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Edge of apocalypse 72
🕑 Added 2023-06-26 23:34:39 +0000 UTCAlbert felt the cold, wooden arms of the last surviving dryad wrap around his body from behind like a deadly embrace. He barely had time to realize the predicament he was in before the dryad began to crush him in a death grip, and Albert felt his internal organs shift and his bones strain under the increasing force and pressure.
Pain flared. But, at least until the trauma of the close call with death was fresh, pain was good.
Bullet Time was activated in a hurry, giving Albert a moment of respite as the mounting pressure slowed down by five times. He looked around at the charred and destroyed battlefield, smoldering flames, embers and raging hot winds.
At times, during battle, something just happens to click. Sometimes, enlightenment doesn’t come through meditation and calm thinking, nor does it come through superhuman effort. It just comes in the form of a brief moment of perfect clarity following an intense struggle.
Albert just stopped his struggle altogether. He observed his surroundings, the dancing flames, the rising smoke. He felt the constricting pressure of the dryad’s arm. He followed the sensations in his awareness, mentally following the instructions of the meditations he used to do with an app on his phone, and watched the world slow down to one fifth of its normal speed in the span of what felt like less than an instant.
Bullet Time had always had the particular feel of being a skill that activated instantly, but this didn’t mean that it actually was one. Albert just had never had the occasion to feel it come to life with as much clarity as was granted to him in this very moment, be it by some strange alignment of stress, tiredness from a long fight, and adrenaline.
He just let everything go, allowing himself to be taken for a ride by the sensation. He followed it, and when he felt the impetus of the skill diminish, he simply extended it with his own personal power of will. He moved about the mana, as if he were a director of an orchestra, as if watching a dance and knowing all the moves. And the mana responded.
Bullet Time Skill level up!
· I: You can slow down time by a factor of 5. Activation is free and instantaneous, and the skill will absorb 1 FU per subjective minute until deactivated or until you are out of mana.
· II: The factor can be increased to 100 for one subjective minute. Activation will cost 20 FU and will put the skill in a 5-minute cooldown.
Time simply stopped. It didn’t really stop, of course. It simply flowed, as seen from Albert’s point of view, so slow as to almost be frozen. A notification popped up, but he dismissed it. He had one minute, and he was going to make use of it.
He slid away from the almost still arms of the dryad, contorting until he was free of its wooden arms. He could almost smell the fragrance of the forest coming out of the wood it was made of as he did so, something he could not appreciate while busy fighting for his life. But now, with the world standing still, the sense of peace was almost dangerous, threatening to lull Albert into a false sense of security while in truth precious seconds were ticking away.
He wondered, however. If he could smell fragrances, breathe normally, and a bunch of other things… was Bullet Time really slowing down time? Not in the conventional sense for sure.
He was not idle as he thought, of course. He took out his sword ready to decapitate the poor, defenseless dryad.
Even the fireball he then cast to kill it glowed and burned normally. The air above it got hot and rose up as if time was flowing normally. Surely, this meant that Bullet Time had its own special rules regarding what could be allowed to happen in real time and what couldn’t. Even light. Thinking about it, as the fireball ignited the core of dryad and snuffed its life, Albert realized that at a 100-times dilated flow of time, everything should be at least 100 times darker.
Due to the granular nature of photons, moreover, shenanigans were bound to happen. Was the speed of light invariant even in Bullet Time?
Bullet Time Skill level up!
· I: You can slow down time by a factor of 5. Activation is free and instantaneous, and the skill will absorb 1 FU per subjective minute until deactivated or until you are out of mana.
· II: The factor can be increased to 100 for one subjective minute. Activation will cost 20 FU and will put the skill in a 5-minute cooldown.
· III: You can select specific parts of the world that will retain increased realism.
Oh wow, two level-ups in a row.
The minute ran out. The last dryad was vanquished, and its mana flowed into the earth, and towards the buried Iperborea seed.
