Changing Plans

It took me a few seconds to realize my eyes had not actually exploded out of my head. The sheer intensity of my own new senses felt like a rather less pleasant fire than leveling's sweet kiss pouring out of my retinas. My nose and even mouth burned, my ears shook like a struck drum, and I was only glad there was no light in the room to gouge out my eyes. I was also glad I still had eyes at all, to be honest.

It took nearly a full minute before my newly heightened senses settled into my mind well enough for me to open my eyes without even the pitch darkness around me driving nails into my brain. The first thing I noticed as I sat there with my eyes closed, was that I could feel the stale air around me moving, dust particles that had laid dormant for who knows how long until my actions disturbed them brushing against my oily fur. It wasn’t a clear sensation, the only reason I could truly identify what was causing this faint feeling was my Paranoia enabling me to “see” the dust brushing against me; nonetheless, it was annoying and distracting.

But more than that, it was revelatory. Sure, the feeling of the air scraping along my fur as my own breathing disturbed it was like suddenly finding yourself unable to ignore your nose between your eyes, but it also highlighted just how much my senses were increased; even through a thick layer of oil and fur, I could actually perceive the movement of the nearly still air on my skin. I’m sure the touch enhancing factor of Silxazar’s mark played a part in that (and threw off my baseline, damnit!), but it was nonetheless a very notable increase in sensitivity.

Which is dangerous, increased senses also mean an increased capacity for pain and suffering. While the mark doesn't explicitly say it increases the sensation of pain, I can't imagine having a stronger sense of touch would make pain any duller. I wasn't exactly planning on being injured or tortured anytime soon, but I've scars enough already to know how likely it is I'll get through eternity unscathed; forever is a very long time, and I've nearly died far too many times in the miniscule time I've been here already.

I took a deep breath, feeling the air flow through my throat and into my lungs more distinctly than usual. I wasn’t one to ritualize deep breaths or try to find some spiritualized meaning to a simple biological function back home (though I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t some mystical breathing methods here, given the provable existence of magic), but I could almost feel cold water flowing down my throat and turning the hot flame of anxious rage in my belly into steam.

At present, the only thing I can do to avoid being horrendously tortured or killed is to focus on growing stronger and more elusive. I can't simply rely on direct strength, not in a world where older monsters with more kills under their belts will have had a very long time to get stronger still! This changes little, however; my plan has always been to become strong and collect contingency methods of immortality. I've always known I'm facing entrenched powers and the potential for fates many would call worse than death, that doesn't change that my only options are to try and achieve the kind of power needed to live comfortably and securely, or to lay down and die at the whim of the strong.

If I were willing to simply give up and die, I'd have done it already. I was more than a little bit unnerved by the thought of being tortured with enhanced senses, but I wasn't willing to deliberately handicap myself to avoid a problem that will only be more likely the weaker I am. If I don't increase my Perception, I'm only increasing the odds of being captured; while having heightened senses will make any injury worse, it will also make getting injured less likely.

It's an unpleasant parallel, but one I have no choice but to grit my teeth and try to mitigate (and ignore) as best I can. Unfortunate as it may be, I'll simply have to accept that as I get stronger, the stakes of failure only increase. Thinking about it, I suppose that's true of life in general, even without heightened senses; the more you gain, the more you have to lose. The more you have, the more enticing a target you become.

I’ll just have to make sure “don’t get captured” stays right at the tippy top of my priorities, just beneath “don’t die” as it has always been. Nothing has truly changed on that front, I never intended to be taken alive or dead by anyone; I can't be sure I’ll always have a choice on that front, but I’ll damn well try my best nonetheless. Though, Markus rather thoroughly demonstrated the limits of that principle when he “recruited” me, already.

Better alive with even a thin potential to escape than dead, I suppose.

I sighed, putting thoughts of thumb screws and crocodile shears from my mind as I stood up. Slowly, I began to pace the room, building up speed with each lap to see just how much my increased Perception improved my ability to keep up with my own speed. It was somewhat difficult to tell the exact difference just based on feeling and memory, but I got the distinct impression that it took significantly longer before my vision started to blur, and when I reached my max speed the world seemed somewhat less blurry than it previously was.

