Seventeen
 
The trees bent under the deluge of water, each strike a hammer blow that hurt and bruised his skin, but Kon sat silently. Below him, hiding from the rain, was another rift. Alice said it was the last of the F-Grade rifts in the area that they could easily reach and was an appropriate level for him.
The last ten days had been grueling. Every morning they sparred till he was ready to collapse, never once landing a clean blow on the Knight. Alice for her part made no remarks about his progress, or lack thereof. She just kept pushing, only stopping when Kon finally collapsed or it was time to hunt.
While he slowly caught his breath she’d go out and hunt. She never had to go far to find an E-Grade monster to come dragging back. The stack of E-Grade cores in the back of the cave was growing large enough it was becoming nearly comical. Neither of them could use them, but Alice refused to let them go.
Kon would eat until he couldn’t anymore. His two nodes worked in tandem to repair his body and restore his energy and then Alice would train him. A pair of broken branches replicated swords and she taught him the basics of bladework. Then they’d enter the forest and she’d show him how to track, following the sometimes subtle tracks. Most of the time rift monsters weren’t subtle, but it was a good skill to have.
Then there was more training. Working on strengthening himself. She intermixed extreme stretching to his daily list when she noticed he was starting to look a little too bulky after a few days. Kon didn’t complain. A fervor had overtaken Alice, an intensity that was scary and he’d catch her looking off in the distance of the jungle occasionally. She kept her axe close at hand and she had started to meditate as she worked on harvesting enough rift energy to heal herself.
This was the first time she had taken him out to hunt since the acid hounds. His leathers felt more comfortable now, the hard abuse breaking them in slowly but surely. The spear in his hand was new as well, Alice having taken a peak E-Grade claw and tying it to a strong branch and handing it to him. She had taken him to this rift and then left, disappearing into the forest as the rain had started to lay waste to the area.
Like the other rifts he had found, this one was in an area that was out of place in the forest. A misty canyon had appeared from one step to the next, a long crack in the ground that thick mist poured out of to slowly dissolve around ground level. Kon had been perched in the tree for nearly two hours watching the crack in the ground.
It had taken a while before he had been able to discern the rift beasts. They blended into the swirling mists and shadows. They slunk along the ground and along the crevasse, never revealing themselves completely. Kon had been able to make out that they were small, no larger than the acid hounds had been. Their flesh was ashen and they had a multitude of limbs that danced around their rather flexible bodies. He had seen them bend in half to squeeze into a crack in the ground and disappear.
Impatience wore at him but he held himself still as he searched with his eyes and listened hard to see if there was anything he was missing. He couldn’t spot Alice, no matter how hard he looked into the shadowy limbs of the trees around him. Fear was there in his chest, cold and paralyzing. Maybe she had left him to fend for himself.
Fear had to be fought and Kon jumped from his low branch to hit the ground softly, bending his knees to absorb the impact. His newfound spear was clenched tightly as he walked into the mist with sure steps. Cool moisture wrapped around him, slicking his skin and cooling him off.
The first beast didn’t wait but two steps as he entered the obscuring mists. Kon hardly had a warning, a subtle shifting of the air currents, then it was lunging up and out of the mist. Long tentacles were spread wide out, nearly a dozen leanly muscular limbs, trying to wrap him up.
The E-Grade claw ripped through it like it was paper and doused Kon in a spray of stinking internal organs. Its own momentum had done most of the work, Kon just had to hold tight to the spear shaft and let it eviscerate itself. As it splattered across the ground, a haunting screech rolled up and out of the mists. The sea of fog froze, no longer spreading out slowly, and Kon’s fear spiked again.
“That’s not good,” he whispered to himself. With every passing second the fog grew thicker and thicker, growing so condensed he couldn’t see much past the end of his bloody spear tip. His breathing rasped away at his hearing and the thump-thump-thump of his heart was audible as outside sound grew muted.
He spun as the back of his neck prickled, slashing his spear around like it was a sword. Flesh parted and one of the tentacle monsters screeched as it hit the ground next to him, sans three arms. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
It was long and sinuous, all rippling muscle and overly large black eyes. A chitinous beak emerged from the center of its body. Pale pink blood splashed across the ground as its severed limbs flailed about sending arcs of blood across the sky and Kon. He sputtered as some got in his mouth and it burned a bit and then his first node activated for a split second.
“Not going to think about that implication.”
