Chapter 15 (Patreon)

“Kassar!” Bruce called the alien’s name for a third time, but the big white ape was still snoring soundly in his hammock.  He glanced back and forth for something to wake his companion up with.  Finally, he settled on the handful of shells he was holding.

The first clamshell missed, but the second bounced off of Kassar’s face.  He woke with a start, a tangled mess of flailing limbs as he fell out of the hammock, planting himself face first in the strangely spongy sand of the beach.

“By the Void Mother,” Kassar grumbled, dragging himself out of the disorganized mess that had been his hammock.  “Couldn’t you have just said my name or something?  I swear, if I weren’t already dead that would have taken a couple years off my life.”

“I tried,” Bruce replied, trying to keep the irritation from his voice.  “You just slept through it until I tossed something at you.”

“Huh,” Kasssar said lamely as he stood up and brushed the sand off of his shirt.  “Those rum coladas really did pack a punch.  I guess a couple millenia of forced sobriety after I died lowered my tolerance.”

“Right,” Bruce responded.  “Look, I picked up a bunch of seashells and now I’m out of EXP.  What’s next?  Do you just send me back to the Great Labyrinth and tell me to start running?”

Kassar took off his sunglasses, rubbing the white fur of his face with his left hand for about ten seconds before he glanced up at the sun that was hanging in the exact same spot in the lightly clouded sky as when Bruce had arrived.

“Too bright,” he grunted. Moments later, it dropped until it was just on the horizon, casting the entire beach the warm dim orange of sunset.

“Much better,” Kassar said with a sigh, putting his glasses back on.  “And no.  I’m not going to send you back to the maze without running you through your paces a couple of times.  It might be all fun and vacations in here, but out there you’re in a world that’s beyond hostile.  You’re going to be running from sanctuary to sanctuary, fleeing monsters you can barely comprehend let alone fight for at least a couple of days.  When you finally return to the top layers, you will have a borelite infestation to deal with.  That will almost be worse.  It honestly might be better to spend some time in the third layer improving your abilities before you venture anywhere near the tree huggers.”

“Are they really that imposing?” Bruce asked, hopping up and down on the sand to try and force some feeling into his body.  “They’re about the size of my fist.  Unless there are about a hundred of the little guys, I doubt they could do much damage.”

“There are hundreds,” Kassar replied.  “Borelites place stone boxes near dimensional transit maws.  Each one of them is a nest of the invasive pests.  There are hundreds if not thousands of the creatures in there.  Worse, I believe you are underestimating the danger posed by a borelite.  They are not terribly dangerous to someone like me, but for an entity with low levels of EXP.”

He shrugged.

“Their Agility attribute is not something for you to take likely.  Even if each of their attacks won’t deal much damage, I doubt you would be able to land a single blow on them at your current level.”

“Outclassed by a cartoon squirrel,” Bruce responded, shaking his head theatrically.

Kassar laughed, pounding one of his fists into the sand as his entire body shook.

“For now Bruce,” he said.  “But I am not here solely to drink rum coladas on the beach in your psyche.  Once you make it to the second or third layer of the maze, find a sanctuary.  I will hone you into the instrument of my revenge and together we will bring your hammer crashing down on the betrayers.  There will be no hole deep enough for them to hide from my righteous wrath.”

Bruce took a step back, raising both of his hands palms outward.

“Woah there, you’re being a little intense Kassar.  I had just gotten used to the relaxed island living version of you and then without warning we are back to the full on ‘flaming skull that scared the piss out of me’ iteration.”

“Sorry,” the ape grumbled uncomfortably.  “I understand that you do not have any experience with the betrayers yet, but I can assure you that given enough time you will come to share my hatred for them.  For now, I will let my rage die down to embers, confident in the knowledge that the winds of change will fan them back to life and transform them into an inferno that will cleanse my foes.”

“Right.”  Bruce took a deep breath, letting the matter drop.  “You said you wanted to put me through my paces before returning me to my body?  I’ve collected a bunch of shells, but I couldn’t help but notice that all of my former patterns are gone.  It sure seems counter productive to start from scratch.”

“Except the abilities sold by the borelites are traps,” Kassar hissed angrily. “At lower levels they are about as cheap as a path’s and they are much easier to access.  The problem comes as you develop them.  They begin to cost more and more EXP to purchase and activate because they are specifically designed to cripple and limit your growth.  By the time you are ready to tackle the middle layers of the Great Labyrinth, the abilities sold by the borelites are so inefficient that trying to progress further is almost a death sentence.  Worse, their operating patterns do not let you access and develop your affinities.  The entire arrangement promises power but it only offers suffering and subservience.”

“I guess,” Bruce began, “now how do I test-”

“I wasn’t finished,” the alien cut him off sternly.  “Affinities are like attributes, abilities that can be enhanced by spending EXP.  By advancing an affinity associated with an attribute, you can reduce the cost of activating every pattern associated with that attribute as well as the mental strain from using those abilities.”

“Wait,” Bruce responded, eyes widening.  “That’s huge.  The little green bastard prevented me from even knowing about something that essential?”

Kassar nodded gravely, reaching up to take off his mirrored sunglasses before he locked gazes with Bruce.

“It is like asking a man to swim across a river only to tie his hands together.  The goal has always been your failure and death.”

“Suddenly,” Bruce replied dryly, “I’m not as much of a fan of the little jerk.  I knew he was predatory and taking advantage of us financially from the beginning, but if what you’re saying is true, it has transitioned from being an opportunist to something much more sinister.”

