used strips of pliable bark from green branches from where the first beast had been to make more robust clasps and so forth. It was remarkable how much stronger a grass and bark pair of shorts were than a pair of Earth jeans. He did miss his more comfortable clothes though.

  During that same time, he had cracked rocks together to make a jagged edge, and wrapped them carefully to create a few stone age tools. He made a hatchet, a few rock knives, a short spear, and many other failed creations until he figured out what worked. Most of them were some combination of a sharp rock jammed between a half split stick and wrapped with cordage or hand made rope from thin roots or strips of bark.

  At this point, he was starting to lose track of the days, and beginning to get hungry again. He knew that he was superhuman at this point. The weather had grown hot, but he couldn’t tell exactly how hot with his new body. The equivalent was a 90 degree day with no wind. But, he could just hang out in the lake and wait for vibration ripples.

  The next month was similar, but his clothes took on a new shape with shell pieces tied in from actual tree bark. He had a plate of bark over each thigh and behind each leg. He even had made a woven shoe that was essentially a pine needle basket for his foot. It was biologically impossible that the materials he used didn’t start to die or rot. The grass was still perfectly green, and friction didn’t seem to bother any of the materials at all. They seemed to lock together when he decided the project was finished in a mysterious way. They operated like a single item would, after they were done.

  He noticed to his delight many other faint Glyphs in his Soul Orb from his various activities, but they didn’t show up as Skills. That was slightly confusing, and he wasn’t sure why. He knew that crafting was a magically imbued skill at this point. So why didn’t it show up? He figured the system only designated Skills related directly to combat for some reason.

  He still hadn’t completed his first quest, and was nearly as hungry as he was on his first actual day in this place. He was well past the point of frustration, and was about to abandon the location in order to go find a new mountain range to look at as he waited to starve to death. There was a brief couple of hours that he dug around to find some kind of grubs to eat, but there simply weren’t any there. Just as he started tying up his tools in a bundle on the end of a stick to throw over his shoulder to hike out with, he felt a faint rumble in the ground. He looked at the lake surface to double check, and sure enough, it was rippling.

  He dropped his tools, and carried his sharpest rock knife to the top of the hill to see where it was coming from. As he climbed, the rumbling grew extraordinary. He could hardly place his feet on the ground at all, but he struggled through the shaking. He wondered why it was so intense, but when he got to the top, he found his answer. In the far distance, a marathon away, two enormous beasts battled each other.

  The first one was the first one that he saw, with an insane number of legs, and a cylinder body that stretched across the horizon further than anything else. It reared up like an angry horse with its many cloven feet, and kicked out at the hyena type creature. The fox-like pelt of this creature was absolutely majestic. It had a slender shape, and an agile form. The vocal sounds of these creatures from such a distance sounded like bombs going off underneath the ocean, and deep sirens blaring like an alien invasion. Their fierce aura’s belted out energy too, and their attacks held some spiritual weight as well. Its something he wouldn’t have been able to detect before.

  Suddenly, a nameplate appeared over both of them. The first had a bunch of deadly skull icons, followed by what he figured was its breed, if you could call it that.

  “(Seventeen Skulls) Tardigrade Titanic Colossus,” and “(Fourteen Skulls) Miacidian Padfoot Titanic Colossus” Sky guessed that the skulls were a threat level assessment, and had to individually count the skulls to even tell how many there were.

  This was his que. If it took longer than a couple months next time, he would actually starve. He needed to get over there and make another base camp. He had long ago figured out how to use the infrared light spectrum to light a small fire with his Light Skill. It crackled like any other normal fire, but he had a feeling it was hotter and contained some kind of theoretical or magical weight to it. With that, all he needed was to get over there and smoke some Abomination meat. If he got there in time, he would try to complete his quest to help kill one of them, but he didn’t have his hopes up. This was a great way to get squashed.

