Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Sarah Avery Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 1

Tutorial Realm

Sarah gritted her teeth through the pain and reformed her sword into a hefty knife. She smashed the Rathwing’s face with her fist as it bit at her, cutting at it with her anima knife and screaming as the violence wrenched the skewer tail in her leg all around. The monster’s jaw clamped down on her arm, but it had no more strength left. The Rathwing dropped off the Vine, its teeth lacerating Sarah’s arm as it fell. Its tail skewer jerked out of the wound in Sarah’s calf as it fell and her sock was immediately soaked in hot blood, her shoe squelching when she moved her foot.

Crying with pain, Sarah reached back up to the aperture and pulled herself up into it. There was no place to rest, though the crevice had plentiful handholds and footholds. It only seemed to go up about twenty meters before she saw sunlight. But Sarah’s right leg was unable to bear any weight. It was bleeding freely, and Sarah was beginning to feel somewhat light-headed. She wedged herself as best she could into the crevice and pulled out one of the health packs out of her Inventory, jamming it into her leg as quickly as she could without fumbling or dropping anything.

It was harder than it looked, and she still nearly fell as the health pack took effect. The effect on Sarah’s injuries was immediate and dramatic. She felt a wave of cold sweep through her that felt like jumping into an ice bath, but from the inside out. When the cold passed, she was left with a tingly feeling and some slight discomfort, but all of her aches and pains had faded away. Most importantly, the hole in her calf had closed up and she could put weight on it again.

She looked at the spent health pack and saw that a little timer had appeared on it. Half an hour before she could take another one without potentially turning into a semi-conscious cancer zombie. The timer ticked down steadily, and she stuffed the health pack back into her pack before putting the pack back on.

Sarah took a deep breath and made sure not to close her eyes. She’d smoothed out her anima back into the Blanket of Shadows as she climbed into the crevice not really wanting to draw the horde of aphids into the tiny confined space with her while she finished her climb. She waited several tense seconds to see if the aphids below continued their mad rush at her, but they milled around, actively avoiding the crevice.

Sarah decided to ignore the disturbing implications in the aphids, avoiding the crevice, and flexed her fingers, feeling the returned strength in them. She began climbing again, feeling sore and tired. The climbing here was easy: the rock face was covered in roots from the Vine giving her plenty of hand and footholds. It took just a quick couple of minutes before she pulled herself out of the crevice and onto the surface of the first Island.

She emerged in a densely forested copse of trees that looked kind of like cypress trees with their strange, thin tallness. Her vision suddenly blurred, and some text appeared in the air in front of her face:

Welcome to Skyland

“Finally!” Sarah breathed. She considered a moment and muttered, “This is going to be a miserable climb back down.”

The undergrowth tangled all around her was an alien variety heavy on colorful blossoms and weirdly shaped leaves. Sarah crouched down, looking everywhere, trying to sense any unseen threats. She allowed a single facet of her anima to poke up out of the Blanket of Shadows. She concentrated, trying to hold the Blanket of Shadows in her mind while she fed more of her anima into a simultaneous Seeking formation.

Using anima to augment your senses was difficult and imperfect at the beginning ranks when you had a few grafts that used your anima. Gammon had taught her that anima powers strengthened a Reborn’s anima by giving them a greater degree of control over it. Those kinds of grafts usually started filling in at later ranks, but it was a savvy Reborn who practiced the required techniques from the beginning. Gammon had been drilling her on anima control since she’d arrived in the Tutorial Realm. Sarah’s concentration was rewarded as she felt her senses bloom outward.

The vision granted by her anima was strange. Crouched there in the dense overgrowth with magenta and yellow flowers crowding in all around her, she couldn’t see anything. Her anima fed the sensory information directly into her brain, so it seemed like a memory of seeing rather than actually seeing.

But instead of the memory being from her eye level, it was one where she could see every angle and get as close or as far from something as she wanted despite having never been to this place before. The rapid shifts in perspective and the all-encompassing sense-memory gave Sarah a powerful feeling of vertigo. Gammon had warned her about the effect anima-enhanced senses could have on the mind. She had to remain extremely careful to avoid possibly going insane if her anima­-sense-enhancing went badly wrong.

