by Dakota Krout
“Thanks, Grimmy.” Taylor wanted to drop her head into her hands, but there were likely Fears in the area still. Getting eaten and broken down into base mana because she was mad about the inability of a book to understand sarcasm would have been beyond embarrassing.
Her Grimoire, liking the affectionate name ‘Grimmy’, flapped to her head and rested on it like a hat. “Hey, that’s bad for your spine! You should close fully.”
It ignored her, and Taylor didn't bother to force the issue. She had other things to look at anyway. “Current exp.”
Etheric Xenograft Potentia: 670/500 to level 4!
You are able to increase in level! Do so now? Yes / No.
“What in the…! How did I gain so much Potentia?” Taylor meant it rhetorically, but was given an answer anyway.
Accessing combat logs…
23 Fear (T1) defeated: 460 exp.
1 Mass Hysteria (T4) defeated: 100 exp.
Spawn point cleared and captured! This was an unknown spawn point. Bonus Potentia gained from absorbing all ambient Potentia accumulated within unknown place of power: 100 exp.
Add spawn point to Kingdom map records? Bonus exp will be granted. Yes / No.
“No, add only to personal map records.” She ignored the last question. Why would she give up the information to an awesome training spot? That’d just be stupid. Instead, Taylor started thinking about what she should do with the unexpected windfall. Clearly, she was going to level up, but where to put the points? “Mind is the best bet, of course… but… Naming…? I almost had that spell; I could feel it. I couldn’t get all the fine details, though. I need better Senses.”
Taylor knew that her instructor had a plan for her development, but she really, really wanted to test her theory. She was certain that her ability as a Namer would allow her to bypass the requirements that higher spells demanded. So what if she didn't have enough Presence to make a Volcano spell whimper? If she could get its true name, it would be hers either way.
Plus… it would be nice to have at least a small way to rebel against Master Don. Decision made, she agreed to level. The point went into the Mental Energy sub-category, bringing her Senses total up to six-point-six, and for a long moment, the world was dark. Her eyes popped open and locked on a hairy leg that was slowly extending around the corner, it was a Fear inching toward her through the darkness. She smiled widely; the low light wasn't nearly as much of an issue as it had been only a few minutes ago.
She had made the right decision. Maybe not for Master Don, but for her. “Fireball, heed my call…!”
Chapter Seventeen
- Luke -
Luke scraped at his combat perch stone and grunted happily. The last two and a half years had been intense, and was basically a blur of killing goats and increasing his battle prowess. A diet of only protein hadn't been great for his system, but he wasn't malnourished in the slightest. In fact, between the constant combat and the huge number of protective hides he wore to prevent getting beaten to death by goats, he had gained an impressive amount of muscle mass.
He was scraping at what he had thought was stone for a simple reason. Earlier today, it had cracked and flaked when it was hit by a leaping goat. When the top layer of grime had dropped off, Luke had been able to tell that it wasn’t rock at all. It was bone.
Goat-bone tools had been the norm for well over a year after his dagger became too dull to handle the tasks he needed it for. So when he found so much bone as a single piece, he got both excited and a little nervous. First, he already had a use in mind. Second, what had been so large in this world that its bone could be mistaken for a rock for over… what, two years?
Luke had started digging, and found that the mindless task was a nice change of pace. When the bone was fully unearthed, he was still confused. It didn't look like any bones that he was familiar with, such as a femur or fibula. No, this was a crooked teardrop that was flat on one part of the wide side. About halfway down its length, there was a spar of bone that jutted out perpendicular to the rest of it.
“Hello, new weapon.” Luke spoke flatly, not having the mental energy to get excited about something like this. “Well… now I get to learn how to use a two-handed club. That should give me something to do for the next few years. A new hobby might be nice, heehee… though digging was interesting as well! Diggy, dig, dig!”
Luke took the bone back to his base by the water and started using some goat bone and rocks to smooth and carve into the large teardrop. It was dense, so the task took some serious doing. That made him happy, as it meant that it would survive heavy usage and give him a short-term hobby. Days later, when he had a place to wrap leather for a grip on both the tapering end as well as the spar, Luke decided to wash off all the excess dirt in the pool. He stood, dragging the oversized weapon behind him. When he was ankle-deep in the water, he dipped the club in and started washing.
When he was done, the bone gleamed like the pearls he had been saving up. It was a beautiful blue-white, and it almost looked like the water had left a film on the bone. No. Wait. Yes. The bone… a few of the scratches, nicks, and blemishes had vanished from the surface. That meant… this bone absorbed water to repair itself! “So cool! The water impacts even dead things!”
Intent on testing this phenomenon, Luke fit the leather grip onto the bone and held the entire thing underwater. As he suspected, after about ten minutes, the bone was entirely fixed up. Bone had grown around the edges of the leather, holding it in place better than sinew ever would. Luke hefted his new weapon and gave it a few test swings. “Good enough.”
Still, he had to frown at the item. It really was familiar, but he had no idea why. “Let’s go looking at bones, then. Ha! There’s a phrase I would have never been able to say around… hmm… what’s his… it was… Andre! Wonder how that guy’s doing?”
