Dan sighed as he sat next to the fire. It had taken him almost two hours to collect and dry enough moss to actually attempt to make the fire with just one arm, but the warmth was essential. The strange planet didn’t have a traditional ‘night’ like Earth, instead the gas giant hung in the sky, bathing the swamp in its dim reflected light.
He stretched the kinks from his back and arms. Despite the fire, he was still getting tired, and it was still cold. Plus, he needed something to cook the bear meat. Well, cooking was a stretch. Dan stared mournfully at the slightly-blacked meat hissing on a short wooden spit in the fire. Searing it until it hopefully wouldn’t make him sick sounded a bit more more correct.
He bit into the haunch, trying to ignore the way the sizzling meat burned his remaining hand. It was gamey and under-seasoned, but to Dan’s nutrient-starved body, it was the best meal ever. He could almost feel the nanites grabbing the protein from his stomach and using it to reconstruct his mangled shoulder.
Since the System was originally based on nanites designed to keep billionaires alive forever, it was hardly surprising that they came with a regenerative function. Really, outside of aiding Dan’s muscle memory and providing analysis as a sort of internal personal computer, the only thing the System did was keep him healthy, given enough raw materials. It wouldn’t heal a gaping wound overnight, but it would be able to handle the heavy bruising and cracked shoulder from the bear.
Now that the fight was over, the adrenaline drained from Dan’s body. He could fight better than most people, and he was in good shape, but if he was going to fight monsters, he needed more magic. Spatial Shield and Shocking Fist had given him the extra edge he needed, but they still weren’t terribly impressive. Really, any magic that involved punching a bear in the face needed some heavy reworking.
Feeling began to return to his shoulder along with an itchy burning sensation as the nanites restored neural connections. The System was an absolute godsend for recovering from bruises, aches, and hairline fractures, but Dan couldn’t help but wish that there was a way to turn off the annoying phantom sensations.
“Set alarm, 120 minutes, wake me early if an intruder is detected,” Dan said aloud as he arranged his sleeping bag on the moss. It was likely going to be a wet and uncomfortable two hours, but if he had to spend that time conscious, waiting for his shoulder to fix itself, he would probably go crazy. Plus, he needed a nap before he started hiking again. He had no idea what lurked in the gloom outside of the circle of light cast by his fire, but if his first five minutes on the planet were anything to go by, he would need to be sharp if he wanted to survive.
Acknowledged. Alarm will sound in 119 minutes.
Reading the System reply, Dan curled up next to the fire and did his best to ignore his shoulder. After about ten minutes of fitful rest, he finally dozed off. He dreamt of a starless night sky. Shapes moved in the dark, always just out of reach. Just as one of the figures reached for him, the alarm went off silently, shocking him awake.
He checked the time, frowning as he noticed that only an hour and a half had passed. He flexed his left arm, stiff and a little weak but otherwise functional. Surveying his surroundings, Dan picked up his sword. In the distance, a shape was running toward him across the swamp, screaming something. Behind it, other shapes swooped toward it in the dim light.
Whoever it was, the System must have heard it and woken him early. He cracked his neck and began stringing his shortbow. Whoever was running toward him was still a couple thousand feet out, and travel was slow over the swamp, especially when the runner had to occasionally stop to dodge the flying shapes.
Dan wasn’t nearly as good with the bow as he was the sword, but with any luck he could at least wing one of the dark shapes. Silently, he cursed the omnipresent gloom. His vision was nowhere near good enough in the darkness. He finished stringing the bow when the figure was about 600 feet away. Dan nocked an arrow and strained his senses.
“Eoli myarh dis, fassun dis taun derre tear,” a feminine voice shouted.
Dan rolled his eyes. Of course she would speak another language. That’s why the one enchantment he actually had with him was a translation rune. He ran some mana into his helmet,static fizzling faintly before it projected her voice directly into his mind by the magic.
“Shit, shit, shit!” she was yelling as one of the monsters swooped towards her. “At the fire, there are nightgliders after me. I request sanctuary! I’m with the adventurer’s guild and I’ll pay guild rate!”
For a second, Dan considered the request. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dark as he made contact with them. The static filled his hearing once again, and his face felt warm. He blinked it away.
Good enough for him. Whatever a nightglider was, it sounded like a source of mana, and he would need to talk to someone local sooner or later. He might as well do it out in the middle of nowhere where he wouldn’t be arrested for an accidental faux pas.