I would hardly call two hundred points a marginal increase, but compared to my Strength and Agility it just wasn’t all that much. Enough to notice for sure, but not enough to get me all the way to keeping up with my own speed. Still, every step forward that doesn't lead to a land mine is progress made, I suppose.

I would just have to keep taking such steps, one by one and two by two until such concerns were far in the rear view… if that was even a truly achievable goal remained to be seen. All the best efforts in the world can't truly protect you from unpredictable occurrences, after all; well, disregarding mass scale hyper awareness and similar omniscience, though even those have their somewhat notorious flaws.

One such further step I could take right now, was to simply continue my experiments. That thought in mind, I sat down cross legged in the center of the room, took a deep breath (so much so I drew upon the related skill almost accidentally), and as I released it I slotted three hundred more points into Perception.

The burning in my senses, the sweet tingling fire that left everything it touched greater for the brief contact, swept across my nerves like a wildfire through dead grass the moment I slotted the new points in. I could feel my eyes melting and changing, cones and rods shifting ever so slightly as the vitreous goo around them boiled. My nose and tongue felt similarly molten, the white fire of leveling turning my nerves into a spindly crucible as they enhanced everything about my Perception.

It wasn’t just physical either, I could feel the very essence of my senses being enhanced; I felt something in my spirit blazing alongside my flesh, the white fire of stats burning deeper than any mortal flame ever could. It should have been agonizing, it should have horrified me that anything had so much control over my very being, but I could only barely bring myself to care; it felt so incredible and I had already more than verified it truly was enhancing me.

The fact the system seemed to reward bloodshed in a way that directly encouraged a more violent world may point towards a potentially malicious or at least ruthlessly Darwinian nature, but there was nothing I could conceivably do about that even if I did care enough to want to try. Even if the system is bloodthirsty or itself benefiting from the heightened conflict it created, if I somehow managed to “escape” or destroy it I would only be destroying my best hope of getting stronger.

Strength is everything in life, in the many forms it comes in; from the physical power coiled in my muscles, Strength enough to shatter bone and crack cement, to the less visible but no less effective power heightening my Perception granted. While a not insignificant part of me was concerned about my reliance on the system for power, I could only make a few backup plans in incase this bizarre phenomenon ever vanished or turned on me.

Most of those plans pretty much amounted to trying to survive and bracing for incoming oblivion, but I at least tried to formulate plans for if my primary source of power ever failed me; I wasn’t delusional enough to think I could really do much if something so seemingly omnipotent and omniscient as the system broke its apparent neutrality, but I would try to survive as best I could. I would always try to survive, at the very least.

When the fires faded and the blazing light in my neurons followed, I found myself nearly folded entirely over myself, drool and tears pooling around my head. I blinked my eyes several times, trying to clear the tears that had evidently overflowed them while I was enraptured even as they continued to leak. Even with my eyelids closed I couldn't help but stare at the inside of those very lids, tracing veins and getting lost in the rhythm of my own heartbeat.

A blend of familiar smells slithered under the dull smell of the wooden walls, a few moments later I heard faint footsteps. With my eyes closed, I focused on those two senses, smelling the distinctive swill of booze and blood of a low class criminal mixed with the noteworthy scent of ash every long term member of the Burnpikes seemed to carry with them as the man walked past the door. I more than strongly suspected my sense of smell was so much stronger than my hearing simply because rats’ naturally have a good sense of smell, but regardless I found it impossible to ignore.

Even if I breathed through my mouth, I could still taste the stale air around me. The scent of the lacquered walls around me haunted my every breath, and the feeling of the dust my own breathing disturbed on my fur tingled strangely. I began to truly understand how one could be driven mad by enhancing themselves recklessly; I couldn’t shut my nose like I could my eyes, couldn’t turn off my skin like I could plug my ears. If I was reckless about this, I could see this driving me insane.

