Chapter 8: Sprint
Bright flowing blonde hair fluttered wildly in the 100MPH winds as a figure in leather body armor from shoulder to boots flew through the forest. Skylar hadn’t experienced anything this fun in his entire life. His new Glyph of Sprinting was launching him with each step, and once he got the rhythm down, he could essentially fly across the land. With Absorption, he was able to recover his magical energy in minutes. He still didn’t know what that energy was called, but that didn’t matter to him. He was really on an adventure now. The memories of his past life on Earth flashed through his mind, and the sadness of the loss was only a flicker now. He still wished he could share this wonderful experience of supernatural ability with people he cared about.
His body had been reforged from absolutely feasting on the Abomination as he crafted his armor. He could feel the strength of his actual bones from the bone broth as his feet landed on the landscape. All the hard work and suffering was worth it.
He still frowned thinking about why the beast was called a Tardigrade even though it obviously wasn’t. It had a skeleton, and inside was just muscle. That was not the biology of a Tardigrade at all. His old knowledge and mindset was slowly shifting though. It helped that he had actual magical abilities to balance his pre-conceived notions over.
His distraction had consequences at 100 miles per hour. When you’re flying through trees like you’re behind an arcade racing game screen, the mind plays weird tricks. No, you can’t press pause. Nope, there is no quicksave option before you make a risky decision like diving off a cliff of an unknown height. This time, his memories of the past and his euphoria at his abilities made him trip on a branch and fly head first into a tree that he was going to dodge. The branch he tripped on slowed him by a good amount, but he was still going highway speeds. Luckily, the impact hurt about as much as ramming your hip into the corner of an island table in the kitchen.
From his impact into the huge tree trunk, he lay face down on the ground and said, “Oops.”
He lay there for a few minutes to recover his energy. It ran out rather quickly even if he used it sparingly.
When he was done, he simply sprang back up and continued his mad dash following the compass needle in his mind toward the planetary exit waypoint. He shivered to think if the exit was going to be another portal like the first one. He really didn’t want to go through that again. But given its name of “waypoint” he figured it would be something else entirely. He decided to believe it would be the easiest part of his trip. There was no point in worrying about a problem that isn’t happening, with no evidence pointing to it happening either.
“Woohoo!” he yelled, as he did a front flip off a short cliff edge. He flew through the air and watched the ground move above his head to reveal the bright blue sky. Then the ground came back up from behind his legs and reoriented itself naturally beneath him. He had never been so comfortable seeing the world spin around him. It just didn’t cause him any harm to fall anymore. The physical toughness and strength he gained from consuming the flesh of that beast was just enormous. This allowed him to easily flip and spin on flat ground until he got it right. Overcoming his fear of breaking his neck was difficult, but he could still give himself a kink or a light injury when using his Sprint Glyph at full power.
These memories would stick with him forever. When people asked for his story, he could pull from any of these memories. All of this excitement was just the beginning. That thought was driven home when he started to see the ground shake again as he flew through the air. Instead of abject fear and shock, he was actually excited to face an Abomination this time. He pulled his black bone scimitar out of the sheath, and planted his feet to skid to a stop on the loose soil. He shook his head, wondering how he got so optimistic as to fully expect the thing not to notice him at all. Of course it could, even if he was a tiny little bug in comparison.
As the ground shook, instead of him being thrown around, he started sinking into the soil like he was standing in a sandbox. He analyzed his surroundings, and found a big clearing before a nice hill that he could get a look around with. He ripped his feet out of the ground he was sinking in, and kicked down by igniting his Sprinting Glyph once again. He shot forward, instantly going over twenty five miles an hour, and increasing rapidly up the hill. After he crossed a half mile, he stopped to see his surroundings and find out what was really going on.
His eyes landed on a creature that dwarfed the furthest mountain range he could see. It was so big, that he wondered if it could orbit around the planet, rather than being stuck as a surface dweller. As it was, he was simply too far away to tell the difference. The thing was striking the clouds with its tentacles in the far off distance.
