“Snakes,” Lief said, pointing to the floor behind him. Thorn stood up and saw a small snake cut in half, still thrashing in its death throws. It looked very familiar, if only a lot smaller than the last one of these snakes he’d seen. “They’re digging through the walls, like that giant one we fought before.”
“There’s at least seven, maybe more on the other side of the shield,” Thorn said. “From…” He tried to orient himself and overlay his perceptions from his Meditation session onto the real world.
“That direction,” he said, pointing towards the ceiling over the bathroom.
“Crrk, crrk, tok,” the crow said, finally waking and scrambling towards Thorn. It was a little bit late to the party, but better late than never.
“Shield’s gonna fail in a few seconds,” Lief said before wheeling himself and his chair to the opposite side of the control room. Thorn joined him, the crow perched on his head (having missed the jump to his shoulder), then flipped the table over with a free hand, his recent bodily enhancements coming in handy.
The shield failed at three points on the far side of the room, a shower of sparks indicating the precise locations at three degrees, five degrees, and ten degrees from his line of sight. The direction and intensity of the sparks indicated the first failure was a grouping of three snakes vectored downwards at thirty-five degrees to the plane, and the second two groups of two snakes each breaching the room at a more or less horizontal approach.
Time didn’t slow down for Thorn; it was simply already this slow, and he hadn’t noticed it before. His sidearm was a solid weight in his hand, as he raised it to aim at the first of the three failure points. His vision was moderately impaired by the glare of the failing shield, but he could intuit the general location of the incoming snakes. He fired into the center of the first grouping.
He noted the recoil from the sidearm and adjusted his aim. He felt a slight strain in his hand and arm muscles. He knew in his mind what he wanted his hands to do, and where to point the gun. His muscles were tight and strong, reacting precisely, but it felt like there was… slack in the line. As if he were driving his truck, but there was a slight delay between turning the steering wheel and when the truck would actually turn.
Making a few adjustments, he fired a precise cluster of four shots before pivoting to the next group, firing four more times, and then to the last group.
The individual snakes were now visible through the dark and the glare from fading sparks from the portable shield. Their bodies were emerging from the stone walls, leaving discolored patches behind them. They weren’t digging holes through the stone; they were traveling through it in a different fashion somehow. Or they were digging, but they were also replacing the stone behind them at the same time as they dug through.
He didn’t have time to wonder how the snakes were traveling through stone walls, though. Thorn aimed for the first snake in the last group. He hit the snake’s neck, and he was aiming for the second before the blood from the first snake had splattered on the wall behind it. Two more shots, two more hits, and he was reloading.
The magazine hit the floor with a crack. The scent of the chemical rounds stung his nose as the smoke wafted into his eyes.
A blunt, brown nose snaked around the edge of the table from the left. It shot forward, aiming for the last core from the eels. It had fallen onto the floor at the beginning of the fight, and Thorn had paid it no heed. It served as a welcome distraction now. The snake’s jaws closed around its prize as two bullets cracked into its skull.
Another snake phased through the table itself, the glossy surface cracking and turning black as the head of a snake emerged. Thorn wasted no time firing three more shots, one hitting its neck and another its head.
Silence stretched through the control room.
Lief whistled. “Have you been holding out on me, son? That was some pretty good shooting.”
“I… was, uh, always a good shot,” Thorn said, but his tone of voice said he didn’t believe it himself.
“Sure, sure, and my ex-wife was a paragon of womanhood who could do no wrong.”
“Don’t you mean ex-wives?”
“They were all the same anyways,” Lief muttered. “Might as well have been the same woman. Can’t say I don’t have a type! But stop avoiding the question. I thought you got some sort of passive sensory Skill, not a sharpshooter upgrade.”
“I did,” Thorn said. “That’s what it feels like. I just notice a lot more details. Time seems slower, I guess? But still the same? I don’t know what to tell you. It actually felt a bit frustrating.”
Lief looked at him thoughtfully and nodded. “Some Skills, particularly ones that affect your perceptions, can be difficult for a user to tell the differences between the before and after. Especially if they come before any upgrades for memory or recall."
“Suffice it to say, I think you need to reevaluate that skill you just got. It’s probably the best one so far, by a wide margin.”
Thorn had to agree. When he’d gotten it, he’d just felt like the world was a bit clearer than before. All of the sounds, sights, and smells were a bit more precise, a bit easier to understand and process.
There was no way that a level two Thorn Farmer could have shot eight moving targets in a darkened room within the span of ten seconds. Level three Thorn Farmer wasn’t sure how he’d done it, but he also felt like it had been the most natural thing in the world.
“Even so…” Lief continued, looking around the control room. “You still missed… what, three, four shots? Lots of room for improvement.”
