Storm Strider 1: A LitRPG Fantasy Adventure, page 27
[There are plenty of floating debris you can stand on outside the grotto, but… eh. I would give it a fifty-fifty chance you will figure out how to use your wings.]
That wasn't very reassuring at all, but Marisol sucked in a sharp breath nevertheless.
She ran her fingers through her hair.
She adjusted her Sand-Dancer skirt and sleeves.
She pulled courage into her heart.
And then she leaped off, soaring through the thin wall of foliage as the mighty sunlit canyon opened up before her.
Ah.
This is terrifying.
It was just a normal jump at first, a mere long jump ten meters away from the grotto, but then she started falling. Gravity took hold of her. The sinking sensation in her gut made her arms flail and panic for a moment before her glaives slammed into something hard—a floating chunk of wooden debris that’d split off the warship as they sailed into the grotto. She tumbled and stopped right before she could roll off the edge, her heart thumping in her chest as her eyes grew wide with terror and excitement.
For a second there, she really felt as though she was flying.
Why didn’t my wings fully open? she thought, glancing back at her twitching wings, and she poked at them as though doing so would make them come alive. Archiveeeeee. I thought you said they’d—
[Do you think all winged bugs know how to fly the moment they are born?]
She looked anxiously down at the canyon, realizing her floating debris was slowly, steadily sinking. There were dozens and hundreds of other floating items in the air nearby—slabs of stone, mossy branches, and countless other sheddings from the mountainous islands around her.
Uh… No? The way you’re saying it makes it sound like the answer—
[Well, bugs are actually relatively simplistic creatures,] the Archive said, wagging a leg at her from atop her shoulder. [Contrary to popular belief, they do not need to ‘learn’ to fly the same way most birds and mammals need to learn complex behaviors. From the moment they emerge from their cocoons or are hatched from their eggs, their simple nervous systems and musculature are already designed to almost perfectly coordinate the movements required for flight. Winged bugs fly as though it is a reflex—compared to humans who must consciously juggle balancing, muscle coordination, and responding to environmental feedback while first learning how to walk. They are physically superior to humanity in almost every sense of the word.]
Hey, are you on their side or ours—
[Now, despite possessing this innate instinct at dynamic movement that humans take years to master, some bugs may experience difficulties during their very first attempt at flying,] the Archive interrupted, tapping where her wings connected to her shoulder blades. [For example, newly emerged butterflies and dragonflies often need time for their wings to fully dry and harden before they can fly effectively. You are currently at that stage. You must allow your wings to get accustomed to the sensation of airflow before you can control them.]
Marisol bit her lips, staring at the closest debris she could jump to.
So… I have to keep jumping until my wings feel like opening.
[Correct.]
How long will that take?
[No idea.]
How useful you are.
Sucking in another deep breath, she closed her eyes and felt the winds passing through her, making her hair flutter under thin sunlight—then, she jumped with all her strength.
She soared fifteen meters up and slammed upside-down into a slab of stone. Her glaives stabbed into the stone and the setae on her palms helped her stick to it, but then the slab started sinking quickly. She took off for a distant slab again, chaining her momentum together as she leapfrogged across the canyon.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t as physically demanding as it was mentally terrifying. Gravity was here, but it was really, really weak. She could already leap ten meters up with her enhanced strength, so it should’ve come as no surprise that she could bounce from debris to debris like she was taking a stroll in the park. Regardless, her heart was still in her throat every time she jumped, and… she loved the sensation. The speed. The weightlessness. There were so many dance moves she couldn’t pull off on land or water that she could easily try out here, in the sky, but that’d just be reckless of her.
One wrong slip and she’d fall to her death. That much hadn’t changed.
So, the next time she slammed hard against a piece of debris on all fours, she narrowed her eyes at a particularly faraway piece as her next destination. It was at least a hundred meters away with nothing floating in between. She wouldn’t be able to back out halfway through.
Jump or die.
Lightning at my heels.
With a sharp exhale, she leaped. The wind whirled around her, the debris shattering under her glaives and scattering across the canyon. The sheer burst of speed carried her twenty meters forward, shooting her in a straight line, but then she started dipping. She started falling. She pressed her arms flat against her sides and gritted her teeth, trying to ‘feel’ the extra appendages jutting out her shoulder blades.
And then she willed strength into them the same way she did her legs, making them unfurl and fan out to her sides.
… Alright!
She dipped for only three seconds, but then she tilted her upper body and let the winds carry her back up. The air was cool and sharp against her skin. It tugged at her clothes, whipped through her hair, and the taste of salt from the roaring torrents below her clung to her lips. She spread her arms and let out a laugh, her body charged with more energy than she’d ever felt before.
Archive! Look! Look! I’m—
[Gliding, not flying. There is no need to flap your wings like that.]
Surely I’m getting some lift from doing that, though? I mean—
[Watch out,] it said lazily.
She reacted a bit too late, slamming headfirst into the slab of stone she’d been aiming for, and it was only because of the setae on her palms that she stayed glued to it instead of peeling right off.