I frowned, sitting up and simply taking one deep breath at a time, releasing each through my nose as I tried to adjust to my heightened senses. I slowly opened my eyes, looking around the room and noting the greater detail I could make out; it was as if I was seeing in a notably higher resolution than before, filling the world with a sharpness and clarity I hadn’t even realized was missing. I focused on that thought, staring intensely at nothing as I tried to blot out the slowly retracting desire to dig my claws into my skin and keep scratching until I could no longer feel my own fur brushing against me.

It was an irrational desire, one I acknowledged as such immediately, but one that grew within me nonetheless in much the same way one sometimes wonders if punching a hole in their head might relieve a headache. Intellectually I knew peeling my skin off would not, in fact, relieve my discomfort, and yet the void still beckoned me ever so sweetly to give it a try. I also knew that things may have been even worse if my flies didn’t habitually slightly numb wherever they decided to nibble; feeling them scurrying and slithering around within me was the kind of gut churning horror the mind simply elected not to think about after a time, lest it come apart at the seems, but I knew I couldn't have withstood feeling myself being eaten alive.

My frown deepened into an out and out scowl as I sat in place, unable to avoid feeling every feather-faint touch as a fly crawled out of my nose while I reconsidered my plans. I still very much wanted my Perception to catch up with my speed, but if this was what half of my planned increase did I was very hesitant to dump another full five hundred in. None of my other stats had ever been so difficult to adjust to, but I couldn’t deny none of them so fundamentally altered my ability to interface with reality as the senses I used to perceive it. The mind was already used to compensating for strength and speed without needing over much processing power just to understand what they were even doing, but having all of my senses suddenly significantly heightened put a notable strain on my mind.

The obvious solution, or at least the one I came to first, was to alter the plan and increase my Will instead. While I wasn’t entirely certain, I had a strong feeling it would help me resist such psychological damage, that it would give me the “will” to power through it. Even in the unlikely event it didn’t, it would still be better to ensure I don’t go fucking insane from outside sources than to drive myself nuts trying to push my Perception further than my mind could handle.

Much as I would have preferred to get a new Trait right away, I wasn’t willing to risk permanent brain damage from overstimulation just to get it. That, and I was beginning to suspect it might be best to try to time when I got my Traits around doing something significant relating to the related stat; so far my Traits all related to something that happened in my recent past, though some more vaguely than others. However, I wasn’t willing to risk dying because I went out deliberately under-statted just to test this theory, so I set it aside for now.

With little hesitation, I dumped the five hundred points I had intended for my Perception into my Will. I wasn’t worried about increasing this stat like I was Perception, I was confident I could withstand the pleasure of the change and I didn’t think my own willpower growing would somehow harm me. The moment I slotted in the points, my head snapped back as ivory flames erupted through my mind, burning away all my thoughts.

Much like with my senses, I could tell immediately that it was more than just the physical stuff of my brain that was being altered but my very soul. I could feel my spirit, my very self bubble and crack under the ethereal heat; and yet, even as it burned and boiled it was shifted and welded into something greater. Despite the faint trill of abject terror that managed to slip beneath the raging current of ineffable pleasure, I knew immediately that none of my mind was lost in this change; my memories and the base pieces of myself, every little fragment of my soul that splintered and melted, were held together even as they were forged into something more durable.

When the fire finally faded from my soul, leaving scant sparks to dance along my neurons for a fleeting eternity, the lingering fear that I would not be myself after so drastically altering an aspect of myself undoubtedly tied to one’s personality faded with it. A quick search of what I knew of my motivations and desires found nothing altered, though I knew it probably wasn’t impossible to make me retroactively think my past self’s motivations matched my current one’s even if they didn’t.

With my Will bolstered so significantly, my senses no longer felt as if they were one strong daydream away from boiling my brains. As I had suspected, my Perception wasn’t physically too much for my brain, just too much for my mind to deal with. I sighed, mildly disappointed with myself for not being able to handle my own damn senses without artificially reinforcing my willpower. I knew it wasn’t a rational standard to hold myself to, but I also knew that being anything less than exceptional would leave me far behind the true monsters of a world like this.

Nature has no room for second best, no throne for the king’s brother and no meal for the slower hunter. And unfortunately, one cannot simply choose not to play the great game of life; choosing not to fight is tantamount to choosing death. If you aren’t advancing, then someone else is, and if they decide you have something they want, they can simply take it from you. There can be no lasting happiness without the power to protect it, not in this world or any other.