Thorn shook his head, a wry smile on his face. Lief could always find fault with something. He found the holster for his sidearm off the ground and put it on his belt.
Lifting the table back into place, he grimaced at the body of the snake half in and half out of the table. He pulled at it, but it seemed stuck.
“How do these snakes do that?” Thorn asked.
“Space magic,” Lief replied absently, busy on the other side of the room.
“Tok, tok,” the crow said, interrupting Thorn’s reading of his System’s response. The crow was busy looting the snakes, pulling tiny shards of cores out of the bodies with precise, efficient pecks.
“I think I’m gonna go with space magic,” Thorn muttered. His System had not explained how the snake was stuck in the table now that it was dead, or how to get it back out again. He pulled out his knife and started hacking at the body of the snake, but the part that was close to the table was as hard as rock.
At least he had discovered one thing: patterns were important. The snakes did their magic by manipulating quintessence into special patterns with their noses. The pumpkin did its magic by pouring quintessence out in that specific pattern that he had sensed briefly before being knocked out of his Meditation state.
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“Crrrrwww,” the crow said insistently, drawing their attention. It snapped its beak on the floor several times, next to the small pile of cores it collected. It gulped one down, then eyed Thorn.
“Yup, yup, the cores are important,” Thorn said, bending down to pet the crow on the head. When his hand came close, the crow pecked it and gave him a baleful eye.
“Hrrrzz,” it said reproachfully. “Tok, tok.”
Thorn massaged his hand. That peck had hurt. Of course, the crow seemed to be able to pierce the flesh of other beasts with ease, so it was obviously pulling its pecks to prevent leaving holes in Thorn, but still. Did it have to peck him so hard?
The crow began to hop towards the door, then back to the pile of cores, all the while making loud, raucous noises. Thorn gave up and asked the expert for guidance.
What the heck. Whose side was his System on?
“Oh shit,” Thorn said and turned to Lief. He had rolled his chair over to their collection of food and was busy stuffing as much in the pack as possible.
“Almost ready,” Lief said. “And I take it you have joined us back in reality. You might be a crack shot with a pistol now, but you still have the situational awareness of a doorknob. I’d say you have bird brains, but that would insult the best scout that we have.”
“You?” Thorn said weakly. He hurried to pick up his rifle and the extra mags they had stored in this room.
“Not me, that damn bird,” Lief replied, pulling the pack onto his shoulders. “Grab the cores and the shield and let’s retreat to the pill closet. The walls in there must be shielded somehow, if the snakes are attacking us here but ignoring those pills.”
“Got it,” Thorn said. He scooped up the cores, or shards, really, since they were hardly full cores, and then the rods for the pumpkin. Lief wheeled himself down the hallway, the crow riding along, and they crammed themselves into the tiny closet that held the pills and shut the door.
“Let’s wait for a bit, and hope that this room is indeed shielded,” Lief said. Thorn divvied up the cores from the snakes, and he and Lief absorbed their portions. It wasn’t quite enough for his next level up, but he was close. “I’m going to scout a bit with the drone and think of our next move.”
“I’m going to Meditate. I’ll be able to sense if the snakes approach us here,” Thorn said. He gave his System instructions on when to wake him, and then slipped into the skill. He remembered sensing the snakes while using the skill, even if he hadn’t understood what he was sensing. This way he could pull in a few extra quints while they were figuring out what to do next.
The majority of Thorn’s consciousness receded, and for what was left, his perceptions inside of the pill safe room, were strange. They were much more limited than before; he could sense outside of the room, but it was difficult to do so. It was as if they were deep in a hole, and he was trying to see outside the top of the hole.
It felt like he was trapped in a hole, but also like he was trapped in a tiny place with thousands of points of light. Tiny pinpricks, sharp as needles, grating against his senses. Those would be the individual glitter pills, packed with sharp wads of quintessence. There was the solid rock of Lief’s presence, as well as the crow’s. All in all, it was extremely crowded inside of this closet, and Meditate felt distinctly uncomfortable.
The quintessence flowing around him was free. Threads and peaks and waves. The quintessence in the shield pattern had been fixed, shaped, geometrical. He tried to shape it, pulling it in different ways, but that wasn’t what the skill could do. The conscious part of his mind tried to use Concentrate, but the skill wouldn’t activate at all. The part of his mind that was detached and inactive was the part that he needed to use for Concentrate, but that was the same part that was now occupied with Meditate.
He could tell that while he was gathering more quints, he wasn’t pulling in very many at all. It was like he was swimming in shallow water; the lake of free quintessence was only coming up to his ankles, whereas before, it had come up to his waist.
The tiny, sunken space seemed to contribute to that, but it also felt like he was fighting against a stronger pull… one that was coming from inside the closet. From the crow.