  So, with his knife in hand, he began a strong run toward the battle. Every mile or so he rolled his ankle on the quaking ground really hard and some of the rolls caused him to faceplant. As long as he didn’t stab himself with the knife or break his neck, he would keep going. He was running far faster than the last marathon record holder he was sure. He didn’t have a stopwatch or anything, but he could tell that he was running at his previous sprinting speed. So, it took just under two hours to close in on the battle. It moved around quite a bit, with the thrashing and gnarling and slamming.

  As he approached the battle a few hundred feet away from their current brawl, he could see the Padfoot creature on the belly of the Tardigrade colossus tearing up its stomach like crazy. Its was a really bad matchup. The Tardigrade was obviously incredibly tough, if the name was anything like an Earth Tardigrade. But, this wasn’t going well. As soon as the Tardigrade tried to crush the Padfoot, it let go of its bite hold and jumped on top of it and they continued to roll around.

  When they lurched or rolled, instead of just earthquaking, the ground leapt up in a wave outward from an epicenter like a bomb went off. Their tough auras were still extremely heavy pressing down on him, and his head throbbed as a result. But he didn’t stop approaching. He was confident he could adapt. He stopped and debated on whether or not he should get a cut in. His logical Earth mindset was convinced that such a tiny cut that he could make would not qualify as a “kill” for the quest. But, another part of him wanted to try anyways.

  He ran toward the battle, and jumped over a wave of forest ground and other debris every few seconds as they thrashed. It was amazing how the forest lay back down where it was without much agitation after such a fight. It was like only the top layer was disturbed and torn up. The trees seemed pretty used to it too, unless they were crushed to bits directly.

  “I can’t believe I’m running toward this,” he said out loud. He flinched. The sound of his voice was unrecognizable. He hadn’t heard it for so long. There was just nobody to hear what he had to say for so long now. Despite the circumstances, he smiled at his new abilities. He could make light, burn wood to make fire, and he could devour the flesh of whichever one of these monsters decides to even take a rest here for a few minutes. The fight had been going on with a high intensity for an hour; they were both getting tired.

  He breached a clearing of shredded trees and foliage where they had previously crushed, and a hundred feet in front of him was an injured leg of the Tardigrade. Now was his chance. He picked up his speed, and sprinted straight toward the injury. It appeared that a particularly hard strike to some splintery trees was what did it. There was still large sticks and branches sticking out of the foot. He thought they were hooves, but it was just a thick skin pad of a different color.

  There was no other way to reach the foot. He had to put himself underneath of it. If the big thing decided to use this half of its body for some reason to fight the Padfoot which was three miles away on top of it, he would be crushed. He just needed to jet in there, get a stab into a wound, and then get out of the way.

  He took a ready stance with his knife in hand pointed down and sprinted toward instant death. He screamed a war cry. It was embarrassingly high pitch for a guy, but that wasn’t anything new. He leaped, brought the knife up above his head, and down into the familiar red flesh he expected. The knife point struck the flesh, and sparked. The back of his hand twisted as the knife abruptly stopped. His wrist rotated, and he ended up cracking the back of his hand onto the flesh too. The point of his blade had broken off entirely like he had struck steel.

  “What!” he complained. He was able to dig into the Godzilla thing with a stick and a rock, but now an actual sharp point didn’t do anything? It occurred to him, there was a huge disparity in toughness and ability between the Abominations here. No wonder the fight was taking so long. They could hardly injure each other. But, neither of his goals would be met if he couldn’t cut into the flesh at all.

  “No! No. This can’t be it.” He grabbed the chipped knife with both hands and began screaming and stabbing with all his might at the same injury location. Each time, it was as if he was stabbing a steel plate with a paper towel.

  “Dammit! What the hell do I do now?!” He looked into the distance to check on the fight. It was bewildering how such a large creature could manage to fight something smaller with only a part of its body, and leave the rest still.