He stabbed it with a simple thrust, piercing the body with ease and holding it pinned to the ground even as it thrashed about. Its wiggling made the wood under his hand groan, but the regular wood held up until the beast went still. It was slimy under his boot as Kon held it down to pull the spear free. It looked smaller in death, half the size it was previously.
He turned and kept his spear up and near eye height, nervous of the flying attacks. He would rather take a blow on his legs or gut than his face. Every step forward was another potential attack waiting to come. The spear swept back and forth as he kept his eyes peeled, but the fog had grown so thick that even the end of the spear was invisible.
Two more attacks came and both of them were stopped at the last second. The third latched onto his back and Kon screamed. Burning pain spread across his back and sides as long arms wrapped around his torso and shoulders. He spun around and threw himself backward and felt something break and crunch under his weight. He groaned and rolled to his feet, the dead monster sliding off of him as its arms went limp.
He staggered back a step, but another of the beasts was already in the air. He hardly got his spear up in time to intercept it, spearing it through the center of its tubular torso. It flew free of the mist as Kon twisted his torso and swung the spear like a bat, sending it flying away.
Pain erupted around his knee and he looked down to see another of the beasts had coiled itself around his leg and thigh. Kon let go of his spear and stabbed his fingers into the creature’s bulbous black eyes, curling them as the jelly squished, and grabbing the edges of something more sturdy than the muscles around it. Its beak opened and it screamed before plunging into his quadricep. Kon screamed in pain but pulled with all the strength in his body, ripping the monster off his leg and spiked it into the dirt.
Red blood ran down his leathers, steam rising from where the tentacles had been wrapped around his leg and knee. Heel met monster and monster lost. Blood poured out of its orifices as Kon crushed it under his boot over and over as rage burned away the fear and pain.
“Fucking stab me!” Kon screamed as he spun around and slashed the mists apart with his spear. Another of the monsters split in two and then he was a blur, striking and slashing as he spun around like a mad top. The monsters kept coming, leaping at him from all angles as Kon danced like a madman in the cloud of mist. Some of them latched on him, burning away at his leathers and trying to pierce him with their beaks. Most died on his spear as he moved erratically enough that their flying lunges connected with nothing but air.
On the ground they were slow and awkward, lacking the speed or toughness of his previous opponents. They made up for it by filling the air with scores of their kind. Blood and guts painted the ground before the crevasse by the time Kon came to a stop, breathing in giant gulps as steam rose from where the acid in their tentacles had strained against his leathers. In some places the leathers had lost, like his back and knee, but for the most part they had withstood the test. Three more piercing wounds had been inflicted on him, another to the same leg, one above his hip, and the final in his back.
His vision was spinning, or the world was, he couldn’t decide. He staggered back and out of the mist, leaning against a tree as Alice landed soundlessly next to him. Her axe was bloody and she had a few more E-Grade cores in her hand, but she looked unperturbed by Kon’s state.
“Knowing when to fight is just as important as knowing how to fight. They actually go together really well. You had no sightlines, no idea how many were in there, or even if you had the ability to close the rift. So why did you engage?” Alice asked.
“You told me to,” Kon slurred. The world was darkening around him as he slumped down the tree and rested for a moment.
“No I didn’t. I told you there was a rift here and that it was the last one inside of your ability to tackle. Didn’t tell you to run into the blanket of fog and try to harvest a seafood platter,” Alice said, shaking her head.
“Seafood platter?” Kon’s mind was drifting, but he held onto those strange words.
“Cause they look like octopus. We brought some colonies from Earth with us. They’re a delicacy on the World-Ships apparently. Oh, shit, you’re bleeding out. Here.” She dropped her axe and her Regrowth rune flared to life in all its complex glory and the wounds all over Kon’s body disappeared like they had never been there.
Alice slumped a bit, but not as much as she normally did. In fact, Kon noticed she looked a lot healthier than normal. The graven exhaustion that often lurked behind her eyes had dissolved. There was a air of vitality that he had never realized was missing until seeing her like this.
“What happened to you? You look not…tired?” Kon aborted his true thoughts as Alice’s eyebrows had started to creep up her skull when he remarked about her looks.
“Oh, this. Finally found a few D-Grades to hunt and I absorbed their cores. Helped speed up my recovery. Also, we’re going to have to run soon. I may have started a bit of an ecological disaster.” Kon stared at her and her rather nonchalant look.
“What do you mean by that?”