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Chapter 111: Squeeze Viper
🕑 Added 2023-10-25 16:21:53 +0000 UTCMatt materialized the token and caught it out of the air as it fell.
“What’s that? Some kind of reward?”
“Yes. Maybe the good kind. One sec.”
The few years of life on Gaia that Matt had experienced had not been kind to his feet. All the general damage his feet had taken had been healed by his VIT and healing skill, but each time, he would be left with thicker and thicker callouses, which themselves had picked up little fragments of dirt, dust and various Gaian debris over time. This made his feet tougher, but that hardly mattered when he kept them wrapped in armored boots all the time. Otherwise, it was just a cracked-toenail-and-gross-thick-skin situation he tried to avoid looking at as much as he could.
As Matt activated the pedicure token, his feet suddenly felt warm, like they were being soaked in a kind of bath. As he looked on, they suddenly began to glow with a soft light as bits of dead skin detached and floated away. Clicking and rasping sounds filled the air as his toenails were cut down to a reasonable length and filed to a presentable appearance. After about a minute, his feet were pristine, fresh, and felt fantastic.
“Matt, what in the fuck just happened? Why is there a little pile of foot fragments on the ground?”
“Pedicure token, I guess.” Matt was grinning ear to ear while he loosened the laces on his boots. He wasn’t about to let his feet get dirty any sooner than he had to. “Worked pretty damn good, actually. It even pushed the cuticles back.”
Matt put his feet into the boots, which turned out to be lined with some kind of cotton-like cloth that would do very well to mitigate the fact that he didn’t have socks. It felt amazing. He sighed with a weird kind of relief.
“Lucy?”
Lucy was still trying to make sense of the madness she had just seen, and it seemed to have knocked most of the conversation clean out of her. “Yeah, Matt?”
“If we don’t die, I think I’m going to like Ra’Zor.”
—
The next several hours were not exactly eventful by normal standards. Without any way of knowing where he was or where he was headed, Matt’s only viable option was just to follow the path until it led somewhere, hoping for some break in the monotony that wouldn’t also immediately try to murder him.
The first change in his environment that ended up mattering wasn't another monster, but something that didn’t have to do with him moving around or being discovered at all. After a while, something began affecting Matt’s eyesight. He could still see, but not as far as before and with less clarity than he was used to. Very slowly, the condition began to worsen until a long-dead memory stirred and Matt realized what was actually going on.
The sun was setting.
Suddenly, Matt was hit with a wave of sleepiness so heavy he almost sat down on the path to go to sleep by sheer reflex. Out of nowhere, he was getting hit with years of pent-up human instinct regarding what sunsets were supposed to mean. It was all he could do to get off the path to a small hollow in the terrain he hoped wouldn’t be visible from the road before he passed out.
—
Somewhere in his dreamless sleep, Matt was vaguely aware that he was in an extremely deep slumber. Some primitive fear of being defenseless eventually roused him to fight against that feeling, at least to the point where he’d be aware enough to protect himself if something did happen. He was sleeping so hard, he felt like he couldn’t even breathe, a fact which he was pretty sure he was only aware of because his PER and WIS were so high.
He tried to move to lessen the pressure, but it was no use. It was like his arms were pinned to his sides and his ankles were tied together. He struggled. It didn’t work. He couldn’t move.
Then he felt the world move around him, tightening its grip, and panic sunk in. Adrenaline started pumping as his eyes snapped open, only to see scales sliding past his face.
“Matt! Snap out of it! YOU ARE BEING EATEN BY A SNAKE, YOU IMPOSSIBLE IDIOT.”
And so he was. Matt was severely disoriented, not just because he was waking up, but because he was being attacked outside of a dungeon. The surface of Gaia had been about as safe as a place could be for the majority of the time he spent there. As the only living thing on the surface most days, the chances of anything happening to him were next to nil. To actually be attacked while he was sleeping was so unimaginable to him at this point that it took him a split second to come to terms with it. And the only reason he reacted so quickly was because he could feel fangs slowly creeping up his legs.
Ding!
Skill resolved. The system apologizes for the wait - it’s a truly bizarre skill. If you’d be kind enough to describe how you got it and the exact way it works, I could probably do a better job. Let me know!
Yeah, fat chance, Matt thought.
Ding!
Stored Strike Obtained
Stored Strike allows you to preload power into your muscles and release it all at once into a single movement, but only if your body is otherwise completely still. Any movement will both stop the preloading process and release the stored power, either into a movement or by dissipating it entirely. Note that this dissipation causes a small amount of recoil damage in both the user’s muscles and bones.
Meta-Trait Occupied: Attack.
