Robin felt amazing in his upgraded armor, running through the trees towards the Tweaker Baby he had spotted. His senses felt like they had changed from acoustic to electric, the signals he was receiving more like actively given information than a simple assessment of the status of things.

He had heard the Tweaker Baby from ten or so meters away, despite the occlusion caused by multiple trees. It was not being particularly loud, or even incautious. It was just…

Prey. Time to test out the stingers!

Robin leaped around the last tree, ascending to the height of a man at the peak of his jump. He had tucked the anytool into the Aliquam Pack, and thus had his hand free as he swung his left fist at the head of the faintly gibbering, elastic-skinned creature.

As he swung his fist at its head, he extended his stinger (as he had decided to call his arm-swords) to the full length, the blade ceasing to extend a split moment before it punched through the top of the head of the monster. It dropped instantly, as if had suddenly lost power.

Robin landed behind the creature lightly, shaking the blood and brain matter off of his stinger.

That was a little ...sudden. In movies they have a second before they fall down dead.

A branch cracked three tree-widths to his right; Robin quietly ran in that direction, willing his Clockwork Horror to begin spooling out web. He felt it respond from one of the side pockets of the Pack. It was a little bit like an old-school microwave beep, but… entirely mental.

Robin saw one side of the moss-covered fallen tree that was between him and his prey light up, almost as if the area had been filled with a very light fog and suddenly had a very faint light turned onto it. Robin frowned and leapt up to the top of the fallen tree, not quite topping it, and crept around the edge, his head low.

This is a lot easier than I would have guessed, even with my increased attributes and the Peak Human Titles. The Grasp of the Spider mutation is more use useful than I initially thought it would be.

Robin peeked around the side of the log. He saw a Tweaker Baby staring around the other side of the tree, slowly eating something it seemed to have dug up from a large hole partially under the decomposing pile of wood. Robin heard a fluttering wing a few meters away from him and cringed, but the creature did not look his way, thankfully.

Robin noticed that when it looked in a particular direction, the fog seemed to move with it.

Is that where they can see, like in Metal Gear Solid? Or is it maybe some kind of attack?

Robin didn’t want to take the time to find out. He leapt downward, whipping his right arm at the back of the creature’s head, killing it instantly. It dropped down just as the other had, and Robin stood over it for a moment, staring at the wretched thing’s sore-riddled skin.

Poor thing… Why is it so light here? Is the sun coming up?

Robin heard an inarticulate screech of rage coming from the ground by his feet, and he leapt back instinctively, angling his swords at the hole. A tiny arm emerged, waving around something furry and covered in blood.

...a rabbit? It looks like something bit the throat out of it…

The arm was followed by a rubbery, alien head, and soon by the rest of a furious Tweaker Baby, waving the rabbit furiously. Robin lunged and swung at it as it was coming out, but he had jumped far enough back that he couldn’t get close enough before it was all the way out of the ground, and now it was too late.

Robin heard several other howls light up the night, all of them within a stone’s throw of where he stood.

Crap crap crapcrapcrap.

Robin snapped his sword to point at the Tweaker Baby, although he was less inclined towards calling it a baby while it had what he assumed was rabbit fur stuck in its jagged, angled teeth. It ran towards him, running directly at him, waving the rabbit corpse as if it were a club.

Robin lunged forward, thrusting the blade out slightly above where the babbling creature’s head would be, and then drew the blade back, moving the sword until he was holding it almost as if it were a fire hose under his arm.

“Shining Trail”, he said softly, resetting his sword position to something more natural.

A silver line appeared, glittering in the air, but the Tweaker Baby seemed to have tunnel-vision for Robin, ignoring the new threat.

The silver strand carved into the thing, opening it up from collarbone to hip, organs spilling out onto Robin’s feet. He was grateful that the Shell of the Blue Entomage seemed to be waterproof. The thought of organ-fluids squishing in between his toes made him ill, anyway, and he hopped backwards, anxiously waiting for the corpse to vanish so he could collect any rewards.

Amazingly, the creature took long enough to die that it had time to take a last futile swipe at Robin, even though it no longer had legs and was thus unable to reach him. Robin was stepping up to put the poor thing out of its misery when it twitched and grew still. Robin stabbed it through the head anyway.

He had seen enough horror movies to know being unsure was a bad idea.

Robin waited for long moments, hoping the body would vanish, but it just ...deflated, slowly, as the blood ran out of it. A crash in the bushes nearby forced Robin to surrender his greed. He turned towards the sound, drawing out from the side pocket of the Aliquam Pack the coil of web he had commanded the Clockwork Horror to create for him. If his intent had carried through with his willpower, and the Clockwork Horror had been given enough time, he should have roughly ten meters.

Alright, time for a bigger chunk than last time… Gossamer of Anansi!

Robin felt the mana flow out of him and into the web coil he was holding. He glanced down at it and used Identify. Maybe I will get lucky and it will have more potency because I used more web.

