02 – Testing some things

Martin came to his senses greeted by the blinding, huge letters of a level up. Around him he could vaguely make out the charred shapes of trees, the still smoking holes in the ground and more exploded slimes than he could count. He felt drained, physically, but mentally he could swear that he never felt this good. He tried to get up, but his body was out of strength: his muscles ached, pulsed and felt full of lactic acid. No matter how much he pushed himself, he couldn’t get up.

He didn’t let the panic get to him. There was, he was sure, a good reason as to why he was feeling this way. Something that had to do with whatever happened during the period of time he couldn’t recall, during the blackout. Plus, the promise of yet another dopamine rush was staring right at him.

>Level up!

>Choose one:

>Improve random skill (1 point)
>Improve chosen skill (2 points)
>Generate new random skill (1 point)

“Generate.”

>Generating new random skill…
>Skill: Energy Sap 1 (touch, 10%) generated!

As soon as the messages went away, a surge of energy flowed through Martin’s body. He felt not only energized, but healed: his pain went away, strength came back to his worn muscles, and his mind felt clear of all the leftover chemicals of a very close brush with a panic attack.

“Leveling up… heals?” He asked himself, in a tone that was half surprised and half ecstatic.

He got up, and looked around. The devastation was significant, but not overwhelmingly so. There were a few charred trees here and there, and more than a few were felled, but there was no raging forest fire and nothing more than dead slimes. All in all, it was acceptable, as long as he avoided having another episode.

“So, this energy sap. What does it do?”

Thinking about the skill, he once again had an instinctive understanding of what it did, how it could be used and on what. However, this time it was much less straightforward compared to the ball of blue fire. All he knew what the he could use this skill to steal energy from a target by touching it, and that ten percent of said energy would be added to his own. That was is. As for the targets, anything went. Literally.

He grabbed the end of a very large felled branch from the ground, and watched as his skill made the still attached leaves turn brown at first, then the wood dried up, hardened and finally started to disintegrate starting from the extremities and working its way to where he was holding the branch. In a matter of moments, all he had in the palm of his hand was a fistful of ash.

As for the energy, it was very little. He could somewhat feel the effect of the skill, but it was comparable to having downed a cup of coffee. He decided to try with something bigger, setting his eyes on one of the trees still standing close by. He touched its trunk and began draining.

The process took a good minute before it was complete, once again giving him much less energy than he thought it would and even worse still, he could feel some sort of tiredness begin to build up in the back of his mind. It was the same as tiredness he got from using the fireball, he realized.

“Mana.” He muttered, deciding to keep to the video game theme to give a name to the energy he used to activate the skills.

He didn’t let the underwhelming amount of energy he got out of a tree drag his mood down. There was another test he needed to do. He sighed, looking at the palm of his hand with a face that begged for mercy, then exhaled all of a sudden and slammed his hand against a splintered and broken piece of tree. The wood cut into his skin and flesh, and Martin’s eyes started to water and his throat tied itself up in a knot. He was having trouble keeping his voice down.

Panting, he grabbed another tree with the other hand and activated the skill. A pleasant warmth spread to the wound, which stopped hurting almost immediately followed by a ticking sensation. He stared as the splinters were pushed out of his skin, and the wound began to close. The tree, however, turned to ash before the process was complete. Another floral victim and he was back to new, save for a slight headache and tiredness, and a wide grin on his face.

“Good,” he giggled, “this is all I needed to know.”

There was another perk to using that skill, he noticed. He was walking down the path close to where he had appeared in this world when the realization hit him. He was not hungry or thirsty, despite it being at least a full day since he arrived here. And, although he wasn’t completely sure, he could swear that he was quite dehydrated when he had woken up this morning. And yet, after using the skill he was completely fine.

His lips split. “Shit, this is golden. For the price of a headache and a little tiredness I can literally go without food or water! I’ll take it!”

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He could just sleep the tiredness off. It definitely beat having to hunt, find drinking water and all that shit. It was as if the system was providing him with the tools to survive in the wild. Thinking about it, it did say something along those lines when it first asked him to choose if he wanted to generate a skill.

