Chapter 232 - The first plaque (Patreon)

Hera slammed the reception door open.

"Hey, kid…." Peaches started speaking, but Hera rushed towards the resting area with one hand over her mouth, "What happened? Did you got bitten by something?" he jumped after her.

Hera started throwing up in the bathroom, "ARGH, there is a fucking leg stuck to my teeth!"

"Oh, you got that far already? Well done," Peaches smiled.

"It's still twitching! I need floss, a toothbrush, something thin and sharp," Hera gasped while Peaches started laughing, "HELP ME!?"

She had completed the 4th task. The first thing she had to do was kill the scorpion. However, the creature was in a frenzy. It kept attacking the container without stopping. Hera knew that some scorpions could burrow underground. Vanishing in the sand shouldn't be too difficult for it. She considered using her own poison, but that could make it even harder to remove the poison from it. Fire could be an issue as well. If its poison had the same reaction to a flame as her poison spells, the creature could be carbonized, and she might fail her task.

"Maybe I should just shake it until it dies?" Hera considered that idea for just a moment before shrugging it off. Doing that felt like picking the legs of a spider. It was unnecessarily cruel.

Having another idea, Hera slowly twisted the cap, making sure not to let the scorpion escape. The creature tried to hit her, but from the small gap she created, it couldn't even squeeze its tails through it. She wanted to use her paralyze spell, but the projectile was too big to enter the container. She made the spell smaller, but it was still too big to go through the opening she created. She closed the container, flipped it, and shook it to make the scorpion fall to the bottom. Since it was a long object made of plastic, the scorpion seemed to have trouble climbing up. Hera quickly removed the cap and threw a paralyze spell down the makeshift test tube. The projectile hit, but the scorpion was still moving around. It took five shots for it to finally be paralyzed.

Hera quickly removed the monster from the container and cut it in half with her handaxe. She then put it back inside the case and waited. Some types of bugs could still move around even after they died, and she had no clue if her spell would still affect a corpse. After five minutes, she felt it was safe to take the scorpion again. The creature wasn't moving, but the x-ray still showed the places where the poison was. Hera carefully cut off the pincers and the tails, doing her best to remove the poison sack. Even though she wasn't afraid or grossed out by bugs, moving the small creature made her squeamish. She was sitting in one of the dunes, and although there was nothing else around, she felt like there were dozens of small scorpions crawling on her. It took her a while, but she finally managed to cut off the appendages with the poison sacks from the bug. She placed the two pieces of the body back inside the container, but the x-ray still showed some poison inside it. Her first idea was holding it up and letting the blood drip down, but it quickly became apparent that it wouldn't work. If the monster had any blood, it wasn't moving inside its corpse.

"I haven't tried this yet, but let's see," Hera mumbled before casting her poison control spell.

After using the spell, nothing happened. She couldn't feel any poison around or any way to remove the poison from inside the creature's body.

"Maybe it came out, and I didn't see it," Hera put the scorpion's body back inside the container and used the x-ray. The poison was still there in the same location it was before.

Hera sighed and used the poison control once more. This time, however, she felt something. It was a slight sensation, almost like someone was looking at her, but it came from the scorpion's corpse. Focusing on that feeling, she somehow understood that it came from the poison. Concentrating on the spell, she used the option to change how a poison behaved and made it so it would get away from the monster, like two magnets with the same polarity getting close to each other. She felt most of her mana be drained. Even her poison mana crystal that she kept on her belt lost close to half its mana, but her idea worked. The small light showing in the x-ray shot out from the scorpion body and fell to the sides.

Hera took out the body from the container and rinsed it with a little bit of water to make sure there wasn't any poison on it. She made sure to save enough to help to swallow the creature. After all, this was her current objective.

"Can I at least cook this thing?" Hera asked the air but got no response. With a sigh, she picked the back half of the scorpion. It was smaller than the front, and it was all she had to eat. The only good part of all of this was that the scorpion was minuscule. With luck, she might not even feel it going down her throat.

Hera gulped and put the half scorpion in her mouth, taking a big swig of water to help it get down. Swallowing it whole. She waited a while, looking around for the notification, but nothing appeared.

"You are kidding me! Do I have to eat the other half?" Hera yelled.

She looked at the front half of the scorpion. Its face and eyes were still there. She took a deep breath and put it in her mouth, going for the water again. Unfortunately, she didn't have enough to help push her meal down. She looked around and started running towards the door, with the scorpion still in her mouth, but the feel of the legs rubbing against her tongue made her gag. She closed her eyes and started chewing, running as fast as she could towards the door.

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You have completed the Desert Biome 4th task

Desert Biome – 5th task

You have enough information about the Three Needle Scorpion.

Return to the plaque and set up the data as it is required.

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"C'mon, kid. It's not that bad," Peaches said.

