Chapter Seventeen: Hearts (Patreon)

Scrabbling around in the dirt, I try to find a rock or something which I can use to deal some blunt-force damage. I spot a rough stick lying not far away and I still. It’s a stick about three feet long with a larger part on one end. A growth or bole or something. Could I use that as a mace or spear or something? Worth a try.

Struggling against the weight of the chickens on my body and the pain of their bites and scratching claws, I manage to get hold of one part of the branch. Dragging it towards myself, I adjust my grip to about halfway along its length and then start swinging it in both directions, clumsily, I’ll admit. This proves to be more effective: the chickens gripping onto me are unable to dodge without letting go. The branch is not the perfect weapon, but it seems surprisingly sound, and has a bit of weight to it. Enough, anyway, to cause damage to my attackers which are surprisingly easy to injure – when I actually land a hit.

An idea comes to mind, but I hesitate. It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy: if it works, it could turn the fight my direction; equally, if it doesn’t work, it’s pretty much guaranteed to make me lose the fight – and my life. Perhaps it’s the effect of the huge number of fights I’ve got myself into during the last few days, and the number of times I’ve been closer to death than I ever was on Earth, but the thought has lost some of its terror. In the end, it doesn’t take me that long to decide to try my idea – if I don’t, I might be done-for anyway.

Throwing myself onto my back, I shout in pain as the action makes the beaks and claws already cutting into me slice deeper, but my momentum carries me over my shoulder and onto my knees. I keep the momentum going, getting to my feet with minimal effort. The weight of the chickens still attached to me threatens to throw me off balance, but the ones I landed on are stunned or dead, and the majority of the others have either been twisted off me or let go of their own volition as I moved.

Deciding to deal with my annoying hangers-on first, I stagger over to a tree and bash my back against it, rubbing back and forth, ignoring the others biting and clawing at my legs for now. My actions manage to free me of the chickens clinging on behind me, though their removal still sends shards of agony lancing through me. I absentmindedly cast Lay-on-hands and breathe in relief as cool energy soothes the pain a little. With that semi-dealt with, I concentrate on the chickens still in the game.

With a tree to my back, my height advantage, and a weapon with a much longer reach available, the rest of the fight is significantly easier. Not easy, nor painless, but now I’ve got my most important organs out of their immediate reach, they have to jump off the ground to get at my torso, which reduces their mobility. I’m dual wielding – my knife in my right hand; my ‘mace’ in my left. Together, I manage to stab the chickens that bite me, and swipe at the chickens on the ground. Adding in a Lay-on-hands every few minutes and I’m slowly improving my condition while the chickens are one-by-one being knocked out of the game.

They don’t seem to recognise that the tide has turned, though. Several of the fights I’ve had so far, my opponents have realised when they’ve lost their advantage, and they’ve tried to run to fight another day – most of the time not very successfully, but still, they tried. These chickens don’t seem to have that instinct as they just keep attacking me even as their compatriots fall around me.

When the penultimate bird gets slammed by my ‘mace’ off its mortal coil, the final one latches into my leg with more ferocity than I’ve seen from these wretched birds all fight. I drop my mace and reach down to grab it by the neck with both hands, not caring that the knife makes the hold awkward. Wringing its neck, I pull it off me and throw it to the ground.

I’m feeling light-headed from blood-loss and nearly at the end of my strength. But, in the end, it’s me standing among twitching, bleeding, dying killer-chickens. That now-familiar sense of triumph goes through me, as well as a shiver of what I’ve come to recognise as Energy. It’s a much stronger sensation than I’ve had after my previous fights, but then these are much worse odds than I’ve ever had before too.

The sense of triumph is good, but it doesn’t heal my injuries. I slump back down the moment I feel reasonably sure that there are no more chickens waiting to pounce. I’ve been casting Lay-on-hands at any moment I could spare during the fight, so there’s only two left in the tank. But, at least that means I actually survived.

Casting one, I focus on stopping the bleeding everywhere. And I mean everywhere. My already torn clothes are hanging off me in shreds and there’s not an inch of skin which isn’t painted red with either my blood or the birds’. The only good thing is that the majority of the injuries aren’t deep and most of those that had been deep when gouged have had at least one Lay-on-hands to make them clot and start healing.

Pulling out my waterskin, I take a long draught and then eat some of the last cooked meat I have. Oh well, at least my food concerns are no longer pressing – when adding this meat to the amount I still have uncooked in my Inventory, I won’t have to go hunting for a good while. When my mana refills enough to once more cast two healing spells, I cast another one. I want to keep one in the tank in case of emergencies, but the second Lay-on-hands is enough to make me walking wounded rather than incapacitated. I push myself to my feet and start collecting the corpses.