Then, its nameplate entered his vision.
It had thirty seven skulls. “37 Skull Abomination of Futility”
He could only see the head of the thing, and had no idea how far it went across the surface of the planet. Then, a sharp eye opened glaring right at Sky. He flinched back as if he was smacked in the forehead by a baseball. It hurt about the same too. He slammed his eyes shut and screamed at the pain in his head. He took a second to double check that this was the direction he needed to go, and sure enough, his navigation panel pointed straight at the world ending terror in front of him.
Its existence was antithesis to all else.
Innumerable tentacles, mass for the sake of mass itself, and lashings that split clouds and broke sound barriers rumbled from its casual decisions.
He gripped his head and tried to resist the pressure being pushed down on him. He sat down on a nearby rock, and put himself in a calmed state to resist the pressure. It seemed to be never-ending. He almost wished that he would have been knocked out so he didn’t have to feel the crushing pressure. He had no such luck. Instead, he sat there in a meditative stance with a grimace on his face. At the very least, he knew that by the logic of the system and the magic he found himself using, he would come out the other end stronger. Well, as long as the Abomination of Futility decided not to blow up the planet or something insane.
The attack, if it could be called that, wasn’t the normal pressure he had felt from the other living Abominations. This was targeted. He briefly risked a glance toward the Abomination of Futility, and its piercing eye seemed to take it as an invitation. His lapse in focus in resisting the pressure was a detriment. A second after he made eye contact, he was ripped from his body. His mind was flooded with images that he couldn’t look away from. He was a consciousness floating in a void, being shown something.
A four dimensional object that refused to be comprehended was lay bare in front of him. For some reason, seeing the details of something he couldn’t understand caused him actual pain. As soon as he felt like he scratched the surface of understanding, the image was revoked and replaced with another. Several universe bubbles were smashed together in a soup, roiling like four different colored oils in water. Just because a blue oil bubble was inside a glob of green oil didn’t make the blue universe part of the green. It was just higher in proximity. But what was the water or medium that it all flowed through? Then, a cosmic hand with an uncountable number of needle and threads pierced each individual bubble of every spec of the different oils and colorful pieces, binding them somewhat in place. There were still orbs freely traveling around without thread. Some of the orbs even dissipated entirely. A flash of light cracked him in the mind and soul. He forgot to resist the mental barrage due to his curiosity. He doubled down and shut his metaphorical eyes as new images appeared. He ignored them despite his curiosity about what concepts they might hold.
When the pain subsided, he opened his eyes and took note of the suns position and guessed that he had been bracing against the gaze of such a being for a couple of hours. To his surprise, the eye was still glaring at him. Then to his absolute horror, another sixteen identical eyes at the top of the creature opened up to glare at him harder. The image of the Abominations multiple eye gaze was burned into the back of his eyelids as he screamed again in pain.
He felt himself being knocked unconscious, and then the pain of his absent undefended mind and soul was so bad that it woke him back up, only to flash grand images of such a complexity that it was only painful for him. He lost track of time, and endured the best he could. Blood once again poured out of his eyes and down his face, and out of other places too. His skin started to sweat blood, and the pain was extending deep into his soul. There’s no way he would give up though. This was the kind of thing he just had to endure. There was no other option. He needed to push back or he would be crushed by its presence. In between the suffering, he noticed time passing. The sun set, and the next thing he knew it was dark. He didn’t have much spare mental energy to think about it, but when he eyes flicked open every couple hours he had noticed he was unconscious for long stretches of time.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Plink. The sound of the notification in his mind brought him back from his meditative focus on defending his mind and soul. Red lightning shook the entire sky in a single crash that made him jump out of his skin. He had never seen weather like that before. He had been here so long with only bright sunny days. He laughed a little that he was more afraid of bad weather than looking into the eyes of a potentially reality shattering monstrosity. He ran his fingers through his knotted up hair. He had fell over and gotten dried leaves stuck in it.
