It has been two days, and I've hardly spoken to Bugbug since the fight with Merrick's people. The snowfall comes harder, sometimes blowing nearly sideways and dropping visibility so low I can hardly see my hand in front of my face. I shelter in a cave, using the light of a fire I keep burning at all times. The two corestones I looted sit safely to the side, gleaming. When I make it back to the outpost, I know they'll lose their shit to have these.
But I have to get home first.Last night, I saw something moving outside that made the hairs stand up all over my body. It was the size of a horse but moved with the predatory agility of a jungle cat. It was dark and the glare of my own fire hid the details except the pair of glowing eyes and horns I saw before it disappeared into the trees.
I know it saw me, but I don’t know if it has the intelligence to linger and try to stalk me once I leave my cave.
Between the blizzard and whatever that thing was, I haven’t been in any huge hurry to leave. I doubt Merrick’s people will be looking for me or my home outpost in this, and I also imagine I don’t need to worry about my friends getting themselves killed looking for me or Kato right now.
So I take the opportunity to stay where I am and experiment, even if I catch myself watching the mouth of the cave constantly—halfway expecting to see those eyes and the horns again.
Bugbug looks like he’s trying not to die of boredom. He’s leaned back in his ship, head lolling backward with his eyes rolled back. His mouth hangs open, sharp little teeth gleaming. After the fight with the gravity mage and the strongman, he hasn’t complained about my methods.
Several minutes later, Bugbug sits upright, staring at me as I pull fire to my index finger once again and feed the flames. “Why does it keep trying to burn the fire?” he asks. “The fire already burns, but the human keeps burning it… is this ritual? Or is human losing mind already?”
“I’m trying to learn,” I say, dipping my left arm in the fire and absorbing more power to my core. As it moves from my arm to my chest, I try to reach my mind into the flow, willing it to change. But once again, it settles with the same feeling as always. “But I can’t make sense of it.”
“Sense of what?” Bugbug asks.
“When I fought those two humans with James, I blocked a spear, right? But when I pulled that power to my finger, it made a spear finger. So why does a physical attack sometimes take the form of a kinetic blast?”
Bugbug folds his arms, forehead creasing. “Human is bad at using power?”
“Maybe,” I admit. “But I think it means I could control this. To some extent, at least. Like… do I have to shoot the fire out of my fingers? Could I ignite a weapon if I had one instead?”
Bugbug’s eyes narrow to slits. “Human wants to hold burning weapon? Is he fireproof, now?”
“I’m just trying to make sure I know as much about this as I can. It could be the difference between life or death. Besides, I’ve seen when I suck in something above my paygrade like that giant’s punch, it nearly rips my arm off to shoot it. What if I didn’t have to shoot it?”
“Could have big giant fist for a finger, instead?” Bugbug asks.
“I don’t know. That’s the point. If this is my power and it has all this potential, then call me crazy… but I’d like to know how it works. So yeah, I’m messing with this fire while we wait for the storm to pass because I want to see if I can do anything else with it.”
“Wake Bugbug if human stops being boring,” he says, letting his head lean far to the side as his eyes roll up.
It’s tempting to be more reckless and experiment with all four of my charges at once, but I don’t want to be reckless. That means I get one shot every half hour to expel a charge and draw in a new one. Every one or two hours, I brave the howling blizzard outside and collect fresh wood.
Unfortunately, the meat I gathered is running out faster than I’d expected. I don’t know if it’s just the amount of walking, power use, and occasional fighting I’m doing, or if it’s possibly the levels I’ve gained… but I’ve been ravenously hungry.
If I don’t get back to the outpost soon, I’ll need to track down another animal and hunt.
I duck back into the cave, shaking the buildup of snow from my furs. I’m happy to sit near the fire again, letting the warmth melt some of the cold that already seems to want to seep into my bones. Level 15 or not, the cold out there is so intense I don’t think I’d survive being exposed more than an hour or two. It makes me wonder how fast an ordinary person would die.