Hera was vigorously brushing her teeth. There were some hygiene products in the bathroom cabinet. She spat out some of the water, "Have you ever eaten one of those things?"

"Why would I? I don't need to eat, remember?"

"Then don't say it's not that bad!" Hera started brushing again.

"Fine, fine, I can't say how that feels, but you really need to tone it down a bit. If you keep brushing like that, your teeth are going to fall off."

"As long as I can get rid of that feeling, I'm fine with that," Hera huffed with the toothbrush in her mouth.

"The feeling? The taste wasn't the worst part?"

She spat out the toothpaste once more, "Oddly, no. It was kind of like beef jerky with some hints of fish. Like weird, but not awful. The worst part was the tiny legs in my mouth. I could almost feel them moving around," Hera stopped talking, "I'm gonna be sick again."

"Well, hunters exist to find food, and food comes in many forms. Ants, worms, spiders, cockroaches, there are all kinds of bugs that people eat."

"Please, shut up," Hera was leaning against the toilet once more, feeling her stomach turn.

About ten minutes later, she got out of the bathroom, but just as she stepped inside the reception room, the sick feeling went away in an instant.

"Wow. The effect is that strong?" Hera turned to Peaches.

"Well, I saw someone regrow an arm during a test, so yeah."

"Really?" Hera gasped.

"Yeah, but I'm not sure if it is a heal. The man had a tattoo on his arm, and it was still there when it came back. Another guy had a wound on his arm when he arrived, but that wound never got healed."

"So it's more like it will bring me back to the same spot I was when I got here."

"Can't say I know for sure, but it does seem like it," Peaches shrugged.

Hera nodded and waited a few minutes. Although the sickness had gone away, the memory still made her lose focus too easily. Before going back to her test, she wanted to have a clear head. The timer by the door was showing she still had a little under 23 hours to spare. Finding the scorpion and completing all the tasks took around 1 hour and a half. If things kept going like this, she would finish this with a lot of time to spare.

"Catching your breath?" Peaches asked after a while.

"Yeah. Even if this place healed me. Throwing up still makes me weird."

"And what did you find?"

"Don't you know?"

"I know some of the monsters people can see here, but not all, and not the one you found," Peaches explained.

"It was a scorpion called Three Needle Scorpion."

"Wow. Congratulations. That one is on the lower side of the hard ones to deal with in the test."

"Hard? Seriously?" Hera asked.

"Yeah, kid. That thing is hard to find, easy to catch, but if you make a mistake, its poison can make you paralyzed for the rest of the test."

"What? Wouldn't I be sent back here?"

"You wouldn't die, just get stuck for a few hours. Because of your size, the scorpion would run away from you."

"How many hours? For it to make me fail the test, it has to be at least 24."

"It's 32, but since the test would be over, you would be sent back here," Peaches replied.

Hera stared at him for a moment. It made sense why the desert could be considered a hard biome if the bug could cause her to fail the entire test just by hitting her with its stinger. Not to mention she only found it because of her relic. There were a couple of moments where the scorpion could easily have stung her, and she wasn't particularly careful while removing the poison from the body. She saw that it could paralyze her, but she figured that just a tiny amount would make her mouth a bit numb and not make her collapse to the ground.

"Don't worry about it, kid. You've finished that one. You don't have to keep thinking about the what-ifs."

"I guess you're right, but I still have to do the plaque thing," Hera looked towards the hallway. She had left the reception door open and could see the plaque from the couch she was on.

"So go for it. You may have some time, but it doesn't mean you can waste it."

"Fine," Hera rolled her eyes but got up with a smile. Having Peaches push her felt different from being scolded by a teacher. It was a warmer feeling. She understood that this was his job, but he seemed to honestly care about her.

She walked over to the plaque and touched the hologram. Three windows appeared in front of her. In the first, to the right, several boxes showed different pieces of information about the Three Needle Scorpion. However, some appeared to be wrong. One of the boxes said that the scorpion's size could be between 20 centimeters to 4 meters in length. She wasn't sure what size the monster could get to, but there wasn't a sliver of doubt in her mind that the one she saw was smaller than 20 centimeters long. It could've been 10 at most.

Looking to the left window, there were some text and graphs and three pictures of the scorpion. One with a top view, one with a side view, and the last was a more natural shot of the creature on top of a sand dune. Looking at the text, it was easy to notice that it was incomplete. It started talking about the scorpion, but at points, it was blank. When it started talking about some specific information, the gaps would appear.

In the middle, there was a simple notification.

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Desert Biome – Final Task

You have acquired all the information about the Three Needle Scorpion.

Complete the information present in the plaque window.

You may manually input the information or utilize the information boxes available to complete the report. However, not all boxes will have the correct data.
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"I feel like I'm in school again," Hera sighed. She looked over and started checking the boxes, trying to first find the wrong ones. Then she would focus on trying to complete the information herself while using the boxes as a reference. There should be something to gain by doing it all by hand.