“Title Upgraded. The Title of Crushed by Abomination has now become, Rebirth by Abomination. He tabbed into the title upgrade, to read it. "What was once a life-threatening injury has now become something else. You have tempered your soul against the Aura of many Abominations, and then you have tempered it further by the gaze of something that can take a bite out of a universe for sustenance. The strength of your presence, and mind, shall reflect that.”
He could only assume the entity was gone now, given that it was too dark to see. Judging by the title, this was most likely a gift from the entity rather than an attempted attack. There was no doubt in Skylar’s mind that if it wanted, he would have been insta-killed.
The sheer vastness in size alone of it made him feel insignificant like never before. On one hand it was relieving, making all the problems he had ever faced in life not even be considered problems in comparison. But on the other hand it was a sad feeling of futility. No wonder it held that as its namesake. He laughed. Here he was not even a few months ago worried about whether or not to drink a soda like it was a life altering decision, and now he was basically looking into the eyes of a God. He really wished he could drink a hot cup of coffee though. His motivation to get to a more stable universe was wholly renewed after this experience. He figured if Earth could go so long without some kind of wild incursion from a monster like that, then so could another planet.
Lightning that filled the entire sky cracked again, illuminating the forest and mountains in a hellish red. The flash allowed him to get a glimpse of the mountain range where the Abomination was, and sure enough it had disappeared somewhere. In response to the darkness, he held his right palm forward and lit his flashlight. He made it more like a stadium light, that just lit everything in front of him for a quarter mile bright as day. His energy regeneration could keep up with some mild expenditures like that.
He could still use his Sprinting Glyph to launch himself forward, but he didn’t go all that fast in the dark even if he could use his flashlight. He didn’t want to misinterpret something and end up falling into a pit of lava or something ridiculous. After all the work he had put in, he wanted to survive this whole thing. Besides, the terrain was pretty rocky to get more than a couple solid footfalls in a row.
Something at the top of the light started to fall down toward him. He slammed his feet down and slid to a stop and pointed the light upward. It was snowing. A blizzard began like the snap of someone’s fingers with no more warning than the clouds in the sky. The ice and snow came down like he was in Antarctica. The normally mild temperatures of the night grew so cold that his sweat formed into ice and broke apart into ice flakes for the first couple swings of his arm.
With how things suddenly changed, he was glad he had a normal amount of ability to see through the darkness. His eyes weren’t adjusted to the darkness because he was using a super bright light, but being completely blind in the dark hadn’t been a problem since he ate the Tardigrade eye. He noticed most of the affect in his eye’s durability, rather than sight.
“Some kind of flash freeze?” He shivered, and looked at the already accumulated six inches of snowfall wondering what to do. His magically toughened body could handle a lot, but this level of cold was going to make him freeze before the night was over. He knew he couldn’t count on the storm to end just due to the sun rising in the morning either. This was freak weather, and it followed no rules that he knew of. The wind started blowing the snow sideways, and he started shivering in earnest.
There was nothing else to do. He needed shelter immediately. With that, he took his already numb fingers and started digging through the soil. To his strength and toughness, it was like loose top soil despite there being fist sized rocks and clay packed in. He dug like a dog, scooping dirt back between his legs as far as he could throw it. He dug and dug, and then remember something. He smacked himself in the forehead for forgetting something so obvious. He could start a fire with infrared light, so he could also easily warm himself up with infrared light too. He just needed to make it more diffuse.
His put his hands facing each other, and started to ignite his Glyph of Light with the specific minor runes surrounding it to create infrared energy. It was a somewhat automatic process, driven by his intentions. Immediately his opposite hand started smoking and he yelped in pain. He decided to experiment by heating the small hole he dug in the ground. He started getting ideas of making a natural hot tub with all this snow and heat, but shook his head. He didn’t have enough energy to generate that kind of overwhelming heat in such a cold place. He held both hands out and focused. The Glyph ignited, and he poured out a diffuse infrared light downward. Instantly the snow that was there melted into water and ran down the gentle slope. He adjusted it a little bit more to a wider area of affect, and then sat with his back down into the small dugout.
