Blessed Time: The Complete Series: (A LitRPG Adventure Box Set), page 90
The spell saved him. Maybe not from death, but at least from a painful wound. For a fraction of a second, burning agony filled his body as a superheated boulder crashed into his lower back. Then Micah found himself pulled a handful of seconds back in time.
As soon as he found himself back in control of his body, Micah kicked with both of his feet, clearing the area just before the rock splashed down in the now empty water. Shaking his head, Micah began swimming once again.
There was no way of knowing how many hours he had been unconscious or even which direction he was swimming. All Micah knew was that he needed to clear the area so that he could at least try and tell his general direction by the sun or stars.
Hours passed into days. At some point, Micah began to wonder if he was going insane as time lost all meaning. While awake, he would swim aimlessly, far under the water’s surface, trying his hardest to stay in a straight line. When he grew tired, Micah would approach the surface with temporal stutter active and sleep facedown, letting the waves carry him.
Micah had no way of knowing whether it was day or night. In the soot-choked twilight, he had no way of measuring time. Each bout of wakefulness could have lasted anywhere between forty-five minutes to a dozen hours. All Micah knew was that he was alone with his thoughts for an interminable amount of time.
At first, he tried to think about his next steps: how he would find his friends, what he would need to do to rid them of the Third Prince’s nagging influence, and what enchantments he wanted on his new spear. That kept him occupied for… some time.
Then his thoughts began to run together. One minute Micah would be brainstorming where he would source reagents for a new enchantment, and the next he would be worrying about whether his companions were safe. Before long, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t make himself focus on the “what ifs” buzzing through his head. The darkness began to close in on him.
Instead, he began counting his strokes as he swam. For a while, that also kept him occupied. Whenever Micah imagined something brushing against his leg in the inky water, he would push it from his mind, forcing his attention onto the physical act of swimming and trying to keep his place in the count.
He lost his count a handful of times. Rather than try and guess whether he was at fifteen thousand, one hundred or fifteen thousand, one hundred and fifty, Micah just restarted from scratch. At some point the numbers began to slither around in his mind, echoing off either side of his skull as the repetitive activities drove him half-mad.
Eventually, Micah’s hunger and thirst began to gnaw at him. Even if refresh could take the edge off, his body still needed sustenance. Unfortunately for Micah, the local marine life was far smarter than him. As best he could tell, there wasn’t a fish, turtle, shark, or monster anywhere nearby.
Finally, just as he was starting to go delirious from thirst, light began to filter from above. Micah swam upward, popping his head through the surface. The air was hazy and tasted like smoke as it attacked his lungs, but for the first time in days, it didn’t send Micah straight into a coughing fit.
A glance upward found the sun, blood red through the volcanic ash that choked the air. Micah licked his lips, reorienting himself so that he was facing west once more before resuming his interminable swimming.
Later that day, he caught a break. A flock of seagulls passed overhead, and between flight and air knife, Micah was able to harvest an easy half-dozen of the plump birds. There wasn’t anywhere to stop and cook the meat, so Micah ate them raw.
It should have been disgusting, but honestly, the damp, slimy meat was the best thing he’d ever tasted. It didn’t matter that the food was bony and musty. Moisture and calories filled his body, dispelling some of the gloom that had begun to cloud over him.
The next morning, Micah was awoken by his first sunrise in a while. The air was still polluted by the results of the mass eruption, turning the morning rays of light an angry red, but it improved his mood immeasurably. To his right, what Micah believed to be the north, the cloud of volcanic ash and dust was a smear that blotted out most of the horizon.
He rolled over in the water, angling himself between the rising sun and the roiling, toxic cloud. The Amelia had been almost right on course to land in Jakint when he’d been forced to lead the Maarikava away, and it had been almost in the center of the Serpent’s Teeth. If Micah were to the south of the volcanos now, that could only mean that his time in the darkness had knocked him off course.
