Chương 2: Something entered His land

What if we tried to inject animals and plants with this technology? Generate mutants that can survive on other planets. Maybe even make it such that we can absorb the energy from them when we consume them to allow us to keep expanding our limits. We've gotta make sure not to mutate the insects or microorganisms though. Just imagine a mutated virus.

- From the memoirs of The First Brain, Lord Gobal KILL CONFIRMED Jupine Vinesnake (E-grade, Tier 1) Essence absorbed Grade G Tier 2 >> Grade G Tier 3 Kara sat with that for a moment. He had tiered up. It started in his chest and moved outward, warmth and a kind of clearing, his whole body briefly conferring with itself and settling on a better conclusion than the one it had been running. The arm that had been arguing with him since the spike went in called a truce.

His legs, running on borrowed time for the last hour, paid a little of it back. He could feel the edge of the next tier already, the way you feel a lit room through a shut door. One accidental kill had carried him well past what months of honest training on the water would have. He looked at his hands, flexed the fingers, and found they closed around the root beside him with a grip surer than they should have owned. He set the observation aside for a safer time.

He grit his teeth and drew the spike out of his arm, which was an experience he removed from his memory very nearly as it was happening, and bound the wound as well as one working hand could manage. He thought about the storm while he worked. He had been calling it a sudden change in weather. That was the easy answer, the one that asked nothing strange to be true. But change in weather had a before, and that storm had none, and this island sat on no map of an ocean he had spent years learning by heart.

Something had happened to him out there. He did not know what. He set it beside the invisible shrubs and the boars that should not exist on Earth, and he stood, and he walked. The philosophical implications could wait. Something had entered his land. He had known it the way he knew most things these days, with the mild interest of a man who has sat in the same chair a very long time and stopped expecting much of what wanders in.

The strong ones arrived like a hand pressed flat against glass, a pressure at the outer edge of his awareness. This was lighter than that. Lighter than nearly anything that had found its way here, and his memory ran long. None of his companions had stirred except good ol' Bodo, who was on his way to the shore before the thought had finished forming. Of course he couldn't contain his curiosity.

So he had got up from his trusty chair, stretched, and followed the trail down through the forest, wide and churned and obvious, the big guy never having learned to set a foot down softly. He found Bodo at the treeline, so still that two small birds had settled on his back and stayed there, which was a trick Bodo was quietly proud of and would demonstrate given any opportunity at all. He came up beside the mammoth and looked down.

He had put down a thought he had been turning over for sixty years to come and watch this, and so far it did not look like a good trade. The boy walked into three separate shrubs with the conviction of a man who believed the fourth would be different. He took a clearing of Martian boars at a dead sprint up the wrong tree. He took a spike clean through the forearm, considered it the way a man considers a bill he cannot pay, and kept walking with the thing still in him.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. Then he pinned a newt with that same spike, killed a vinesnake without meaning to, and his hands changed. The fingers lengthened, barely, and the last joints of them curled inward, reshaping into hands built to close around a branch and hold. It happened across two breaths, quietly, the body reading the island that had spent all day trying to kill it and rewriting a piece of itself to answer.

Beside him, Bodo's stillness developed a quality. Down in the dirt, the boy flexed his fingers once, found the grip surer than it had any business being, and set the observation aside for later. He, on the other hand, went very still. Could it be? Ten minutes passed without incident, which after the afternoon he had been having felt close to suspicious. He was starting to think again about the arm when he heard movement to his left, and from behind a trunk five metres wide a jackal stepped out. He stopped.

It was the size of a large dog and moved fluidly, a smooth pouring of grey-gold from behind the tree. Its eyes found him at once and held him, and there was more going on behind them than the word jackal had ever promised. A faint shimmer rode the edge of its body, clear even in the dim forest light. He had read about auras. He had never stood in front of one. D-grade. Three full grades above his own. He then remembered something else about jackals. They hunted in pairs. The second one came out on his right.

Both of them watched him with an expression he could only call curious. The hunger was not there yet, or it had been set aside in favour of the study, and he had the deeply uncomfortable sense of being examined against some criteria he was not aware of. He backed away slowly, keeping both in his sightline, breathing on purpose because his breathing wanted very much to make its own decisions. No sudden movement. No stare held long enough to read as a challenge.

Every scrap he knew about predators, laid down carefully. The jackals came with him, matched to his pace, closing the gap a little at a time, as if they had agreed on a method and were working through it. They drew to arm's length. He held still. The left one dipped its nose toward the spike wound, took one breath of it, and pulled back with a snort. The newt's residue, most likely. The right one moved in toward his open palm with the same careful interest. He did not mean to do it.

His hand came up before the thought had finished forming, the reflex of a body that had spent all day close to a nervous breakdown. His palm struck the jackal across the muzzle, brushing against the aura, doing no real damage. The jackal's eyes changed. It caught his hand in its jaws and bit down, teeth grinding into the meat of his palm. What followed was blistering pain. He screamed and his eyes started watering. He pulled. That just made it worse.

The other one was already moving, low and fast, and its jaws closed on his ankle through the suit and the bone snapped with a sound he felt in his teeth. His leg went out from under him. He hit the ground on his side, hard, and a hoarse cry ripped out of his throat before he could stop it. The jackal at his ankle dragged. The one at his hand let go and shifted its weight up his body, over his chest, its breath hot and stinking of old kills, and its head came down. He threw his good arm up. The muzzle drove past it.

Teeth raked his jaw, his ear, and his head cracked back against a root. The forest tilted. Grey-gold filled his vision, breath reeking of old meat, and the weight of it pinned his chest flat to the ground. The jaws opened over his throat. He really should have listened to his brother sooner.