Chapter 15

  You Again?

  Insects buzzed, filling the jungle with ambient noise. Sweat dripped off a vaguely muscled torso as Elijah crept, half-naked, through the shrubs. Blue eyes stood out from a pale face, disguised by a dark green paint made from crushed leaves.

  The teen had thrown himself into jungle life as he made his way through the thickly vegetated forest. He felt like Rambo, bare-chested and with a cloth band tied around his head. The only difference was that his headband was made out of a spare pair of underpants, but he could pretend.

  Elijah was a perceptive youth. He would watch how things happened and learn from them. Monkey see, monkey do-esque stuff. He had long ago learnt how to alter his gait.

  There was a headteacher at his school; he walked with heavy steps down the old wooden hallway, adjacent to the changing rooms. Students used to smoke there, and if they heard him coming, they would scatter. Elijah learnt to copy the sound of his steps and used to find endless joy in giving the smokers heart attacks.

  Using the lessons he had learnt about controlling the way he walked, the teen did his best to move quietly through the jungle.

  Not long after setting foot in the insect-infested sweatbox, he had seen something that looked like a three-tailed jaguar jump from atop a tree and kill a deer-like creature. If it hadn’t pounced then, he never would have noticed the predator. He would have walked right under its nest. The encounter taught him that this was not a safe place!

  His movements were slow and controlled. He was sure to survey the path ahead before continuing.

  On one occasion, his Perception helped him to see some kind of sharp-toothed monkey lurking on the path ahead, and he was able to sneak past with the aid of the rank: D Skill, Light Footed.

  It was a Skill he had gained after selecting the Arctic Hunter Rabbit Evolution, and was supposed to make him 50% harder to detect, at a cost of 1 Stamina per second when not moving, and more Stamina the faster he was going.

  He had expected the Skill to halve the sound of his footsteps. Something that would have definitely been useful given the number of dry, crunchy leaves that littered the forest floor. That was not how it worked; the effects were far greater.

  Despite the name of the Skill, it did more than quieten his footsteps; it dampened him to every sense! Looking down at his hand, turning it over and examining it, he was amazed to find that he appeared to be only half visible; he was transparent. His opacity had decreased to 50%.

  That wasn’t an end to it. The Skill seemed to also lessen how much his sweaty body smelt, and the noise that he made while moving. Truly, this was the Skill of a hunter!

  It wasn’t perfect, however, and as Elijah snuck past the bloody-mouthed ape, the Skill showed why it was only D rank.

  The Stamina cost while moving was astronomical. One extremely slow step increased the rate of consumption to such a degree that 30% of his Stamina was consumed. He was forced to travel a small distance, hide, and then release the Skill in order to recover his Stamina.

  Still, his attempts to evade the menacing primate were successful, and the young man got away intact.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Not long after, Elijah emerged from the jungle. Before him lay sheer rock, covered in cracks. This was the chest-shaped mountain. Elijah had become disoriented. He remembered roughly where on the island the treasure was supposed to be, but that didn’t matter, since he didn’t know where he was.

  His plan: climb up high and get a lay of the land.

  He had been an avid climber back home. More than once, he had scrambled up the granite cliffs, not always for fun.

  Once, he had been walking along an isolated stretch of beach, a scenic area that few went to. He had failed to check the tides beforehand and ended up stuck between the steep cliffs and the incoming tide. That experience improved his climbing abilities to no end.

  He put those skills to use as his hands wedged into crevices, his feet pushed on the rock, and he ascended the sheer face.

  Reaching a plateau, the seam between two planks in the image of a chest, Elijah pulled himself up. It had been a harder climb than he expected. The rock here was dry and crumbly, not at all what he was used to. More than once, a handhold or foothold had simply crumbled away, leaving him hanging.

  The teen simply lay on his back for a time, catching his breath. Eventually, the mosquitos biting at his sticky skin became too much of an annoyance, and he was forced to get up to swat them away.

  Looking out over the jungle, he was able to get a proper look at the island as a whole. As it turned out, that map was surprisingly accurate.

  Not only did this place have a comically large, treasure chest-shaped mountain cluster, but a lake he thought had been oversized, for the sake of drawing a landmark, did in fact take up the eastern third of the island. Three massive trees marked the west, and a bog with lines of stink actually rising into the air marked the south.

  With three points of reference, Elijah was able to orient himself and knew where to go. He was about to begin his descent when he noticed something. In a haven to the north, the Mosquito had docked his ship.

  It was hard to see from this distance, but it didn’t appear as if there was anyone on board, meaning they had already disembarked.

  Elijah had thought that, given the ship would have to go back to get its Captain, and that he had gotten a lift from a whale, he would have some time to begin the search before they got here. Apparently not.

  The spot marked on the map, and, surprisingly in real life, was an area in the middle of the jungle marked by a big red X made from red sand. It was to the north, halfway between him and the pirate ship.

  This was bad. They were already on the move. If he wanted to beat this unique Trial, he needed to get a wiggle on.

  Feeling renewed, Elijah began his descent.

  Agility +1

  “He went this way, I’m sure of it!” A gruff pirate called out, venturing further into the unforgiving jungle.

  “You’re full of it,” another chided, slapping the first on the back of the head. “There ain’t no trace of him, he’s been sneaky and doubled back.

  “You sure?” The younger man asked, eager to continue the pursuit, even without knowing where to go.

  “Ye ever known me to be wrong?” the one-eared man asked.

  The other man simply shrugged in defeat and followed his superior back in the direction they had come from.

  Elijah's arms trembled; he struggled to hold onto the underside of the slippery branch. Just as the two pirates made it out of earshot, his Strength failed, and he tumbled through the thick foliage, gaining a number of cuts and bruises along the way.

  The pirates had surrounded the treasure spot and had been searching for him. Elijah had only gotten close enough to hear digging before he was spotted and his flight began. He really did not want to fight these things; they were altogether too human, so he just ran.

  The pirates had followed him doggedly, over bush and under root, through streams and into mud. They hadn’t been riled into a frenzy, however, and were smart enough to leave a number of the crew behind in order to protect the red X.

  The Mosquito had been tricked once, and it didn’t appear he wanted to be fooled again. It didn’t matter in the end. Elijah wasn’t able to evade his pursuers for a good hour. By this point, they should have dug up the treasure, meaning there was either a problem with getting to the treasure or the Mosquito was waiting for a chance to get its revenge.

  Elijah suspected it was the latter.

  As he stood in the rainforest, hands on knees, panting for breath and swatting away what seemed to be an ever-growing number of bloodsucking insects, he wondered to himself:

  Wait, why am I being flocked by insects?

  “There you are,” a malformed, wet, and sloppy voice said, insect parts twisting in a way that they weren’t designed to in order to make the sounds of the words.

  Elijah looked up, straightening his back and wiping away his exhaustion. It appeared the Mosquito’s crew had corralled him right into the path of the Treasure Sucking Monster. After taking a breath to compose himself and swiping away even more mosquitos, Elijah responded:

  “You again?”

  patrons: