Book 2: Chapter 16

Book 2: Chapter 16

Kay stood a little ways off from the base with both hands held up. He mentally weighed his decision while pretending his hands were the ends of a tipping scale. Allow the worry about the talk Eleniah is having with the other two to consume me, or ignore it and go make and test my new Class? Hell, why not both? He sighed and started walking north. But seriously, let's see what these new skills do.

Like most non-combat Classes, there were multiple skills attached.

Which is another weird thing about this whole System! Kay cut off his own train of thought. Why does it work like this? Non-combat Classes have multiple skills from the beginning for the most part, and combat Classes only have more than one Skill when at tier three or higher, but not always! It's only guaranteed that they have more than one Skill when they all combine at tier five! Who designed this System!? Did they test it at all?

Kay spent some time disparaging whoever made this world the way it was. He'd already decided that the System, or the World, depending on who you asked, was a deliberate creation by someone. It was too clumsy to be anything else. Nature didn't do clumsy; it followed the path of least resistance. The System is too damn complicated to be a natural creation. He scrubbed at his face. Not that it changes anything, but it's nice being able to blame someone for my annoyance. If it was just the way it worked because of nature, I'd have to suck it up and deal.

"Anyway," He muttered, "Back to testing."

Stable Footing was obvious, and he felt it working as he walked. Every step he took felt more solid than before he'd had the Skill. He walked up to a large root poking up from out of the dirt and carefully walked over it. Even on the uneven surface, he felt stable.

Expanded Sight was also easy to figure out. He could literally see more. His range of vision had expanded. At level one, there wasn't that big of a difference, and he couldn't figure out how much farther he could see right then since there were a bunch of trees in the way, but he could see a lot more of the trees than earlier.

For one of the new Skills, Sharpened Memory, he was just going to have to accept that it was working. How was he supposed to tell if his memory had gotten better? If he didn't remember something, he didn't remember it; how was he supposed to compare how much he remembered now versus before getting the Skill if he'd forgotten what he didn't remember. Kay paused in place and furrowed his brow as he thought through that sentence again. "Whatever," He eventually said, "It's not like I have to explain this to anyone."

The last of the set of new Skills was Spatial Determination. That one he was going to have to read the description for.

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Skill: Spatial Determination (Level One)

- This Skill grants an increased ability to measure and determine distances and sizes using sight, touch, and hearing. Higher levels of this Skill will allow the user to determine more exact measurements.

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Kay looked up and randomly picked two trees. They were thirteen feet apart. He frowned. Was that the Skill working? He closed his eyes and focused on turning Spatial Determination off. When he felt the mental 'click,' he turned around completely and picked two different trees. That was probably six feet or so between them? As he stood there, investigating his own feelings, he was pretty sure he was more confident the first time. He turned Spatial Determination back on and looked at the trees again. They were seven feet apart.

"Huh. Good Skill for mapping." Kay rolled his eyes at himself, "Well, duh. They might be shitty designers, but I don't think whoever made the System set it up to intentionally fuck people over."

He spent a few more minutes walking around a small area and determining how far apart things were and the sizes of various things. The biggest tree in sight was eighty feet tall, the cool rock was three inches wide, the blade of his punch dagger was three inches long.

Kay grinned when his notifications lit up, and he saw he'd leveled the Skill already. Alright, enough playing around. He pulled out his various map scraps and started figuring out where to explore next. As he looked them over, he began to frown. The frown got deeper as he continued to look them over.

The lead stag pawed at the ground and bared its teeth at Kay.

Wait... That's not normal deer behavior. Kay's new Expanded Sight Skill let him see the sharp fangs in the deer's mouth with little trouble. Oh. That's not a regular deer.

With a vicious growling noise that did not belong to a body shaped like that, the stag charged Kay, a few more of the smaller stags following behind.

"Shit!" Kay drew his halberd off his back and prepared to fight. With carnivorous deer monsters. "My life is so weird now!" He yelled as the monster charged him.