He loosed the nocked arrow at one of the swooping shapes. It swooped to the side rather than toward the running figure, and he missed. Dan rapidly began filling the air with arrows, only taking the barest second to aim. Although he didn’t hit any of the shapes, the attacks served their purpose and they kept the flying shapes from attacking. After a harrowing stretch of time, the running woman made it to him unscathed. Dan barely looked at her as he dropped the bow and drew his sword, a handful of iron filings in his left hand ready to be infused with magic.
Almost immediately, one of the shapes dove toward him. Dan muttered “Spark Field” and shuddered as the mana flowed from him. He threw the filings into the nightglider’s flight path. Sure enough, the creature ignited into a nimbus of crackling blue light as it passed through the cloud of iron filings. Dan knew from experience that the electric field created by Spark Field mostly served as a distraction, but to an unsuspecting target like the diving bat in front of him, it would hopefully serve as enough of a surprise to make the creature drop its guard.
Bats. Dan hated bats, and this was a gigantic freaking bat. The nightglider had an almost ten-foot wingspan, but rather than the snub nose of a normal bat, it had the jaws and face of a wolf. Specifically, a wolf that was snarling at him and lunging for his throat before the electric charges from the iron filings brought a surprised yelp from its throat.
Rather than the weaving and dodging descent he had seen from the other gliders, this one tumbled straight towards him. Dan cleaved its wing off, his sword snapping through the bone frame of its wing then ripping the leathery membrane like tissue paper.
Another two of the gliders descended, trying to rake him with their claws, while the remaining bat flapped past overhead. At the last second, he activated Spatial Shield, causing their claws to skitter off the soap bubble of distorted space. He used the moment of confusion, when one of the swooping nightgliders thought it had hit him, to stab upward, punching the point of his sword through its fragile torso.
The remaining gliders circled overhead. Dan spared a second to glance at the woman standing near him, a short sword in her hand, staring defiance at the circling shapes above. Then, one of the gliders unleashed a high pitched screech. Dan’s vision grew blurry and his knees wobbled before the balance assist from the System kicked in. Next to him, the woman fell over to her hands and knees, a look of fear on her face.
One of them dove at Dan. He activated Shocking Fist with a quick vocalization, the thrill of mana coursing through his body. As it approached, he held his sword at guard and prepared himself to grab the bat with his electrically-charged left hand. Its claws clattered off of his sword as he barely blocked it.
In his mind’s eye, Dan saw himself grabbing the creature’s leg, the electricity immobilizing it as he pulled it to the ground and finished it with a smooth stroke of his sword. Instead, his hand closed on nothing, the magic discharging in a flash of light and a puff of ozone.
The two remaining nightgliders circled the fire once in the air, all the while making chirping noises to each other. Then, as one, they turned and flew away. Dan watched them go, then shuddered as mana flowed into him. Next to him, the woman had regained her feet and was using a one-foot-long short sword to finish off the injured gliders. It was intoxicating. His body felt lighter, and electricity seemed to run through his veins. An easy smile plastered itself onto his face. He could get used to this.
The woman coughed to get his attention. She was about five foot seven, heavily tanned, and dressed in dark leathers. She shifted slightly, eyeing Dan up in turn. Across her chest was a bandolier of knives, and at her side rode the sheath for the foot-long short sword she was wiping monster blood from. She sheathed the sword. On her back was an empty quiver, although he couldn’t see any sort of bow. Given her headlong sprint across the swamp, it was very possible she had lost it at some point.
“Thanks for the assist, friend,” she said cheerfully, her eyes still warily trained on his sword. “I got separated from my party when the nightgliders attacked us. We really should have been more prepared, but I was scouting ahead, and no one else was really looking at the sky. I spotted them in time, but part of the pack broke off and chased me off before my party could meet up with me.”
“Not a problem,” Dan replied as he sheathed his sword as well. “I was just laying down and trying to take a nap when your shouting woke me up. You’re the first non-monster I’ve seen in this swamp, so that was a bit of a surprise.”
She shrugged. “I know. We’re pretty far from the main hunting grounds, and there really isn’t much out here but grezdu moss and non-profitable monsters.
We were on a mission to gather some rare herbs from the swamp. I was against it, personally, everything out here is either an advanced rank or a pack hunter.” She flashed a bright smile at Dan. “Given that we have no idea where the herbs are, we were almost certainly going to be stuck out here searching for a while. With only five of us, the odds weren’t good that we were all coming back, given the difficulty of the monsters in the area.
