Greenriver is becoming a fortress. We discovered a type of stone plated tortoises that gives the ability to mash dirt and other stone into brick like shapes. It did not take us long to call on volunteers to take the sigils and start building a wall. No mortar was needed, they stuck together like Legos. More importantly, someone used the diamond in their wedding ring to test the hardness. Neither were able to scratch eachother.
If anyone told me that the end of the world would let me live in a lego castle made with magic ripped out of monsters when I was younger, I would have asked if there was any way to end the world sooner. Anyway, a wall of bricks is being set up around Greenriver, lines of construction vehicles are moving large blocks to where they need to be. It will take a few weeks, but I will get my castle.
Day 28, Owen Landers
Notice: Someone is attempting to claim the sigil of Schemat Accendo will you allow this?
Warning: This will degrade the Schemat Accendo sigil as the recipient has not earned the reward.
“Go ahead,” Silas said aloud.
The sigil disappeared from Bella’s hand, sliding easily into her palm. She looked uncertainly at Silas, “This will help us get water?”
“Possibly,” Silas said, “I’m not one hundred percent sure, but it came from a monster whose only interesting quality was their fire abilities.”
He had considered that it might not give fire abilities. What if it bestowed ghostly scale armor or gave her a tail? He didn’t think so, the werewolf was the only one he knew of that gave an ability like that and it was focused on the pack. While the dragonkin lived in large groups, they weren’t exactly community based creatures. Still, Silas did not have a large pool of data to draw on.
Bella’s eyes zoned out as she read through her interface messages, “It is called Lesser Thermal Cultivator and it can increase the temperature of anything I touch by up to three times,” She looked up at Silas, “Is that good?”
Silas didn’t know if it was good, honestly both of her sigils sounded terrible compared to his. However, the greater versions promised to be more impressive if he could figure out how to get them to work.
“That sounds good enough for our needs. It sounds like you can increase the temperature of this bowl. If I understand how the sigil works, it will gradually rise to boil,” Silas assumed that an object sitting in a seventy degree environment would be raised to two hundred ten degrees by this sigil.
“Now what?” Bella asked looking at the bowl, “I can’t feel any difference.”
Silas frowned, “Give it a few minutes, both of my sigils seemed to work automatically.”
So they waited. It did not take long for Bella’s eyes to widen, “It’s getting warmer, it’s really getting warmer.”
He leaned back with a sigh. That solved their water problem. No one was going to die of dehydration today. Glancing at the hideout, Silas wished that Samantha had been awake to see this. She had been physically exhausted from hauling rocks and emotionally exhausted from finding out what happened to her father. He had been concerned that seeing what remained of Connor would traumatize the girl, but Bella had made sure to keep the girl from seeing anything too horrific.
Bella and Samantha were currently living Silas’s worst case scenario. The person they would have fought so hard to return to was already gone. At least they had each other, as flimsy of a reassurance as that was in hell.
The larger bowl started to fill up with purified water, one drop at a time. It would take quite a bit of their time, but they could get enough water this way. Now he needed to focus on the food problem. Heating something to two hundred ten degrees was simply not hot enough. However, if mother and daughter’s abilities were stacked, they could feasibly heat a stone to six hundred thirty degrees if it was multiplicative. If it was additive, then it would peak at four hundred twenty, which was still hot enough to cook the issues out of the meat.
Silas was currently injured, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to use his time efficiently. He got to work on his shoulder protection. Since the skulls he used previously, he had learned a few things. Primarily, armor modeled off of human conflicts would only be marginally effective against beasts.
Humans found weaknesses and brutally exploited them. Joints would be struck, the weight of armor would be used against its wearer, and blunt force weapons would be brought to bear. Animals just didn’t operate that way. They went for the throat, for tendons, or tried to overwhelm him with raw kinetic power.
In practice, this meant that he would need to protect his vitals more carefully, but could leave his joints mostly unprotected. The exceptions were the knees, ankles, and neck, as he had already been bitten in those locations multiple times. This allowed him to further thicken the areas that he expected to see consistent abuse.
Silas got lost in the process of making. He didn’t know if talents were something people were born with, but he regretted not picking up sculpting in high school. It was relaxing to feel something come together under his hands. Sometimes it was tedious, such as when he drew individual leaves on the surface and other times it was soothing. Regardless of the feelings associated with it, he was proud when he finished the project even if he could point out a dozen flaws with it.
