BXBX NOVEL Chapter 185 - Growing Pain
The group continued back on their Amphiboards, getting lost a few times in the process. The sun kept moving across the sky and the fog kept thinning. By now, they could make out everything in a two-hundred-foot radius around them. If something jumped out at them, it was given a brutal death by either Elero or Frey before being tossed to the dirt or stuffed into a spatial ring. Doevm and Thomas sighed whenever it happened.
The second Frey got past the string still wrapped around their improvised campsite, he lay down on his Amphiboard and covered himself in spare clothes: "Someone else take the first shift." He closed his eyes and let his tired body relax. The rest looked down at him in a moment of collective, silent envy.
The moment was broken however, when Thomas got off his Amphiboard. He reached into his bloody clothes and withdrew two spatial rings other than the one he was wearing. He tried to say something in between smiling, chuckling nervously, and looking at the ground.
"What is it Thomas?" Elero asked as she sat on her own Amphiboard and began disassembling her braces. Each piece, she wiped off before putting it into her spatial ring. "Did you find something shiny?"
"W-well I\'m not proud of this…" Thomas scratched the back of his head. "but yes, I stole something shiny. Two things for that matter." Elero narrowed her eyes at the two spatial rings in his hands. Then the realization set in. "I knew I wouldn\'t be able to take anyone down, and I figured I should at least do something useful. The only things of values they had which were free game were their spatial rings, so I sort of…took them." He put them on and dumped out the contents at the center of the camp, which amounted to over a dozen corpses and a rolled up piece of parchment.
"Where…" Elero\'s eyes went wide. "You didn\'t!" She reached over and pat him on the back so hard that he almost stumbled into the pile of corpses. "Good job you slick bastard."
"Bastard?" Thomas scrunched up his eyebrows. "Um…thank you?" He stepped back from the pile and put on a fake smile.
Doevm turned the piece of parchment over and acted like he was breaking the wax seal even though he had already done so before. "Whose finger did you get this off of again?"
"This stuff is mostly from Gregen," Thomas kept his nervous smile up like a wall to hide his guilt. "He was a dick to me so I took it when I grappled him. That maybe, just maybe…had a slight probability of why I got cu…You know what? Nevermind. It\'s not important." He let out another nervous chuckle and hid his face behind his shirt. "I\'m sorry. Liz always says I should not steal but I always got so bored back at that stinking house. How else was I supposed to have fun?" He took his head out of his shirt only to be met with Elero\'s glare. "I gave their stuff back, eventually."
"Good job." Doevm unrolled the map and prodded Frey awake.
Just like the map with bobcats, this one had a specific section of the swamp, a system of caves in the west-most side, in high detail, while the rest of the map was blurred out. On the left of the caves was a drawing of a venomous salamander, its footprints, a description, and point value: "Venomous Salamander. Currently unknown how they got to that size but they are highly toxic and a single prick can be lethal. While highly doubtful that they are a mutant, the mutant bonus combined with the rare point value still applies, making this a "times six" value target."
"We are still in the game," Doevm laughed. "But first, you guys should rest. I\'ll take the first shift."
"You know," Elero said as she finished taking off her last brace. "I think I\'m starting to like this group. Besides Doevm referring to humans as if he isn\'t apart of them, which is extremely weird by the way, I think I\'ll stick with you guys after initiation. If you don\'t mid that is."
"Thank you, Miss Mech," Thomas said. "We\'ll need it."
"Just Elero is fine." She wrapped her legs in a blanket and shut her eyes. Thomas went to sleep under a pile of clothes. Frey soon began snoring. Only then did Doevm move.
He placed all items into his spatial ring and put his head in his hands.
…
"Lich, kill it!" The mob cheered louder than their prayers to that accursed goddess which demanded his death. They cried out with increasing fury. Ten minutes later and they were silent as the Undead soldiers which Doevm kept around his library.
…
"How could I spar with you?" The fifth person Doevm had asked to spar with him cried. "You killed my family, slaughtered my village, and trampled the ashes for an ounce of magical power. You should suffer for all eternity."
…
Doevm glanced down at Frey\'s sleeping figure. \'I\'m going to have to tell him some day, a day I can\'t keep delaying for much longer. How did he resist? He followed the first two commands - to freeze and lay down - but why did the third order, to forget, fail? All theories point to that protective layer. Either he\'s using the small part of my soul he inherited to block it, or the hero\'s power. I would like to test how much it can defend, but that\'s risky. I already had to use magic once. If I could just isolate him somewhere and run a couple experiments, I could think of something, some way to keep manipulating him and finally get his head straight.\'
He sat down and opened his notebook, which he pulled out of his spatial ring. "Side experiment. Subject Frey failed to follow the third command issued by soul mana: to forget. While greater amounts proved useful, it\'s clear the more I order him around, the more of a resistance he builds, whether he knows it or not. While the simple solution would just be to tell him, I don\'t trust him to keep a secret. Or maybe I can use soul magic to keep his mouth shut. However, if he resists one thing, who is to say he won\'t resist another command? Either path is a risk, but I need his power for the future, for when I finally take her down. Further experiments pending."
He flipped the page, then a few dozen more until he got nearly halfway through his little notebook, and sighed. "Learning to heal, trial number forty." He glanced at the cut on his finger, which had yet to heal. He moved the quill along the page: "Any combination of the old techniques proved to be ineffective. No combination of strengthening, defense, or speed seemed to be any help, so now I am forced to attempt new measures. Now I attempt to "breath" within wounded area, which I can only define in words as applying a rhythmic pressure to the area." He put the journal and quill into his spatial ring and closed his eyes.
\'Breath in,\' he thought to himself. \'breath out, just like meditation when gathering mana. Now condense.\' Life essence wafted off of his body. He willed it, and all of his life essence moved to the wound on his finger. Blood sprayed out when he applied pressure, but when he inhaled and released the pressure, the flow of blood stopped, and any blood in the area retracted. That went on for several cycles until part of the ground was covered in his blood. He halted the experiment and wrote down the results before trying again, this time with more pressure. That too, was a failure. The next trial he tried less pressure. When Doevm opened his eyes and inspected the wound, he couldn\'t find one. It was gone. However, most of his life essence was gone as well. He frowned before taking his book and quill out.
He flipped through the pages and wrote down the results before glancing at all the blood on the ground. \'It\'s a shame to waste it.\' He dipped his hand in the small pool and moved life essence to his fingers. To his dismay, the life essence didn\'t move to his blood, which he recorded in another page of notes. All trials stopped from there because his life essence flickered out of existence.