Chương 3: Chapter Three: Taxonomy

The peltwalker was a menace. It walked through the empty streets of the village, trashing anything that moved. It was, literally, a thing possessed, driven only to hunt and bite. Hollis could have shot it from where he was on the roof. His bolt action rifle was accurate and reliable. However, experience had taught him important lessons about peltwalkers. The first he had seen had been a coyote or a small wolf possessing a deer.

Its pelt was so degraded he couldn't exactly tell what it was, but he had heard folk wisdom about the monsters. Best skin anything with sharp teeth, or it will skin itself and then come skin you for good measure, NPCs had said about the beasts. Once the creature caught a human's scent, it was a homing missile. He had to take it out before it caught a whiff of him. He set his rifle up against a stained chimney and set his backpack down afterward.

Then, he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a long, thin flax cord with a leather patch in the center. It was an old-fashioned sling—a David and Goliath classic. He only had twenty rounds for his rifle and twice that many for his revolver. Ammunition was heavy and precious. It was for an emergency. This didn't rise to that level. He reached over to the chimney and pried loose a chunk of mortar about the size of a golf ball. Then, he crept closer to the rampaging beast across the street.

It had found a packrat. Those silly, intelligent rats were fun to watch and hard to kill, but the peltwalker seemed like it was going to get the job done. It growled, making a sound that Hollis heard in his neck and bones, rather than his ears. The packrat squeaked desperately like it was trying to reason with the monster. That didn't seem to work. The undead wolf attacked, and the packrat quickly began rubbing its stomach and ribs. It would have looked ridiculous if Hollis didn't know what it was doing.

Suddenly, before the wolf could get its flapping jaws or the boar's muzzle around the rodent, a cascade of items appeared from nowhere, blocking its bite. The items were the packrat's precious collection. Wood scraps, shredded cloth, straw, and a large leather boot. There were other things that Hollis couldn't see. It had kept them in its strange, invisible, metaphysical pouch. The clever rats would dump their stash to distract incoming predators. Hollis had fallen for that trick himself when playing the game.

The common advice was to kill it quickly and not touch its underside until it was dead, or it might store your hand in its dimensional pouch permanently. The peltwalker was fooled completely. The leather boot was just as satisfactory a reward as any prey would be. It began tearing at the leather while the packrat scurried away with a high-pitched chuckle. The peltwalker was stupid. The packrat was smart, for an animal. As fun as it was to see, that matchup usually went the other way.

Fierce, aggressive creatures eventually got their meal. Hollis climbed down the side of the building he had been standing on while the peltwalker was distracted. He prepared to launch the chunk of mortar with his sling. He remembered the procedure for killing the beast in the game. It was time to see if he could do it in real life. He walked closer, but not too close, until the peltwalker sniffed the air stupidly a few times and turned to see him. Swing. Swing. Launch. [Marksmanship lvl. 6].

He hit the beast right in the nose. The mortar chunk exploded as the hog seemed to regain control long enough to launch itself onto its back, attempting to scrape the wolf pelt off. It was a hopeless effort. Then, Hollis dropped his sling and ran as fast as he could toward the creature, his hatchet raised. When he got to it, he struck it again with the back of his hatchet, the blunt side. The trick with this beast was remembering not to kill the host animal.

As long as the host, the boar in this case, was alive, it could fight the wolf's influence. It could feel pain or be stunned. Once the animal died, the peltwalker transformed into a rampaging beast that would tear its host animal apart, trying to kill the hunter. Hollis knew that well. He didn't even need the inspector screen to tell him. He had learned it in the game.

He grabbed hold of the pelt and began tearing it from the hog's body as fast as he could, using his hatchet to cut through any fused fibers or hairs. Within a minute, he had rid the poor creature of its tormenter and thrown the possessed pelt to the ground, where its skull and upper jaw still tried to gobble him up. He stepped on it hard with his boot. He had captured the pelt, but it was too late for the boar. The animal was on its side, breathing deeply.

It tried to get up when it saw the nearby human, but it couldn't. Hollis could smell the rot on the poor swine. He could see where the flesh of the beast had gone putrid. It had been possessed too long. The pelt that had enslaved it was the only thing keeping it alive at that point. [Naturalism lvl. 5] You see a dying spiny boar. It is riddled with infection and disease. Hollis stowed his hatchet and took out his fixed-blade knife.

He needed to put the dying creature out of its misery, and so he did with one quick jab. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. As for the pelt, it was trying to crawl away. He couldn't have that. He grabbed the thing, careful not to get bitten, and began rolling the pelt up, making sure the skull, claws, and any other meaty part still attached were inside the roll.

He grabbed a small length of tarred twine from his jacket pocket and tied the rolled pelt down tight. He didn't know why he was doing it. In the game, there were NPCs who would pay money for this creature. It was an undead spirit monster, after all. No one remained to buy it from him now, but he still slid it into his backpack once he had retrieved it from the roof. All wrapped up, the creature was silent. As long as it wasn't stimulated, it would be fine. He considered how he could use the undead monster.

He knew it had magical and medical properties that could be exploited. Unfortunately, there was no way for him to train up that type of knowledge back on Earth. The inspector told him as much. [Taxonomy lvl. 1] This creature is a parasite. Best steer clear. Taxonomy was the skill that allowed explorers to understand an animal's magical and biological traits, which branched off from one another. Parasite was one such trait. Possession was likely an offshoot of that.

