—Sally—

  I never felt more terrified in my life as the massive snake rose above the bck water, and I mentally kicked myself for pointing out the stupid rock to Orion. When I spotted the dirty piece of quartz under the murky water, I should have fucking guessed that it had something wrong with it.

  And when Orion just spontaneously threw up, throwing me to the ground—thankfully further than his spewed guts—I knew that I was truly, capital F, F-U-C-K-E-D, fucked.

  The final, morbid nail in the coffin was when it opened its mouth, and I heard it speak.

  “Ah! Two frogs, fallen, into my well.” It hoarsely whispered, its voice both a manifestation of gale screaming against a cliffside, and a choked whisper, clogged with phlegm.

  The terrifying act of it speaking like the hurricane personified broke me out of my shock, and I looked to Orion in hope that he could do something, and save both of us. But his eyes were unfocused, gzed and staring at the weird rock on the serpent's forehead.

  It wasn’t even that special looking, I mean it did glow like a dirty Neon light, but the milky and slightly transparent gem was… average? Like an unpolished diamond, it would need a lot of work for it to look anywhere half-decent or valuable.

  But mid as it may be, Orion was staring bnkly at it like he’d just met his future wife, eyes unblinking, mouth open, drool… dripping?

  It hit me that his state of strange apathy to the giant snake might be unnatural, maybe magical. It did make me feel a bit stupid that it took me that long to figure it out.

  “One, Little, Hu-uman…” It hummed in sing-song-y cadence, its one eye fixed on the Ranger, not even bothering to look at me. I supposed now was my chance if I wanted to do something.

  I would love to say that my first instinct was to run and help Orion, but I really wasn't that enthused by the idea. In the moment, I didn't care about him in the slightest, I just wanted to run off.

  Yet again, like a mosquito that doesn’t know when to quit, I was tempted by the idea of leaving him behind, expending his one-time use as a distraction for my own sake. But the unfortunate reality of it was that after it was done eating him, there’s no way that I could get far enough away to get out of its sight.

  But what could I do? Little pathetic ol’ me. Attacking the lizard was out of the question, so that leaves finding something that can snap Orion out of this weird enthralment. Well… I suppose he’s looking at it, so that’s something that I could at least disrupt.

  Without letting myself procrastinate any longer, I ran up to his leg, careful to avoid the puddle of vomit as I did a little hop onto his pants. With skills perfected over the st couple of days, I scampered up by hooking my cws into the cloth, probably cutting him up in the process, but it’s nothing that he couldn’t heal from. In a few seconds I’d reached his shoulders, my front cws reaching around his neck so that I could get a good view of his face.

  “Hmm? A Lizard?” The snake asked, childishly enough that it sounded like a demented toddler, and I ignored it, thankfully it seemed to barely be aware of what was going on.

  Ignoring the foul smell coming from his mouth, the main thing that stood out to me was Orion’s eyes, completely focused on the gem and unblinking. With nothing better to try I flipped my wings up and out, creating a fleshy screen, and cutting him off from the crystal.

  It took a few seconds, but he eventually started to blink rapidly, his face cycling through many emotions in the few seconds it took for him to recover. I saw the small twitches that could be diagnosed as disgust, nausea and maybe panic. The st emotion scaring me as much as the giant snake behind me, he didn’t show fear when a rotting zombie was on top of him and trying to bite his face off.

  “What. Are. You. Doing?” It spat, sounding like a petunt child denied its 33rd birthday present. I turned my head around to see it leaning closer, tilting its head towards us so its one good eye got a better view of what’s going on.

  But that seemed to be the thing that finally prodded Orion into action, the ranger grabbing me with one hand and clutching me against his chest, turning around before he moved my wings out of his face.

  It was a bit rough, but I could always get revenge ter, when there isn’t a creepy-as-shit giant snake right behind us. As he began to run towards the weird stone pile I saw earlier, I heard the monster let out a sly chuckle

  “A Chase? This’ll be fuuun!” The snake ughed, and I stuck my head over Orion’s shoulder to see the snake nguidly start to slither after us. The casualness of it mixed with how fast it fucking moved started making me understand why it felt like ughing at us. It's just pying with its food, milking every second of enjoyment it could get out of us.

  But, while I had my eyes on it, might as well take advantage of my situation.