He watched the tightly wound sphere of quintessence he’d come to associate with the black bird more closely. The tug in its direction became stronger, the threads and waves sliding towards the crow’s presence, becoming stronger and stronger. Individual threads began to circle the bright, tiny sphere at the center, forming an interlocking mesh.
Thorn watched in fascination as the mesh grew in size, woven from the individual threads of quintessence. The pattern was complex, individual threads extending out from the sphere in the center before circling around and between other threads it was pulling in from the surrounding field. The intersections where multiple threads met seemed to spawn peaks that held their own weight, resisting a pull downwards towards the center of the crow’s core.
When the mesh had formed an entire sphere around the crow, the core grew bright in brilliance and pulled on the field around it. Thorn felt that pull on himself as well, and it was distinctly uncomfortable. It reminded him of when he had hit the dead zone; it was a cold wave of force washing over his being.
The crow’s core pulsed again, twice more, each time stronger than before. Thorn began to worry that it wouldn’t stop, but on the third pull, the intersecting peaks of the spherical mesh finally collapsed, their resistance overcame, and the mesh consolidated around the core at the crow’s center. It ceased its pulling on the field around it, and the core itself seemed to dim once more, returning to its more passive form.
Thorn exited his Meditation skill and looked down at the crow. It appeared to be resting, head tucked under a wing.
“Did you feel that? A few minutes ago, I think.” Thorn asked Lief, nodding towards the crow.
“I felt a little something,” Lief allowed. “I chalked it up to claustrophobia and blood loss, then I saw the crow pop a few blue sparks out of its eyes and wing.”
“I’m pretty sure I saw it level up, or whatever the beast equivalent is,” Thorn replied, describing the sensations he’d felt in the quintessence field while he’d been meditating.
“Normally I’d be freaked out by a beast putting another layer on its core while hiding in the same closet as me,” Lief said. “And I’d say I’m still worried, but it’s probably a good thing, right? We’ll all need to get stronger, and for whatever reason, it’s on our side. It chose us as its flock.”
“They’re called murders,” Thorn said. “Groups of crows, that is. Not flocks. And no, they aren’t typically alone, are they? They typically travel in groups and are quite territorial.”
“As long as we aren’t the ones being murdered. Like they say, an enemy of our enemy is our friend.” Lief had mentioned that before, when they’d found the crow wounded in the greenhouse.
“I also saw something else while meditating, back in the control room,” Thorn mentioned. “I could sense the snakes, even though I didn’t know what they were at the time, as well as the quintessence field when the pumpkin activated.
“I think… I might be able to use Concentrate to make the same kind of patterns that the pumpkin makes. Or other patterns as well. That might have been what my System was implying.”
“That could be very useful,” Lief said. “Have you tried yet?”
Thorn nodded. “I tried just now, but I’m not able to use Concentrate while also using Meditate. So while I was able to pull on the threads of quintessence and see them, I couldn’t really manipulate them into a pattern.”
“How about you try now with Concentrate?”
Thorn nodded and activated the skill. He’d had just a glimpse of the pattern from the pumpkin, but it was fixed in his mind. Maybe it was his new skill, Assess, or another feature of his System, but he felt like he could remember precisely what that pattern had looked like.
He carefully traced his finger, a tiny trickle of quintessence flowing outwards into the air. The pattern was fairly simple, but replicated many times with interlocking pieces reinforcing each other. He outlined one of those interlocking pieces, bringing the final thread back to where he had started. He couldn’t see any of the quintessence he was leaking or any effect of the pattern yet with his bare eyes, but his movements had been precise.
Right when he finished the pattern and stopped supplying additional quintessence, there was a brief flash of blue, and Thorn was immediately buoyed by hopes of success. On his first try! Those hopes were dashed in the next split second, as a tiny explosion rocked the room. A black mark scored the back of the door, next to where Thorn had drawn the pattern.
The crow woke up with a squawk, immediately taking flight. The splint broke off of its wing as it flapped up past Thorn’s head to land on one of the upper shelves. It glared down at them, first eyeing Lief, then Thorn. It dropped from its perch to briefly peck Thorn on top of the head, having determined who had woken it out of its own meditative slumber, before flying back to its perch on one of the top shelves.
“Oops,” Thorn said. “That wasn’t quite what I was intending; I was trying to copy the pattern from the pumpkin. But the good news is it looks like our beast friend’s wing is all better.”
“Good news?” Lief said, shaking his head. “I hope so… and I hope it doesn’t think it doesn’t need us anymore. No, that’s not the good news.
“And who cares if that wasn’t what you intended,” Lief continued. “We got a shield already, and you just came up with something better!”
“What’s that?” Thorn asked.
“A bomb.”