Luke walked to where the day's meat was waiting to be processed and carefully dismantled the first goat. While he was butchering it, he found nothing that looked even remotely like the bone that was now sitting next to him. Luke pulled out the pearl and added it to his bag with a *plop*. He had given up one of his waterskins specifically so that he could fill it with water and hide the pearls. It was effective, and at full capacity, the skin could hold a few hundred of the tiny pearls. Not that it ever needed to do so.
He had gotten to a point where there were almost a few hundred pearls in his waterskin, but one day, the water had started churning when he dropped a few in. He had waited a few minutes, then dumped out the water and found that he had a bunch of the third-rank pearls and only two of the first rank ones. At least he would know when they upgraded; the process was somewhat violent as they got stronger. Luke sighed and shook his head.
A third-tier pearl made him sad, because that meant that he had killed yet another twenty-five hundred goats and added their pearls to his collection. Currently he had forty-eight of the tier threes, and twenty-six tier ones. Relatively soon he would be able to witness a tier-four pearl, and he wasn't sure if he should be sad at all the killing he had done, or excited to have a goal. To make a single tier four pearl… fifty of the first, second, third… that would be exactly one hundred and fifty thousand goats that he had managed to pull a pearl out of.
If the goats hadn’t been carnivorous, he would have been drowning in blue goat meat. Also, instead of the population dropping like he had expected, there had been a population boom. At least, for the left herd. Since their competition had been killed off to the tune of over a hundred thousand deaths, and most of the meat was left for them to eat…
“There it is! Oh… Celestial Feces.” Luke had finally found the bone that matched the large club. He held it in his hand, which was shaking slightly, mainly due to his sudden realization. The bone in his palm was almost the exact same shape as his new oversized club. He had pulled it out of the goat’s
skull, specifically the ear. “You are a malleus… also known as the ‘hammer’ portion of an ear bone. Also known as the smallest bone in the body.”
Luke looked at his weapon again and gulped. It was at least four feet long and about two feet wide at the thickest point. “Good thing whatever this came from is already dead…”
Over the next three months, Luke worked to familiarize himself with his ‘hammer’. It was as though he was learning to fight all over again, and only the fact that he had been conditioning his body every day for over two years allowed him to survive until he had gained some proficiency with the club. Every time the bone started to get cracks or flaws, he would put it in the pool until it regained its luster and smoothness.
As time went on, he found that the outside of the weapon was getting damaged less frequently and was becoming more and more blue. Luke was using his hammer weapon regularly, and had even named it! ‘Crustulum Capra’, nicknamed ‘Crust’. That translated as ‘Goat Paste’, which was what the goats turned into when he got a good hit in on them.
It could also translate as ‘Goat Cookie’, which still made him laugh a month after he had realized that fact. He had immediately thrown all other names out and started calling his weapon ‘Cookie’.
Then, disaster struck. During one particular excursion, Luke was swarmed and Cookie got caught between the ground and several charging goats. Their odd magically-enhanced horns made them hit harder than they had any right to be able to do, and the portion that he used as his normal handhold snapped off. Not the spar, but the actual end of the teardrop. Luke managed to finish off the remainder of the goats by falling back on punching them to death, but he was furious at himself for his carelessness.
He collected all the new pearls and the broken chunks of his weapon, then made his way back to camp. He carefully inspected the break and quickly found the issue. “Ah… I see… the outside has been getting harder to damage, but the interior is still soft bone. How can I…”
Luke scraped at the bone and discovered that the inner area formed by marrow, was far softer than the exterior had ever been. “Now this gives me an idea…”
Cookie was out of commission for the next few months, which infuriated Luke. Luckily, he had a ready and never-diminishing population of small animals to take his frustrations out on. During the day, he destroyed goats from the right herd. In the evenings and nights, he slowly hollowed out the enormous bone. When he needed to do something less tedious, he shaped the bone that had broken off.
Eventually, Luke had most of the teardrop hollowed out. He had even used bone shards from the goat horns he collected to drill through the spar and made a twisty ‘U’ bend in the marrow on the interior. He lifted the broken teardrop tail and started to turn it. The shaped screw fit into the main body and held! “Yes! Now to fill you up with water…”
He hurried to test it, first washing out the bone scrapings that had accumulated, then filling the entire thing. He simply left the bone underwater overnight, making sure that it was totally filled with water. In the morning, he saw that blue gas was leaking from the hole in the spar that he had drilled, and nodded in appreciation. It was working exactly as he had hoped it would. Time for the next test.
He twisted the screw, really putting effort into it. The end eventually popped out, and he grinned as the remainder of the water trickled out. It wasn’t as blue as the exterior yet, but that had a few months of extra time where it had been hardening. Still… Luke refilled the hollow portion and replaced the bone screw, then turned his attention to the shifting grass.
“Cookie is back on the table.”
Luke charged downhill and into battle, crushing twelve goats and laughing the entire time. No longer did he need to slowly dig the pearls out; a simple smash, and the pearl practically rolled out of the broken skull on its own! “Time to make some goat paste.”