  [Using [Appraisal – Lvl 1] on: Ulun’sut

  [Ulun’suti, The great horned serpent – Level ??? Monster]

  [The foulest failed assassin, Last living Uktena.]

  SpoilerA Sun burned the nds, her fmes purging the forests of life. A hunter, the keen-eyed, desperate enough to beg, came to the spirits for help, the little men answering the call. The thing of poison, pced a thumb upon the common man’s forehead, adorning with a gem.

  Another Uktena born unto the Divine madness.

  Marked, made into a weapon of cruel corruption. But with the daughter already vioted, the Uktena was purposeless.

  It tried to return to the vilges of man. The poison, made for stronger things, first bled into its flesh, then into everything around it. The flood of the writhing blood, the sickness in the manic mind, and the frigid cannibalism of wendigo fever, its progeny spread and killed more than it ever could.

  Named Ulun’suti, after its gem. The crystal scale of addicting madness held the most coveted of powers, enough to lure the strongest or more stupid hunters to their death. For no power other than the cruellest was worthy of its transparent nature, for the Ulun’suti is the sweetest poison of all.

  [colpse]

  That… I don’t know why I keep torturing myself with reading these descriptions. I know that the system doesn’t give me any sort of stats to work off of, and only cares to describe the most disturbing lore of the monsters. It really seems like the System’s only function is to tempt me with possibilities of information before making me regret asking, it couldn’t even bother to tell me its level this time! And how it writes these descriptions, expining in disturbing detail all of the reasons I shouldn’t’ve gotten my hopes up in the first pce

  Seriously, what the fuck is up with this pce? First the zombie of a were-deer, then a snake kaiju with a mind control crystal embedded in its forehead. This can’t be a starting area, with how the system describes these monsters, I have to assume that I’ve been dumped in a te game area.

  “Otnay aginyay!” Orion cursed, the Ranger running along the path like a parkour enthusiast, using the shattered remains of stone tree stumps and their trunks as shortcuts.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see him trying to get us to the weird stone building sitting on the ke. Now that I knew it was the only way to get out of this without dying, I gave it a closer look.

  It was a pile. A hill of broken and shattered splinters of stone stacked in a way so it didn’t immediately colpse, a hole at its base hinting at the idea that its hollow. The gap wasn’t small, easily big enough that Orion could walk through without bumping into it, but a thing as big as the Ulun’suti could never fit. Very convenient.

  For a second I was worried that we wouldn’t make it in time, but then I looked at Ulun’suti again, and saw that it wasn’t really making any effort to out-speed us. It seemed to be enjoying itself, smashing and ramming the few remaining standing trees. It was acting like a horror movie monster, taking a sadistic sort of pleasure in taking its time to catch us.

  I don’t know how I could glean its emotions from its completely snake face, but it seemed to be something that came with this body, like being able to understand its words.

  “Fun! So much fun!”

  I really wish that I couldn’t.

  As Orion’s breathing began to grow strained, the mound was almost within reach, the st sprint over the bed of broken trees only a few seconds to being finished.

  “To hunt the Hunter again. It makes me so-o-o happy!” It screeched, a delirious euphoria exploding in its eyes as it suddenly coiled up its body like a cobra, poised to-

  Without a second thought I screeched, the horned serpent unching its upper half through the air and down towards us, reminding me of a video of a barn-snake striking at a live mouse dumped in its enclosure.

  I’m not too sure if it was Orion’s skills or my jarring scream, but he dived forward into what could’ve been an elegant roll. But ft ground was non-existent, and the ranger cried out in pain as his shoulder hit the side of a stone, sending him tumbling into a nearby log without his usual elegance.

  Thankfully he had the foresight to make sure that I wasn’t dropped at the very least, grabbing me and holding me against his chest as his body absorbed the force of the fall.

  I looked back at where we were half a second ago, and saw the monster’s four fangs embedded into a piece of stone. With what looked like minimal effort, the snake lifted its head, tearing the boulder out of the stone path and holding it like a tennis ball. It looked at us with the tonnes of rock still impaled in its mouth, its one eye squinting at us. With a crunch it tensed its jaw, and the boulder cracked and crumbled like a piece of rock candy.

  I ran.

  I jumped off of Orion’s chest and completed the st couple of metres to the entrance by myself. It wasn’t easy, but it didn’t really matter how fast I went, because it looked like the Horned Serpent knew its main prey was done.

