Chương 10: Carnage ensued

The small skinned snake turned slowly over the small fire lit on top of the rock outcropping on the north-west of the island. Kevin was slowly turning the spit, while occasionally throwing a suspicious look at Nihil who was sitting on the other side of the rock, legs crossed and chin on his hand. Empty coconut shells lay scattered around, some containing water and some nothing while a large plastic tarp covered the unused half of the large rock with a few leaves scattered on top to collect extra moisture.

"You know you're the one eating the best on this island," Nihil told the ever-suspicious Kevin.

"The group still hasn't grown the balls to enter the outer circle of the jungle and hunt for insects and small animals. They just keep begging me to do it while shitting themselves to death from the coconut diet." Well, not completely true. He had seen Aliyah munch on a cricket brought to her by the animated hand once. Also, Musk had recently started looking better, indicating that the range of his mosquitoes had increased far enough to finally reach some animals that had fragile enough skin to donate blood.

He still complained like a little bitch though.

"Thanks, I guess," Kevin muttered sullenly, seemingly ungrateful to the core. He shifted his slowly healing leg to the side and finally brought the snake meat to his mouth to take a bite.

"So, what's new under the water?" Nihil asked. Kevin had the skill to share vision with his summons, although he didn't really have the ability to control them from a distance yet. Maybe that would come later. The younger man took another bite.

"The monsters are getting used to the fact that there is no point in eating my creations," he eventually said.

"More and more of them are simply leaving them alone. After all, biting into them just causes the structure to destabilise and an explosion of ink to occur in their mouth."

"Who would have thought that the depths would become explorable through the monster adaptability mechanisms," Nihil mused.

"Yes, anyway, I've also perfected the shape of an agile summon that can move quickly underwater while requiring as little material as possible," Kevin continued explaining. Nihil had seen the creature, a small eel-shaped wriggling thing that swam faster than one would expect.

"The amount of monsters I've seen continues to be limited. Twelve or so different creatures. The super piranhas, the spiked octopus, the double headed sharks. We've already gone over it many times," Kevin muttered in-between bites of the snake.

"Anything useful continues to be illusive however. I've traversed algae fields, coral reefs, underwater caves. Nothing."

"Keep looking," Nihil said causally, before shrugging.

"Or don't, I guess, it's your life. I have a suspicion that you'll know when you find what we're looking for. It will likely be very obvious. After all, creating such a dangerous environment on level 1 and then hiding the reward would be too cruel." He stood up, making to leave, before pausing.

"Oh, you wanted to show me something, right?" he asked. Kevin startled, hand in his pocket.

"What do you mean?" he asked awkwardly.

"I mean, you've been fiddling with that hard thing in the pocket of your jeans for a while now. It's a gun, right?" Nihil asked non-chalantly.

"You're not deluded enough to think you can get me with a knife, so you must have concluded that range is your friend." Kevin froze like a deer in the headlights, before slowly nodding and pulling out a small pitch-black gun from his pocket. One of those single bullet things that weren't really as inconspicuous as the creators had hoped back on earth. The employee pointed the gun right at Nihil's torso.

"Shoot me in the head," Nihil prompted instead, putting a forefinger on his forehead.

"Come on, do it." Kevin's grip on the gun shook as he readjusted his aim.

"Your ability scales with understanding, don't think I haven't seen you struggle drawing things that most people don't know the anatomy or composition of," Nihil said conversationally.

"The question now is if you understand a gun's mechanism enough to put a bullet through my brain."

"Why are you like this?" Kevin asked slowly as his grip on the gun steadied.

"How are you like this?"

"What do you mean?"

"In the pyramid, I got robbed immediately when someone thought they needed to take the pouch from me to secure their own survival." Kevin choked out, brown eyes watering.

"They stood over me, I could have retaliated. I'd taken a knife from one of the dead goblins. But I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't imagine hurting another human even under circumstances in which I believed I'd die if I didn't. How can you be so callous towards others?" Nihil stared down at Kevin as the sun dipped behind them, turning the sea golden with its evening rays and giving the scene a pinkish hue. Never in his life had Nihil felt so not threatened while having a gun pointed at his head. He tssked.

"I don't know what you lack," he eventually told the boy.

"You're either failing to let go of a set of morals that was pragmatically created to function in a society where people could thrive without killing, or you've simply too much respect for human life. People are just meat, puppets driven by instincts they barely understand to preserve that flicker of life so that they may perhaps procreate one day. What's the difference between killing someone for something they have and cutting down a tree for firewood?

The fact that in this particular case you share an outwardly similar resemblance to the tree?" He shook his head.

"Honestly, you don't have to do much more than prove yourself useful and I'll take care of these things for you. I'd say you're beyond basic agency, a perfect slave. You haven't even tried to fight back once." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Kevin looked away, lowering his gun.

