Chương 7: Harsh Survival

Dark Bolt: Somber power requires fuel. Sacrifice a finger (0/1). Alexandra stared at the skill quest for Dark Bolt for long minutes. Instinctively, she knew that a simple mental command would be enough to complete the quest. A finger. That was what the journal was asking of her. A steep cost. Which finger would be sacrificed? She didn't know. Hopefully not a thumb. Perhaps her left pinky would be the least handicapping, but it didn't look like she could choose. She shook her head. It was too much.

The fight with the goblins had been close. One more hit of her sickle and the injured one would have died, completing her quest. She turned her attention to her other skill quests. Summon Lesser Fiend still required her to make a deal with a demon. With no idea how to even get started on that, she discarded the thought. Anyway, Alexandra was no fool, and this sounded like the worst course of action she could take. Selling her soul for a goblin? She hadn't fallen that low. Thus, her only choice was Inflict Weakness.

Well, that, or giving up her streak. Inflict Weakness: Damage a living being enough to reduce their strength to 0 without killing them (0/1). Regretting that she hadn't asked how attributes worked while she was in Lanterne, Alexandra turned the pages of her journal to check her status. Sure enough, her own attributes hadn't changed. It raised more questions than it answered. Was she not injured enough to, at least temporarily, lose a few points of strength, constitution, dexterity?

She certainly didn't feel at her peak. Perhaps these sorts of variations wouldn't show up on paper. Perhaps it took more than physical damage to reduce one's stats. She didn't know. Couldn't know. But she could try making it work. For that, she needed to capture an animal. Alexandra had spent enough time walking through the plains to know that the flower fields were teeming with life. Catching something wasn't going to be easy, though. Her best bet was probably one of the many insects crawling on the ground.

She knelt down, and inspected the dirt under her feet. Sure enough, there were a few ants, an earthworm, something that looked like a beetle… Was it a beetle? She wasn't sure. She pinched the earthworm between two fingers, and brought it to her eyes. It was squirming, clearly confused at what was happening. A frown etched itself on her face. How much strength did a worm have? Not much, right? Did they even have attributes? Only one way to find out. She strengthened her grip. The worm went still almost instantly.

She loosened her fingers and it hung limp. Alexandra stared at it for a moment. Then she set it down carefully in the dirt, as though that mattered now, and stood up. Too much. Far too easy to overshoot with something that small. She needed something with more margin. Enough strength that she could feel it draining without killing it. Something bigger. A bird? No, she couldn't see herself catching a bird. To be fair, she couldn't see herself catching anything.

It's not like the critters that called the plains of Baleria home would run into her arms. Even less so when her intention was to torture them. Her stomach churned. She snapped her fingers in quick succession, pacing around. How did hunters do it? Guns? Well, she had no gun. Perhaps a bow? But even if she could maybe find one in the village, she didn't know how to use it. She'd never hit a target before nightfall. Stopping dead in her tracks, her hand brushed on her belt. A trap! It felt… possible.

Not a sure shot, but worth a try. How hard could it be? Her vest loosened as she unbuckled her belt. She unstrapped her sickle. The belt was leather, just long enough for a snare, albeit a short one. Next, Alexandra shifted through the plants around her, looking for some that seemed edible. She was aiming for a rodent. A mouse, or something like that. Did they like seeds? Probably, right? Her eyes landed on a sort of sunflower.

It wasn't quite the plant she remembered from earth, as this one was twice as tall, and colored purple instead of yellow. But the disk was covered in seeds. With a pull of her sickle, she cut off the flower head. Since it was too large to fit in the loop of her belt, she further cut it in half, and one more. Then, she cleared a small patch of dirt, placed the bait in the center, then tied her belt around it.

She lay down under the cover of a few tall flower stems, her arm fully extended as she held the tip of her snare trap. Stolen novel; please report. Ready to pull. Just waiting for a poor rodent to walk into it… She waited. The plains were indifferent to her plans. Wind moved through the flowers in slow passes, bending stems and releasing pollen in small drifts. Something buzzed near her ear. She didn't move. Five minutes. Ten, maybe. She had no way to measure. The bait sat undisturbed in its clearing.

No movement in the grass around it, no small curious nose appearing at the edge of her cleared patch. Nothing. The flowers swayed, and the world continued without any particular interest in her quest. Her arm was beginning to ache from being extended. The ground was harder than it looked, and there was something wet—a worm, probably—crawling onto her leg. Without thinking, she poked the side of her cheeks. The bleeding had stopped. The pain was there, muted. Still nothing.

She found herself watching an ant navigate the edge of her cleared patch, detour around the flower head, and continue on its way. After what felt like considerably longer than it probably was, she became aware of a smell. Faint, but there. Something animal and warm. Her. The old clothes that Lara had lent her.