Suddenly a strange fatigue overtook Albert’s body. He felt heavy, tired, sleepy. He had just fought hard, running around, spending a lot of mana, teleporting… but he felt like this sleepiness was unnatural. Forced.
The world grew distant. For a moment, Albert remembered when he was on the brink of death, barely a few moments ago yet what felt like ages ago. At the beginning of the fight. Back then, he had used Healing Touch to get out of it.
Doing so now did nothing.
Darkness.
Albert fell asleep on the soft grass.
When he woke up, all signs of battle were gone. The seed had sprouted, and a thin, shy plant was growing out of the fertile earth. Little leaves swayed in the wind, lit by the morning sun. All night had passed.
Albert blinked to clear his eyes of the dry tears that had accumulated during the night. He almost thought the whole battle had just been something he dreamt about, but the aching in his body, the new skills he had and especially the many system notifications told him another story.
He tried to get up, stumbled, and decided that he had a pounding headache so strong that it would be better to just sit there for a while. He took out a large bottle of water, lukewarm because the inventory didn’t freeze time inside of it, and sipped at it while resting in the shade of the now growing Iperborea tree.
Its leaves were shiny, healthy and its shade cool and pleasant. Being close to the tree, young as it was, felt nice and safe.
The headache slowly dimmed, the pain receding. Albert examined the notifications he received.
Quest: Daily Challenge – Time Management Skills Complete.
· Bullet Time has been a core skill for you for a long time now, but you never managed to upgrade it. Find a way to improve it, and bring it to level 2.
· Reward: Teleportation points added to Map: All capital Cities around the world.
[New points added to the Map: Capital Cities are now available.]
Albert hummed, and summoned the map. The so-called fog of war (a term used in strategy games for places of the map not yet explored) was now dotted here and there by small ‘explored’ areas in a strategic locations in each capital city of the world. Not the whole city was available however, just a small area next to the main point of interest.
Rome had the Colosseum. London had the Elizabeth Tower. So on and so forth.
“Nice.”
There wasn’t much more to say. Not only was this a very good boost from the system which would save Albert a lot of flights just to map out the world, but the fact that the quest was finally over meant that now he finally could access other daily quests. He had been putting this particular quest off for a very long time, he felt, because he didn’t think upgrading Bullet Time would have been easy and wanted to do so when he had some free time on hand. Which was never, as he always found something to do even when there were moments of apparent calm.
Now, instead, he could just ask the system gently to give him some other kind of daily quests. Something like the early ones, where he could train and improve his skills without always being in a life-or-death situation.
Things had changed, Albert thought with a smile. Back when he did the daily quest with the goblins and the bats, he had thought that the system was putting his life in danger so he could grow. Now, after seeing what actual danger looked like, the quest looked like little more than bland training.
Well. Time passed, and Albert wasn’t too sure he liked the now more.
Who am I kidding? It’s sooo much better now!
There were other notifications waiting for Albert’s attention.
Race changed to: Half-Elf.
Albert blinked as he stared at the notification.
“What?”
Race change? Half-elf? What was going on?
Reflexively, his hand went to his left ear to check whether something had changed. His rational mind was still throwing a bunch of questions at him, but there was no doubt that his subconscious mind was displaying a level of excitement Albert had rarely felt before.
And when he felt the shape of his ears, the excitement just burst out. It was strange, he thought as he gasped, unable to process what he was feeling. Weird. Special. Amazing.
The forest around him… now he could see why it felt so vibrant, so alive, so amazing. Why the Iperborea sprout in the grass felt like a safe haven. Why the wind itself was talking to him, whispering things he could not understand. Strange words that were like a long forgotten lullaby, calming and with the faint scent of tea.
Everything at the same time. He was a bit scared too, considering what just happened to him. He had fainted and woken up something different. Something else. A whole new race, a fantasy race!
Quest Update: Racial Evolution – Psionic.
· Find a way to make Perception Level 5 usable.
· Plant the Iperborea Seed to restore the shield around Elvenhome.
· Cross to the other side.
· Return.
· Reward: Race evolved into Psionic Half-Elf.
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