This time, when he began swimming, Micah was able to see his progress. He cut through the waves, powerful arms pulling him toward his destination three to four times faster than the Amelia could ever hope to travel.
In a way, not being slowed by the ship was a blessing. His Body attribute was incredibly high, with all but the rarest close-combat classes lagging behind its development. More often than not, Micah’s largest limiting factor when he exerted force wasn’t his actual strength, but rather the durability of the tool he was using.
Technically, the fastest way to cross the Emerald Ocean would have been a smaller galley that Drekt and he could row. The only problem would be enchanting the wood to survive the titanic forces that Micah could exert. Even with his armor, half of the reason he enchanted it for durability was so that his movements in combat wouldn’t deal more damage to the scales.
That night, Micah was woken by a shark. It had been pushed into a frenzy by the bird blood drenching his chest until it attacked his sleeping form. Well, attack might have been the wrong word. The creature was certainly trying to gnaw on his torso, but its teeth couldn’t penetrate the Maarikava’s scales. Instead he just felt pressure as its fangs clicked off of the rock-hard scales layering his chest.
Even without a weapon, his hands were more than enough to tear the shark apart. He’d spent so long fighting higher-level monsters—either dungeon escapees or in the dungeons themselves—that he’d almost forgotten about normal animals.
His first punch tore through its rubbery skin. The second crunched through cartilage, embedding Micah’s fist deep in the shark’s body. It twitched once before going still.
Once again, Micah ate his fill, more interested in the moisture from the meat than the food itself. He was still parched by the time he finished, but at least the pounding dehydration headache abated some.
Then, like every other day, he cast panacea on himself, purging his body of any illness or parasites, and began swimming. The blood would draw more sharks, and even if he could handle them, it would only serve to delay Micah further.
Finally, on the fourth day after he left the still-visible cloud of volcanic ash, the shore came into view. A steady line of verdant green stretched across the horizon—clearly not the red granite cliffs that Jakint was built into, but a welcome sight nonetheless.
That night, Micah didn’t sleep. He kept swimming by starlight, aiming for the growing coastline. By noon the next day, he’d arrived, washing up on a white-sand beach thirty or so paces from the beginning of a massive rainforest. Trees towered above him, each of them almost as tall as the largest growths in his grove back in Pereston.
He staggered ashore, stumbling on unsteady legs toward a nearby river that emptied a torrent of fresh water into the Emerald Ocean. Micah fell to his hands and knees, taking in great gulps of the water as he tried to ignore the pounding dehydration headache that blurred his vision and churned his gut.
Nearby, a large turtle surfaced, cautiously eating some sort of kelp as it kept an eye on Micah. Birds chittered and flitted from branch to branch in the canopy far above him, undisturbed by the noisily slurping human.
After what felt like twenty minutes of drinking, Micah stopped, once again casting panacea to ward off any infection. Technically, he could have just boiled the water—a high-tier Wood magic spell was more than overkill for the sort of naturally occurring diseases he might encounter—but after his long time in the ocean, Micah wasn’t inclined to wait.
He rolled over, muscles aching and eyes drooping. More than anything, he just wanted to nap after his long swim, but just as he was closing his eyes, Micah saw it.
A dagger made of fine steel, a wavy pattern set in its blade, lay half-buried in the mud of the riverbank next to an unmistakable human footprint.
Wearily, Micah pulled himself to his feet. He might be lost and in danger, but he wasn’t alone. Reaching down, he picked up the dagger and tucked it into his belt. If he had neighbors, it was better to find them and introduce himself while awake and prepared. He’d prefer not to wake up with a blade to his throat or tied to a tree.
THIRTEEN
MAKING FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
A monkey chittered angrily at Micah, glaring at him as it clung to a branch. He glanced up from the muddy footprint he was inspecting to look at the angry ball of fur. Briefly, Micah considered bringing it down with a spell and actually having a cooked meal, but he quickly rejected the idea. The prints in the soil were fresh, and smoke might bring unwanted attention. If he was going to find his mysterious neighbor and make a good impression, the time to do so was now.