“But…” She rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms. “Ishlar was greedy, and he thought we could handle it. We were only out of town for a day, and we’ve already been ambushed and separated. There’s no way they’re going to find anything without me, so the only question is whether they come looking for me, or if they turn around and return to town.”
Dan tried to process the torrent of information she was feeding him. Really, he had next to no idea what she was talking about. He could infer some of it. Advanced rank likely referred to monsters that were above first rank as an example. The rest may as well be Greek to him. He just didn’t have the context to put half of what she was saying in the right place. Internally, he shrugged.
He paused for a second, uncertain as to how to proceed. He needed more information, but at the same time everything about his origins needed to stay a secret. Dan pursed his lips. He didn’t even know this woman’s name, and he needed to make a decision as to whether to trust her with part of his story. Distantly, he heard static. Her eyes seemed to devour his gaze as he weighed his options. Fuck it. He would have to make a gamble sometime, it might as well be now.
“I’m going to be honest here,” he tried to look as trustworthy as possible. “I just teleported in, but I have no idea where I am. I think I was supposed to arrive near a beacon, but instead I showed up in the middle of this swamp.
“I barely understand what you’re talking about.” He chuckled uncertainly. “But I would appreciate being pointed in the direction of a town and some sort of occupation where I can make enough money to afford to feed myself.
“I’ve tried cooking bear,” he continued, motioning halfheartedly to the poorly-seared haunch of his first encounter. “But I clearly have no idea what I’m doing, and I would prefer something edible if at all possible.”
“Ew.” She wrinkled her nose at the charred bear meat. “Blood bears taste awful, even if you cook them properly. Still, they’re rank two beasts, and it’s impressive that you were able to bring one down. I’d be happy to guide you to the nearest town after you pulled me out of that tight spot back there. If nothing else, there should be a spot for you in the guild if you can solo a blood bear.”
She paused, hesitantly eyeing Dan up and down. After a couple seconds of her chewing her lip in awkward silence, she seemed to come to some sort of decision.
“I noticed that you took down one of the nightgliders back there with magic,” she stated slowly. “Is it possible that you’re a mage of some sort? I haven’t seen any runescript on you other than your helmet, but if you can manage combat spells, I can probably help get you placed into a team right away.”
He frowned. Dan didn’t know the social norms of the planet, but it didn’t seem likely that strangers who met under possibly hostile circumstances would share the details of their combat abilities. Everything was going a bit too fast for him to process, but he still got a vague feeling of wrongness. Still, there was something about her eyes that drew him in, told him to trust her.
“I might know some magic,” Dan relented, shifting awkwardly under her scrutiny. Girls usually didn’t look at him this closely unless they were Doctor Weathers. Even then, it was only as a friend. “I don’t feel terribly comfortable talking about it with a complete stranger, even if you are planning on helping me. Hell, I don’t even know your name.”
“Well that’s easy,” she replied, smiling back at him. “My name’s Nora Strasshill and I’m a Ranger. Now we aren’t strangers, and you can tell me all about your magic as we head back to town before it gets dark.”
Dan began to frown as he formulated his reply. Static sounded in the distance. That had been happening a lot. He’d have to talk to Sam when he got back to Earth about the way the System interacted with the translation rune of the helmet.
“What do you mean, before it gets dark?” He motioned to his dim surroundings. “It seems pretty dark out to me.”
“If you’re off planet, you wouldn’t know.” She shrugged, already hopping out onto a tuft of moss in the swamp a couple feet from his camp, “the days here are about forty hours. When Tanloff gets between the planet and the sun, we have about four hours of actual darkness rather than this murky half-light. You don’t want to be out at night.
“Unless you have a set of sanctuary runes, it’s a death sentence.” She turned and smiled back at him from the lump of grass she was standing on. “Ishlar was probably the only one for miles that has sanctuary runes. Without them, you’re at the mercy of things from the bowels of the planet that would absolutely make your skin crawl. Even inside a sanctuary, it’s not a treat to spend the night outside of a city with those things just prowling outside the light of the runes.”
“Wait,” Dan tried to interject. “What does that..”
Alarm. 120 minutes have passed. Alarm.
The System jolted his body, and Dan swore quietly to himself. He turned to stop her, but Nora jumped onto another island of moss and began working her way across the swamp. Despite all of her assurances, he didn’t really feel like he had learned anything. Her nimble form hopped over another brackish puddle. He sighed to himself and hurried to catch up.