He spent the next few weeks making minor adjustments to his weapon and fighting style, and was finally ready to make his next big push. “Three years and… four months? Better make sure I keep that tally up to date…”
Luke was covered in six inches of padded leather across his whole body. His neck and head were wrapped with hardened goatskin, and Luke felt that he was as prepared as he was going to get. “No stopping, no slowing. It’s time to get past these creatures. You ready for this, Cookie?”
There was no reply as Luke scooped up the pearls and added them to his goat hide. “Hey. Cookie! Come on, don’t give me the silent treatment like that. I just wanted to grab these pearls; no stopping after this. We’re still gonna go break that-”
Heat.
Luke yelped at the foreign sensation and jumped away. It didn’t help. His leather was on fire! Actual fire! He dropped and rolled, smothering the flame. Luke searched around to determine what had happened, and his eyes locked onto a nearly see-through pearl that was generating enough light that only the fact that the sky was brightening allowed Luke to look directly at it. Beyond the sight, he could feel it. His skin under all of the armor tightened and twinged as though he was standing next to a burning building. “Where did…?”
“You have goat to be kidding me.” His eyes widened as the area around him started to fill with noise; he grabbed the pearl and sprinted toward the pool. As he did so, a cry went up from all around him. Luke had just created a tier four pearl, and the goats wanted it. Luke tried to think over what had just happened; nodding as everything fell into place. The water had boiled and churned even when the smaller versions of the pearl had been created. With this one, the reaction had apparently flash-boiled the water and caused him to catch on fire.
Fire was over-effective here, on all things, and he had no idea why. Luke was just glad that he hadn't started a wildfire. If this blue grass path had caught… it was unlikely that he could survive very long. The goats, as much as he hated them and wanted them to burn, were his food source. Also, who could tell how long the area might burn for? He could be trapped in the pool for weeks, and he wouldn't survive that either.
Still, what mattered right now was surviving the next few minutes! He could hear hooves stampeding, so much so that it felt like the entire population must be heading his way simultaneously. The pearl in his hand was hot, not in a way that was physically burning him, but in a way that made him aware of exactly where it was. It practically screamed at him, and he was sure that everything for miles around was coming for him.
“If I can get this home… make it into a necklace…” Luke puffed as he ran uphill, “Sell it to some random lady. Make sure no one can eat it and explode. She becomes Queen, no one can take their eyes off of her. She gives me a Noble title as thanks, I hide from the world forever. No goats allowed on the property. Yeah. There we go.”
Luke reached the edge of the pool and dived in without hesitation. Instantly, the hot feeling vanished. The loss hit him so hard that he almost sucked in a breath, just barely managing to refrain. That would have been bad, being underwater and all. He came up and could hear confused calls coming from everywhere.
“Baaa!”
“Yeah, like I care that you’re unsure of yourselves. Stupid carnivorous goats.” Luke idled in the water for a while, relaxing and floating until his skin started to pickle and the noise level had reduced to normal. “Good thing that happened this early in the day. If every one of them was awake and worked up… I can’t imagine that I’d have gotten away.”
Luke looked down and saw that the entire pool was filled with light, thanks to the pearl in his hand. He could see all the way to the sandy bottom a dozen feet below him, and was a little disgruntled to notice that the bottom was positively filled with bones. He dove down, and as he got closer; he saw that most - but not all - of the bones were from goats.
He knew what goat skeletons looked like; he was likely the foremost expert on goat skeletal structure right now, on Murder World or his home world. Luke surfaced and took a long breath of fresh air, then explained what he was doing to Cookie. “There were som
e human bones in there. I’m not the first to arrive here? Am I the first to survive, for some reason?”
“Come to think of it, I can't remember the goats ever drinking the water.” He knew for certain that there was nothing else in the pool. In fact, it was the cleanest, clearest water he had ever been in. “I wonder why? Also, why are these ones in here? They died of old age, maybe?”
“Now, what to do with you?” Luke looked at the innocently shining pearl and smiled. His waterskin had burst and was now a set of tattered hide; but there was an easy solution to this problem. He already had a tool ready-made for this! “Looks like you’re going in the Cookie jar.”
Luke unscrewed the end of Cookie and rolled the pearl inside. There was plenty of room for it to move around, and he wasn't at all worried about it getting stuck in there. Since Cookie was already filled with water, the pearl stayed ‘cool’. He heaved himself out of the water and started walking. There were goats to get past, and today was the day.
Chapter Eighteen
Luke broke into a downhill sprint, moving as fast as he could while wielding his massive bone and being covered in several inches of leather. The water on him was vaporizing, turning to gas as he charged along. Some goats got in his way, but he simply plowed over them, breaking bones as his huge weight crushed them into the ground.
He was starting to have a following, a few hundred of the bleating beasts were charging along behind him. “Short… legs… suck, don't they! Ha!”
“I can keep this pace up for days!” Luke called back about five minutes of running later, when his following had turned into a few thousand. The galloping beasts behind him bleated in reply, and Luke decided that it was almost time to put his plan into action. Two minutes passed, and he took a sharp right. He cut in front of the leading edge of the herd, and they followed him, deep into the heart of ‘right herd’ territory.