She only stood still for a few moments, not wanting to stay in one place for too long. The extra sensory information brought on by her anima’s dual formation was almost too much for her to take in, but she didn’t withdraw her senses. She moved away from the crevice, manifesting a machete in her hand to hack away at the jungle undergrowth.

The air on the island was hot and muggy. It felt like she was stuck in a steam room where someone had just dumped water onto the rocks. Already, Sarah could feel herself start to sweat and that’s when the flying insects found her. They were as long as her thumb with needle-like stingers and they all wanted to drink her blood. The insects didn’t seem to notice her anima at all. She just had to keep moving, slapping at them when they landed on her.

Sarah couldn’t see much further than her outstretched arms, so she figured her first step to finding any Prize would be to figure out where she was. She started trekking through the dense undergrowth, searching for a likely place to get higher up. It was very strange to have her actual sight so confined to her immediate surroundings and at the same time be aware of such a wide area. It was this awareness that saved her life.

She had been making her way up a little hill, hoping that she could get a good view to see more of the island when she felt a very strange feeling. It was like she was hungry, but it wasn’t her that was hungry. She was feeling someone—or something—else’s ravenous hunger. She stopped moving, looking around in confusion. There was nothing there but the overgrown jungle. The hunger’s intensity grew, and she clutched at her stomach as it growled loudly.

She felt a slight quiver in the ground and followed her instincts to leap away from her position, forming a spiked shield in her right hand and covering herself with it as she dodged. An enormous, half-meter thick arm covered in soil and clinging plants ripped up from the jungle floor. It swung around, blindly grasping at where she had been a moment before with a black-clawed, six-fingered hand that could palm a wrecking ball. The hand just barely missed her as she rolled away, and she leaped to her feet, continuing to run as the entire forest floor heaved up nearby.

Dirt and rock rained down on her from behind and she chanced a look over her shoulder. An enormous man-shaped creature six meters tall and four meters wide was emerging from the soft earth. It was covered in clinging dirt, mud, and jungle plants all tangled up in its thick black body hair. Its skin was more like a thick hide and colored a deep brownish green. Its face was a nightmare of contrasts: it was enormous but sunken with terrible hunger. Its huge green eyes burned with mad hatred and its mouth was wide open with broken blunt teeth and two half-meter-long tusks protruding from its lower lip. It roared with an eardrum-bursting bellow, reaching for Sarah as it ripped itself out of its hiding spot.

Sarah turned right around, putting her head down and concentrating on speed. She pumped her legs for all she was worth, sprinting away from the monster, barely dodging a sweeping slash from another arm that could be mistaken for a telephone pole. The swipe demolished a tree next to her, showering Sarah in splinters and sawdust.

The jungle was a nightmare for escaping from a hunger-crazed giant with roots and tangled vines everywhere, all trying to trip her up. She crashed through the woods, keeping her eye out for anything that might help her. She wasn’t running out of breath, but she was running out of room to maneuver: the giant was really fast, and it was quickly closing the gap. It was getting harder and harder to avoid its grabbing swipes.

Finally, she saw that the jungle seemed to thin out a bit ahead of her and she pushed harder, careening off a tree trunk as the giant slammed a fist down right next to her, nearly throwing her from her feet. Sarah managed to keep her balance and continue sprinting toward the clearing. Just a few more meters and I’ll at least be able to turn and fight it! She thought, breath hot in her throat.

She emerged from the jungle with a suddenness that was shocking. Sarah careened out of the jungle and skidded to a stop before she flung herself off the top of the tall cliff she was on. She was at least fifty meters above the ground and far below, she saw that the jungle thinned out even more.

“Shit!” Sarah screamed.

The giant was seconds behind her and she had no real time to make a decision. She had no idea if she could fight the thing, but she manifested the Master Sword in a two handed grip with her anima. Sarah stepped out boldly in full view of the giant as it crashed through the forest. She never even managed to get a System readout on the monster, it all happened so quickly.

