++The grimwoods change all things greatly. Even those rare magical creatures found outside of them cannot be relied upon to remain the same when stumbled onto in the confines of these dark, deeply magical areas. Tread carefully.++
Book 2: Chapter 1
Reggie licked the last bits of Witchfinder blood off his hands, and sighed. He’d gotten excited again, made things messy.
Apparently, his Shape of The Beast brought with it a few animal instincts that came to the forefront when faced with human combatants. He’d not noticed in Norvhan quite as much, maybe a product of the unique motivation of his situation, but in casual fights like this…he got overexcited.
Overexcited and sticky. And he only knew one place to bathe, not pleasant. He took the Witchfinder corpses with him as he went all the same, transforming back to his intermediary shape gained with only the first level of Form of The Beast. He still proved strong enough to walk with all five of them and their equipment at once.
A thousand pounds, was it? Reggie smiled to himself as he shuffled along. The only difficult part about those thousand pounds was holding onto all of them at once, fortunately the extra few inches of height and limb-length his transformation provided made that less of a concern.
More fortunately still, this region of the grimwoods was mostly bereft of the larger predators, like wolf spiders. Had it not been, Reggie wouldn’t have risked slowing himself as he made the ten-mile trek back home.
Home. Not much, as far as homes went.
Actually, what was Reggie saying? His own homes had been a hole-riddled shack right next to the deadliest place in ten leagues, and the back room of a paranoid serial killer who’d been trained for the whole length of his adolescence to kill him. A shitty castle was pretty good, by those standards.
Not that shitty was doing much justice to the condition of this one, though. Reggie walked past a few of his workers and examined their progress.
Peelers liked him. They followed him, and they could obey simple instructions. By Reggie’s estimate their rotted brains let them understand orders better than dogs but worse than children. That wasn’t going very far for this project.
Reggie saw the ones he’d put on clearing out stone debris doing well enough. There were, after all, only so many ways you could screw up ‘drag that heavy thing into this room’. That was about it for his successes. The ones he’d put on actually gathering stone had brought him various useful ones, often foregoing the hard granite of the surrounding area for fragile rocks that came apart in his own grip. At one point, for some fucking reason, Reggie had seen a peeler repeatedly headbutting one of the walls. It died before doing any structural damage, which was just fine by him.
You won’t have any significant control over the undead as you are now, Sycily told him helpfully.
“You’re telling me there’s some unexpected contrivance to vampirism that I wasn’t aware of? I’m shocked, Sycily, shocked I tell you.”
This is…Oh, are you being sarcastic?
“Yes.”
I actually spotted it that time.
“You’re getting better,” Reggie found himself genuinely smiling at that, “but about the undead, uh, how do I get better control? An Evolution I take it?”
Correct.
“So that’s something to consider then,” he grumbled.
Evolution. It was starting to be Reggie’s least-favourite word. He’d only been back at the castle for three days, but already it was hanging over his head like a guillotine blade. Evolution. When to do it?
Not now, certainly. As much as he wanted to. If Reggie evolved now he’d get a new Ability or Trait, that could be big. He’d have the ability to improve his existing Abilities and Traits as high as level III, that could be enormous.
And he’d be limited to gaining Attribute increases only by feeding on Tier 3 creatures and people, which could effectively trap him at his current level of power.
No. He’d hit the maximum of all his Attributes, or at least as many as he could, and then Evolve. It was the only way to do it fast, and he needed fast above all.
Name: Reginald Smith
Age: 21
Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]
Class: None
Attributes:
(S)Strength 25/37
(P)Speed 25/40
(P)Celerity 25/40
(S)Toughness 25/37
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(P)Charisma 25/40
Abilities:
Blood Magic II
Form of the Beast II
Royal Presence I
Traits:
Enhanced Senses I
Regeneration II
Addictive Ichor
He hadn’t asked Sycily to bring up his sheet, but she’d done so anyway. Sensed his intent and…wait.
“Sycily, what are those new numbers, after the dashes?”
They are the maximum of each Attribute you can obtain in your current Tier and Class. Primary Journeyman Attributes can gain +30 from the baseline average of 10, while Secondary can gain only +27.
Reggie was glad for the reminders. “Can you make those extra numbers permanent then?”
Of course.
He nodded, more to himself, and dumped the Witchfinder corpses in one corner of the castle. Things didn’t rot, in the grimwoods. One of the first things he’d noticed after trying to figure out storage for the peeler that brained itself. That was a bit unnerving, but very convenient for Reggie. He could store those corpses out in the open basically forever.
But forever was a long way away, and he had more pressing matters to attend to. He’d been hoping to hunt a wolf spider before, saving up peelers for his whole time in the grimwoods. Those Witchfinders straying so close to his castle had basically killed that plan.
Fortunately, he had another.
Reggie had gained one very crucial bit of information, from his time at Lorwick. A glimpse at the inside of ant nests, and the knowledge that there were larger creatures found deep in their tunnels. He headed out into the grimwood now to test it. He’d seen ants there, after all, so surely he’d find ant nests if he searched, right?
