Chapter Sixty-One: Nightmare-inducing (Patreon)

Regret isn’t helpful right now so I push it away, using the split-seconds I have before it’s upon me to instead try to figure out how to stay alive. By the time it lunges at me once more, I have a basic – and risky – plan of action. Here’s hoping it’s sufficient.

Pulling my arm up to block, I attempt to slip the mace in between its mandibles and trick it to bite down on that, but I’m a fraction too slow. Instead of chewing on wood, its sharp mouth pincers tear into my arm, probably delivering another dose of venom. I curse mentally, but there’s no time to waste. My knife held in my other hand, I start stabbing wildly at its face, or the insectile horror that passes for one.

Its carapace is strong, and my first few stabs seem to do nothing. I’m losing the race against time, despite my frantic casting of Lay-on-hands to keep my health up. Then I hit something soft – I manage to get one of its eyes.

The creature shrieks, the piercing sound at such close range making my ears ring and causing my vision to go fuzzy for just a moment. I keep on stabbing, temporarily blinded and deaf as I am, nothing more important to me in that moment. I feel as the creature yanks its mandibles out of my arm, their serrated nature causing even more blood to flow.

It’s trying to back up; I can’t let it. I’m running out of mana at a rapid rate and really can’t afford to give it even the slightest moment to recoup. Hoping that its attempts to retreat are because I’ve hit somewhere it’s vulnerable, I propel myself forward and grab the mandible which had previously been stuck in me.

My weight pulling it down, I’ve temporarily halted it in its tracks. With the energy of a dying man, I stab, stab, stab at its eyes. They pop under my blade, the sensation as disgusting as the fluid that explodes out. The insectile creature screams again, but I just fight against the pain and disorientation, and keep on stabbing.

Just keep stabbing.

Just keep stabbing.

It turns into a mantra which blocks out all else. The creature tries to throw me off, push me away, but its body is designed to catch and pull in prey, not push it away. Its feeble attempts are no match against a ten in Strength and the power of desperation. Llittle by little, I pull it down to my level and then beyond, pinning its front to the ground. Now I have a hard surface to stab against, my strikes gain in power and piercing quality.

When it stops moving, I don’t realise for a few moments as I keep just grimly burying my knife into it its eyes and, hopefully, what passes for a brain. When I finally notice it hasn’t done more than twitch for at least a minute, I feel all the strength leave me in a rush. My hands release my knife and the mandible involuntarily. I’m out of mana, out of stamina, and almost out of health.

There are no numbers on my visible bars, but I can see what little remains of the red bar slowly drain away with the red that’s dripping out of my wounds. My mana bar is already starting to regenerate, however, and I cling onto that thought like the lifeline it is. I fight against the blackness trying to take over my vision until finally, the blue bar reaches a point that I reckon should mean I can cast another healing spell.

As unconciousness pulls me down into its depths, I trigger a final Lay-on-hands and tumble down, wondering if I’ll ever wake up again.

*****

I hear birdsong as my consciousness swims up to the surface. I’m lying on cold, damp ground, the chill seeping into my body from below. I smell something metallic that I slowly realise I recognise: blood. Finally, opening my eyes, I hiss as the light lances into them, making my head pound with pain. Slamming my eyes shut, I just breathe and try to think through what happened.

It takes me a few moments for my memory of the events immediately before falling into unconciousness to become clear. Some sort of insectile horror laid a trap which I walked into like an idiot. I chose to fight instead of run, also like an idiot. Somehow, I managed to survive, which doesn’t make me any less an idiot; it just makes me lucky.

Ruefully, I wonder to myself if I’ve just got a bit overconfident by the relatively easy victories lately. I mean, Bastet and I won against the lizogs without a scratch, despite them being foes that could easily have ripped me to shreds. But we only survived because we applied our brains to the task; it only makes it clear how easily I could have died just now because I didn’t.

And what happens to Bastet or Spike if I die? I’m pretty sure that it would just be that our Bond broke and that they were then free to go – it’s a sense I get from the Bond rather than any true knowledge. Being a feeling more than cold hard fact, it could be wrong; what if my death has some negative effect on them? What if it killed them too? I really hope not, but since I don’t know for sure, and it’s not exactly the kind of thing I can test, it’s something I need to bear in mind when I’m considering risking my life: it may not be just my life that I’m risking.

On that note, I don’t know if it would have been better or worse to have had Bastet actually there. Of course, having the adult raptorcat would have definitely improved my chances; I might not have got quite that close to death. Having Bastet would have meant having the cubs, though, and they would have been far more vulnerable to the creature than I was. If one of them had died while Bastet was fighting on my behalf…

On the other hand, maybe Bastet would have recognised the danger before I did – she’s probably got much better senses than me, and knows the area and its denizens a lot more than I do. It’s enough to make me wonder whether bringing the four raptorcats along might be safer than leaving them back at the cave. Well, it would definitely be safer for me; I just have to consider whether it would be safe enough for the cubs too...

Opening my status panel shows just how close to death I got. I’ve got twenty-five units of mana in the tank which indicates it’s been about twelve minutes since I blacked out. That’s also borne out by the fact that I have fourteen units of stamina – it must have been regenerating while I was fighting to keep conscious until I could cast another Lay-on-hands and I don’t use stamina for my healing spell.