He stepped back and smiled at the finished set of armor. The pauldrons were more exaggerated than was typically seen in historical pieces of armor, flaring up a bit to deflect claws or teeth into his thick helmet instead of his neck. He had built slots into several locations into which, stone arrowheads would be set. That should deter quite a bit of grappling and biting. Porcupines were typically left alone for a good reason.
“That’s cool,” A voice said.
Silas jumped in surprise, he really needed to work on his awareness. Looking to his left, he found Samantha standing next to him. She was still filthy, but otherwise, it looked like she had recovered from her grief. Silas guessed that she was simply distracted, getting over what she had been through would take a long time and be delayed until they escaped this place.
“It is,” Silas agreed, “Have you tried out your superpower?”
Samantha nodded vigorously, “I can make things hot just like mom. Together we can light stuff on fire.”
Silas internally sighed at the note of pride in Samantha’s voice. He had just created a pyromaniac. Not the worst outcome, pyromaniacs would likely do well in hell.
Then a thought crossed Silas’s mind, “Wait, what did you light on fire?”
There wasn’t a whole lot they could burn. Samantha pointed to a pile of charcoal next to a flat rock. Bella was still running the distiller and had gotten a good amount of liquid, but one hand was covered in what Silas assumed to be a carbonized bone squirrel.
“We burned dinner!” Samantha said proudly.
So it was multiplicative. Four hundred twenty degrees was enough to light meat on fire, but one would need to be woefully incompetent as a chef to do the amount of damage he was currently looking at. Six hundred thirty degrees might be a little on the low side as well. Silas frowned, all his calculations were made off an assumption of a seventy degree baseline. However, he remembered it being much hotter here when he arrived, before he got two points in vitality and one body. Was he becoming resistant to temperature?
“Samantha, how hot do you think it is?” Silas asked.
The girl gave the question some serious thought, “It is cooler than home in the middle of summer, but only a little. Maybe forty degrees?”
Silas blinked. What was she going on about? It took him a moment to realize that she was using Celsius. He had no idea what the conversion equation was, but he knew water boiled at one hundred. So forty was around one hundred in Fahrenheit.
He started in surprise when he did that math, “You heated some meat to nearly a thousand degrees!”
Samantha stared at him blankly, trying to understand what he was talking about. When Silas’s meaning failed to compute, she grinned, “It’s pretty cool isn’t it.”
“It is,” Silas said slowly, “Were you by chance able to make any of the food edible?”
“Oh yeah, that’s why mom wanted me to get you,” Samantha said, “She wanted to give you the first piece.”
If Bella hadn’t asked, he would have recommended it. Flesh Lord not only made him resistant to the problematic elements of the food, it also notified him of the dangerous pieces. He thanked Samantha and made his way over to Bella. Today he could test how much his sigils impacted his personality and desires. If cooked food tasted worse than raw he would have definitive proof that there was some effect.
“I hear you want me to try some food,” Silas asked.
The walk over was surprisingly smooth. In the time he had been working on his armor, Flesh Lord had reduced the broken shin to a fractured one. He might be better in just a few days at this rate.
“Yes, your sigil tells you if something is dangerous to eat,” Bella asked, her tone making it a question. She held up a chunk of pale meat.
Silas nodded as he took the offered goodie and popped it into his mouth. He waited for the notice telling him of the horrible organisms that filled the flesh. Nothing, he gave Bella a thumbs up. Then his face fell, it tasted horrible. Dry and stringy with no flavor, this meat was not dissimilar to his mother’s attempts at Thanksgiving turkey.
“Needs ketchup,” Silas muttered
Bella smiled a bit sadly, “I didn’t bring any spices with me. Is it at least safe?”
“My sigil doesn’t see anything wrong with it,” Silas shrugged, “How long will the meat here last you two?”
Bella examined the large geckos and remaining squirrel, “Three or four days, maybe a bit less if we don’t heavily exert ourselves.”
Silas nodded. He had a few days to recover and while he did not expect it to be a complete recovery, hunting should no longer be off the table. Before then, he would need to do quite a bit of work. He needed to expand the hole to fit all of them, which meant digging into the rock formation. They didn‘t need much, but room for all of them to rest was a necessity.
Armor for Bella, or a bigger room? Silas decided that the room was more important. The fact that he was tired had nothing to do with it at all. Though in all seriousness, he did think it was more important than armor. Normally he would suggest posting a guard and sleeping in shifts, however, Samantha was too young to guard and the closest Bella had come to fighting was throwing a rock at the Terra Ursa. Better to create a secure hideout that they could all sleep in. It would take a few days, but he could manage that much.