Right. Reggie spent less than three hours looking before he recognised the shape of a great hole gaping up from an earthen mound, several of the smaller drone-ants swarming around it. His salvation.
This time he intended to make the most out of it.
Reggie had his gun, and he had a chainmail shirt hastily scavenged from one of the Witchfinders for all it’d do. Other than that he’d have only his wits and his claws to rely on. Fine by him. He transformed fully, then headed into the tunnel.
Dark. It was dark, darker than any human could see in. Even Reggie’s eyes were limited in visibility, catching objects maybe fifty feet ahead but no farther. Did the ants need to see? Could they pierce the gloom better than him? It felt likely that this wouldn’t cause them any problems, or else why would their own shelter be arranged like it?
Because they can’t produce light, Reggie, don’t overcomplicate things.
Hard to overcomplicate a tunnel. Reggie ventured deeper, then deeper still. This one was a lot bigger than the nest he’d found in the plains outside Lorwick, and it was only after ten minutes of walking that Reggie came across the first few ants. All drones, unfortunately. He didn’t bother draining them, already having verified from Norman that he couldn’t progress his next Evolution without starting the one right ahead of him first, and only drank what he needed to replenish the bits of ichor burned up by his being transformed for so long. The walls were red and sticky as he moved on, heading even deeper.
Reggie wasn’t walking for much longer before he found his prize. Or, rather, before it found him. He was ready for it this time though, and already familiar with the uncanny silence soldier ants could cross their tunnels with. He heard it coming, braced himself as it approached from behind, then whirled and slashed at the air with his claws.
A few feet too low, as it happened, because the damned ant had been crawling over the ceiling rather than the floor. It dropped down for him and Reggie just barely rolled aside, hitting a wall, kicking off it and slashing again. He felt his talons chip upon impact with carapace that was apparently close to their own hardness, though thin enough that he took a nice chunk out of it too. The ant leaned back, opened its mouth and…
Oh, it was black.
This was Reggie’s big warning before the spray of acid came for him. He’d started twisting aside about a fiftieth of a second before it began and was treated to having only one arm soaked in the stuff as a result. Ant acid wasn’t that strong, right? Oh. His bone was showing.
The ant reared up like it was ready to squirt him again, mouth opening wide just long enough for Reggie to stab two of his claws right into the gaping maw.
No carapace in there, not even a scrap. The deadly talons found only meat resisting them, and that was no barrier at all.
Reggie’s claws slid two, maybe three inches into the ant before hitting something a great deal harder than the viscera. Its shell, he suspected. Collision with that stopped the talons with a forceful jerk that ran right down his arm.
Even with the grievous wound to its head, the soldier ant was still alive. Its forelimbs thrashed around, barbed edges nicking Reggie’s iron-hard skin more than once and drawing teardrops of blood from him. The energy in its movements surprised him, until he realised it was nothing more than the frenzied strength that came to all dying things.
He decided to speed it up a bit, twisting his claws and ripping them free. Yellow blood burst out of the head wound, and several chunks of solid stuff Reggie suspected was brain matter fell down along with it. The ant’s movements became weaker, but didn’t stop altogether. Perfect.
Reggie fell on it and drank until it was empty, something that took him no more than a few seconds.
+1 to Strength.
Name: Reginald Smith
Age: 21
Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]
Class: None
Attributes:
(S)Strength 38(+12)/49
(P)Speed 37(+12)/52
(P)Celerity 37(+12)/52
(S)Toughness 37(+12)/49
(P)Charisma 13(-12)/52
Abilities:
Blood Magic II
Form of the Beast II
Royal Presence I
Traits:
Enhanced Senses I
Regeneration II
Addictive Ichor
The blood was answering his call so easily now that he actually wondered if it still needed physical contact at all. Stepping back, he succeeded in levitating a good few drops of it free of the corpse and proving his suspicions right.
“Can I use this in combat?” he whispered, embarrassed at not having even considered the idea. Sycily answered him fast.
That question is more abstract than the ones I am best at answering, but I think so.
This was hardly the best time to experiment, but after his next life-or-death struggle was a worse one still.
Reggie had drained most of the ant, but there were a few drops of blood left in it. Literally a few drops, across the whole thing. He’d never have gotten them out normally. His method today wasn’t normal though; an exertion of will to focus on the body, probing its emptied veins and seeming to highlight every bead of untaken vitae like a star shining in the sky. Reggie’s mind wrapped around them all…
…And he pulled.
They came free faster than he’d expected, and this was how Reggie learned about the minutiae of mana-infused creatures and how soon after death much of their bodily tissues softened up as the magic left them. With no arcane resistance to his power, the blood was drawn out exponentially faster and harder than ever before. With no arcane resistance to the meat around it, that blood found a relatively easy time in drilling through. It hovered before Reggie’s outstretched hands as a few tiny crimson orbs.
And it filled him with all sorts of ideas.
