Blood Shaper

Book 2: Chapter 16

Kay stood a little ways off from the base with both hands held up. He mentally weighed his decision while pretending his hands were the ends of a tipping scale. Allow the worry about the talk Eleniah is having with the other two to consume me, or ignore it and go make and test my new Class? Hell, why not both? He sighed and started walking north. But seriously, let's see what these new skills do.

Like most non-combat Classes, there were multiple skills attached.

Which is another weird thing about this whole System! Kay cut off his own train of thought. Why does it work like this? Non-combat Classes have multiple skills from the beginning for the most part, and combat Classes only have more than one Skill when at tier three or higher, but not always! It's only guaranteed that they have more than one Skill when they all combine at tier five! Who designed this System!? Did they test it at all?

Kay spent some time disparaging whoever made this world the way it was. He'd already decided that the System, or the World, depending on who you asked, was a deliberate creation by someone. It was too clumsy to be anything else. Nature didn't do clumsy; it followed the path of least resistance. The System is too damn complicated to be a natural creation. He scrubbed at his face. Not that it changes anything, but it's nice being able to blame someone for my annoyance. If it was just the way it worked because of nature, I'd have to suck it up and deal.

"Anyway," He muttered, "Back to testing."

Stable Footing was obvious, and he felt it working as he walked. Every step he took felt more solid than before he'd had the Skill. He walked up to a large root poking up from out of the dirt and carefully walked over it. Even on the uneven surface, he felt stable.

Expanded Sight was also easy to figure out. He could literally see more. His range of vision had expanded. At level one, there wasn't that big of a difference, and he couldn't figure out how much farther he could see right then since there were a bunch of trees in the way, but he could see a lot more of the trees than earlier.

For one of the new Skills, Sharpened Memory, he was just going to have to accept that it was working. How was he supposed to tell if his memory had gotten better? If he didn't remember something, he didn't remember it; how was he supposed to compare how much he remembered now versus before getting the Skill if he'd forgotten what he didn't remember. Kay paused in place and furrowed his brow as he thought through that sentence again. "Whatever," He eventually said, "It's not like I have to explain this to anyone."

The last of the set of new Skills was Spatial Determination. That one he was going to have to read the description for.

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Skill: Spatial Determination (Level One)

- This Skill grants an increased ability to measure and determine distances and sizes using sight, touch, and hearing. Higher levels of this Skill will allow the user to determine more exact measurements.

[————————————————————]

Kay looked up and randomly picked two trees. They were thirteen feet apart. He frowned. Was that the Skill working? He closed his eyes and focused on turning Spatial Determination off. When he felt the mental 'click,' he turned around completely and picked two different trees. That was probably six feet or so between them? As he stood there, investigating his own feelings, he was pretty sure he was more confident the first time. He turned Spatial Determination back on and looked at the trees again. They were seven feet apart.

"Huh. Good Skill for mapping." Kay rolled his eyes at himself, "Well, duh. They might be shitty designers, but I don't think whoever made the System set it up to intentionally fuck people over."

He spent a few more minutes walking around a small area and determining how far apart things were and the sizes of various things. The biggest tree in sight was eighty feet tall, the cool rock was three inches wide, the blade of his punch dagger was three inches long.

Kay grinned when his notifications lit up, and he saw he'd leveled the Skill already. Alright, enough playing around. He pulled out his various map scraps and started figuring out where to explore next. As he looked them over, he began to frown. The frown got deeper as he continued to look them over.

"These are all wrong!" He pointed at one of the drawings, talking to himself as he fretted. "These rocks were farther apart, by about two feet! And this tree was five feet shorter than that!" He stopped talking after he processed what he'd just said again. "Oh wow, that could get annoying." He looked through the drawings again and found a number of small problems, all related to the distances or sizes shown in his maps. "Well shit, I guess Sharpen Memory is working. And in concert with Spatial Determination." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter that much right now; I'll just fix it when I make the big map. Although it makes sense why I got those skills now." He paused and looked around. "Dave would totally be making fun of me for talking to myself again. But fuck him, he's not here." Kay tilted his head back and sighed as a random wave of mourning hit him. He stared up into the sky, a piece of a cloud barely visible through the canopy of leaves and branches. "I really hope you guys are safe at home. Because if you aren't, there's jack-shit I can do about it, and I hate that thought." He sighed again after a moment and rolled up his papers. "Since there's nothing I can do, I'll just get back to what I was doing before this wonderful moment."

