Chapter Forty-Three: Flailing Master (Patreon)

I stalk carefully through the forest back towards the tree. The shadows are already lengthening, but mid-afternoon here means there’s still plenty of time until night falls. I took over an hour to reach this area last time, but I wasn’t exactly moving fast, instead meandering while looking for an appropriate branch to turn into an axe-haft. When I came back last time, I wasn’t at my best having just been attacked. So, I figure I should only take half an hour or so to reach it at my current speed.

Sure enough, by the time I reach the area that I recognise as being near the tree in question, it’s only taken about that long according to the amount of Energy I’ve absorbed – that’s my way of telling the time, these days. Searching around the area a little, I feel glee as I see not just one resinous tree, nor two, but four. They’re all next to each other, perhaps three of them offspring – or sprouts – of the first, or perhaps all of them remnants of another, larger tree. There isn’t enough size difference between them to indicate which might be the most likely possibility, though the fact that they are all similarly sized indicates that they were all planted at similar times.

And then any thoughts musing about how and why trees are growing flee my mind: I’m suddenly far too occupied with the fact that my foot has suddenly sunk into the ground up to the knee.

I shout in surprise and pain as the ground gives way underneath me, my right foot plunging into a pit. A pit, it soon becomes obvious, which is not natural. Chirping battle cries piercing the air, I’m bombarded before I know what’s happening. What is with this area and getting attacked? I bemoan to myself.

It takes me a few moments to gather my senses and start attacking with my knife and mace, moments in which the battle does not go well for me. There are two sets of attackers – one set up in the trees, one set down below. The group up in the trees are ranged and the ones below are more melee. Covered in feathers, my assailants look surprisingly similar to the reconstructed images of feathered velociraptors I’ve seen. They have long toothed beaks which the ground troops soon start using to attack me, and the ranged attackers use to spit mud at me. Perhaps mud-spitting doesn’t seem particularly impressive, but the speed at which they’re succeeding in sending the attacks is enough to sting my skin.

At first the mud doesn’t make much difference, but as it builds up, I feel it weighing down my limbs and making me feel wearier than I should be. I try to shake it off, but it sticks on stubbornly. At the same time, the sharp beaks and claws of the ground velociraptors tear at my clothes and skin. Against someone half my size, they’d have already won; as it is, I’m not in a good state, not at all.

I flail around with my mace to try to keep the ground attackers at bay, but my stuck foot limits my mobility. Another downside is that it also brings my body and vulnerable organs closer to the creatures which, for all their numbers and strategy, are only as tall as the average medium-sized dog. And unlike a dog, since they’re bipedal, they can’t reach up much further than that. Unlike the killer-chickens I fought before, these guys are feathered, but have no wings – the feathers coat their forearms, but don’t extend backwards very far.

In short, if I can get myself back to my normal height, I’ll have a significant advantage over the ground velociraptors. As for the ranged ones, I can probably reach a few, and the rest I’ll just have to throw rocks at, once the ground troops are dealt with. Annoying as the mud is, It’s not immediately life-threatening; the sharp toothed beaks of the ground creatures potentially are – even if I don’t bring my vulnerable torso into their range, they could still get in a lucky bite and open an artery in my legs.

Deciding to concentrate on getting free of the hole, I do my best to ignore the bites and slashes of the creatures now surrounding me as I put my hands and good foot on the ground, using them as a stable base from which to free my other foot. It’s painful to pull my foot back and I’m worried I’ve twisted my ankle.

When it finally pops free, I wince at the sight of the cuts and bruises already blooming on my skin: the walls of the hole were not exactly smooth. Although they hadn’t been deliberately made worse the way I probably would if I dug a pit trap – as I’m sure by now this was a trap – it’s still a hole in the ground with plenty of roots and stones.

My ankle isn’t sprained, at least, and my quick Lay-on-hands sends healing to start dealing with the injuries incurred both by the trap and by the undefended attacks that connected from the creatures surrounding me. My mobility regained, I grin savagely at the velociraptors, a knife in one hand and my mace in the other.

“Now who’s the easy prey?” I ask them rhetorically as I start swinging and swiping. I’ll admit that it probably looks fairly ungainly from the outside – I’m a flailing master– but I don’t care. For all their obvious intelligence and viciousness, like the killer-chickens, these velociraptors aren’t durable. One good hit with my mace is enough to take a velociraptor down. My knife isn’t quite as effective as it actually has to hit the right spot to work, but once I get a rhythm going of stunning a raptor and then stabbing it, I find that the attackers almost melt away.

Once more, it almost seems like a replay of the killer-chicken fight, only this one has the added complication of ranged attackers which, while only annoying, do mean that I have to spend a lot more energy on maintaining my mobility than I’d prefer. Just like the chickens, these velociraptor look-alikes are pack fighters, using surprisingly intelligent ambush and hit-and-run tactics to take down prey.

If I hadn’t been human, I’d probably have gone down a long time ago. But I am human which means that not only do I have weapons which multiply my damage-dealing capacity, but I also have healing magic. Consequently, instead of a quickly over blitz attack, the raptors are suddenly having to deal with a battle of attrition. And, like with the killer-chickens before them, these creatures are not so good with elongated battles.

