Kaelen had come to his humble abode after his run-in with the monster, and soon after his return, he was tired. Why?
He went back for the corpse, of course. As he walked away, the thought of the dead body attracting another creature was not something he wanted to risk. Again
His worries had kept him awake for a while, and so did his hunger.
'So there are other nightmare creatures here...'
He doubted that anything above the rank of an awakened would appear, and it also wouldn't be something like a demon with intelligence.
The spell was cruel but also fair, and asking an inexperienced child to hunt anything that's several times stronger than him and possessed an intelligence was a bit more on the unfair side... but then again
Sunny had gone up against a Tyrant, and Nephis had gone up against a Terror. Granted, both of these had different circumstances that aided the situation, but he had none.
There were no other humans here as far as he knew, nor was there anything to impose significant permanent damage, well, aside from some rocks.
I'll worry about that in a bit; for now, I need to eat.
He had more or less made up his mind on eating the corpses of the creatures he killed since it had come to a point where he would either risk poisoning himself or dying.
One was going to take him faster.
He turned to the corpse piles. Its body was composed of translucent, crystalline plates and a dense, fibrous muscle that looked like bundles of wet hemp. It wasn't meat—not in any sense he recognized. But he was past the point of being picky.
He used a sharp splinter of the Scavenger's own legs to saw at a thick cord of muscle in its other leg. The "meat" was tough, resistant to the edge, and when it finally came free, it didn't bleed red. It leaked a clear, viscous sap that smelled faintly of pine and old minerals.
I have to eat it. If I don't, I won't have the strength to reach the end of this trial.
Kaelen stared at the grey-white cord of muscle. His mind flashed back to the birthday dinners his family used to host—the smells of roasted lamb and fresh bread. The memory felt like a cruel joke. Those people were gone. That world was gone.
He bit down.
It was like chewing on a piece of rubber soaked in salt and turpentine. His jaw ached as he ground the fibrous tissue between his teeth. The texture was revolting, clicking against his teeth like half-set plastic. But as he forced himself to swallow, a strange, localized warmth spread from his stomach.
I can still move. Nice
He thought, whilst trying to not gag, it was worse than the 'water,' but it was edible at the very least. He spent the rest of the morning harvesting what he could from the scavenger, wrapping the fibrous "meat" in a piece of his torn hoodie that he tore off. It was a ragtag, desperate storage device.
He took one of the pieces and started to chew on it while he tucked the rest away neatly in the corner.
He took the now almost bare bones and threw them to the side of the cave and grabbed his rock that had already gotten smaller because of the constant smashing against nightmare creatures.
And once he had eaten enough, he left the cave while keeping a lot left over for later.
When he left the cave, he climbed to the top of the cave. He looked in the same direction that he had landed in. Now that he had a good view of the area, he looked into the distance, and he came to a realization.
That's where the objective of the trial is, isn't it?
He wanted to complete the trial as fast as possible, but he knew he was not ready, and there were many things he could do in order to try and increase his chances of succeeding.
So far he had managed to complete many of the tasks that he wanted to: he had found a source of shelter, water, and food.
All that was missing was a weapon other than just a rock.
He was going to go hunting in order to try and get something he hadn't been given as yet as a carrier of the Nightmare Spell.
A memory
It was unlikely that he would get what he wanted, but something to aid him would be appreciated; it was just that he didn't know how many he would need to kill in order to accept something.
He went back into the cave and looked at the body of the Rock Shard Scavenger. It was long and sturdier than the crawlers and also had a lot more mobility. It had a bone structure that could be used.
He took the body and started to remove all the bones. When he found a particularly long one—the spine. He was going to use that as a weapon. It was also good that it was very sturdy and also connected well enough to land a hard blow.
The ribs of the creature were also sharp and sturdy, so he took 2 of those and kept them in his pocket, angling them to not poke him, and he held the spine in his hand and swung it a few times.
'It's not a sword, but a whip is good too.'—The only thing was that it was not a whip either. It was something like a flexible sword, but regardless
The hunting would begin.
Leaving his cave again, Kaelen walked in the direction that he looked at earlier. On his way there, he found a few mud pools and prepared himself.
'There should be some mud crawlers here.'
And he found the first one. It was lying in the mud, as the others were, and this one had its back a little dry due to the sun, like baked clay.
It was so odd; unlike the first day, he had already adapted to the notion of killing nightmare creatures and had already developed a strategy to do so.
