Twenty-Five
 
Kon jerked upright with a gasp as Alice’s violet aura faded away from around her. He looked around wildly and saw he was still in the bloody valley, laying flat in the muddy ground as Alice slumped a bit. She smiled at him as the faded remnants of her Regrowth rune disappeared from the air.
“How bad was I hurt?” Kon groaned as his hands wandered over his leathers. There were several noticeable rents in the rough leathers, but the skin beneath them was whole and unperturbed.
“Not too bad, but we can’t be slowing down right now. Diur is clearing out the rift now and will bring out the anchor. Had to heal her when she couldn’t see the big rune.”
“What was that all about? Last night?” Kon asked as he tried to get his mind focused on the task. The tingles of energy from Alice’s healing still ran over him and he was suddenly filled with vigor as he fought the urge to get up and run. The node in his gut burned as it processed energy and returned it to his body.
“We’ve been kicking ass for a millenia kid. Everyone knows about our runes. At least they think they do. They know of the fragments and even their own people now use them. They don’t know about full runes and they are a strictly guarded secret. Like, burn the planet’s atmosphere secrets. Call all the fleets together to eradicate systems and blow the local star up secrets. You get me? So we don’t talk about it in non-human company.”
“Ohhh…” Kon stared at the very, very, serious Alice.
“Yeah. Oh. So, we’ll have to be a bit more quiet when we talk about the full runes and how our webs and networks work. We get this new node in your head working right and we can start talking about memorizing the full rune I’m going to teach you. Now get up and start harvesting.”
Kon got up and started harvesting. His body moved on auto-pilot as he found his shattered spear and used it to pull out F-Grade cores and pile them off to the side. He had killed quite a few of the weasels, but Diur’s rampage had killed three times that number.
“What was that? What Diur did?” Kon asked. He had managed about four minutes of silence before his brain demanded to be satiated.
“Projection. Focused the energy she’s cultivated into an energy blade. It’s a fairly basic attack form you’ll see amongst cultivators. Gives them ranged attacks and they can be devastating. Especially if they’ve managed to develop an aura to stack with it,” Alice said as she leaned lazily against the wall.
“Can we do that?”
“Close enough. Your second and third network will have nodes that specialize in projection. We build your body up first.”
“Alice. Is it S.O.P to do the nodes you have me doing first?” Kon asked the question he had been thinking for a while. Alice had said it was normal, but Diur’s reaction to his strength was telling. Alice just grinned and didn’t say anything. Kon kept cutting open weasels and putting the cores into a pile.
Forty-five minutes or so later the world twisted. The red tinge of the canyon disappeared and a pressure he hadn’t realized was there, disappeared. Kon breathed easier as Diur came walking toward them. She looked unperturbed even as she was liberally coated in blood. Her sword bounced on her hip as she looked at them while holding a fruit the size of her head in one hand.
“It is done,” she said as she stopped in front of them. She offered the anchor to Alice who waved it off.
“You collected it. You get to keep it,” Alice said. Diur’s face scrunched for a second and then she started to eat. Each bite sent rivulets of juice down her chin, but she didn’t slow as she ate as fast as she could. Kon’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead as he watched the display of ravenous gluttony.
“Are anchors different than the others? I thought you couldn’t use lesser cores and stuff?”
“Anchor? We call them treasures. This is a common enough one, it helps refine the body.” Diur spoke with a full mouth as she ate.
“The one you retrieved was an energy based anchor. Easy for someone to use, it’s why I used it immediately. Others are like this, you can eat them and they’ll potentially help you develop. Some will poison you or cripple you or just straight up kill you. I wouldn’t suggest using one unless you have several grades on it or it's been properly processed.” The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Accurate. We’ve harvested several of these from local rifts. My clan believes that these treasures are formed after the rift opens or done simultaneously and the local environment affects it. Then there’s the natural treasures. Local fauna or minerals that have been affected by rift energy and taken on characteristics one can use,” Diur said. She had managed to eat the majority of the fruit till it was little more than a core.
Sweat beaded along the edge of her brow suddenly and ran down to begin washing away the weasel blood. Bones cracked as she tilted her head back and forth and then swung her arms.