“Good,” Kassar remarked, putting his glasses back on and shading his eyes from the setting sun.  “Now that you understand that the borelites must die, it is time for you to tell me what abilities you selected so that I can create a testing domain for you.  After all, any damage you suffer in this space we can simply heal and let you try again.  In the real world, injuries are not so forgiving.”

Bruce looked down at the collection of glittering shells still clutched in his left hand.  He reached down with his right, picking up one of the blue clam shells and holding it up in the orangish light of the sunset.

“I threw Scan at you,” He began, handing the shell over to Kassar, “But I also picked up Void Sense and Eyes of the Void as you suggested.  After that I got patterns for Hammer of Justice and Shield of Virtue and raised my attributes to five in both Body and Agility.  At the end of all of those purchases, I only had enough left for Healing Factor.”

“I’m going to miss Regeneration and Phase Armor,” Bruce grumbled.

Kassar didn’t reply.  A second later, he grunted and a half dozen orbs of purple light popped into existence.  Almost immediately, all six of them zipped into the palm trees that lined the beach.  Reality seemed to ripple, causing Bruce to stumble slightly as his senses scrambled themselves for a fraction of a moment.

“What was that?”  He asked, shifting slightly to the side to look past Kassar’s bulk at the treeline where the spheres of light had already disappeared.

“Your warm up,” Kassar replied, planting his knuckles into the sand and ambling back toward his hammock.  “Each of the beacons has the barest hint of psychic energy invested in it.  Eyes of the Void should let you find them.  Of course, it won’t be easy.  They’re small, hard to detect, and moving quickly.  Your job is to touch all six of them.  Once you can manage that, you should be ready for the Great Labyrinth.”

Bruce squinted at the woods.  The palm trees were waving slightly in the afternoon wind, but he couldn’t see even a sliver of light from the targets between their swaying trunks.

He sighed.

With a creak, Kassar climbed back up into the hammock, cupping his hands behind his head as he prepared to doze off again.  Bruce opened his mouth to say something before he thought better of it.  The ape was clearly sleepy and cranky.  He might have assigned Bruce a bunch of make-work to keep him out of the alien’s fur, but at the same time he could see some benefit to the training.

Bruce jogged into the palms.  There was still plenty of light from the setting sun filtering down through the fronds so he didn’t have much trouble seeing where he was going, but the forest had absorbed all six of the targets without a trace.

He slowed, stopping eventually and leaning against a tree.  Once Bruce was no longer moving, he rubbed his thumb over the small blue conch shell that represented Eyes of the Void.  Something warm and almost liquid rushed up his arm, traveling through his skin until it took up residence in his face.

The world exploded in color.  Infrared, ultraviolet, and microwave.  All of them blossomed into layers of detail that overlaid the otherwise placid forest.  For hundreds of feet in either direction, Bruce could see around and through the trees as if they were little more than a gauzy screen.  At a distance, his vision was blurry, but ultimately it wasn’t enough to cut his sight off entirely.

A flash of purple drew his attention.  Almost three hundred feet away, he sensed a ball of energy darting through the trees.  It radiated light in a strange wavelength that Bruce’s mind couldn’t place as it shifted and dodged.  Whatever the energy was, it felt familiar, like a song he had listened to in his childhood that was rekindled by a snippet of melody decades later.

He couldn’t explain how or why he knew what was happening, but on a deep level Bruce simply understood that the ball of purple light was a mixture of EXP and Kassar’s will.  It stood out from the thrum of energy and radiation that made up the rest of the world like a flare, calling his attention to it even through distance and thickets.  There was no way for Bruce to see it directly, but that hardly mattered.  So long as he concentrated, he was sure he could find it in the deepest cave or during a driving snow storm.

Bruce broke into a sprint, leaping over rocks and streams and shimmying past palm trees as he tried to catch up with the orb.  Quickly, the palm trees disappeared, replaced by large tropical variants with heavy foliage that choked out the sun.  Hanging vines caught and pulled his skin and hair, drawing lines of blood as he didn’t bother to slow long enough to extricate them.

Wind rushed past him, drawing tears from his eyes as Bruce crested a ridge.  He stopped for a quarter of a second to regain his bearings before rushing back down the hill in a series of quick stutter steps to avoid stumbling and falling on the incline.

He was faster than before.  So much faster.  Having a Body and Agility of three had made Bruce feel strong and coordinated, but it was barely even comparable to reaching level five.  There was no way of knowing exactly how fast he was moving, but Bruce had little doubt that he could outpace any cyclist alive.  More than that, even as the path he was taking narrowed, Bruce was able to easily dodge the trees, rocks and branches that barred his way.

The target swerved behind a rock before diving into a hole made by a fallen tree’s roots pulling up a small mountain of soil.  He jumped over the boulder, landing in a crouch next to the pit.  The sphere of light zipped out of the cave, zig-zagging through the air as it tried and failed to escape Bruce’s grasping hands.

As soon as he touched it, the ball of light disappeared in a puff, leaving nothing behind.  Slowly, Bruce stood up, wiping the blood, sweat and grime from his face as he looked around the jungle.  Eyes of the Void let him see in every direction simultaneously, tracking the rustle of leaves seconds before he felt the gust of wind blowing across his face.

He clapped his hands together and set off at a jog, his face screwed up into a mask of determination.

“One down,” Bruce mumbled, straining his enhanced senses as he tried to catch another whiff of psychic energy.  “Five more to go.”

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