Groaning, she rubbed her bruised nose and flicked the little water strider on her shoulder with a scowl. With one more glare at the little water strider, she turned and looked out at the rest of the canyon. Now that she could glide and cruise along the winds, she could essentially go wherever she pleased within the strait.
… You remember the way back to the grotto?
[Yes.]
What’s the warship need for repairs?
[The main thing would be the sails,] the Archive said, gesturing broadly around her. [Wood for repairing the hull would come by very easily. Even the Guards can harvest it from inside the grotto, so you should search for anything that could be used as sails. Giant crustacean chitin and fish scales would work wonders as usual.]
She turned her head around, squinting for anything of the sort floating across the canyon. I don’t wanna go looking for carcasses too far away from the grotto, though. If anything happens, I need to be able to come back quickly.
[Use your sense of smell,] the Archive chided, poking at her nose. [You perception level is three, meaning you are thrice as perceptive as the average human. Considering the nature of these canyons, you should be able to pinpoint the closest carcass via the pungent smell of rotting death alone.]
… Ah!
You're right!
She closed her eyes and took a deep, heavy whiff of the air—smelling mostly brine and the sharp, fresh scent of the morning. There were also a dozen more subtle scents swirling underneath it all. The gushing smell of flesh. Vigorous streams of blood. She opened her eyes slowly and felt as though she could physically ‘see’ the trails of blood leading her in every conceivable direction. Each of them would surely end at a giant carcass.
The only question now was which trail of blood to follow.
[The closest one appears to be within thirty meters. Check that one out first.]
She nodded briskly and took off from her debris, gliding a bit lower in the canyon as she headed towards her first carcass. Flying straight was a bit difficult at the beginning, but eventually she got the hang of it—it really was ‘instinctual’ as the Archive had said—and landed on the side of the cliff. She stared down at a giant orange shrimp impaled on a jutting rock spike.
She winced at the gruesome manner of death, and quickly waved this first option off as she jumped after the second blood trail.
Lots of giants are just dead around this strait, huh? she thought, half-mumbling to herself as she checked the second, third and fourth carcasses. They were all manners of shrimp, crabs and lobsters smashed against the side of the canyon. You said it’s because… the low gravity pulls them out during especially strong waves when they go briefly airborne, and then they just get impaled on the spikes? How unlucky is that?”
[Very few creatures live here since it became a low-gravity strait three decades ago, and natural decay occurs very slowly around here as a result. The carcasses you are looking at are most likely not new carcasses by any means—they have probably been stuck there for years and decades with nothing to feast on them.]
Sounds like an ecological nightmare.
[It is called the Dead Island Straits, after all.]
So she bounced around for what felt like two or three more hours, growing more and more tired with each hard-shelled crustacean carcass she checked. There were still hundreds more blood trails for her to follow, but she felt she was starting to stray too far away from the grotto. Any further and she should probably tell the Guards where she was going first.
Fortunately, on her way back to the grotto, she came across a giant carp lying flat on a protruded cliffside near the bottom of the canyon. In fact, it was almost directly under the grotto—she’d simply failed to notice it because she only started smelling much later in her hunt. Her eyes lit up as she glided down to the rocky ledge, landing atop the giant carp with a quiet thud.
The carp was twenty meters long, ten meters wide, and its eyes were milky white and lifeless. Its bright orange scales were the first thing that caught her eye. They gleamed even under dim sunlight, and each one of them were as wide as a dinner plate, more than large enough to patch up the holes in the warship’s sails. Bits of them were chipped and dulled, and some had fallen away, but for the most part it was not nearly as mutilated as the other carcasses she’d seen the past few hours.
It was almost as though it’d flopped up to this ledge and just…
… Something ain’t right.
Why’d it get stuck up here, a mere ten meters from the bottom of the canyon?
Couldn’t it have just flopped right back down?
So she took another deep, heavy whiff—and she smelled something acidic lingering in the air, a condensed scent of poison she’d not smelled anywhere else around the canyon.
She dodged before the Archive could even shout at her, just narrowly evading a feathered dart that slammed into the carp’s scales from behind.
Tch.
Yet another ‘anomaly’ again, Archive?
As she skated back on the carp and whirled, she eyed the dozen dark-green tribesmen hovering in the air above her.
Their slender, half-insect bodies were suspended effortlessly by their wings beating so fast they were but blurs to her eyes, so if she had to place what type of insect they were…
[They are the Damselfly Oracles, known and documented cannibal tribesmen of the Dead Island Straits,] the Archive said dryly. [They could be unexpectedly friendly, though, like the Harbor Guards when you first met them in the colossal remipede’s stomach. Would you like to try to talk to them?]
Chapter twenty-seven
Damselfly Oracles
Minus the beating wings, the damselfly tribesmen looked very much like Kuku and the crab children. The men only wore thatch shorts, the women wore loose-fitting reed dresses, and their tanned skins were blotched with intricate tattoos she couldn’t make heads or tails of from a distance. Each of them carried a blowgun with them, carved from dark wood with sharp, pointed ends. They were designed with only one purpose in mind: to fire poison darts at unsuspecting girls trying to steal their prey.