So he grabbed his hammer and started working away at the rock formation. Every time he got a rock loose, he pried it out and set it to the side. A hole in the wall was only so useful, it needed to be hidden and for that, any extricated rubble would be useful. The stone set into his hammer broke many times, but Silas was fortunate to have an overabundance of rocks to work with.
Silas had intended to be finished in the time he allowed himself, but digging a bedroom sized hole into solid stone was not as easy as he had imagined. He almost hoped to be interrupted by some monsters, just so that he wouldn’t be forced to go out and hunt for them. For the first time in his stay in hell, the creatures left him alone.
It was with irritation that he had to get some sleep while packed in the original hole with Bella and Samantha. Normally the experience would have been awkward, but he was tired enough that sleep came quickly.
Sleep was a wonderful thing. Sure it was just about the least productive thing humans did, but it felt good. It was the one thing Silas disliked about the army, they had no respect for it. Unfortunately, neither did Flesh Lord. Sleep was made to heal the body to maintain peak physical health, and so was Flesh Lord. Once Silas got enough rest the stupid sigil reactivated all his systems to peak functionality, which included his brain.
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Silas grumbled, hugging Abby, not wanting to wake up.
Abby cleared her throat.
Silas opened his eyes just a bit and gazed down at Abby’s black hair. He frowned. Abby had brown hair. With a start, he realized he had an arm slung around Bella. A spike of anger shot through him. It wasn’t targeted at Bella, she had done nothing wrong, but she was the only outlet. It wasn’t fair that he was stuck here. That was a child’s logic, but it would feel so good to let his anger out.
So he did what his father always told him to do. Bottle it up and take it to the gym. Punching bags existed for a reason and it wasn’t exercise. Silas didn’t have a punching bag, but he did have an entire planet of monsters as a substitute.
Bella cleared her throat again, “Can you let go?”
“Oh, sorry,” Silas muttered, scooting as far away as he could in the tiny hole.
The entire area was just a bit bigger than a full sized bed, not big enough for two adults and a child to sleep comfortably. With him pressed up against one side and Bella and Samantha on the other, there was barely any room to slide out. Silas managed to get out without doing anything else embarrassing
As soon as he was outside, he surveyed the surroundings for threats. Finding none, he went to grab breakfast. He called it breakfast, but in truth, he had no idea what time it actually was. He had worked for a few days straight between his armor and the cave, but he had let the work put him in a sort of trance so he didn’t know how long it had been. Meals were his only indicator of time and as this was the first meal after waking up, Silas termed it breakfast.
As soon as he stuffed the last of the gecko meat into his mouth a notice arrived, one that he had been expecting.
Notice: You have pushed Flesh Lord to its limits by severely injuring your body. Flesh Lord has advanced to the new baseline you have demonstrated. Your Vitality has increased to reflect this.
Silas had not been one hundred percent sure this would happen, but it made sense. He had screwed his body up enough to cripple most people in the last month only for Flesh Lord to completely patch him up. If that wasn’t a strain on the sigil he didn’t know what was.
He popped open his interface to look over everything. It was mostly the same with the exception of the point in vitality and a few titles.
Vitality seemed to compound his sigil’s healing speed. Silas believed that the statistic represented the energy his body generated and used. From ATP to food being broken down for nutrients and energy. All the processes his body used to move were overseen by vitality while the body stat represented the structure.
In more mundane terms, Silas believed that the physical stats were like a remote controlled car. Vitality was the batteries, the frame was the body, and control was the tires. He frowned at the mental analogy, he had tiny tires. No self respecting rural American would be happy with tiny tires.
His gaze fell to the titles. Over time he had collected quite a few of them, however, they seemed to be completely useless. Maybe they were useful in some way, maybe they collectively formed a type of nobility system. How many titles would he need to become a king?
Only one truly concerned him. Nimrod’s Foe. The notices had claimed that he had avoided the being's attention. It could be that he had set himself against Nimrod by harming his followers. That implied a desire to face the dragonkin, a desire which he was not entirely sure that he possessed.
Silas shook his head as he closed the interface. There were other things for him to be thinking about. Like collecting lunch and advancing his abilities. He did some stretches to check how hurt he was. His ribs still twinged and his back protested when twisted in certain ways. Silas grinned, he wasn’t completely healed, but it was close enough. It felt ludicrous to break his bones at the beginning of a week and go hunting monsters at the end, but that was his life now.
“They say comparison is the thief of joy,” Silas grinned as his eyes fell on the weights he had been using, “But that is only when comparing oneself to others.”