He would need to improve his Taxonomy to get a better understanding of the pelt and its uses. As for the boar, he could do nothing with the meat. If cooked, it would satisfy his hunger, but it would cost more Bile, risking serious illness. The iron bristles that could usually be harvested from the hog had long fallen out due to prolonged sickness. Food would be a problem eventually. The inspector reminded him he was hungry every five minutes. While he was hungry, passive healing wasn't possible.

It was shelter, though, that was most important. The sun had not pierced the clouds since he had gotten to Periapt, but as the light faded, he knew sunset was near. The question was where he should hole up for the night. There were plenty of abandoned buildings with no one to complain if he camped out. That only made the situation more unsettling. Where did the people go? Periapt had its wonders, but it was a bleak world for settlers. Practicality and safety were always part of their decision-making.

The luxuries of civilized life were a distant dream. He had seen these people take to the streets and arm themselves against all manner of beast that invaded the village. Had they gone into the forest to follow the ancient trail inward, where dangers abound, and mankind needed strength in numbers, or had they escaped back out to sea, to the islands surrounding Periapt, where their ancestors had fled centuries ago?

The many ships in the harbor, smashed and sunken for the most part, made it less likely that they had fled by water. What could have scared them from their homes? While he contemplated this, Hollis caught sight of a marvelous glowing light in the distant fields outside of town. The fields had been prime hunting and farming grounds once, but now they had gone wild again. The light danced brilliantly, and a hundred other lights joined it in the dusk. A message appeared on the inspector.

Eleventh of Summer, 10 o' 8 o' 3 Saw the fireflies and glowbugs around Beckett's Sound from the ship tonight. Wish the captain had let me visit the city. The lights are so bright and numerous that it's like the stars are reaching down from the sky. Oh, I wish I could see it up close. Sometimes the inspector would quote someone writing a journal about their time in Periapt. This was the first one Hollis had received since arriving in person.

He figured it must have been a really old entry, as Beckett's Sound hadn't been a proper city in over 300 years. Things really must have changed. While the yellow, orange, blue, and green dancers were beautiful in the gray light, they could never have been compared to stars in the sky. There were too few. No one from a ship in the harbor would have been able to see them. Yet, they entranced Hollis.

All he knew about them was that if he clicked on them while playing the game, they got smushed and harvested for their glowing innards that could be used to make weapons glow in the dark. It had been very jarring when he first did it by accident. In these forests at night, a hunter would do anything for a bit of light. He didn't want to squish them this time. He wanted to watch them. They were the only sign of life he had seen so far in Beckett's Sound that wasn't brutal or dangerous.

There were different types of glowbugs. Some glowed with the heat of fire, others with sparks of electricity, others seemed to glow by nothing but magic. Some were big, others small. Each of them danced desperately, yet gracefully, in the fading evening light. [Naturalism lvl. 5] There are Sparksteppers, Jackaround Wasps, Night Walk Moths, and Trickerwisps, among others, in the swarm. Something swooped down from a nearby tree and harassed the swarm. It wasn't trying to eat them.

It was siphoning their collective spirit like some sort of vampire. The creature was bat-like and, to look at it, composed of pure darkness. It was one of the many things that made night so dangerous in Periapt. The glowbugs were not without protectors, though. One such insect, a large, defiant Ghost Light Beetle, had a neat little trick where it could cast its light away from its body in a dancing, flickering bulb. The illusion only lasted a few moments, but it managed to distract the bat.

Soon, the predator would squeal angrily as its feasting came up empty, then turn around and get distracted by another illusory ball of light shot by the same bug. Other bugs would join in defending the swarm, but they were more concerned with whatever mating ritual they were performing. That first Ghost Light Beetle, though, it squared off against the shadowy bat like a matador, never giving quarter.

"He's dying, you know," a soft voice said from beside him. Hollis jumped away, unholstering his revolver in a flash and aiming at the speaker. When he saw who it was… or what it was, he dropped the gun to the ground out of sheer awe. It was a woman, by shape. Flowing hair that glowed a soft bioluminescent green-white, a body that seemed almost made of starlight, but from a dying, fading star. She floated a foot off the ground, looking tired and morose. Hollis couldn't move himself to speak.

He couldn't hold back the tears her presence evoked. She was beautiful, but not in the way a woman was often thought to be beautiful. She was beautiful like a shooting star or a waterfall. She was beyond anything Hollis had ever seen. And she was so very weary.

"He flies weakly. Look at him," she said without moving her mouth.

"Such a brave soul, a good soul, don't you think?" As soon as Hollis' wits returned enough for him to register the question and look over at the little beetle, still fighting the bat, he realized he had fallen to his knees.

"He's protecting his own," Hollis said through a stutter as he tried to find the woman's eyes but failed to make them out in all the light.

"Valor is a trait found in too few of my charges," she said.

"I taught them to love beauty, and I thought that would make them brave, but a love of beauty does not make every soul brave. No two souls are the same. If they were, I would hope for two like his." Hollis managed to find his feet again as he stared from the glowing woman to the beetle she was so captivated with. He glanced in the back of his mind at the inspector. [Folklore lvl. 1] The Lambent Maiden has appeared before you. Hollis didn't need to read any further. He knew how this worked. She was an eidolon.

Not a god, not a monster. He had seen eidolons before. The Rat King could be found in the ruins of old Beckett's Sound. He had met him twice while gathering rat pelts in the game. This was different. The Lambent Maiden was angelic, even if she did look sickly at that moment, with chunks of hair missing and a fading countenance. He knew why she was there. She had come to him for the same reason as the Rat King or any other eidolon of the animals and plants of Periapt. The Lambent Maiden was there to barter.