He lifted the fern that the track was hiding under to get another look. Micah hardly had the tools or experience with tracking that Ravi did, but he’d spent a fair amount of time outside of Basil’s Cove hunting big game in his third and fourth timelines. It wasn’t enough for his status sheet to record the knowledge as an official skill, but he could tell that his quarry was barefoot and running from the way the ball of their feet sank into the wet dirt.
The monkey screamed again. Pacing Micah, it jumped from branch to branch above him, screeching in alarm every time he stopped to check for more tracks. Once again, Micah wondered what the annoying animal would taste like roasted, but he quickly returned to his primary concern: looking for broken branches and disturbed vegetation that might yield him another footprint.
Micah found another marking, a smear where his target had slipped in the mud, just beneath a dead and rotting tree that hadn’t yet fallen. He reached down and touched the dirt, frowning as he tried to make sense of the print. There were toe marks, and a nearby indentation from a palm where they had fallen, so he knew the results were from a person. At the same time, their tumble had ruined the tracks, leaving him a bit lost.
Then the monkey abruptly went silent. Micah frowned, looking up just in time to see a flash of orange as a figure poked out from behind a tree to fire an arrow at him.
He jerked his head to the side, letting the projectile zip past his face even as he mouthed the words to haste. His spell went off, and Micah sprang into motion just as his opponent fired another arrow. This time, he didn’t even bother to dodge, letting it shatter against his new armor. He kicked the tall woman in the stomach, doubling her over from the force of the blow.
Before she could react, Micah slammed his shoulder into her, knocking the woman to the ground and pinning her to the muddy soil with his left hand while he held the knife he’d picked up by the river to her throat with his right.
She stared up at Micah, eyes wild and chest heaving, as she tried to struggle out of his grasp. Whoever she was, she was strong—clearly the beneficiary of a physical combat class—but her struggles were far from enough to unseat Micah. He pressed the knife down, drawing a bead of blood on her neck as the edge broke through her ochre skin.
“Wait!” the woman interjected, going still as soon as she realized that she wasn’t breaking free of Micah’s grasp anytime soon. “You’re not from the Roktoll tribe. I didn’t mean to shoot you!”
“You did a pretty good job of shooting me for someone who didn’t mean to,” Micah responded dryly, not moving from her chest.
“No, I tried to shoot you,” she tried again frantically, Adam’s Apple bobbing under the knife to her throat. “I just didn’t realize that you weren’t with the Roktoll ambush party. I was out gathering mirage hawk tail feathers for fletching when a couple of their warriors dropped from the trees. I thought I had lost them by fording the Amghul, but then Jakaw told me that someone was following me. So I started thinking, maybe one of the arrows that hit me was a tracer.”
“I understood probably ninety percent of the words you’re saying,” Micah remarked, stepping off of the woman and offering her a hand, “but it all makes zero sense to me. Slow down and re-explain what’s happening like I just washed up on shore this morning.”
“Oh, thank you.” She took his hand in hers, engulfing Micah’s smaller limb as she stood up.
She winced slightly as she came to her full height—almost a head taller than Micah, favoring her right side. A quick glance confirmed the shaft of an arrow buried in the leather armor of her left flank. A modest amount of blood stained her outfit.
“My name is Leeka, by the way,” she continued cheerfully, ignoring her wound. “The little one glaring at you from the bora tree is Jakaw. He’s not much use in a fight, but it’s almost impossible to traverse the jungle without a stripe-tail leading the way.”
Warily, Micah turned from the injured woman. Behind him, the monkey that had been screaming at him earlier crouched on a tree branch, its gray tail ringed in bands of black. It bared its teeth at him, chittering angrily.
“Micah,” he replied, reaching toward the wound on Leeka’s side. “Here, let me help you with that, and then we can talk. It hurts just to look at an injury like that, and it’ll end up distracting me if I don’t do something about it.”