Based on his maps and memory, most of the northern section of the valley was covered in trees. It wasn't as thick as the gargantuan forest they'd traveled through to get to the valley, but it was thick enough to block most of his vision as far as they'd gone up the mountainside. So besides the trees, he didn't have much of an idea of what was ahead of him. Which made any choice as good as the rest. He picked a random direction and started walking.

Thirty minutes later, he looked up from his most recent drawings and looked around. Glancing back down at the paper, he marveled at how much better this new drawing was than the others. He'd even expanded it farther than he could see at that moment by memory alone. I should test Sharpened Memory out. If I can do everything from memory once I get back to base, it'll save me a lot of time. I won't have to stop and make myself an easier target either.

He went back to walking in another random direction, headed vaguely north. I wonder why I didn't get a Skill for a better sense of direction? Is that some other Class' Skill?

An hour of walking past where he'd stopped the first time, he could still remember everything he'd seen with crystal clarity, as long as he'd taken a moment to actually look at it. Quick scans didn't do anything. He wasn't sure if that was something the Skill just couldn't handle, or he just needed a higher level in it. He thought it was probably the latter, but he could never be sure. Where he stopped to check his memory was also where the trees started to thin out as the soft soil they were growing in gave way to rough stone.

In front of him, the valley started to taper to a thing point. The side of the cliff face wrapped towards the mountainside at a sharp angle, leaving little space to move. The farther forward he went, the thinner the space became, until half a mile or so down the gullet, there was only enough space for two or three people to pass through.

Kay stopped and stared down the pass. I'm pretty sure I drifted fairly far to the west, and this pass is curving the same direction… Does it wrap around the mountain again? He glanced up. This valley sits right in the middle of a big mountain and a massive plateau. Does the plateau just stay that flat the entire way? He frowned as he used Spatial Determination and Sharpened Memory. It basically does. There are only a few feet in variation from where I entered this pass and where I am now. Kay stared further in, then turned around and started walking. I'm not exploring this entire thing myself, not when I don't know how long it is. Since I went so far west, there might be more off to the east. I'll come back with more people to check this place out.

It turned out that the "regular" terrain to the south did turn into a massive plateau that loomed over the valley to the north. He couldn't see the top from his position, so he couldn't see what kind of land was up there, but the plateau walls made the massive cliff that surrounded one side of the valley. The same cliff that they'd built their base against just kept going for miles and miles, shifting colors and textures as it went. Where they’d entered the valley and close to their base it was a regular gray color. Here, in the northern end, it shifted into a dark red color and he saw hints of a dark blue near the very end.

As he stood at the top of a rocky outcropping to get a better view, Kay stared in wonder at the sight. "This is way better than the Grand Canyon."

One side of the pass Kay had been partway down was made out of a weird claw shape that jutted off from the rest of the cliff, blocking the pass off from the rest of the valley for hundreds of feet. Trying to picture the shape of the entire valley, Kay thought it probably looked like a weird crescent moon with a lumpy top. The mountain bulged out, and the cliff curled away from it before it curved around in strange shapes and made the lumpy top part. Part of those strange shapes made the pass, while the rest made bulges and dips in the surface of the cliff. He wouldn't be surprised if there were hidden pockets in between the folds in the rock.

"If there's a large enough space, it might be better to move our base into a place like that. Anyone who wanted to attack could only come in one direction." Kay looked up. "Or two, I guess, but that's almost a mile high cliff." He made a face. "Of course, that would mean we'd only have one way out, and any potential enemies would be blocking it." With the help of Stable Footing, Kay made a few hops off the stone spire, jutting out of the ground, and landed with a flourish for an imaginary judging panel. "Ooh! We could make passages in the stone, like Darten's making those rooms for the dwarves. We could emulate the Pueblos and make an entire cliff city like I was telling Ahthia about."

Farther east, the plateau actually overhung the valley, creating a gigantic shadow in the middle of the day. The overhang was large enough that a portion of the area underneath it was in constant darkness.

Another place to come back to with backup. Kay decided to head back to base, this time hugging the cliff wall on the eastern side of the valley instead of the mountainside to the west, so he could map that section out. There was a triangular area between the trees and the cliff that was just open, with grass fluttering in the breeze.

He noticed a few deer watching him from the edge of the trees.

Oh, good. An extra food source. That'll help keep us fed until we can support ourselves. Kay stopped in place and sighed. I guess I really have decided already.

His thoughts trailed off as he watched the deer watching him. He was two hundred feet away from the closest one, a stag with a massive rack of antlers, standing protectively between Kay and his herd. Flock? No, that's birds. Herd of deer, right? I think that’s it.

Kay looked behind the stag to the rest of the deer. There were a few smaller and probably younger stags, a handful of does, and a few babies. All of them were staring at him.