He grabbed the makeshift weights lying around. The exact poundage was a mystery, but he would guess they weighed around one hundred pounds each. They were still heavy, but significantly more manageable than before. He attempted to do a single arm curl with the weight and failed. Still making it three-quarters of the way was a significant improvement. Another point in body might allow him to break some world records.
The thought made him wonder what athletes would be like. They were already better than everyone around them, either they would start with more than one point, or their point would matter more. Silas was suddenly glad for the army’s strict physical standards. Dropping the weights, he nodded to himself. Today would not be the day he wrestled werewolves, but he might be able to expand his prey range by about fifty pounds.
Silas donned his armor and grabbed his weapon. Stats weren’t the only way to improve his little group. Sigils could also be improved from lesser to greater. He wasn’t yet comfortable fighting a beholder, however a horned bear or any pair of interesting creatures that he could disable would be useful. Scratch that, he didn’t want to drag around a crippled horned bear, so Samantha was going to be getting her greater sigil today.
What would a little girl get use out of? She had fire, or at least heat. Silas shook his head, what was he thinking? Samantha was not a child soldier, she needed something that would keep her out of danger. Flight, camouflage, or a way to rapidly scale walls, she needed something that would keep her away from the claws and fangs of the monsters.
Unfortunately, Silas knew of several creatures that could climb or fly but not what their sigils did. Power seemed connected to what the creature represented more than what it did. Silas didn’t get tentacle powers, but he did get consumption ones. None of the ones he could think of were embodiments of flight or hiding.
Well, he hadn’t exactly gone exploring outside his little bubble. There could be something a ten mile hike away and he would never know. With that thought in mind, Silas started jogging in a random direction. He still scraped his sign into the stone as he ran past stone constructs. Monsters were common, he saw them once every few formations.
The rubber-furred monkeys seemed to have built themselves a few communities partway up the ravine walls. German shepherd sized bird lizards preyed on them. Scavengers moved about on the ground, eating the fallen bodies and getting eaten in turn by larger predators. It was a whole ecosystem composed exclusively of carnivores.
Silas hadn’t seen life like this since arriving in this world. To be fair, he didn’t believe he had much of an opportunity to. On his first day, two kaiju had waltzed in and ripped open a portal large enough to clear out the local wildlife. Water had been dumped in creating a foreign and unnatural terrain. A fact that was exasperated by the colony of dragonkin just a few miles away and their hunting patterns.
Unfortunately, he didn’t see anything that screamed ‘keep children safe.’ At this point he would be willing to go with something like a turtle on the off chance Samantha got a shell. He looked around and didn’t see a turtle, or would it be a tortoise? The Chinese had a few myths including tortoises, right? Silas knew they had funny looking lions and corgi-looking dragons, but that was the extent of his knowledge.
The increase in environmental life was both a good thing and a bad thing. It increased the likelihood of finding a compatible animal, but it also increased the likelihood that he would be seen. While not every animal was out to kill him, enough were making Silas wary of any noisy confrontations. Thankfully, more life did not mean bustling, simply double or triple what Silas was used to.
It took him longer than he would have liked, but he did find something. Three ravines farther in, Silas found a creature covered in translucent plates of what appeared to be glass, similar to the fogged panes used for shower doors. It reminded Silas of an armadillo, though a nightmarish variant.
The bone plates or glass plates allowed Silas to see the vague outlines of the organs beneath. A head that was small proportional to the body poked out and was munching away on one of the rubber monkeys. It had a boxy skull tipped with a proboscis that seemed to have enough suction to slurp up meat, bone, and blood.
Silas shuddered. This was no armadillo, it was what would happen if a tank and a mosquito had a baby. He and his father had often joked, “If God made the world in six days and said it was all good on the seventh. Then mosquitoes would need to have been made on day eight alongside goatheads, lice, and politicians.”
It was big for anything with a proboscis, but only half again larger than Silas including the armor. While on all fours it came up to Silas’s lower ribs and with its bulky body he was certain that it couldn’t lift its head higher than his knees. He wasn’t naive enough to think that disabling the monster would be easy, but it shouldn’t be too difficult compared to werewolves, centi-snakes, and dragonkin.
First things first, take out the other creatures in the ravine. A pack of what he was starting to call German raptors was perched in stone nests built into the stone. He needed to remove them which would force him to climb the wall. The German raptors were not particularly threatening on the ground, but he assumed that the winged lizards would be more problematic in their preferred environment.