She began to say something, but whatever it was, the words disappeared as Micah decisively ripped the arrow out of her side. She gasped with wide, pain-filled eyes, blood splashing over her armor. A second later, augmented mending knit Leeka’s flesh back together. If it weren’t for the stains and the hole in her armor, it would have been impossible to tell that she’d ever been hurt.
Leeka patted her side, sticking a finger into the arrowhole before she gaped down at Micah. “Wait.” She took a step back, looking around the undergrowth as if trying to spot something. “You’re a male. Why are you out in the jungle? Is your escort nearby?”
Micah reached up with his left hand, spreading his palm out so he could massage his temples while the woman stepped past him. She craned her neck as she searched their surroundings.
“Yes,” he answered, trying to keep himself from being short with her. “I am a male, and I have no idea why that would matter to you. I would like to reiterate that I have no idea what is going on. You’re going to need to explain things to me like I’m a child. Preferably sooner rather than later.”
“You’re a spellcaster.” The way Leeka said the sentence, it clearly had some sort of extra meaning for her. “Men either use magic or go into a trade. Women become hunters or warriors. That’s simply the way of things; everyone knows that.”
Micah paused, unsure how exactly to respond to her statement. Before he could put his thoughts together and come up with a proper reply, Jakaw started chattering angrily from its perch in a nearby tree.
Leeka’s eyes widened, and she grabbed the arrow that had been lodged in her side until recently from the jungle floor. She brought it to her nose, sniffed deeply, and threw it aside with a curse.
“Rancid Para fruit!” Leeka spat on the ground, throwing the mangled arrow to the side as she lunged for her bow. “The Roktoll did use a tracer. Jakaw says there are at least four of them.”
Leeka drew an arrow from the quiver at her waist, nocking it as she crouched next to a nearby tree. The arrow itself was almost as long as Micah’s forearm, topped in a glinting steel arrowhead imprinted with the same wave-like pattern as the knife he’d recovered by the river.
“What the—” Micah began, frowning as he looked from the discarded arrow to Leeka’s kneeling form.
“Run, Micah!” she whispered urgently. “When they shot me, the arrow was coated in Rancid Para fruit. Humans can barely smell it, but the Roktoll’s stripe-tails will be able to smell me from tens of thousands of paces away. Even with the source removed, they’ll still be able to track me from a thousand or so paces.”
“I’m not sure that will be necessary,” Micah replied, walking behind a nearby tree as he cast foresight.
“I don’t care if it’s necessary,” Leeka hissed back. “I’m sure you think that you have some magic that can help in a situation like this, but if the Roktoll see that there’s a male here, they will target you first. Without warriors to guard you, they’ll stick you full of arrows before you can manage to cast a single spell.
“No,” the woman continued, taking and holding a deep breath before exhaling it back out. “I got you into this. The Roktoll never would have known you existed if it wasn’t for me. I might not be able to defeat four huntresses and warriors, but can keep them occupied long enough for you to find your escorts. It’s the least I can do after that inhospitable welcome.”
Briefly she flashed him a pained smile. Jakaw went completely silent. Simultaneously, all expression slipped from Leeka’s face, replaced by a mask of concentration.
She popped up from her bush, firing an arrow at a flash of orange flitting from tree to tree toward the two of them. The arrow missed, burying itself into bark.
Before it landed, Leeka was already in motion, activating a martial art or a blessing to move incredibly rapidly from her hiding place to a waist-high log. She vaulted it, landing in a crouch just ahead of another two arrows that lodged themselves into the decaying wood.
“Fuck this,” Micah said quietly, shaking his head.
He stepped out from behind the tree, already mouthing the incantation to explosive thicket. In front of him, two tall orange women clad in leathers were charging toward Leeka’s hiding spot. One had a hatchet in her right hand, and a wicker shield coated in some sort of dark resin in her left. The other held a spear in one hand, and the same sort of woven shield in her left.
