The dome was gone, and it was anti-climatic.
The grass was yellow, but not a dried yellow of dying but a pale yellow of health. It was short. The mound, which was all Tom could focus on, had insects buzzing in and out. In fact, when he looked further afield beyond the trees, the distinctive shapes of what had to be hives stretched out into the distance. There were so many of them.
Tom’s eyes kept assessing what else was out there. High above in the sky, there were little dots. Migratory birds, wyverns, or something similar. They were so far away he couldn’t see any details. Closer to home at ground level, there were no large animals anywhere, apart from a small flock of crow-sized birds which rested in the branches of the nearest clump of trees.
An insect buzzed by, and Tom automatically felt it out with his senses.
It was only ranked at level one and was tiny. However, a bug being ranked made it more deadly than any insect on Earth. Without considering venom, in a straight-out physical fight, that single puny insect could kill a house cat.
Tom kept examining it and used the ability he had developed to sense fate. He shivered. Even this single insect had two points, the same as his current pool.
It buzzed away before he could get extra information.
Tom’s mind fell into his battle awareness state. Processing everything at a million miles per hour. It might feel counter-intuitive, but he would have been a lot more comfortable if there were large monsters around. “Everlyn, can you see anything? I mean other than the insects.”
“Rank two birds,” she nodded at the trees, “No other animals. Just those things.” Her hand jabbed out at the nearest mound. “For miles.”
Tom shook his head. Lots of mounds, no animals, that sort of implied the wasps from the mounds were probably the dominant life form.
“Harry, can you put down a ritual behind us?”
“The mana one?” Harry stuttered.
“No, the energy sapping one.”
“What? I see you’re teasing.” He sounded upset. Possibly frustrated that his only ally was abandoning him. That was not at all what Tom was intending.
“No. I’m not joking. We need the sapping ritual down now.”
“Why?”
Tom glanced back sharply and was relieved to see that Harry was already starting the spell. “Because once it’s down we’re going to back behind it and then you’ll put up as many as you can.”
“But…”
“Did you get an assess off? That lone insect was rank one.”
“So?”
“Your energy sapping ritual can take down monsters can’t it? I presume high-ranked ones.”
“With time.”
“And how much weaker is a rank one creature?”
“I understand.” Harry was suddenly completely focused on putting down his ritual.
Uneasily, Tom looked around. This was not a situation any of them would have prepared for. No one expected to be fighting stupid insects. Those spears and swords were designed for combating dire wolf packs. Not this. While he waited for Harry to finish, he listened to what they were saying.
“Where are the monsters?”
“Don’t do anything.”
“We need to set up proper defences.”
“I’m worried about the insects.”
“Has anyone got an identification off?”
The other teams sounded a lot more concerned than his own.
“Done,” Harry reported.
Silently, his entire team rotated back behind the pattern scratched into the dirt.
Tom pointed to the side. “Another. But leave a space between.”
Harry did not argue this time and got immediately to work.
“Harry?”
“Tom?”
“How long will they last?”
“I don’t have any reagents, so it loses about a percent of its energy a minute.”
“So, a hundred minutes?”
“Yes, and no. If it was made fifty minutes ago, it’ll only be half its stopping power.” Harry stopped talking as he focused on the circle.
He finished, and Tom could see a line of sweat on his face.
“How many can you make with your mana pool?”
“A little over one.”
“You just did two,” Sven interrupted.
Harry sighed. “Regeneration. One from my mana pool and another every six minutes.”
“Can you use other people’s mana?” Tom asked.
Harry shook his head.
Tom eyed off Rahmat’s throwing spears. Against insects, throwing spears would not be very effective. “Rahmat, can I have one of your spears?”
The man tossed one across and Tom snatched it out of the air. An insect was buzzing past, and he flicked the weapon. The wind of the passing weapon disrupted the air and knocked it over the draining circle, and Tom felt the bug focus on him. He promptly stepped sideways so that he was between the two energy draining rituals. The insect flashed towards him, and he swung the spear, relying on muscle memory as opposed to agility. The wasp avoided the strike but had to abort its own attack. It flew into the second ritual. It buzzed and shot out toward him. With no other choice, he let himself fall to give him time to control the spear’s end. All of his focus and skill went into the blow. Fate shifted out of him, and his spear clipped the insect, knocking it back in the direction it had come from.
It buzzed and flew towards him, but then dipped with its energy sapped. Its wings stopped beating and it fell onto the hard-packed dirt, and bounced once still surrounded by the confines of the ritual.