The largest monster rolled off to his right and started circling behind him as the rest of the attacking group grew closer.

"Nope!" Kay shot a bolt of blood at it, which it dodged. Kay waited until the attack drew level with the deer-thing and made it burst. It did very little damage, but it achieved his goal of getting some blood on the creature. With that taken care of, he spent a couple of seconds firing more streams of liquid at the approaching deer. Once all of them had at least a little blood on them, he bolted for the closest tree. Using his magical senses, he managed to avoid attacks he couldn't actually see, knowing the deers' location and dodging their charges using the blood he'd coated them in. Angling away from the rest of the herd, he managed to get a tree to his back right as the attacking group caught up with him again.

Kay slammed the shaft of his halberd into the tree and used his momentum to spin around. Slamming into the tree with his back hard enough to bruise later, he lashed out with a thrust and took one of the younger deer in the throat. The deer that had been trying to impale him against the tree died gurgling blood and collapsed to the ground. Its razor-sharp antlers got caught against his weapon as it fell, dragging it off to the side. Kay abandoned the halberd and pulled with his magic, drawing the blood from the already-dead monster.

He managed to gather enough blood and solidify it into a solid plane right before the pointed hooves of one of the other deer impaled him. The attack bounced off of his impromptu shield, and the enemy staggered as it lost its footing. Kay replied with a blast of pressurized blood, punching a hole in the creature's side and dropping it.

The largest stag, the presumed leader of the herd, screamed in rage. It was a predatory sound, entirely at odds with the deer-shaped body of the monster.

Kay mentally affixed the shield to his arm and formed a sword in his right hand. He wasn't quite at the level of Skill he wanted, both literally in terms of the level of his Skill and more figuratively for how good he wanted to be. He imagined himself in the future as a fluid fighter, no pun intended, shifting his armor and weapons from liquid to solid as he needed to, changing their shape in the middle of battle. An enemy jumped back from the thrust of your sword? Change it to a spear in the middle. An enemy was armored against slashes and pierces? Turn that halberd into a maul. Need thicker armor? Make some on the fly. That was what he imagined for himself.

He wasn't at that point yet, so when one of the stags feinted at him and dodged back out of the way of his slash, he missed. It also left an opening for one of the other monsters to stab him in the shoulder with its antlers. He managed to deflect most of the attack with his blood shield, but one of the prongs slammed into his shoulder.

Kay grunted in pain and did something he hadn't tried before. He grabbed the monster's antlers with the blood leaving his new wound and held it in place. It jerked and bucked, trying to break free and worsening the wound, but Kay held on. He used the monster's body as a shield against its comrades while he took a moment to adjust his gear. It took precious seconds, nowhere near the fluid and near-instantaneous sight he wanted to create, but the enemy had given him an opportunity. He gave his shield a sharp spike and turned his sword into another halberd.

With a backhanded swing, Kay pierced the trapped deer's neck with his now-weaponized shield. He forced the prong of its antlers out of him with a blood push and used the same force to shoot some more out, covering the other stag's eyes. With it blinded, it was easy to run up and impale it.

The last remaining enemy, the lead stag, stood a few feet away, glaring at Kay. It hadn't moved for a few moments, and the slowly growing glowing around its antlers was an obvious sign of some kind of charge attack.

Kay grinned evilly at his enemy and held out one hand. "Too late." It was too difficult to try and manipulate blood on a moving enemy when he had to focus on more than one of them at once. But one enemy that was oh-so-nicely holding still for him? Easy. The blood he'd covered the lead stag with at the beginning of the fight shifted through its fur, and before it could finish charging whatever attack it had in store, a needle of blood shoved its way through the deer's head.

Kay glanced over towards the rest of the herd and saw them fleeing. He scanned the area for more threats, and finding nothing, he relaxed.

"Predatory deer." He muttered as he stared at the bodies. "I wonder if you taste like normal venison?"