NOVEL WEB Ch. 19: Wind Step
She briefly considered trying to butcher her kill. Boar was a meat people ate, wasn’t it? She needed to eat to survive.
Cass stared down at the dead pig. It was a gory mess. Nothing like corpses in video games. Her stomach twisted and she took a step away from the body.
Corpses in video games were tidy affairs. Usually the same character model as the living version. Usually just rag-dolled across the floor. And that was if they didn’t explode into a cloud of pixels leaving only sweet, sweet loot behind.
There was no blood. No split skin. No shattered bone. No crushed skulls.
She closed her eyes and took another step away from the body. Real death was so much worse than video games and movies made it seem.
She pressed that aside, focusing back on her survival. Butchering the pig. Could she do it?
She thought about it another minute but kept coming back to a simple answer: No.
There were at least three problems, though Cass was sure if she kept thinking about it, she’d come up with more. The first was that she didn’t have any tools to do the butchering. Sure, she could make an axe out of stone, but that was different than a butchering knife. She’d need to cut meat from bone, remove internal organs, remove the hide. That wasn’t the job of a heavy blunt blade (not in its entirety at least).
This was glossing over the fact that Cass didn’t have any experience butchering in the first place. She’d never so much as deconstruct a chicken, much less a larger animal like a normal-sized pig, never mind a behemoth like this wild, magic boar. With a sharp knife, was she willing to give it a go anyway? Probably. Without one? She wasn’t about to try to rip it apart with her bare hands.
Secondly, even if she did butcher it, then what? She couldn’t carry it. It was enormous. Even taking a part of it would be challenging and gross. She didn’t have a bag or anything to wrap it in.
Third, what would she do if the smell of blood and flesh brought scavengers or worse? She’d survived the terrorcat through luck as much as determination. The boar had been manageable, thanks to her system skill in the end. She didn’t know when this streak would run out, leaving her a bloody corpse on the forest floor and she was unwilling to increase that risk.
She shook her head and started walking away without looking back. Nope, definitely nope. Nothing she could do about it. Better to just keep moving.
Cass continued her watch of the forest and the cliffside, placing more emphasis on using Stealth with every step. She didn’t need another boar racing out of the underbrush at her.
As she walked, she considered what to do with her new stat points. Perhaps the fact that boars were sneaking up on her now was a sign it was time to do something about her Perception. It was her lowest stat after all and the only one she had yet to increase.
A boar had snuck up on her! They weren’t exactly animals known for their grace or stealth. If a boar could sneak up on her, what else was lurking out of sight?
She sighed and dropped all of them into Perception.
Per 5 -> 9
She blinked as the world snapped into focus like it never had before. For half a second, she thought her glasses had magicked into existence over her eyes, but honestly, the world was even sharper than that. And it wasn’t just sight that had improved.
Her ears were inundated with the sounds of the forest around her. The creak of wood buffeted by the winds. The chitter of the rodents scampering in the boughs above and scrambling through their burrows below. The buzzing of the cicada and the like hiding in the brush all around her.
Scents she hadn’t noticed wafted through the forest. Herbs she recognized from her foraging. Rot and blood from the decaying dead. The sweet smell of the wind blown from afar.
Even her unnatural senses seemed sharper. She could feel a bead of lightning forming in the clouds above. It was still miles away, but she could feel its power building from here.
There was something else in the air too. Something that had hung at the edges of her senses for days now. Separate from Atmospheric Sense she was sure, but similarly unnatural. But once again, she found it too nebulous to name.
She took a deep breath and let her new senses settle. It was a lot all at once, but after a moment she had no trouble processing it all. It had surprised her initially, but she found that it neither overwhelmed her nor faded into the background.
That settled, she continued along the ridge, melding with the wind with her Stealth.
She still didn’t quite understand how it worked. She suspected it had to do with the “(Wind)” tag next to the skill, though why or how completely escaped her. As she moved while trying to be stealthy, besides the instincts on how to move her body to reduce noise and the amount she disturbed her surroundings, she also seemed to flicker out of sight, almost as invisible as the wind. And just like Wind Step, it seemed more effective if there was wind to meld with.
Eventually, her ridge came to an end, dropping almost as sharply ahead and to the left as it did on her right. The wind gusted over the ridge. It spun and twisted, shooting down the back of the hill and out over the forest ahead of her in equal measure.
A crossroads, if she’d ever seen one.
Follow the hillside down into the depths of the forest? Return the way she came and find out if the ridge went anywhere in the other direction? Or ride the wind with Wind Step through the skies?
The last option excited her, even if she wasn’t sure if that was some slyphid instinct whispering in her mind or her inner daredevil finally waking up. She didn’t even know if she could do it. So far, Wind Step had pulled her along the ground. She hadn’t managed to ride a gust into the air even where they did take to the skies. For all she knew, if she tried to ride the wind she’d fall down the ridge immediately.
She closed her eyes and felt the wind, letting Atmospheric Sense fill her.
No, even if the gust blowing out from the ridge dropped her, plenty more ran across the ridge’s face. She’d be able to catch herself again.
Atmospheric Sense has increased to level 3.
So, she had decidedly three options:
Return the way she came and stay on the cliffs.
Go down into the forest to her left.
Ride the wind, see what she could do and where they took her.
She still had no destination in mind. She still had no idea in which direction she might find people or monsters. (The answers were nowhere and everywhere respectively, if she had to guess.)
If every direction was the same, shouldn’t she do the one that excited her?
That was apparently enough. She had barely decided she’d try before she engaged Wind Step and let herself be taken up by the gusting winds.
She faded into the wind. She was the wind.
Atmospheric Sense still burning strong in her mind, she could see how the winds twisted around her. She stepped between gusts with ease and let them carry her fast and far. She grinned, incorporeal and invincible, racing over the tops of trees below. She spun with the wind, through the towering branches of the lightningwood and the accumulating clouds that clung to their highest reaches.
She rode the gusts up and over the next ridge and then the next. More and more wind joined her, they streamed together, faster and faster.
Exhilarating.
Better than fighting. Better than leveling.
She was moving faster than cars on the highway. There was no stopping. Just speed.
Just freedom.
The thought had barely crossed her mind when she noticed a sharp downturn of the wind. The entire river of wind funneled straight down after the next ridge. She tried to lower herself to land on the ridge before she was slammed down into the ground, but she was too high and moving too fast. By the time she was level with the ridge top, she was pulled past the ridge. Pulled down into the chasm hidden just beyond it.
The wind was sucked down. It spun and eddied down, losing speed and direction as it flitted about. By the time it hit the bottom of the chasm, it wasn’t even enough of a breeze for her to ride and she was unceremoniously dumped out.
She landed on her side, but she had slowed to such a degree there was barely any force in the impact and Cass stood without effort.
Wind Step has increased to level 2.