  After a few heaving breaths, he had an idea. The tough chitin of the foot he was stabbing suddenly flexed down at him, and he screamed in terror. He fell onto his back and crawled away as fast as he could, but the foot didn’t do much else than twitch. He looked over to where the fight was taking place, and it looked like this thing was near its end.

  He got back up with his knife, and grabbed ahold of this last ditch effort. If this didn’t work, nothing would. He quickly chipped a new point onto his rock blade in a practiced manner, and took aim again. This time though, he poured all his energy from his Soul Orb into the tip of the knife and compressed it as hard as he possibly could, while thinking of penetration and sharpness in his mind.

  When all he could muster was into the blade tip, he slammed it down as hard as he could. The blade entered the beast all the way to the hilt. Better yet, he had energy to spare.

  Plink. “Yes! Yes! Finally!” His head throbbed in pain after the stab, but he ignored it.

  He started charging up another stab and quickly ran out of energy. He didn’t pass out anymore as a result of that, but he still felt completely spent. With the remaining energy he stabbed into the beast. This time it didn’t go quite as far.

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  He bent over to catch his breath and then threw his dull blade in frustration. He thought about how his Endurance ability used the energy around him to run his everyday actions and even some moderate activities, and he tried to actively pull on that to recover. He opened his mind to the world around him, and sensed with all his focus the energy that was pouring into him. He had tried to feel the natural energies many times before, but this time he managed to feel something.

  With the slight feeling of air blowing on him and entering his skin, he pulled with all his stress and desperation. Plink. He breathed in, and pulled. He breathed out, and compressed it tighter. With this level of focus, he recovered his energy for another full force stab in a few moments. He stepped back over to the beast as the Tardigrade seemed to begin giving up the fight and letting the other thing tear into its chest. He realized he had a notification, but it didn’t matter right now.

  He stabbed with all his energy into the bottom of the beasts foot again, and again. Each time recovering just enough energy to make another successful stab. He tried one on the more durable exterior muscle shell of the leg where it wasn’t injured, and that just sparked and damaged his blade further even with the energy enhancement.

  “This really is like a video game isn’t it. Well, where’s my dam mentor, tutorial, anything?”

  He shook his head and continued to stab the beast until he had a giant chunk of flesh on the ground in front of him, and a solid 4 square feet of thick hide. The hide he couldn’t cut through, but its previous damage already separated it from the other hide. He just had to cut through the flesh of it to dislodge the bits. The internals of the beast made no sense though. It was just 8 inches thick of steel tough hide, followed by muscle tissue running in every direction that was as hard as concrete. He had use a crowbar to break apart bits of concrete on a job site before, so he could accurately say that. However, he had to remember that everything in this world was also up to 100 times more dense and tough. So, everything was wonky. It was tough.

  He dragged his chunk of flesh to a safer location a few hundred feet away under some pretty massive trees. He made sure to drag it tougher side down. He wasn’t sure he could eat sand or rocks at this point and didn’t want to risk it.

  “I got lucky today, holy shit.”

  He was about to finish catching his breath and start carving a piece to eat, when a something happened. If he didn’t know any better, he would say a spontaneous tornado had just appeared around him, and he was in the eye of it. Except that, it wasn’t wind, it was energy. It still threw the tree around like crazy though, and little twigs were falling on him. If he was how he started, that would have ended him already. Ten to twenty pound weights falling from six stories up would have broken his body to pieces.

  Then as soon as it arrived, all the energy slammed into him with more violence than anything he had ever known. It was like back in high school football getting tackled by a Varsity linebacker. No it was like the entire team slammed into him in every direction at once. That and a solid uppercut from his heavyweight martial arts mentor back home. He thought the initial impact was all that was going to happen, but nope, it continued. In fact, it started to increase in intensity, and rush into his body and Soul Orb like nothing he had ever experienced. Before he knew it, the pressure actually lifted him up off the ground into the air.