There were only four of them. He could handle that, at least he hoped. Grabbing two rocks, Silas started climbing. Previously it had been easy to climb the formations, he had two in vitality and ones in everything else back then. This time he was sporting seventy pounds of armor and fifteen pounds of sword alongside a two in body. It made things easier and harder, holding himself to the wall was simpler while any jumps he needed to make were harder.
Silas looked down, glad he wasn’t afraid of heights. Forty feet was not a long distance, but it felt like it when he was dangling from the edge of a predator’s home. He made sure both feet had been set on solid stone and got a good grip with one hand on the lower lip of the nesting cave. The other drew the mantis blade in a reverse grip. He paused, waiting a moment to see if the German raptor would respond to the noise of a metal blade on a bone sheath. Nothing happened. Maybe the meaty slurping from the tank mosquito thing covered it up.
He stood on the balls of his feet to give himself just a bit of extra height and stabbed the mantis blade in. Silas was not sure how deep the caves were, but he assumed that they would only dig deep enough to sleep securely. He was proven right when the tip struck something meaty and after a moment stopped abruptly against the wall.
The pained chirping scream warped into a startled squawk as Silas jerked the blade back out. Mantises had barbs on the reverse side of their arms and they were wickedly destructive when magnified to the size of the mantis blade. A barb caught on a rib and yanked the flailing creature out of its den. The German raptor was sent out into empty space, Silas had managed to stab through both wings and a few important organs.
A combination of the monster’s own weight and Silas jerking back freed his weapon. The raptor tried to flap its wings, they were damaged but should have still carried the creature’s weight. It was unable to get its bearings before the bloodsucker below started consuming it alive.
“That is disgusting,” Silas shuddered as he watched chunks of bone and muscle be sucked up the translucent proboscis.
An angry screech came from the three other caves. Silas was ready. When the first one emerged, just to his right, Silas bonked it on the nose with his sword. Not dangerous, but it recoiled back into its cave where Silas stabbed it as well before throwing it to the bloodsucker.
The remaining two German raptors managed to escape their nests. Silas pulled himself up, planning on using the caves as a type of shelter. Unfortunately, German shepherd sized monsters made German shepherd sized holes. He couldn’t fit.
Bemoaning his poor decision making skills, Silas awkwardly pivoted on the rock face. His heels were less equipped to find purchase than his toes were. A ledge less than six inches long separated him from the ground below. His left hand grabbed onto the edge of the nest hole. It was almost by chance, but while getting a grip his eyes fell on three uniform stones.
Eggs? They were slightly wrong in shape. More oval than the bottom heavy nature of standard eggs. He was unable to capitalize on his discovery as the raptors were able to circle around to strike again. Silas chopped into the first one’s wing in exchange for a groove being scored in his chest plate.
There was a reason why animals this big tend to be relegated to the ground. They are heavy, Silas’s weapon was jerked aside as the now flightless lizard spun out of control He kept his grip, but was unable to bring it around before the next seventy pound body rammed into him. Claws scraped along the bone, finding no purchase, but they packed enough force to knock Silas off the side of the formation.
Frantically, in a move that was more instinct than anything else, Silas dropped his weapon and latched onto the raptor’s legs. Then like a drowning man, he pulled the lizard down with him. A light framework and hollow bones allowed this creature to fly, attaching two hundred sixty pounds of armored human was a bit too much. Both of them tried to catch themselves on the stone that was rapidly rushing past. They did find purchase, but neither were able to stop the fall.
Silas caught one ledge with his left hand and felt tendons strain as the force of his fall tore him from the wall. While stopping was beyond his capabilities, slowing was not. Between the raptor and Silas, they managed to create the most comfortable four story fall imaginable. That is to say, they had the wind knocked out of them, but nothing was broken.
Despite his inability to breathe for the moment right after impact, Flesh Lord kept his control over his body intact. He drew one of his stone bladed skinning knives from his belt and jumped on the raptor. It was still recovering, and much lighter than he was. His weight bore it down as he drove the stone tip into its neck, just below the jaw, and dragged the edge back to the collar bone.
Notice: you have made contact with spirit manifestation Lacertosus. Would you like to purify the taint of Nihilo?
Silas swore to himself, how many of these pagan deities were there? Nihilo, that was like the root of annihilation. That was just great, he went from a god of schemes and hunting to a god of the end of all things. He pushed his disgruntled thoughts aside, he had a bigger evil to do away with at the moment. Giving his ascent to purify, he retrieved his mantis blade and faced the giant blood sucker.