With it trapped and unable to move, they had options.
“Everlyn?” He asked quietly and then jumped when he realised she was already beside him. Even as she leant down to get a closer look at the insect, her hand was reaching down to help him get up. He gratefully accepted her help, and she easily boosted him. As slight as she was, she, like everyone apart from him, had superhuman strength.
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“What can you tell me? Weaknesses, poisons, any scientific stuff?”
Everlyn’s captivating eyes glowed, and Tom forced himself to look away and to examine the insect himself. It did not appear very impressive. A bee or wasp or something like that. It had an obvious stinger. His initial assessment of strength was accurate. Despite its tiny size, it would be hard to kill. For example, you could not squish it like he could have squished a bee back on Earth. One of those you could kill by hitting it with a rubber flip-flop. This one would require you to stamp on it wearing metal or hard leather shoes while it was on concrete. On this dirt…Tom shook his head, and body weight alone would not be enough as the dirt would cushion it. If this clay or grass was what they were fighting on, they would need to crush them with actual weapons.
The thing was still alive but unable to move. They could both see its legs twitch every now and again. Its fate was the same as his at a flat zero. Tom remembered using his own fate and frowned. It must have just gone into cancelling out the insect’s.
“Is it alive?”
Tom turned and moved his spear in front of the young man stopping his approach. He was a crafter who had come somewhere in the sixties. “Sorry,” Tom dropped the point of the spear. “Don’t enter the ritual. Who are you? Why are you here?”
“I saw you trap the insect, and I’m an alchemist.” The boy produced his own knife. “I’ve lots of skills to see something’s natural properties. What do you want to know?”
Tom shrugged.
“Everything we can,” Everlyn said quietly. “How best to kill them? What elements are they susceptible to? Are they poisonous? How does any venom they have work? Are they aggressive?”
The man with the knife carefully manoeuvred the insect to the edge of the field. Trying to dig the knife under it. Tom helped him with his spear, knocking it onto the metal blade.
The man lifted the weapon with the insect balanced on the flat section. “How long will it remain disabled out of the field?”
“Minutes,” Harry stuttered. “I don’t know. Half a minute at least.”
The knife was pulled out and instantly a spell from the man hit the insect. Everlyn, he noticed, was casting her own magic. The spells glowed around it for forty seconds and then the insect’s wings started twitching. Without hesitation, the alchemist moved it back under the influence of the field. “I’m done.”
“Me too.”
“Do you want me to go first or?”
“You can?”
The alchemist took a deep breath. “They’re vulnerable to lightning, metal, and earth, and highly resistant to fire and air.”
“That’s bad for us,” Sven cursed.
Tom understood his viewpoint. The traditional fantasy response to a swarm of insects was fire or a mini tornado, and he suspected that fire would be the most common elemental power amongst everyone gathered; so if they were highly resistant, then those powers would be useless.
“They’re poisonous,” the alchemist continued. “Not sure how bad.” His knife pressed on the prone insect, his point digging in slightly before he released the pressure. “Crushing damage will work; piercing won’t. Don’t know anything about temperament. As for their stingers, they’ll be able to go through skin, but not much else.”
“I concur with all those points,” Everlyn stated. “Temperament is territorial and hostile. Poison is a nasty muscle paralysis that can kill you if it reaches the heart and that will deliver a stinging pain. Best technique is to wrap yourself up fully to avoid getting stung.”
Tom studied it. “Is a single sting lethal?”
“No, but three or four will be hard to deal with.”
Tom’s hand grabbed the knife and guided it out of the circle.
“What are you doing?” The alchemist asked.
Tom grimaced. “Building up a resistance. I have some experience with this sort of stuff.”
He shivered as he remembered exactly how he had learnt this level of control. The trial had been on in the tutorial. At least sometime in the first decade. His memory took control.
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Tom frowned as he lay in the pool of healing water. The burgundy wound that had covered his thigh had been reduced to three or four coin-sized patches. Fail. His teeth were clenched; he heard a cracking noise, and then the magical water was actively reinforcing them.
She had told him to do this trial.
He hit the water hard with his fist, and the liquid splashed into his eyes, stinging them. He did not rub them, that wouldn’t help, and he just blinked to let the stuff fall away. Then, when he could see once more, he shut his eyes and appeared in his system room.
Dux attentively looked up from her desk, but Tom disregarded her for a moment and looked at the wall and the big electronic zero displayed. Time was paused in the trial, and so there were no more questions.