All this made him wonder, however. Were there other people, or even animals in this world? All he saw so far were plants and slimes and yes, the path he was walking on had to be either human or animal in origin but… so far it was only him and the vast silent forest. Maybe he had been dropped in a starter area?

Martin walked for a while longer, but before long he was a bit tired and short of breath. He wasn’t against stopping for a while to catch his breath, of course, having nothing else to do than enjoy life now that he was not on Earth anymore, but before doing that he wanted to see if using Energy Sap would help him or not.

He leaned against a tree, and activated it. Surely enough, it worked, replacing the soreness and lack of energy with a headache and overall body numbness.

“I’d wonder if it’s better this or just being plain tired though.”

Repeating this process a few times during the day taught Martin something else about the skill: first, he only needed to rest up a bit before the headache and numbness went away. It didn’t matter what he did either, as long as he didn’t use skills. So he could walk, jog or rest. Even meditate, it really didn’t matter. Mana had a passive regeneration thing, apparently.

On the topic, the second discovery was the most exciting of them all. Every time he used Energy Sap… he grew stronger! It was subtle at first, that’s why it took him a few times, but soon he noticed that he could walk longer before getting tired, and that his headache was coming in slower and was going away slightly faster than before. While the first thing could be due to him getting conditioned to walk more, his muscles growing and recuperating at record pace thanks to the healing properties of the skill, the headache part was definitely something else. He couldn’t be sure, due to the nature of a headache, just how much it changed but he knew that change it did.

He wished he had a timer, but sadly he didn’t have his phone with him. The system must have left it behind when it grabbed Martin and brought it here. In any case, his gut told that every time he sapped energy from a target, part of it went into growing his overall pool of energy. Maybe that 10% that was written in the skill actually meant that 10% of the sapped energy was added to his own.

Curiously killing trees gave him no exp.

Night was approaching rapidly. If Martin had been more knowledgeable about geography, perhaps the direction and speed of the sun going down would have told him something about where he was in the world. But then again, it wasn’t a sure thing that he would either care to know, or that such knowledge would have helped him, considering that he could very well be on a planet that didn’t follow the same rules as Earth did. He was, after all in another universe.

He had made sure, when his headache wasn’t too bad, to shoot a fireball to any slime he saw along the way. This made him realize that he really needed to work on his aim, and that the throw was only as good as his throwing arm was. He could use both left and right arm, and made sure to train both, but by the end of the day he felt tired and pissed. Pissed because despite killing dozens of slime and getting that sweet +1 exp every time, he hadn’t leveled up yet.

He missed that dopamine rush, and wanted to get some.

Just as he thought that, he spotted some smoke rising above the tree line. It was quite visible as it was lit by the setting sun, where the golden orange light made it stand against the dark blue backdrop of the night. Martin redoubled his pace, getting ever close to the source of the smoke. The closer he got, the more glimpses of light he could see through the forest of tree trunks in the distance, followed by voices and the bustling noises of a village.

However, something wasn’t quite right. He checked a few times but… “Unless the trees are wayyyy bigger over there, those houses aren’t the right size at all.”

Ever from this far the houses, huts and buildings appeared to be too small to fit a person inside. From what Martin could tell, those dimly lit buildings, with their lit windows and barred doors were barely half the size they should have been.

He decided to approach stealthily, making sure nobody noticed his approach. He went off the path, and into the forest proper, and by the time he had reached the small village it was full on night, dark and silent. The village itself was silent, with only muffled noises coming from inside the buildings where the lights were still on. Careful not to trip on the uneven ground, Martin reached the last tree before the clearing where all the houses were, and observed.

If he had to be completely honest with himself, those run down, barely standing huts looked like goblin houses. And he had all the more reason to believe it, considering what he had experienced so far.

He rubbed his hands together.

“Goblins are monsters. No need to be ethical. They’re just… Free exp.”

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