He walked up slowly and took out one of his bone ribs and held it like a dagger.
Slow, heavy, and sneakily
He crept up on the beast and struck.
The crawler didn't even have a moment to move. Kaelen was faster, and unlike the last few days, he not only had a full belly, a hydrated and well-rested body, but also something he didn't have on his first day.
experience
He drove the bone blade into the soft joint behind the creature's neck.
The beast just fell lifeless into the mud.
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Mud Crawler.]
Kaelen kept moving; he was avoiding the monsters unless he had either a terrain advantage or the element of surprise. He identified them through the sounds of the louder click-clacking on the ground made by their weight and size of their legs, but what he did do was make use of the beasts.
Unlike the monsters, however, they did not have the bone structure to make weapons aside from the exoskeleton itself.
He had a whip like a sword. Rib bone daggers, but what he didn't have was a bludgeoning tool or a sort of ranged weapon, and that is what he was here for. The exoskeleton of the beasts had the ability to act as a hammer of sorts.
But what about a ranged weapon?
Well, if he was in possession of a hammer-like tool, then he could use it to hammer out some rocks into a spear. He had taken part in sports day at school every year before he eventually left that life behind...
Anyway. Something he was good at was javelin throwing, and that was not all that different from a spear, was it?
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Mud Crawler.]
[You have slain a Dormant Monster, Rock Shard Scavenger]
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Mud Crawler.]
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Mud Crawler.]
[You have slain a Dormant Monster, Rock Shard Scavenger.]
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Mud Crawler.]
[You have slain a...]
The day had come to an end, and he had killed 9 more Mud Crawlers and 4 of the Rock Shards.
He had absorbed most of the shards immediately after killing the Nightmare creatures, and he took 2 back home with him, along with some meat, water sacs, bones, and the other useful parts of the ugly creatures.
'So far I should have a count of like 24 minus these 2.'
But that was not the only thing he was starting to notice.
'My skin has been becoming harder recently, hasn't it...?'
It had initially worried him to see his skin turn almost like the stone he walked on, and at some point he had stopped sweating like it was being reabsorbed by his skin almost instantly.
He had chalked it up to his attribute in this nightmare [Formless].
'Will my aspect be related to the earth? It has to be given where I am'
He was mastering the 'Earth' slowly but surely, and tomorrow he was going to go towards where he thought the trial objective was.
He laid his head back, the cold, ethereal glow of the 2 shards shining a dim light in the cave.
Before he knew it. The night had finished, and the day was here, and unlike the last few days, there was no worry or jump when he woke; he simply opened his eyes and went on with the day.
He drank some water, ate some food, and then stepped out of the cave.
The Scavengers never get ambushed. The Crawlers don't smell me until I'm close. Why?
And more importantly, wasn't he getting more stealthy and even stronger the more he was killing...?
'I'm becoming like the earth...!'
The formless attribute was working since he killed the first mud crawler and continued to as he killed more!
'But if I have to kill more to become more like the earth, aren't I going to have to face more without the added stealth and strength...?'
It was almost paradoxical.
'So then why don't I use the earth to disguise myself more, then kill more and become more like the earth to kill even more?'
What better way to solve such a problem than that?
He looked at his own fair skin, stark against the brown and gray landscape. He was an anomaly here.
He knelt, digging his fingers into a patch of heavy mud from the pool. He began to slather it over his arms, his chest, and his face. The mud was thick and smelled of sulfur and iron. It acted as a natural camouflage, but more importantly, it masked the "sweet" scent of a human—a scent that, to a Nightmare Creature, must have smelled like a beacon.
Once the camouflage was sorted out, he turned his attention to weaponry.
Next, he turned his attention to his weaponry. The granite shard was reliable, but it lacked reach. The glass dagger was sharp but brittle. He needed something that combined the two.
He spent hours scouting the ridge, looking for a specific type of stone. He found it near a pit. a long, tapered shard of obsidian-flecked basalt. It was heavy, dense, and naturally sharp along one edge.
He used the exoskeleton of the crawler to shave off any ridges that the rock had and to try and sharpen the edge a bit more.
The spear was good and would definitely be effective against beasts and monsters, but he felt he would need more of these weapons and need to make it a bit more well-rounded.
It could stab and poke and even hit, but could it bonk?