In that sense, maybe they weren’t so much like the crab children. With metallic masks over their faces and giant, hexagonal insect eyes boring holes into her from above, they looked far, far more terrifying than Kuku when she’d first met him.
… Nope.
Don't wanna try talking like this.
[Then you already know what to do. Loosen your wings and—]
She kicked off the giant carp as they jerked their blowguns up, firing a volley of darts at her. There was no warning, no attempt at communication. She slammed glaive-first against the canyon wall and started skating up, speeding away from them as the Archive rambled off random numbers in her head.
[Searching through database… locating the locale tongue… automatic translation activated. If you wish—]
“Stop!” she shouted without looking behind her, throwing her arms up as she continued skating. “I ain’t here to steal your prey! I’m sorry! If you could point me to another giant carp you can spare for me, though, I promise I’ll entertain you with my speed and dance routines—”
In the blink of an eye, six of the tribesmen blurred in front of her, their beating wings a constant annoyance in her ears as they fired darts down at her.
[Evade!]
She kicked and backflipped off the wall, fanning her wings out in the same motion. The winds immediately jerked her to the right, and now she was gliding away from the grotto, away from the tribesmen. She winced as she wiped a streak of blood off her cheek and glanced behind her, scowling when she saw them flying after her at breakneck speed.
[It is not deadly poison, fortunately,] the Archive muttered, licking the wound on her face. [Avoid getting hit by any more of their darts and you should not be paralyzed. It is not their style to poison their prey to the point they themselves will get poisoned when they bite into you.]
Not their style? she hissed, slamming into a branch and leaping off it as the first of the damselflies caught up, his clawed insectoid feet smashing through the entire branch. What’s their deal, anyway? They’re fast! Almost faster than me, even!
[They are a known and documented tribe of D to C-Rank Giant-Class cannibals who reside in the Dead Island Traits. The Hasharana believe they used to be normal tribesmen until they started consuming the Spreadwing Damselfly God's carcass three decades ago, at which point they began mutating wildly as Spreadwing Damselfly Afflicted. Their essence aptitudes must be quite high, though, since none of them seem to have completely lost their humanities just yet.]
So you’re saying it’s the Worm God’s fault I’m getting chased, then, for not properly cleaning the carcass up and letting these people eat the damselfly in the first place! The hell’s a damselfly, anyways?
The Archive made an interface pop up next to her face, and she gasped as she almost jumped headfirst into another slab of stone. She jerked her body down and swerved under it, her wings rippling at the abrupt change in direction. Two of the pursuing tribesmen weren’t so quick to change, though, and slammed right into the slab with pained, ear-grating howls.
Don’t show me an interface! Just tell me—
[Within the standard ‘spearfly’ class of insects—consisting only of dragonflies and damselflies—damselflies are like smaller, slimmer dragonflies. They typically reside around aquatic habitats. Both have two pairs of wings, but the damselfly wing pairs are typically similar in size, while dragonflies typically have broader and more rigid hindwings compared to their forewings,] the Archive said curtly. [This means damselflies have a weaker, more fluttery pattern of flight compared to the strong flight capabilities of the dragonfly. They are less able to change directions sharply.]
Her mind raced to find a method to throw them off her heels.
Oh, but… can you gain essence and point by eating humans?
The Archive stared at her like she’d gone mad, so she had to quickly shake her head and wave the seriousness away.
Just a hypothetical, just a hypothetical. Ain’t like I’m actually planning on eating humans, she quickly thought. But say I ate the Blackclaw Marauders. Normal humans don’t have essence inside them, but those marauders have systems and accumulated essence, right? Would I be able to… you know?
[... Yes, you would be able to gain points from eating humans.] The Archive sighed. [If someone has 500 BeS in aura and 15 vBe in points, you would gain fifteen points from eating them. That is because you can only gain points from consuming volatile bioarcanic essence. The person has already spent and stabilized the other 485 vBe into permanent biological upgrades, so considering most people spend their points almost immediately after they obtain them, there is no real advantage to eating humans over bugs for points.]
But fighting people seems easier than fighting bugs. You sure there’s nobody eating people for essence?
[Most system-enhanced people start with only 10 BeS in aura—you started with fifty because Altered Symbiotic Systems naturally come with a bit more essence—so the continent-average for most system-enhanced people is actually only 30 BeS in aura. Knowing this, I am sure you can extrapolate and imagine how little points most people actually have stored on a daily basis?]
Seriously? Thirty aura is the average?
[Not all people with systems live violent lives, and you are most certainly an exceptional exception for how fast you are progressing. Considering there are only about thirty million systems in circulation around the continent, of which around seventy percent are not owned by people in combat professions, 30 BeS in aura is being generous. Any ragtag group of bandits trying to get stronger via cannibalism can only realistically target those who cannot easily defend themselves—like farmers, harvesters, miners, couriers, and workers in all sorts of professions—because if they target actual fighters who might be storing points to unlock higher tier mutations, they would find even a battalion of Ant Class Soldiers in the southern empire quite hard to kill.]
