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[Skill-Eater] Chapter 131: Travel
🕑 Added 2024-10-24 17:01:02 +0000 UTCTraveling after such a heavy rain wound up being something of a mixed bag. On the bright side, the retreating storm brought a breeze in its wake, cooling the air quite a bit. Riller and Violet were able to hike comfortably throughout the day without having to shelter inside the wagon.
On the other hand, it turned the packed-dirt trail they were following into a band of foot-thick mud. It wasn’t deep enough to keep Blue from pulling the wagon, but it slowed her down and the muck got everywhere. It made Edge glad for his waterproof poncho and bag, which kept his inner clothing and gear from getting too muddy.
After a few hours of trudging through the slop, Trapper decided to follow an alternate route, turning down a fork in the road that would take them across rockier terrain as they continued heading north. Not longer after, the path led them to stone-lined waterway—a smaller river that wasn’t as deep or as dangerous as the one running south of the settlement.
As promised, the mud wasn’t nearly as bad if you didn’t get too close to the riverbank, and the crew made better time past that point. Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, they followed the river, staying near the border of the grasslands. On top of getting them out of the mud, the route limited the lizard’s approach.
They had the tall grass on one side to reveal the padamas’s presence and the water on the other. If they did wind up being attacked by the giant predator, it would have to come at them from straight ahead. It let the crew focus most of their attention across a much smaller area, although they still had to remain vigilant against other forms of danger as they devoured the miles between their position and the border of the Ivory Plains.
To Edge’s relief, they didn’t run into the giant beast along the way. They did have some excitement in the late afternoon, when the crew had to drive off a pack of brush hounds that wanted to steal the food in the wagon.
After taking a crossbow bolt from Trapper, a poison arrow from Riller, and a flame imbued arrow from Sasha, the aggressive canines learned the error of their ways. They went darting off into the grasslands with their tails between their legs, and the hunters didn’t see them again.
Riller spotted some harvestable resources on two separate occasions while scouting the terrain ahead. Since they were in a hurry and the prizes weren’t close by, they just marked the location on their map so that the crew could return another day. A map that Violet updated as they went, recording the parts of the plains that were the same as they had been before the anomaly, as well as any terrain that had been swapped in from elsewhere.
Since everyone else had been on Ord for longer than Edge, he learned a fair amount from listening to their reports. It turned out that not all the new parts were from the frontier. Some were from other biomes on the planet that the hunters recognized. Most of transported regions were tiny—just a small slice of jungle or swamp that had been moved thousands of miles in the blink of an eye. Trapper judged that they were gradually being taken over by the dominant biome and wouldn’t last longer than another year or two.
The crew stayed well away from the pieces originating from the frontier, even when they had to cut into the grasslands to do it. Fortunately, such sightings were few and far between, so it only cost them a few hours to avoid the potential threats.
Those mysterious locales needed to be explored by combat-oriented teams sooner rather than later, to see if they had any dangerous residents, valuable resources, or opportunities like the one Edge had found. Some were likely home to deadly threats that would have to be dealt with at some point, but the crew had their own job to do.
It made him wonder how badly the environment had been damaged by the disaster. Most planets would have suffered catastrophic losses, leading to a spiraling loss in biodiversity. But Ord was a resilient world that had been tainted many times before. Invaded first by off-world beasts like the creatures from Earth, and then again by the nightmarish monsters that the System had created after the AI installed itself into the planet’s core.
The beasts of Ord were tough, and the biomes had their own forms of magical defenses. The planet’s incredible concentration of magicytes let the land and its inhabitants adapt at a rate unseen on other worlds. Even still, the changes to the flows of magic were certain to have major consequences. Many species would perish, and others would flourish. Edge just hoped that humanity would be counted amongst the latter.
In the late afternoon, Riller appeared from around the bend, reporting that he had found a mana-seed not too far from the road. It was guarded by a pair of shaggy white boars—a native species known as grell. The seed would be useful in the fight ahead, so Trapper and Sasha went to drive the grell off and claim the prize—figuring that a stink bomb and a pair of flashbangs should do it.
While the women were busy, Edge took advantage of the opportunity to do some skill hunting. The crew wasn’t expecting to run into the padamas until tomorrow, and they planned to spend at least a day setting up the kill when they got there.
Just in case, he decided to save one use of [Extraction]. Under the guise of catching something fresh for dinner, he ranged south of the wagon. Since he wasn’t looking for anything that he wanted to keep, he targeted the first beasts he found—a pair of rabbit-like creatures the size of bobcats.
He had plenty of mana, so he closed the distance using shadow step and stabbed with his iceblade to cripple his prey. Their skills were the kind that were only useful to beasts, so he Absorbed them both and added them to regeneration, since it had started out with some experience when he first picked it up. Each of the basic skills only filled its cup a few percent, but it was better than nothing and took the lifesaving skill two small steps closer to reaching rank-two.
Repel water was ready to rank-up whenever he wanted, but Edge had barely used it yet. He decided to experiment with the skill over the next few days, so that he could make an informed decision when it was time to pick his first upgrade.
On that note, he spent a few minutes playing with it now, sliding droplets of dew off the plants and showing mud around. He even tried using it on a rodent running past his position. The pulse of mana sent the small animal flying, squealing in terror before landing in patch of grass a good fifteen feet away, uninjured but understandably agitated.
Not long after Edge returned with both carcasses, the women arrived with the mana-seed—some kind of bright green sphere that reminded him of a plum. Violet stored it inside the crew’s magtech preservation unit, and they continued on their way.
Part of their job was to keep an eye out for refugees, but the hunters didn’t run into anyone else on the path they followed. They did find signs that several of the farmers had passed this way while heading to Puppet Town, who had likely arrived before Edge’s team left the settlement.
All in all, it wound up being a pleasant day of traveling. One last day to reflect and unwind before enduring the torrent of danger that was looming dark along the horizon.