“It’s okay to be frustrated,” she said quietly.
Tom ignored her. She was bound by a host of rules, and if she could have helped, she would have already. His mind raced. “Display trial terms.”
The wall fizzled, and the text appeared.
You have entered a skill trial.
The skill Touch Healing has been randomly selected to be improved.
Complete the course without dying to gain a benefit.
Note: If you perish within this trial, you will be returned to the trial entrance in the same state you entered.
The trial cannot be taken a second time.
Tom was not sure of the number times he had re-read that description, trying desperately to parse it in a way which would give him a clue to complete the trial. “The trial is broken!”
The scream echoed frighteningly loud in the metallic space.
Dux looked at him evenly and if she was a real person, he wouldn’t have been that rude, but he had long since been disabused of that foolish notion.
“A skill trial cannot be broken. It supplied everything you need.”
“Shut up.”
Almost mechanically, she picked up her pen and continued her mockery of secretarial work.
With a sniff, Tom ignored her. The task that had been set was simple. He needed to travel three kilometres down the long corridor before what he had nicknamed the burgundy rot killed him. The problem was that so far, he had only gotten a couple hundred metres before he had to return to the healing waters to stop the rot.
Once his mana gave out, the rot would spread, and pretty soon, sufficient muscle would be dissolved that he would lose use of the leg.
Within the magical pool, the last spot disappeared on his leg. With a sigh, he got up and walked through the rippling curtain of energy that separated the tunnel. As he did so, he felt the sting on his thigh in the same spot as always. When he looked down, he could see nothing, but he knew it would grow quickly. Tom had to change his approach, do something differently. Instead of walking down the tunnel, he sat.
He had attempted to cut out the rot, but then no matter where he was in the tunnel, a wave of energy would appear, and a new infection would be placed.
Straight out healing delayed the spread, but he only had so much mana to spare.
An attempt to alter his healing to just focus on the rot had extended the time that his mana lasted. It had motivated him to push harder, but ultimately the extension was not enough and worst, during the last six attempts, he had achieved no further improvement.
The point of the trial was to improve a skill. What did that mean? Was there another way that Touch Heal could be improved beyond efficiency?
On his thigh, the first deep red spot had formed. Currently, it could be anything, maybe even a freckle, but once the infection expanded, that distinctive colour that he had grown to hate would appear, and then shortly after that it would start hurting.
How did disease work?
His fingers drummed around the spot. It spread and if it couldn’t spread? He asked himself.
Everything else had failed.
This time, instead of healing, he focused on trying to contain the rot. As he did so, he felt whispers in his mind. A touch of consciousness on the edge of his awareness that was very similar to when he had purchased a Skill.
Tom froze, for a moment, then did nothing. The rot that had been a tiny freckle was now a small one. What had prompted the trial to share knowledge with him? Was it because for the first time he was on the right track? That insignificant trickle of information caused hope to swell inside him. That was dangerous. He was almost too afraid to start hoping, because when he did that feeling, that stirring, that optimism, that had been created might slip through his fingers and vanish forever.
He studied his leg. The spot was now a medium-sized freckle, and he could see the distinctive colour. A small hop into the pool and it would fade away, but if he did that, he might as well walk out right now.
“Do it,” he whispered into the empty corridor. His voice was rusty from disuse. He missed his mum, his friends, normal life but nothing would make him give up. Especially soft emotions like that.
Touch Heal activated, but he did not throw any mana into the spell. Instead, he focused on using it to build a cage around the spreading rot. The feeling was weird, and he felt the spell allowing itself to be used in a way that it was intended, but not how anyone else did. There was the resistance of infrequent use. It was like a half-rusted door. Most people would choose to squeeze through the gap, but Tom was opening it fully. It creaked and groaned, and the rusty hinges squealed, but it opened. That is what Touch Heal did. It was made to be more than the basic spell form he had cast every time till now, even if no one ever realised it. Tom kept building the barriers to contain the rot.
It didn’t work.
He couldn’t tell if he slowed it down, but it felt like he was making progress. This time when he hopped over and fell into the pool there was a stirring of hope.
Maybe with practice, he could get through this trial and become stronger.
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Tom grinned when he grabbed the wasp. With his ability to stop the spread of any contaminant, he was confident he would be fine with the sting. Ultimately, even if basic Touch Heal could not purge it, then his control could physically push the poison out. It was time to get firsthand experience with what this venom did.