Not moving wasn’t a problem, at least in the sense that Matt couldn't move even if he wanted to with his body being constricted in place. He willed the trait into action, feeling the power load into him like he was a coiled spring, while he became more and more claustrophobic in the snake’s grasp. Finally, he let all the stored power go as he kicked his legs as hard as he could, feeling his foot connect inside the snake’s head before it, he didn’t know how, moved the roof of its mouth out of the way.
It must be a specialized constrictor skill, or something. Who else would have a damage reduction skill for the inside of their mouth?
Still, the kick must have done something because the snake immediately slackened its grip around him. He pushed Spring Fighter pretty hard and just about squirted out of the coils of the snake, landing a few feet clear of it and popping to his feet, shovel at the ready. Somehow, Survivor’s Reflexes wasn’t showing him a single weak spot yet. He braced for a hard fight before realizing that the reason the snake’s vulnerabilities weren’t showing was that he had already exploited them,
When he kicked the inside of the snake’s head, the full force of the armored boot had transferred to the roof of its mouth. Without the room to snap back, that kick had apparently been hard enough to do some serious damage. The jaw of the snake hung open at the hinges like a half-dead Pac-Man, and it wasn’t moving.
“Lucy, what the hell happened?” Matt asked, trying hard not to let the accusation seep into his voice. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Because, Captain Sleepy, I tried to wake you up. For like a full minute before the snake even got to you, and then as it took its damn time wrapping you up. You were out, Matt. The sun went down, you went all Goodnight Moon, and apparently no amount of screaming was going to get you going. Not my fault, Matt. If I were capable of going hoarse, I wouldn’t even be able to talk right now.”
Matt considered this. Given how strong the sleep had come on, it was possible.
“Well, sorry. I guess I’ll have to be careful about sleep until I get used to there being a day and night cycle. It would be lame to get taken out by a one-shottable mook like this before we even get anything done.”
“Actually, a weird thing about that.” Lucy focused in on something invisible that Matt assumed was the description of the snake-monster. “It says this is, again, some sort of demonic-variant snake, something called a Squeeze Viper. Which, you know, is a dumb name, but whatever. But it describes it as this big, bad thing. Like ‘many parties fall to the Squeeze Viper when…' type of language.”
“Well, it didn’t seem that tough.”
“No, it didn’t.” Lucy shrugged. “It’s possible this system instance is just an exaggerator. But don’t tell him I said that.”
“I’m pretty sure it can just hear you anyway, Lucy.”
Ding!
Night Ambush Survived
You have survived your first nighttime ambush. They say more adventurers get taken out by threats they don’t see than by those they do. This is true, but it’s mainly because sleep is a dangerous, defenseless time.
You managed to get ambushed while you were alone and unconscious, wake up, and win a decisive victory. Congratulations! You get to be one of the lucky ones who survives being kind of stupid in a very dangerous place.
Rewards: Camper’s Survival Pack, 50 Class XP, 1 PER
Additional information: You seemed to just be telling your guardian that I could hear her. For the record, the system instance of one world has no access to the system guardians assigned by the system instance of another world. I can’t hear what she says unless you verbally repeat it.
If she was explaining something important, such as the details of your food consumption skill, it would be helpful if you would repeat the statement.
“Ooh, Camping stuff.” Lucy said as the pack materialized. It wasn’t as big of a backpack as Matt’s previous pack, but it had a lot of the things he had tried to bring as creature comforts. He now had matches, even though it was clear he didn’t need them. There was also some kind of magic lantern, cutlery, and even some conventional, non-magic bottles of water. “For killing the snake?”
“For not letting it kill me, I think.” Matt schooled any tricky expressions out of his face. “The system says it can’t hear you because you are under our system instance’s jurisdiction, by the way. Just in case you wanted to communicate something to it.”
Lucy’s mouth made an “oh” shape as she absorbed the implications of that statement. The Gaian system instance had done a lot of bad things to them, but one of the big no-no rules it never directly broke was telling a direct lie. It could mislead, sure. But outright lies seemed beyond its powers. Matt nodded at her, unassumingly. It was still a risk, but the high likelihood that the system couldn’t actually hear her freed them up to have better communication when it was important.
“She says thanks for letting her know, system, and that she will do that. And thanks for the pack!” Matt said to the sky.
It was still night, and even though Matt wasn’t in the same must-sleep-now straits he had been before, he was still sleepy. He ended up quickly scorching and swallowing a piece of snake meat, getting a mild defense buff out of it that he decided to keep, despite it coming with an increased sensitivity to fire. Then he laid down and went back to sleep.