By the time I’ve cut my ground attackers down from probably around ten to three, they decide they’ve had enough of this and turn to retreat. Not having any of that, I swing my mace and knock one of them hard enough that I hear the crunch of its fragile rib cage breaking. Then, going after one of the two remaining, I’m suddenly hit by an absolute deluge of mud. It’s like the creatures in the trees above have doubled their assault.

All I can do is hunker down and try to protect my head from the sticky, heavy mud. Then, as abruptly as it started, the deluge peters out, and then stops completely. Wiping some of the mud off and smearing it onto the ground – collecting a good number of dead leaves and twigs at the same time – I look up at the ranged squad. They’re tired, panting, like that last attack was a final all-in move. Not giving me a second glance, they’re also trying to flee, moving along the branches in which they’re sitting in something only slightly faster than a shuffle, jumping from branch to branch.

Anger boils within me. They think they can pour mud on me and then just leave? Not likely. Grabbing stones from my Inventory, I start throwing them. My increased Dexterity shows as I actually manage to hit my targets almost as much as I miss – I couldn’t have done that before.

Getting attacked sends the ranged raptors into a bit of a panic and they increase the speed at which they’re running away: clearly they weren’t expecting that, and why would they? I haven’t shown any ranged abilities up until now. A couple of raptors are knocked out of the trees and I rush after them to swing my mace and end their lives. I manage to get three more before they get too far away for me to justify chasing them.

Grabbing the bodies and just dragging them, I return to near the tree where all this had started. Slumping to the ground, I take a few moments to recover. I’m not terribly injured as I’ve been keeping up with pumping healing magic through me at various intervals. As I sit there, my health regen plus continued Lay-on-hands tops me up the rest of the way in just a few minutes. My stamina took more of a beating than my health, if I’m honest. I should probably consider putting more points into Strength (Endurance) in the next level up. Or start training for a marathon.

Still, I’m covered in mud, which does not make me happy. Add that to the fact that another pair of trousers has been rendered to shreds and I grumble out loud as I start digging out the hearts of the velociraptors, tossing the rest of their corpses into my Inventory as I go. In total, I got thirteen of the creatures, and probably about ten or twelve got away. Hopefully they won’t be back for revenge anytime soon.

I build a quick fire and a rudimentary spit with two twigs with forks stuck tail-first into the ground. Another twig serves as the spit itself and I shove the hearts onto it as a strange kind of kebab. While the meat cooks, I go to do what I’d actually come here to do: collect resin.

Fortunately for my sanity, I hadn’t misinterpreted what I’d seen and all four of these trees have sticky, aromatic resin dried on their bark. The chunks will definitely need processing before I’ll be able to use them for pitch, but I reckon it will all work out in the end.

My harvesting over, I’m feeling a lot more peaceful by the time I sit down to munch the hearts. They’re not well-cooked – one side is rather over-done and the other only barely done since I struggled with getting the spit to turn over and stay there – but I don’t care: they taste like victory.

In that moment I realise something that disturbs me a bit: I’m starting to like this. Or, maybe ‘like’ is the wrong word. And maybe ‘this’ is too general. It’s just...there’s something about this world which is real in a way my previous existence wasn’t. I live on a knife’s edge between survival and death. At any moment, it wouldn’t take much for me to die of starvation, thirst, or injury, and somehow that makes the rest of life sweeter. The food I eat is bland in comparison to the sweetened, salted, and fried food of my past, but it has a taste which all of those lacked: the taste of freedom.

In this new world, there’s no boss to tell me what to do. No alarm clock to wake me up in the mornings. No landlord demanding rent. No bills demanding payment. Nothing to stop me from just...walking into the forest and going wherever I please.

Instead, I have to make my own decisions, and the reward for making the right one is living one day longer, or having something that adds a little bit of luxury to my life, like my fireplace. I have to build things with my own hands, put my blood, sweat, and tears into every labour. And in doing so, I’ve regained a sense of value for everything.

It’s...freeing. But not in an irresponsible way. I can’t afford to be irresponsible, but in being given complete responsibility over my own existence, I’ve gained a sense of satisfaction deeper than any I’d felt before.

Given the choice of going back to my previous life, it’s hard to know what I would choose. Last night proved to me that I miss home, but I’m not sure ‘home’ actually exists for me anywhere. The old adage says ‘home is where the heart is’ and my heart is gone. Earth holds nothing but the bitter ash of regret and destruction in many ways, but I can’t say for certain that I would reject the siren pull of the safety, comforts and ease of modern life. On the other hand this place has danger around every corner, but it feels...fresh, in a way. Like the only history here is what I’ve brought with me.

Walking back home, I pause to just jump in the river to wash off the mud before heading up the slope. Deciding to butcher the carcasses later, I change into dry clothes, spreading my wet ones out near the smouldering fire in my fireplace. Then, slumping down onto my bed, I check out my Energy gain. A good forty-four percent increase, nice.

When I’m done with munching on my bird meat and drinking a bit of my ‘soup’, I decide not to move, instead making myself more comfortable on my jacket ‘nest’ and pulling out a book from my orange suitcase. I could – and probably should – continue with making bark-fibre cordage, or begin to whittle my soap mold with my knife and a chunk of wood, but I don’t. After the fight earlier, I feel like having an evening off tonight. I’m going to read a bit by the light of my fire until I become too sleepy, just like I always used to back before Classes and life-death encounters were a part of my life.

Hopefully I won’t have any nightmares tonight.