My health, which currently regenerates at one and a half points per five minutes – or three points per ten minutes – is only sitting at five. That means I was two units away from death at the time my last healing spell finished its work. I have to guess that it cleared out the rest of the poison, because otherwise it’d be dead, no question.

I feel weak at the knowledge of simply how close to death I’d come. If I’d been secondslater in killing the thing, if I hadn’t managed to keep myself conscious until I was able to cast my Lay-on-hands, if I had had one more poisoned wound… My stomach rises into my mouth and I turn to one side to empty it onto the dead leaves beside me.

Staring at my vomit for a long moment, I then violently push myself to my feet and walk a few steps away from the corpse; away from the place where I had almost breathed my last. I’m shaking. My skin’s clammy.

I know I’m in shock. Why it’s suddenly hitting me now, I don’t know. I’ve been close to death several times since arriving here. Heck, the wolvezard was at least just as close as now, maybe closer since I really would have died if Kalanthia hadn’t given me my only remaining health potion.

But all I can do is stare at the little number on my screen that denotes how close I am even now to a stiff breeze being able to kill me. Five. Six. I watch the number change, fortunately in the right direction, indicating that several minutes have passed. In the meantime, my stamina and mana have grown considerably more. Mana…

I feel like a lightning bolt has hit me. Man, I’m an idiot! By this point, I have enough in the tank for at least three normal Lay-on-hands. Why haven’t I cast them yet?

Putting action to thought, I quickly cast two more healing spells, keeping one back just in case something suddenly happens – like I almost step on another venomous creature – and I need to close wounds or clear poison or something. Twenty units of health later and I’m feeling considerably better.

My shakiness clears and I stop feeling so nauseous. Maybe part of the reason for going into shock was because my health was still so critically low? By the time I woke up after the wolvezard, my health had had the chance to climb a bit more. My curiosity engaged, I wonder, assuming my theory is correct, if it’s a relative value that matters, so a specific fraction of my health like an eighteenth being all that remains, or if it’s that everyone goes into shock at only five units of health remaining.

Another question to add to my list, though this one I might be able to answer once I’ve added more points to Constitution. Not that I’m keen to experience being quite so close to death again…

My frame of mind already better, I’m now able to turn and face the remains of my foe with some equanimity. Despite knowing full-well it’s dead, it still makes me shiver. It’s rather similar to a massive spider, reminding me of that one in a blockbuster movie trilogy. Only, instead of the normal eight legs of a spider, this only has six. And this one doesn’t have a sting on its bulbous abdomen.

Its legs are hairy, but its body is smooth, with an exoskeleton rather similar to the chitinous exterior of a beetle. It’s dull in colour, a nondescript brown that makes perfect camouflage for where it was hiding under the dead, brown leaves. I don’t know how many eyes it had – I made rather a mess of them with my knife, after all, - but it had multiple. Probably between six and ten. It has serrated mandibles like an ant which still shimmer wetly with my blood. I shiver again. I have a feeling this thing’s going to make a star appearance in my nightmares later.

The only good thing is that it was clearly worth a lot of Energy since I’ve jumped up ten percent from where I was before. Good thing too, because there’s no way I’m eating whatever passes for a heart in this monstrous thing. Still… I run my hand over its carapace thoughtfully. Pulling out my knife, I test the material’s strength.

As I’d thought, it’s pretty good against my knife. My strongest blow only leaves a slight dent. Checking out my knife, I castigate myself – if I’d broken my only metal blade just to test out the strength of this bloody thing… Fortunately, the blade is unharmed.

Actually, I’m starting to wonder if it’s quietly magic in some way. My knife doesn’t heat up or light on fire, or cause electrical damage to my opponents, but I haven’t had to sharpen it yet, and it hasn’t shown any sort of wear no matter that I’ve used it to burn and chop wood, cut flesh, and break through cartilaginous joints. I’m no knife expert, but my absorbed memories tell me that that’s not normal.

Anyway, magic or not, I’m grateful. Turning my mind back onto the topic at hand, I decide to keep the insect-spider’s body. Not its legs – I think seeing those would probably give me a flashback – but the body. And maybe the mandibles. They were pretty nasty on me and might make a decent weapon of some sort. The body, of course, I’m considering trying to turn into armour of some sort.

If I can get through the carapace itself to chop it into chunks, I should be able to somehow attach that to a fabric or hide underlayer and then make myself some decent protection. It would be nice to have something between me and all these teeth and claws that doesn’t tear apart at the first hit… I might have been able to heal all the wounds I’ve taken so far, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt to begin with!

Chopping the legs off the body isn’t that hard – the connections are fairly thin – but having hairy legs and detached body falling at me is once more nightmare-inducing. I didn’t like spiders or insects before this whole debacle; I sure as hell like them even less now! Finally, I’m able to store the heavy body and head in my Inventory and I rub my hands together to try to remove the nasty feeling of touching the creature.

About to walk away, I spot where the spider-monster came from and my curiosity is engaged once more. It’s not some sort of shallow pit that the creature clearly dug for itself; it seems much deeper than that, a yawning hole in the ground. I check my stats: my health is full thanks to regeneration and regular Lay-on-hands; my stamina and mana are full from regeneration. I’m as close to well as I can be: should I investigate this hole?

My curiosity can’t be denied. With warring visions of treasure and more spider-monsters jumping out to eat me, I creep closer.