"Shit," she swore, pushing herself up. Whatever lived in this field had a nose considerably more developed than hers. She didn't know this with certainty, but it was likely that the leather of her belt, vest, and her own body odor were scaring her prey away. Alexandra stroked her chin as she walked through the fields. She could drop the vest, but the belt was her only tool to make a snare. Getting rid of the smell would be tough, if it was even the right call. Maybe she needed to find another angle.

It was still morning, but she was on a timer. If she wanted to return to the goblin burrow before nightfall, and complete her quest, she needed a solution.

"Wait… Burrow!" She exclaimed, before shushing herself, afraid to scare the local wildlife away. Why didn't she think about it sooner? All she needed to do was find a burrow. Not a goblin one, but the home of a small animal, that of a viable target for Inflict Weakness. She swallowed, hard, then shook her head. She just needed to do it. Finding a burrow took longer than she'd hoped.

She spent the better part of an hour crouched low, moving through the field in slow sweeps, scanning the base of every grass clump she passed. There were a lot of holes in the ground, but how was she supposed to know if they were inhabited? She found one that looked promising and waited beside it for twenty minutes before concluding it was abandoned. Her knees ached. The sun had climbed high, burning her back and shoulders. She was almost ready to give up when the right one showed up beneath a heap of grass.

Fresh earth scattered outside the entrance, a visible path worn into the stems leading away at an angle, the ground around it subtly compacted from regular use. The belt loop was harder to construct this time. She needed it flat against the ground and open, which meant propping it somehow, and the flower stems she tried kept snapping under the leather's weight. She worked through it methodically, replacing each broken stem, adjusting the diameter. Her fingers were clumsy with it. She was never one for manual work.

Eventually she had something that held. A rough circle of leather, flush to the earth, its far edge touching the burrow entrance. She drove the sickle into the ground beside it and ran the belt's free end around the handle for leverage. Then she lowered herself onto her stomach in the flowers, took the strap in her right hand, and settled her chin onto her forearm. She waited. This time, she would have liked the wait to be different. It wasn't. If anything, her awareness of the smell she exuded made it worse.

It wasn't that she could smell it, though she could, and it was bad, it was that she would have to wait for the animal in the hole to grow hungry enough to take the risk. The sun moved. Her hip found a root and stayed on it. She breathed slowly and kept her eyes on the dark opening in the earth. She thought about the worm. The way it had gone still so suddenly, faster than she'd expected, faster than she'd intended. This was going to be so much worse.

The field moved around her in long slow waves and she stayed still inside it, a fixed point herself, holding a leather strap and waiting for something to walk into her trap. It did, eventually. The mouse appeared nose-first, whiskers working at the air. It paused at the entrance, half in and half out. Then it stepped forward, and its head was through the loop, and she pulled. It ran as her belt's leather snapped into its belly, trapping it. The mouse's cries rang through her ears. She felt a pang in her heart.

Oh, it was going to get so much worse. With a flick of her free hand, she summoned her journal, and flipped it open to the relevant page. She placed it on the ground next to the struggling mouse. Her jaw trembling, she took a deep breath, and exhaled ever deeper, releasing more tension than she realized. Not enough. One hand grabbed the mouse tight, the other still on the belt, pressing it to the ground. She opened her mouth as if to say something, closed it, looked away. Then she got to work.

The belt, already tightly coiled around the mouse, she pulled on it. Slow. She couldn't look. Her eyes were fixed on the journal, on the one line that mattered. A little more. She could feel the mouse stiffen in her hand. It moved. A little. It tensed, even more than it already was. The words in the journal hadn't changed. She frowned. Not enough. She bit her lip and tightened again. Still nothing. Why wasn't this working? A ragged breath. Her whole body recoiled in disgust. A little tighter.

The mouse made a sound. Her stomach lurched. She was shaking, she realized distantly, her whole arm trembling around the thing in her hand. More. She stared at the journal so hard her vision blurred at the edges. Move, she thought at it, or perhaps at herself. Just move. Her teeth came together with an uncontrolled clank that sent pain up her jaw. More. Her lips parted in a groan that turned into a shout, emptying her lungs. She tightened the belt. Her voice didn't falter, it drowned all sounds.

Even that of the wind brushing against the flowers, even that of the mouse. She tightened once more. Inflict Weakness: Damage a living being enough to reduce their strength to 0 without killing them (1/1). She let go. The tears came before she knew they were coming. She didn't sob, didn't make a sound. They just fell, silently, onto the pages of her journal while the mouse lay still in the trampled flowers. She let herself have a moment. Just one. Then she picked up the sickle. This time, she didn't look away.