The thought that someone out there probably could just ignore the kind of discomfort that scratched against my mind like knives on a chalkboard filled me with an aggravated sort of anxiety that demanded action. I squeezed my fists until my knuckles popped, glancing at my remaining points. The pulsing in my ears demanded I spend every last one of them that very instant, but

A very large part of me wanted to burn them all right now, to throw them into any given stat just to feel the sweet fire again.

But a larger part decided an emergency stash large enough to matter was more important than my immediate gratification. I couldn’t help staring at those remaining points a touch longer than I should have before tearing my eyes away to look over my Traits. As viscerally satisfying as gaining more direct power was, I knew well enough the vital edge mastery of one’s abilities granted. Between two fighters of equal strength, the fighter that knows the extent of everything they can do with what they have will all but always win against the one with no idea how to use what they have.

For instance, Bones Of Mist had kept my spine from shattering like a cheap toothpick under that lieutenant's fist, but the way I had used it wasn't explicitly mentioned in its description. I hadn't truly considered it as I used it, the idea to try and save my spine and ribs with the skill entering my mind the same second I put it into action. It made sense, mist can't be shattered or cut (though it can be dispersed, a grimly cautious corner of my mind noted) For once, an unexpected discovery made me pleased rather than chilled to my core; the system being descriptive and not prescriptive meant I had room to experiment.

I held up my right arm, watching it closely as I focused on the Trait. The first thing I noticed was that "an effort of will" did not equate to an expenditure of Stamina, but rather referenced that it required actively wanting to use the Trait. Exactly as the description said, my bones are like mist; all it takes to utilize this strange aspect of my skeleton was to acknowledge it, and decide to use it. I could feel the moment the ability activated even before I saw the results; though said results were very notable, with my arm becoming wobbly and beginning to lose its shape almost instantly.

It felt bizarre, but not truly unpleasant. A quick test proved my muscles and tendons still generally functioned, but I had to focus on a truly alien arrangement of muscle groups to get my limp limb to move with anything approaching coherence. It was rather like what I imagine moving a tentacle would be like, though with a gaseous core and none of the built in systems for moving without bones; so, rather not much at all like a tentacle, actually. I could move it every which way, compress it much more than solid bone would allow, and bend in a manner only cephalopods could compete with.

I attempted to throw a few experimental punches, only to find that having solid bones to anchor your tendons was rather important to the whole “punching” process. Rather than anything approaching a true punch, I achieved something more along the lines of aggressive flailing. My dreams of fighting like the boneless demons of the sea were certainly far off, but at least the faintly grotesque sight of my limb twisting and writhing erratically was more than a little bit amusing.

A deep chuckle interrupted my training, echoing out from the darkness around me despite my Paranoia telling me I was alone in the room. I whirled around, turning in nearly a complete circle before my frantically searching eyes met the amused, wine red gaze of an ancient predator. Rokharth’s wide and toothy grin faded into existence beneath his eyes shortly before the ghost pale skin of his face faded out of the shadows, “I thought I might find you secreted away like this, training on your own.”

I grunted, hiding my fear behind a veneer of merely not deigning to reply. I very deliberately turned my back on the old fiend, and pretended to casually resume throwing flailing punches. It was pointless to pretend I didn't have an ability he doubtless already saw me use, and I didn’t want to speak, lest the ice in my blood from this bastard’s sudden appearance (and the fact I had no idea how long he’s been watching me) rob my voice of stability.

Though, I was somewhat proud that I hadn’t dropped the gaseous state of my arm even when surprised. I mostly put it down to my heightened Will, but that did nothing to stop it from being a useful habit to maintain; it would be very bad to be startled back into solidity in the middle of somewhere I couldn’t fit normally, after all.

He didn’t seem concerned by my lack of comment, only snickering lightly. “You know,” the ancient monster drawled, “I know a much better place to train, where you can test your skills and gain more experience.” I could hear the corners of his smile creaking as his grin stretched ever so slightly further across his face.