“Kon, I think you should go out for a moment.” Alice nudged him with her foot and shot a glance up the hill.
“Huh?” Kon asked as he was entranced by Diur’s reaction to consuming the treasure.
“She’s having a reaction and it’s making her hot and expelling impurities. She probably wants to strip down and not ruin what’s left of her clothes,” Alice said and looked pointedly at Kon as he still stared at the Ulmna woman. It took a minute for him to realize what Alice was hinting at and he blushed as he spun on a heel and marched back out the neck of the canyon as Alice chuckled behind him.
As he got to the top of the canyon he looked about to find a spot off to the side where he wouldn’t be far from the entrance of the canyon but still couldn't be accused of being lecherous. He settled down next to a tree and rested his back on it as he put his thoughts in order.
“Alice is definitely experimenting with me. No way everyone trains like this or uses these types of nodes. At least not the processing and muscle repair one. Maybe the understanding one,” Kon spoke out loud but under his breath. Alice’s hearing was much better than any normal persons.
“Second, there’s assassins on the planet and they’re going to be hunting us. Third, we have a young master with us who is likely missed by her clan. Fourth, there’s some type of way to use the anchors to refine your body or something? Why hasn’t Alice gotten me to do that? Fifth, I almost died. Again.” His fingers traced the outlines of the tears on his leathers and he sighed.
“What has my life become? I joined up to get a meal and now I’m here,” Kon stopped his monologue and looked around him. Black clouds filled the gaps between the glittering leaves, the metallic trunks a myriad of colors while the soft loam beneath him was softer than any mattress he’d been on. Every breath was alien and strange, his senses assaulted by the alien world, but slowly becoming comfortable to him. It was strange and beautiful.
The pain in his body was hidden by the surge of his strength. Every ache and pain had been dissolved by Alice’s healing, but the memories of fangs and claws tearing into him were vivid and seared across his memory. As was the thrill of the fight. The way his heart had pumped and adrenaline scoured his brain, the joy that had resided in the struggle of the conquest as he rose and his foes lay broken.
“Sixth. I fucking love it,” he whispered that last part to himself more than any of the other pieces of information.
With his toe he drew the rune fragment he was supposed to be learning. He had always had a good memory, but this was nearly supernatural. He only needed to look once to fully memorize the fragments, but finding the correct words was always a bit of a challenge.
“To understand what my eyes see,” Kon mulled the words over, turning them carefully. They were close to what he needed. It still felt too narrow, but he kept Alice’s warning in his mind. Melting his brain was something he was hoping to avoid.
“To Understand the world? To Understand my eyes? No, that would probably melt my eyes. Or give me a really good knowledge of what my eyes are doing. Hmmm,” Kon trailed off as he looked at the rune and let his mind wander further out.
“Am I thinking myself into a corner?” He said to himself, but Alice and Diur were coming up the canyon wall and he was forced away from his own thoughts and up to his feet. He realized neither of the women had brought up the cores and he groaned as he walked past them and down into the canyon to retrieve the cores.
He piled them into his arms and had to resist the urge to simply drain them as he waddled back up the canyon with his arms full of the small spheres. Diur and Alice were waiting for him and Alice had produced another crude skin sack from somewhere. It was still wet and dripping blood as Kon dropped all the spheres into it.
“When did you make that?”
“While she was going through her transformation. Doesn’t take but a few minutes.”
“Why didn’t you gather up the cores then?”
“That’s your job.” Alice smiled at him and Kon dropped the argument.
“What now?” Diur asked and Kon looked over at her and took her in now for the first time. It was hard to put his finger on why she looked different, but she did. An edge to her? A slightly more pronounced jaw? A sheen to her skin that wasn’t there before? He couldn’t figure it out.
And that also tickled at the back of his mind for the words he was looking for. Frustration built up as he couldn’t figure out the words he needed.
“We keep moving. He hasn’t figured out the words he needs yet. There’s a couple gaps in the rift territories between E-Grades that we can slip through. Now that I know this is a plateau, I want off of it. We get to the rest of the survivors from my ship and we make sure the rescue beacons work.” Alice led them back to their temporary camp in the ribs of the long dead monster and grabbed her E-Grade cores and then they were travelling again.