Gossamer of Anansi (Un L) The Gossamer of Anansi is spun from hunger and deceit, containing the essence of the spoken words of a hungry father of starving hundreds. Creatures touching this web suffer a penalty to REGEN, and may not gain any benefits from consuming, drinking, or imbibing food, liquid, or potions of any kind.

It is entirely different from the first one! This might be good to keep someone unconscious, if you have a prisoner… Otherwise, it seems like a way to condemn something to a slow, exhausted starvation. Yoshi…

Robin tucked the web back into his pack. Swords and guns it is.

Robin heard a soft breathing from ahead of him by a few meters, lumbering through a small copse of pine trees covered in barbed needles the size of hot dogs. He leapt onto the side of a less dangerous-looking tree and began to scurry up. He glanced over at the copse of pine trees and was shocked to see a Tweaker Baby staring at him from the outer edges of the needles, small bleeding cuts all over its body. Robin could see the sheer hatred in the glare it was sending his way, and he made a resolution to think of a better name for the little terrors.

Babies do not have that level of hatred. He couldn’t help but picture the rabbit fur stuck in the teeth of the one he had fought previously, feeling a small shudder pass through him.

The Tweaker Baby had started leering at him suddenly. Robin realized that the shudder he had felt before was still happening; it hadn’t been him. He looked down the tree and saw four more climbing up it towards him, moving faster than Robin had been able to run on flat horizontal ground before the Ysari System had changed everything. He was reminded briefly of the YouTube videos of people climbing trees to get away from bears, and how that usually went very poorly for the humans.

He smiled down at them.

He wasn’t a human.

Robin dropped off the tree, extending his arms and simply letting go. He found that his palm mutation was almost entirely subconscious, attaching and detaching with no effort on his part. He extended his arms blades as he let go, feeling both grow to their full razor-sharp length in moments.

The two nearest below him died before even realizing that Robin had leapt off of the tree, his blades shearing through the tops of their skulls by sheer dint of his weight and momentum alone. The one nearest the top two looked up at the twin crunches, but it was too late to save it from the same fate as those above it, with the only difference being that it saw its death coming right to its face.

The Tweaker Baby on the bottom had time to react, and leapt off of the tree to tackle Robin, a fleshy cannonball.

It collided with his stomach, and Robin heard something crack as he tumbled backward through the air. He hit the ground after what felt like an eternity, the impact driving the air from his lungs for the second time. Thankfully the Tweaker Baby fell away from him in the air, landing with a wet thud a few meters from him.

Robin got to his feet, panting and trying to ignore the taste of bile in the back of his throat.

The creature seemed to be doing the same, but it was struggling on a badly broken leg.

Okay, I will take it, I guess.

Robin took a single pained step forward before something slammed into the side of his torso, knocking him to the ground, rolling towards the dangerous-looking pine trees. He rolled to his feet, more grateful than he ever had for the Flexibility trait.

My muscles would be gelatin after this if not for that… And even so, I will likely be pretty sore, if the weird Ysari System healing does not handle that. If you survive. My thoughts are oddly lucid, he thought. Unless they are not, and I just think they are. You’re probably concussed.

Robin glanced at his BODY, and was surprised to see that it was down to twenty out of twenty five. His MENSTAM was reduced, as well, but it seemed to be stable, so it didn’t concern him too much.

Dismissing the menu, Robin looked over to where the blow had come from and saw the aggressor easily enough; it was not trying to hide its presence from him, or even its intent to kill him as violently and as soon as possible.

The source of the blow was what Robin would have to guess was what a Tweaker Baby turned into when it grew up - a Tweaker Mage. It looked like a man, at least in terms of size and general characteristics, but the skin was a dark, ruddy purple, like a bruise had covered the entire skin. The skin itself had lesions and scabs dotting it, many of which were open and oozing. The arms…

The arms were as long as Robin was tall, but not much skinnier than those of a thin human man. They each ended in stretched-out fingers with ten-centimeter long filth-blackened nails, jagged and rough on the ends, each finger twitching like the leg of a dying spider, curling and uncurling towards its palm.

The feet had the same stretched-out characteristics as the hands, including the elongated digits. Robin had not really been able to see much of the feet of the Tweaker Babies, because they were usually standing in brush or grass. This thing, though, had one leg on the side of a tree trunk, like it was trying to push the tree over with one leg. Its crotch was displayed, and Robin was incredibly thankful that it was wearing what appeared to be homemade leather underwear.

Robin lifted his blade and pointed it at the leering adult, looking into the bloodshot eyes for the first time.

It stared at him, twitching every few seconds as if it was filled with an overwhelming desire to get to the shredding of Robin’s flesh.

Robin smiled at it, showing all his teeth.

“I killed your friends. What are you going to do about it?”

The Tweaker Mage screamed at Robin hard enough that Robin felt like it had to have lost some BODY, rushing through the darkness in a barely-perceptible blur.