  He expected it to be painful, and at first the mental shock of it was a sort of pain, but instead he felt powerful. More power and strength than he had ever had filled him up. His Soul Orb was brimming with that same whispy energy that was slowly accumulating. It had filled the soap bubble like Orb to the brim. Now, it was a swirling mass of liquid in comparison to the dark mist it once was. Like ten different liquids that would not mix together, they all swirled and pressed against the boundaries of the Soul Orb.

  He felt like his Soul Orb was going to pop like the bubble it was, and then, the tornado of energy flying around him squeezed it down with a crunch. It reduced in size to a fin point, and another bubble appeared around it and began filling with the same energy. Then that bubble was full enough to pop. Its thicker skin was much stronger than a soap bubble, but even then it became too full and received a second crunch. A partially translucent energy barrier sprung up around the twice crunched Orb, and filled every so slightly with a little bit of the remaining energy tornado. Its final wisps entered his Soul Orb, and he floated back down to the ground next to his enormous chunk of flesh.

  Plink. Plink. Plink. The notifications sounded off in his mind.

  “Quest Number One Completed! New Skill activated. New Title. You have reached Stage 1. You have reached Stage 2.”

  “New Skill: Empowered Strike: This skill is a foundational weapon skill that allows a simple imbuement of energy into a weapon for a more devastating blow.”

  “New Title. Seventeen Skull Abomination Slayer: You have slain a Cthulhu Class entity at Stage 0. Said entity was seventeen orders of magnitude more powerful than yourself."

  His jaw dropped at the words he was reading. That was an insane achievement. He definitely expected some kind of benefit from it, but so far it just seemed to be a record of achievement. The last thing he did was open his Quests tab.

  “First Quest: Kill a living organism other than a plant, fungi, or member of your own species. To fulfill this quest, you must be responsible for doing significant damage to an animal, monster, or living thing that is capable of attacking you, just before it dies. Quest Complete!”

  “Congratulations on integrating yourself into this sector. Your performance on the quest is as follows:

  Time: Double F-Grade.

  Challenge: S-Grade

  Choices: B-Grade

  Leadership: F-Grade

  Overall Score: C -Grade Accomplishment”

  “Leadership? There wasn’t anyone to lead!” he protested. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Reward for first quest is pending…”

  “No reward will be given. New Tab unlocked. New Quest."

  Plink. Plink. Plink.

  He opened his system menu, and there he found a brand new tab next to the others. Stats were still locked for some reason, and he really wondered about that. Now there was also a Navigation tab. That put a smile on his face. He mentally tapped on it, and the next screen just held a big question mark. He shook his head and started laughing. It didn’t know?

  “New Quest: Quest Two; Find the exit waypoint for this world. Use your navigation menu to track the direction of such departure locations so you may continue, Human of the Other Realm. Find a civilization, integrate, and rejoice.”

  Sure enough after reading his Quest, he now had a compass needle to follow in the corner of his vision if he focused on it leading him off this godforsaken planet. Finally. He found the wording of the quest slightly odd and personalized. He wondered also from his notifications if a Cthulhu Class creature was just an English translation of the closest thing, or if Eldritch Horrors were a real thing. He supposed that he may be on a planet full of what some people would call an Eldritch Horror, but he could imagine worse.

  He noticed there were some notification sounds that didn’t add up to the number of changes he found in his menu, and wondered what was new. He opened his Skill Tab.

  “Two Skill Choices remaining. Would you like to make a Skill Choice?”

  His jaw dropped again, before beaming with a big grin. He had been ready for this for a while.

  He assented a “yes” to the question and ended up in the Soul Orb meditation space in his head. He was pulled back from his Soul Orb and shown a different menu. It was a skill tree that was full of markings and stuff he didn’t yet understand. Most of it was covered by what looked like fire made of darkness. He couldn’t see almost the entire thing due to these "Fires of Blocking."