  After safely reaching the entrance of the mound, I looked back at Orion, feeling a bit bad about his poor luck, but there wasn’t exactly much that I could do about it. So, I watched with a solemn sense of camaraderie as the horned serpent nguidly moved to eat Orion, a bit sad that his part in my story was already over.

  I closed my eyes and looked away, not wanting to see the gruesome scene about to happen, but instead of hearing the expected noises of a horrific death, I heard wails in words I could understand.

  “Owie!” Ulun’suti screamed as I opened my eyes to see him writhing backwards, a back mark on its nose and the smoke trailing off of it hinting that something explosive had just saved Orion’s life.

  I watched curiously as the snake pitifully tried to move its head towards Orion again, but a sudden fsh of red immediately repelled it, like a phantasmal firecracker just got thrown at it.

  “Hunter!” The snake spat, like the word itself was dirty. It looked down at the slowly recovering ranger before retreating, the gigantic creature slipping backwards off of the ptform and underneath the dark bck water with far more stealth than something that size has any right to.

  But it seemed that through practically divine intervention, Orion lived again, escaping from the jaws of death like the determined cockroach that he is. He let out a grunt of pain as he got up, almost looking behind himself before flinching and keeping his eyes focused on the ground in front of him.

  With a slight limp he made his way to me and the entrance, giving me a look, squinting lightly before letting out a pained breath. Before he could make it inside I quickly scampered ahead of him, and heard an abrasive *ding* as I did so.

  [Congratutions! You have reached the checkpoint: Barren oasis]

  [Forbidden entities cannot enter checkpoints, which includes the factions: Monsters, Moon Cultists, unintelligent beasts, Chaos aligned Spirits…]

  I looked around the small chamber that was inside of the mound, and found mostly chips of stone and weird scratches on the wall. But the most interesting thing about the cave was the corpse.

  It was petrified like everything else in the room, the bones and ragged clothes frozen in time, like it’d been dead for a long time before being turned to stone. In its hands was a bow and arrow—also turned to stone—the string of the weapon snapped and crumbled, while the arrow a bit weathered but still mostly whole.

  But the head of the arrow wasn’t rock. It had a head of extremely familiar pale stone, the clear and almost gss-like piece of quartz fastened to the shaft by a piece of stone twine.

  Thankfully, unlike the Ulun’suti, the gem didn’t faintly shine ominously, or entrance Orion like an angler fish. It looked almost normal. It was much clearer than the one on Ulun’suti’s head, enough that it could be from another source, but it had to be special in some way.

  It didn’t turn to stone, and there’s no way it could’ve been pced there after the petrification. It’s not like you can tie something onto a shaft with a knot out of a rope made of stone.

  But before I could go cim the loot for myself, Orion smoothly outpaced me to it, striding ahead of me as he investigated the sculpted cadaver.

  He knelt by it, investigating the figure with a discerning eye before his eyes nded on the arrow, his hand grabbing it a split second ter. I ughed at him, amused that he thought that he could get the arrow out of its grip whole—it was practically connected to the statue.

  Then the arrow disappeared, the implement vanishing into thin air like it’d never existed in the first pce.

  I ran over to take a closer look, feeling both amazement at the feat of extracting it without damaging the stone and jealousy that Orion got the loot. To be fair I did nab the neckce, but I found that all by myself, so it's mine.

  He then held out his hand face-up, the arrow re-manifesting itself into his awaiting palm with a sudden and abrupt flicker of red light.

  Orion held it up to his face and peered into the gem like there was something inside of it, but to my eyes I could see absolutely nothing. He lowered it and poked the sharp edge of the gem’s side, and it immediately drew blood. Orion removed his finger from it without so much as a flinch, like he meant to accidentally cut himself.

  With a silent sigh he dismissed it, the ammo disappearing into whatever void he kept it before. It’s really not fair that he gets a cool magic system, while mine still wants a creator code or some bullshit.

  But as he got up to inspect the rest of the cave, I realised something dire. I never got the chance to inspect it, how am I meant to exist in peace if I don’t know what the cool artifact does?

  I decided to leave it be, Orion did manage to make it here, and I suppose that alone can be his reward. And I can always use [Appraisal] ter when he brings it out again.