No, and he was not going to use a weapon that could not incorporate the basic caveman tool of combat—the mighty bonk.
He used the exoskeleton of another beast and the tendons from the monster and attached it to the back end of the spear—if it could even be called that now.
It was a crude, heavy spear-axe—a weapon of the Stone Age, born in a world of nightmares.
Weight, reach, and edge, he thought, testing the balance.
Now I don't have to let them get close enough to bite.
With his scent masked and his weapon ready, he began to experiment with the terrain.
He practiced moving through the loose silt flats without shifting the surface, learning to distribute his weight on the balls of his feet while swinging the spear.
He discovered that using the bone ribs to shove into the gaps in the mini rock walls/hills, he could climb them with frightening speed compared to just with his hands.
He found a lone Mud Crawler wandering a ravine. Usually, he would have charged. This time, he waited. He pressed himself into a crevice, his mud-caked skin blending perfectly with the stone. The beast passed within three feet of him, its eyeless head swinging aimlessly. It didn't smell him. It didn't hear him.
Kaelen rose like a ghost from the rock. One swift, overhead arc of the basalt spear-axe split the creature's neck in a single blow.
[You have slain a Dormant Beast: Mud Crawler.]
Pure satisfaction. That's what he felt.
He didn't feel the rush of adrenaline anymore. He felt the cold satisfaction of a job well done. He harvested the shard, the gland, and a bit of fresh muscle, his movements clinical and fast by now.
By midday, Kaelen stood atop a high plateau, looking down at the churning earth surrounding the monolith. From this height, he could see the patterns in the soil—the way the ground rippled in concentric circles.
He gripped his spear, the mud on his face cracking as he narrowed his eyes and smiled.
The violet sky was beginning to bleed into a suffocating, bruised indigo as Kaelen moved along the edge of the high plateau. The wind had picked up, carrying a low, rhythmic thrumming that he could feel in the marrow of his bones. He was miles from his cave now, deep in the heart of the "Earth" region, where the very soil seemed to groan under some invisible weight.
As he rounded a spire of twisted, calcified rock, he stopped. Every instinct he had honed over the last five days screamed at him to go still. He didn't just stop walking; he became a statue, his mud-caked body merging with the shadows of the basalt.
Far in the distance, at the base of the Monolith, the "churning earth" he had seen from afar finally revealed its true nature.
It wasn't a natural phenomenon. It was awake.
The creature was in the mud pool, but unlike the crawlers and beasts, this thing... well, he was wondering if the crawlers' anatomy was an affront to nature compared to this thing.
And that was excluding its size.
It was a large—no, it was a massive, low-slung creature that looks like a cross between an alligator and a snapping turtle, but stripped of its skin. The body was covered in thick, overlapping plates of natural slate and dried clay that have fused to its hide.
'I swear my aspect better be at least supreme.'
Awakened, it was definitely awakened. His grip tightening on his crude spear until the stone handle creaked.
He knew the hierarchy. A dormant creature was a test of survival. An Awakened creature was a test of existence. The gap between the two wasn't just physical strength; it was the quality of the soul. Not that the big bastards lacked any physical strength; in fact, this one seemed to possess a dreadful amount of it.
But still that thing didn't just have a physical body; it had the beginnings of soul essence that could crush a dormant human.
There was a light at the end of the tunnel, though.
He watched as a pack of three Scavengers—the same stone-toothed monsters that had almost killed him before he learned how to kill them easily—scurried out of the Earth-Shaker's path.
They didn't make it far, though. It crushed them instantly and chewed; the bone and flesh both went down, and so did the shards.
I have to kill that, Kaelen realized. The thought should have been absurd. He was a 16-year-old with a bone-and-stone spear axe and a stomach full of monster meat. That thing was nature's biggest 'screw you' with the strength to topple a whole car.
The realization was a heavy weight. He spent the remainder of the evening observing the beast from a mile away, his eyes tracking its movements.
He noticed that it moved in a predictable, territorial loop around the Monolith's base. It was blind, just like the Crawlers, but its sensitivity to vibration was so extreme that it could likely "see" a pebble drop within the range of its territory.
He didn't head back to his cave. It was too far, and the night was already here. Instead, he found a narrow crevice high up the canyon wall—far from that thing. He wedged himself in, his spear held across his chest, and chewed on some meat he brought in his pockets.
Tomorrow he was going to hunt that big oaf and get out of here.