  The first thing he noticed was at the bottom there were different vertical trees for each type of ability. They seemed to chain together like he expected, and even most of the ability categories were blocked by the darkness. There were some areas he had choices to make though. The Mobility branch was unveiled, and there were a few basic choices at the bottom that had lines of energy reaching up into the darkness, probably to the next ability in the chain. They weren’t going straight up, and some of them forked instead of having just one line.

  The only other category that was unveiled was the Profession category. It was extremely wide, with most of the available profession skills at the first level being blocked. He was a little confused as to why such a vague category even existed. There had to be a nearly endless number of professions, and for it to be a single skill branch? That was weird. The only skill available was the Glyph of Stitching. He focused on it and was able to bring up a description.

  “Glyph of Stitching: You can use your energy as a needle to thread through nearly any material. You must utilize the appropriate thread type for the material you are trying to stitch together.”

  Okay, well that would help with a lot of things for sure. He peaked around the massive tree he was hiding under to see if he was safe to be this distracted. Sure enough, the Tardigrade Titan Colossus was still laying there in all its glory, with a football field sized chunk taken out of its chest and side in various locations. That was just places he could see too.

  He sat back down and re-entered the Skill Choice menu, and navigated back over to the Mobility section. His choices were between the following. Dash, Vault, Leap, Burst, and Grappling Hook.

  “Glyph of Dashing: For one minute, your speed is highly increased. High energy expenditure.

  Glyph of Vaulting: For a moderate energy expenditure you may vault over an object in your path.

  Glyph of Leaping: For a moderate energy expenditure you can perform a significant leap in any direction.

  Glyph of Sprinting: For a small energy expenditure, each footfall will cause a small Leap forward horizontally across the ground.”

  Before he made his choice, he wanted to see if he naturally unlocked any other skills, as the ones he currently had weren’t on his choices list for some reason. There, he saw Endurance, Light, You Are What You Eat, Empowered Strike, and Absorption. He tapped on Absorption to see what it was.

  “Absorption: With enough will and mental effort, you may refill your energy from the surrounding natural energies of the reality you find yourself in. This is an unlocked Human of the Other Realm type ability.”

  In order to get away from the Abominations, he would need to be able to move and also be able to change directions while moving. If a leg was going to stomp him where he was about to be, and he was in the middle of leaping through the air, he would have no way to stop his momentum. So, Leap is eliminated. To only be able to Dash for one minute and be out of energy is also unacceptable. A high energy cost after obtaining all that energy from the kill probably means that it is an insane ability. One that he would have to get later for sure. Vaulting over an obstacle sounded useful, but it was also something he could do himself. For the Mobility tree, that just left the Glyph of Sprinting. Although he had two Skill Choices, he could choose Dashing and Sprinting, but was already sold on the idea of making armor from the Tardigrade Chitin Shell Hide with the Stitching skill.

  He shrugged. He’d get another skill point in the future anyways, and maybe even fairly soon for all he knew. He was excited to get moving toward the exit waypoint and figure out how to find some kind of civilization. He was pretty certain by the wording of the second quest that this entire planet held only these giant monsters and not much else.

  With that, he sunk a Skill Point into the Glyph of Sprinting. He could hear the energy sizzling, and feel it burn into the hardened shell of his Soul Orb. The Glyph was shaped like a set of chevron arrows pointed to the side, with air currents coming off of it. That made sense. Then, he sunk his final point into the Glyph of Stitching. A similar sizzle and empowerment happened, and the Glyph was in a completely different location. This one appeared to be a symbol of a needle with a thousand different threads coming off it all spiraled into one glyph.

  Before anything else, he wanted to take a bite of some of this Seventeen Skull Abomination Flesh. He didn’t have his knife because he threw it. He also did not have any patience left after not eating for weeks. He wasn't going to sit by a fire and watch it slowly cook if he could eat it raw.

  So he got on his hands and knees like a feral beast and got ready to take a growling bite off the edge of the slab. For good measure, he put some of his new and improved energy into a toothy Empowered Strike to make them sharper. One wiggle of his hind quarters later, he chomped.