"I hope you find the courage to shoot that thing one day," Nihil said seriously.

"It will prove your use in more situations and therefore increase your value in my eyes."

"I was just an art student," Kevin eventually choked out.

"Nothing I ever did prepared me for this."

"Should have learned a trade," Nihil said jokingly before turning around and taking a large inhuman leap off the rock and onto the beach where he landed and kicked up a splatter of sand. He turned his neck in a cracking motion without any sound to accompany it, sighed and entered the jungle, for the first time, in the early night. -/- Nihil moved through the jungle incredibly slowly, taking care to never step on any soft surface that could leave behind a footprint.

The roots of the large tropical trees present in the interior of the island were his biggest friends here, providing hard steps that propelled him forward, past vines, flying insects and other sorts of critters. Everything was asleep at the moment. This would be different if the island was home to any nocturnal predators, but it had been a full week since Nihil had done nothing but observe the jungle and he still hadn't seen anything to indicate the presence of any truly dangerous animals.

Naturally this wasn't the case for other humans, as they couldn't just ignore the venom that some of the creatures definitely possessed, but that, one could say, was the essence of skill gap. Through practiced steps Nihil found his way past the markings of the trees and penetrated a bit more deeply in.

During the last few days he'd noted that a fishman patrol wouldn't always come out as far as the markings, so going a bit further inland was a surefire way of forcing an encounter now that he finally deemed himself ready. It was after encountering a particularly large clearing with a small spring finishing its run in the grass that he was sure he'd found the spot. A spring was always the centrepoint of life in natural environments. Animals were forced to come here, essentially. And with the animals, the hunters.

Nihil observed the clearing which even had a small opening in its foliage through which the soft moonlight filtered through and illuminated a beautiful scene of untouched nature. He identified the tree with the most low-hanging branches which would serve to obscure him from sight but did not yet ascend it.

Instead he collected a few fallen twigs and leaves, enough to form a small mound underneath his chosen tree, before continuing his search, this time for one of the anacondas that he'd seen roaming the night in search of rats and the like many times now. The search took him deeper into the jungle, where he looked for this large snake which seemed to be the favourite food-source of the fishmen, often being seen hanging around their necks as fallen prey, but in their absence, being the largest predator in the jungle.

It took him several hours of traversing the jungle, staying clear of going further inside, until he finally found the snake crawling through the underbush in search of a night-time snack. Nihil observed the long creature from behind as it slithered towards a tree, before unceremoniously punching his arm forward and shooting it out to grab the snake by the maw, preventing it from opening its mouth.

The anaconda, naturally, didn't care for that and immediately started thrashing as he reeled it in, before enveloping his body in a crushing hug. Its long body wrapped itself around him several times over before squeezing violently. Nihil let the snake do what it wanted. He didn't have any blood flow to restrict, any organs to force into failure, or any muscle to bruise. His inner control worked to keep the threads making up his body hard and he continued his search for another anaconda.

After all, he still had one hand free. -/- The rising sun found Nihil nestled high in a large tree covered by a lot of foliage. There was one clear line of sight below him, leading directly to the small mound of leaves and twigs that he'd built. A suspicious looking structure hinting at a creature having burrowed itself inside.

Both his hands were clamped around the fanged maws and throats of two anacondas, which had long since given up on trying to constrict him into unconsciousness and now simply lay there limply in surrender. Their thick and long bodies hung across several branches which barely carried their weight. Both were massive specimens, one of them five meters in length, the other almost seven. Their bodies were thicker than his arms, but that didn't help them against his supernatural strength.

His increasing control over his threads was making him superhuman in all categories. Nihil estimated that he was about twice as strong as the strongest athlete in his weight class of cruiserweight and maybe 1. 5x times as fast. As for what he was planning on doing with the snakes? Well, that would become obvious very soon. It didn't take long for him to hear the crunching of footsteps on fallen leaves and grass and the harsh gasping gills of the fishmen.

The hunters emerged into the clearing, wary, careful, but about to make a huge mistake. Just as he'd expected, the group of three gathered around the small mound he'd created beneath the tree, unceremoniously stabbing at it with their spears. Then one of them looked up, its fishy googly eyes locking onto Nihil, although it wasn't quite clear if it could make out something that far away.

Regardless, a flying 50kg anaconda immediately slammed into the fishman and constricted around him as if its life depended on it, which from its perspective, it maybe did. Chaos immediately erupted and the fishmen startled gurgling and waving their spears around while the anaconda-afflicted one fell over and landed on the ground with a thud. Another anaconda was launched, but unfortunately missed its target and quickly found itself perforated with a spear.

The distraction was successful however, and nobody was paying attention as Nihil flew down from the tree, goblin dagger in hand, like a particularly vengeful and armed coconut. Carnage ensued.