Just as his shivering started to subside, a screech blared out above him loud enough to bust his ear drums. The sound made ringing buzzing sounds in his ear drums as they burst open. To see what it was, he turned both palms up and let out two bright stadium lights of visible white light.
All he saw next was a house sized talon coming directly at him, and up from there was a birds leg for the next fifty feet. The body of a very large eagle shown behind the thick snowfall in the bright light. There was too much snow to make out much else before the talon slashed across the ground he was half buried under. It’s single slash cut across the ground, and into both of his legs before he could react. He felt the talon rip into his thighs and skip across his newly hardened bones before they continued to cut through the soil. If he hadn’t been underneath the soil line, the impact of those talons would have cut his legs clean off.
He screamed in pain and jetted all the energy he could from his Soul Orb into two tight beams of infrared energy. He didn’t have any other option. His screams were muted, due to his ears being blown out. But even then, he didn’t recognize the sounds coming out of his mouth. He couldn’t see anything due to using only infrared, so he switched one hand to a tight beam of visible light to find the eyes of this bird. It was circling him overhead, getting ready to swoop down. It landed a hundred feet away, and that’s when the nameplate triggered in his vision.
A single skull began the name, “(1 Skull) Infantile Bird of Prey Abomination.”
“An infant?!” he yelled out.
He started to get short of breath and lightheaded. He realized he was going to bleed out at this rate. His infrared fire-starting laser started searing his flesh together as quickly as he could manage it. Cauterization was nasty business, but it was also really fast in the circumstances. Within moments, his wounds were desperately bad but not actively bleeding everywhere. He only knew basic first aid, but he also knew that anything he could do to stop from bleeding out needed to happen immediately.
The infant took thundering footsteps toward him in a jog, getting ready to peck him out of the ground like a worm. He brought back up his stadium light and infrared laser. As it approached, he focused the thick laser of infrared light into its eye. It flinched back but kept approaching. Once that eye was fully closed, he targeted the other eye. That’s when it stopped and screeched again and shook its head. It rubbed its face on its wing to try and fix its eyes, and it would probably recover soon. This was his one and only chance.
He used his Empowered Strike on his fingers like claws and rolled over despite the bloody mess from his eviscerated and cooked thighs. He screamed again at the pain the motion caused but used his upper body to dig with all his might. The bird was still thundering its footsteps but didn’t seem to be moving from its current location all that much. An idea struck him. How did this bird even find him? Did it have thermal vision? Was it the one that made everything cold and snowy in order to find its warm-blooded prey? With that, he had nothing to lose by shooting some heat in another direction.
He focused his heat laser for a couple agonizing and terrifying seconds to the nearest tree, or where he thought the tree was. That turned out to be a good decision. The bird was starting to recover and reacted to the new heat signature. With his ears blasted out, he could only imagine the sound. The ground rumbled and crunched from the direction of the tree he lasered. He figured he didn’t have any more time to dig, and dove face first into the hole. Then he grabbed his legs by the broken leather pieces and yanked them in despite the pain. He was still partially above ground.
His fingers, with Empowered Strike, collapsed the walls on the small hole he dug, and he tried to bury his head with big rocks to maybe leave him some room to breathe. He pulled in snow to bury on top of himself, which luckily was also coming down inches at a time. The bird outside his little grave was rampaging around at everything. He left a single hand out of the dirt to continue to heat up the surrounding ground. He led the bird away into the distance slowly like a cat with a laser pointer.
He sure hoped that would be enough, because he was completely out of energy to make any more heat or light. He was feeling beat up and completely spent. After that experience, he simply was unable to hold onto his consciousness any longer and passed out. His final thoughts were hopeful. He hoped that he could reach his destination and find some people to adventure with him. People to have his back, and to have fun with. His very last thought was of his girlfriend back home, and the way that they used to tease each other.