Once fresh wood is on the fire, I dip my arm in, allowing the fire to absorb through my skin. I’ve repeated this routine so many times over the past two days I’m almost moving on autopilot by now, but my attention spikes because something feels different.
The cold, liquid feeling of the power moving from my arm to my core feels more… clear. I close my eyes, trying to sense the shape of it. Almost by mistake, something inside my body flexes, slowing the flow of the energy. Just before it reaches my core, I can feel how the normally frantic energy of the fire calms, just slightly. Once the nodule forms, it’s distinctly different from the others I absorbed earlier.
Grinning, I pick up a long stick in my burn pile and hold it like a sword. “Bugbug,” I say. “You may want to wake up. I think I just figured something out.”
His head straightens, eyes rolling back to normal. “Oh… human has discovered large stick. He must be very proud.”
“No… watch.”
Carefully, I pull the new nodule from my core, letting it flow to my right arm. Power trickles through my body, my hand growing hot. And then the top half of the stick ignites in a bright blaze. “Hah!” I say, half laughing as I swing it around the cave. “See? I can change it. I just needed to figure out how.”
Bugbug scratches his head. “Could human not just light stick on fire before?”
“Yeah, but this is different. I bet it’d work with other materials, like steel. And who knows what it means for other powers I could absorb. Like… imagine poison, right? I could poison a weapon instead of just splooging it all over my enemies.”
“What is splooging?”
“The point is this is huge. It also opens the door to other possibilities. I mean, if I can do this, what else can I do, right?”
“Neck is changing,” Bugbug says, pointing.
Sure enough, when I reach up and touch my neck, I feel the “F” for my power rank is now an “F+”.
“Well I’ll be damned,” I say softly. “I think this means the first power ranking isn’t connected to my level. It’s some kind of assessment of my understanding?”
“Interesting,” Bugbug says in a dry way that says he’s not interested at all. “Can we leave cave now?”
“Yeah, easy for you to say. I doubt you have to feel the cold here. Even if you did, you’re in your cushy little spaceship.”
“Spaceship?” he says. “Hah. Hah. Hah. This is port-a-thrug. Is not made for space travel.”
I bite back a smile. “Port-a-thrug? Is that really what it’s called?”
“Bugbug species is thrug. This makes thrugs portable. Without them, we can only travel when riding on the backs of our brood fathers.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I’m torn between wanting to ask more and hoping to scrub that information from my brain.”
“Bugbug will not answer more questions on subject. Stupid human no longer has dilemma.”
Little by little, the storm finally starts to die down outside. I spend the next few hours experimenting with my new discovery and making sure I can repeat it. But once I know what to do, the act of slowing the essence is almost trivial. In a way, this new method of constricting and slowing the flow makes the power feel more stable. Maybe I’ve only been able to stabilize powers that are closer to my own level. Things like the giant punch or even hammer strikes from the strongman could’ve been too forceful to constrict, meaning they came into my core in an unstable form.
But it does make me wonder if this other form of charge is also stable in the sense that I could hold it and store it longer. Maybe the projectiles spoil fastest, making them like highly perishable consumables. If I could store the other kind of charge longer, the implications would be pretty exciting.
I stand from the fire and move to the mouth of the cave, looking out at the forest. Fresh powder covers everything, meaning any tracks I’ve made since my escape from Merrick’s camp will be long gone. Even the horror of what I did to those two people is probably buried beneath inches of snow by now.
But there are tracks. They’re paw-shaped and they’re just outside my cave, overlapping with the bootprints I left from gathering wood. I swallow, eyes tracing the path of the beast’s tracks. Most of them look incredibly fresh, and the thing has clearly been stalking back and forth around my cave this entire time.
Slowly, I head back in and stick my arm in the fire, gathering a stable charge I can use to ignite a weapon, if needed. The other three are unstable.
“Why is human making face like that?” Bugbug asks.
“Because we’re heading back to the outpost. But I think we’re going to bring them some fresh meat.”