Not quite fifteen, more like thirteen, but still more than enough to overwhelm most creatures. I can see why they were confident enough to attack me, and not even with a proper ambush either. Not knowing that humans tend to have weapons, they probably just saw me as easy prey. Plus, I was sitting down, which probably made me look less threatening besides. Or maybe animals here are just crazy – these guys probably actually had better odds than most of my attackers so far.

Anyway, I need to deal with the corpses. Remembering what I’d learnt from the system knowledge stone, I decide to try to get as much benefit from the remaining Energy in the bodies as I can. Knowing that I can’t, and shouldn’t, eat all the meat present, I need to pick and choose a bit. Based on the system lore stone, I figure that the organs will have the greatest density of Energy. I’m a bit reluctant to eat things like the liver and kidneys, assuming these birds have those, as they’re used to process the blood and may contain unhealthy concentrations of vitamins or other substances. The hearts, however, should be fine – if the blood is tainted, I’ll have a problem eating any of the meat so I feel reasonably safe with the hearts.

Still, before I can do anything with those, I have some other processing I need to do first, including getting a fire started. Not to mention washing the blood off me and getting a new set of clothes so I’m not practically walking around in my birthday suit.

*****

Three hours later, I survey the area, satisfied with my work. It wasn’t what I was intending on doing with my day, but I feel pretty productive nonetheless. I’ve gathered lots of meat which has joined the bird meat already in my Inventory. I’ve cooked and eaten more hearts than I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve collected lots of feathers, figuring they will come in handy later – these have taken up two slots of my Inventory as apparently the soft curled feathers are counted differently from the straight wing feathers. Finally, I’ve got a new weapon. I’ve inspected the branch I used as a mace and am pretty impressed with it, considering that I’ve done nothing to make it more effective.

It doesn’t look like much, but apparently it’s sound enough to serve as a weapon. The thicker bole at its base is probably the result of a growth of some sort and makes a somewhat weighty and hard lump which improves the stick’s impact. It’s a bit long for a mace, being almost two-thirds my height, but I can either just shift my hand closer to the bole for more control, or later trim it shorter. It was actually quite useful in this fight to use it as a double-ended weapon. I can imagine even more ways to make it more effective, primarily adding more weight or sharp pieces to the business end, but for something that just dropped off a tree, it’s almost ideal.

My efforts during and after the battle have had results. My Energy to the next level had increased to a whopping 57% by the end of the battle. Part of that is my natural absorption, but most of it is the killing. By eating the hearts, that percentage has increased further to 65%. It just makes me grimly acknowledge that if I’m going to make any inroads to becoming stronger or accumulating Energy towards this ‘debt’ of mine, I’m going to have to take the fight to the creatures. That’s...not the most enticing prospect. I might have Lay-on-hands, but the injuries still hurt, and I can never forget that a single wrong move could be the end of me.

The thought of dying on this deserted world, unmourned, unnoticed…it’s not a pleasant one. But if I don’tstart earning some proper Energy, am I actually increasing the chance of dying? It may seem illogical, but I can’t help thinking that so far I’ve been attacked almost ten times, just minding my own business. I figure that the likelihood is I’m very lucky that I haven’t yet been attacked by something I can’t handle with either my hands or my very basic tools. All of which means that with every encounter, heck, with every venture out into the woods for basic necessities, I’ll increase the chance that I will encounter something too strong for me to fight off as I am now. And that means I need to get stronger, as fast as possible. I need to earn those stat points. And those only come from levelling up or effort.

It means that when I was offered a stat increase to Dexterity while digging through the chickens’ bodies, I turned it down. While I acknowledge that I should benefit from the extra stat points while I can, I can’t help but think that levelling up will earn me more in one fell swoop. Unless my Class is really common, of course. If that’s the case, I’ll know not to bother saving my Energy when offered stat points in the future.

I hope it’s the right choice. Also, if I am the hunter, rather than the hunted, I’m more likely to be able to choose my encounter, and to choose to make it more advantageous to myself. I’d already planned to absorb the Hunting stone tomorrow, but now I decide to also go hunting, if only for some easy prey. But first, I need to find my shelter so I have a reasonably safe home base to return to at the end of the day – I can’t forget how I woke up this morning after all.

One good thing I have managed to discover is a sort of heads up display. I had wondered at the utility of having my mana, stamina, and health in my status screen. They’re not that useful if I only ever see them in times of safety, since looking at my status in the middle of the battle would seem to be a very bad idea. At the thought, my absorbed knowledge from the System stone this morning kicked in and helpfully informed me of how to make these values display themselves in the corner of my vision at all times.

I fix them in the top-middle part of my vision as I figure that’ll be the least annoying, most helpful position. There are no values, just three bars of different colours: I quickly work out that blue means mana, yellow stamina, and red health. At least it’ll give me an idea of how many more Lay-on-hands I have available in the middle of a fight, if nothing else. Plus, it’ll tell me if that horribly painful wound is actually as life-threatening as it feels.