She saw the giant’s eyes widen in anticipation and it leaped through the air, arms wide and sweeping in to gather her into its mouth. Sarah’s eyes widened in shock and fear as the giant’s entire body launched into the air. It was like seeing a city bus jump at you. She had planned to leap out of the way and cleverly make the giant fall over the cliff but when it came right down to it, the sheer impossibility of the giant’s suicidal grab for her made her hesitate a moment too long.

Instead of leaping to the side in time to avoid being taken off the edge of the cliff with the giant, Sarah jumped at the same time as the giant’s hands smashed together, trying to clap her between them. Instead of getting smashed between the giant’s hands, she bounced off the outside of his palms and shot off the cliff like she had been launched. The giant also fell, just a few meters below her.

Sarah tumbled through the air, one last desperate idea occurring to her at the same time as she enacted it. Scrubby trees grew out of the sheer rock face, looking small but hardy. Hopefully, one would be strong enough to hold her. She formed a meteor hammer with her anima, shoving tensa into it as quickly as she could, extending the chain as long as she could. As it was still forming in her hand, she whirled the heavy hammer end and by the time it was completely substantial, she had thrown it.

She watched the trajectory of her toss in stark clarity as she fell. The shimmering blue crystal sailed up into the air like it was in slow motion. It flew straight and true, right at one of the tough-looking little trees that grew out of the cliff face. The hammer suddenly reached the end of its chain length still a good two meters shy of the tree and Sarah felt a terrible sinking sensation as she realized that she was actually going to die by falling off a cliff. Like Wile Coyote! She thought crazily, Except I won’t be getting up from this one.

It was with even more shock that she suddenly jerked to a stop, the arm holding the end of the chain wrapped around it abruptly dislocated as her fall was arrested. She heard the giant crash into the trees below her and roar again, this time in pain. She looked up at what was holding the end of her meteor hammer, grimacing as her hair whipped around her face. No one was holding the other end of the meteor hammer; instead, it seemed to be embedded in a spot of immobile bright light. She hung there swinging, ten meters below the cliff’s edge for a long few seconds, doing her best to not cry as her shoulder screamed at her.

She gathered her will and called out, “Hello! Whoever you are! Thanks! But… I could use a little more help if you can!” She waited for a long moment, feeling like the yawning fall seemed to suck at her feet.

After a moment that felt like an eternity, a head poked out from the top of the cliff. Sarah couldn’t make out any features on the person’s face as they were framed by the sun, keeping them in silhouette.

The person spoke in a high, piping voice that was out of breath, “I’ve… neverseen… anyone… trytofight…a jungle giant… like that before!” They held up a hand and took several deep breaths before continuing in a more normal tone. “I’m Kimi-Lim. Sorry for the near miss but don’t you worry, we’ll get you back up here in no time!”

Almost instinctually, Sarah requested a System popup for Kimi-Lim. Nothing.

Weird, she thought. Very weird. Play it cool.

Sarah breathed a sigh of relief and smiled up at Kimi-Lim, “Kimi-Lim, you’re a literal life-saver! Pull me up and we can talk all about how to fight giants in the future.”

Kimi-Lim giggled with a musical little laugh, “I think you’ll have to give me some pointers. A level one Reborn generally doesn’t take on a terror like a jungle giant and live to tell the tale.” They paused, then giggled again, “Of course, you wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale without me, so I guess we’re even. Oh, there we go, power’s off cooldown!”

Sarah laughed weakly as her arm twinged in pain again as the chain started to smoothly rise through the air. A few seconds later, she was set down back on the top of the cliff and rubbing her dislocated shoulder. She choked back tears as she felt her Fast Healing racial ability immediately go to work now that she was no longer expending energy. The shoulder first popped back into the joint, then she felt intense itching as muscle reknit. It would take about an hour for it to get back to normal, but it was serviceable for now. At least there’s some benefit to getting magic powers, she thought wryly.