I'm far enough away, and there shouldn't be enough people in the area for them to think of me as a threat. Why are they all staring at me? Shouldn't it just be the head honcho watching me, maybe a sentry or two? None of them are eating or moving or anything.

The lead stag pawed at the ground and bared its teeth at Kay.

Wait… That's not normal deer behavior. Kay's new Expanded Sight Skill let him see the sharp fangs in the deer's mouth with little trouble. Oh. That's not a regular deer.

With a vicious growling noise that did not belong to a body shaped like that, the stag charged Kay, a few more of the smaller stags following behind.

"Shit!" Kay drew his halberd off his back and prepared to fight. With carnivorous deer monsters. "My life is so weird now!" He yelled as the monster charged him.

The largest monster rolled off to his right and started circling behind him as the rest of the attacking group grew closer.

"Nope!" Kay shot a bolt of blood at it, which it dodged. Kay waited until the attack drew level with the deer-thing and made it burst. It did very little damage, but it achieved his goal of getting some blood on the creature. With that taken care of, he spent a couple of seconds firing more streams of liquid at the approaching deer. Once all of them had at least a little blood on them, he bolted for the closest tree. Using his magical senses, he managed to avoid attacks he couldn't actually see, knowing the deers' location and dodging their charges using the blood he'd coated them in. Angling away from the rest of the herd, he managed to get a tree to his back right as the attacking group caught up with him again.

Kay slammed the shaft of his halberd into the tree and used his momentum to spin around. Slamming into the tree with his back hard enough to bruise later, he lashed out with a thrust and took one of the younger deer in the throat. The deer that had been trying to impale him against the tree died gurgling blood and collapsed to the ground. Its razor-sharp antlers got caught against his weapon as it fell, dragging it off to the side. Kay abandoned the halberd and pulled with his magic, drawing the blood from the already-dead monster.

He managed to gather enough blood and solidify it into a solid plane right before the pointed hooves of one of the other deer impaled him. The attack bounced off of his impromptu shield, and the enemy staggered as it lost its footing. Kay replied with a blast of pressurized blood, punching a hole in the creature's side and dropping it.

The largest stag, the presumed leader of the herd, screamed in rage. It was a predatory sound, entirely at odds with the deer-shaped body of the monster.

Kay mentally affixed the shield to his arm and formed a sword in his right hand. He wasn't quite at the level of Skill he wanted, both literally in terms of the level of his Skill and more figuratively for how good he wanted to be. He imagined himself in the future as a fluid fighter, no pun intended, shifting his armor and weapons from liquid to solid as he needed to, changing their shape in the middle of battle. An enemy jumped back from the thrust of your sword? Change it to a spear in the middle. An enemy was armored against slashes and pierces? Turn that halberd into a maul. Need thicker armor? Make some on the fly. That was what he imagined for himself.

He wasn't at that point yet, so when one of the stags feinted at him and dodged back out of the way of his slash, he missed. It also left an opening for one of the other monsters to stab him in the shoulder with its antlers. He managed to deflect most of the attack with his blood shield, but one of the prongs slammed into his shoulder.

Kay grunted in pain and did something he hadn't tried before. He grabbed the monster's antlers with the blood leaving his new wound and held it in place. It jerked and bucked, trying to break free and worsening the wound, but Kay held on. He used the monster's body as a shield against its comrades while he took a moment to adjust his gear. It took precious seconds, nowhere near the fluid and near-instantaneous sight he wanted to create, but the enemy had given him an opportunity. He gave his shield a sharp spike and turned his sword into another halberd.

With a backhanded swing, Kay pierced the trapped deer's neck with his now-weaponized shield. He forced the prong of its antlers out of him with a blood push and used the same force to shoot some more out, covering the other stag's eyes. With it blinded, it was easy to run up and impale it.

The last remaining enemy, the lead stag, stood a few feet away, glaring at Kay. It hadn't moved for a few moments, and the slowly growing glowing around its antlers was an obvious sign of some kind of charge attack.

Kay grinned evilly at his enemy and held out one hand. "Too late." It was too difficult to try and manipulate blood on a moving enemy when he had to focus on more than one of them at once. But one enemy that was oh-so-nicely holding still for him? Easy. The blood he'd covered the lead stag with at the beginning of the fight shifted through its fur, and before it could finish charging whatever attack it had in store, a needle of blood shoved its way through the deer's head.

Kay glanced over towards the rest of the herd and saw them fleeing. He scanned the area for more threats, and finding nothing, he relaxed.

"Predatory deer." He muttered as he stared at the bodies. "I wonder if you taste like normal venison?"

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