part0026

I ROSE WITH THE FIRST signs of dawn, lit a campfire and set some meat cooking. Thankfully, there were plenty of dry branches lying around. I wasn’t afraid of giving away my location with smoke or firelight, since the Marsh Mistress already knew it, I was sure — I’d heard the sound of clattering stones and the scrape of chitinous legs near my shelter several times in the night. The dangerous predators could smell me, but the Marsh Mistress and the other arachnoscorps were too big to get through the narrow windows and half-collapsed passageways into the basement of the ruined building I was hiding in. There were no night beasts in the swamp. I guess they weren’t fans of the creepy arachnoscorps either. So Shelly and I were safe here underground.

Carefully leaving my cover for the surface and seeing Dinotard still curled up in a ball, I shivered in the morning cold and hurried back into the cellar. With my fire, at least it wasn’t so chilly down there. I turned the meat as it roasted over the fire, then checked on Shelly, making sure she was tucked in tight under my jacket. The girl had stopped shivering. She muttered something in her own language in her sleep. Maybe thanking me for caring. I smiled and crouched down next to her.

The Huntress had a hell of a night. The Marsh Mistress’s poison was strong. Shelly’s right shoulder, where the cruel arachnoscorp had injected its venom, was horribly swollen. One moment the veich girl was overheating, the next she shivered with cold. Her fur was wet with sweat all night. The girl didn’t react to my words or touch, and she got worse every minute. At a certain point, I was sure she wouldn’t survive the night. So I risked injecting her with a shot of Anti-Adder that I had in my bag.

I didn’t know if the highly specific anti-venom could treat a bite from an otherworldly arachnoscorp, or whether human medicine worked at all on veichs, but I couldn’t help it. Sitting and just watching as Shelly lay dying was unbearable. Anyway, the virtual world seemed to have labeled the anti-venom syringes as a ‘strong antidote,’ so I decided to risk it. It helped. The long-tailed girl’s breath evened out, and the swelling and fever both went down. Once I was sure she was on the mend, I brought in a few more bundles of soft grass from outside and fell asleep next to the Huntress. I was out like a light after that exhausting day. Through my veil of sleep, I heard Whiskers the kitten find my shelter and start digging through my backpack, I guess trying to reach the meat I’d hidden there. Then he calmed down and curled up on my makeshift bed with me and Shelly.

Now the furry little critter was deep asleep next to the she-wolf. I have to admit, I was even a little envious of the kitten — no problems or worries, just sleep and eat and level up time and time again. As it happens, Whiskers the Hexxer had already reached level twelve, and even looked bigger. The power of fresh air and a healthy diet.

I stroked my cat and he turned onto his back, meowing and letting me tickle his tummy. Cute little thing. I had no idea how he survived in this dangerous world. Even just his presence seemed to be have a soothing effect. Then he got mischievous! Whiskers must have been in a playful mood. He started hunting my hand, fake-scratching and nipping it. I took away my hand and touched the sleeping Huntress’s brow. Shelly’s temperature was gone. The girl was recovering. With the tips of my fingers, I carefully and even tenderly touched the black tufts at the tip of the veich girl’s ears. Shelly’s eyes sprang open.

“Serrrgeant, arrre you flirrrting with me?”

I didn’t expect the girl to wake up. I turned bright red and removed my hand at once.

“No, I wasn’t. Well… maybe just a little. No dirty thoughts though! It’s just, your ears are really cute.”

Uhm… After that game message, now I was really embarrassed. What did that mean? That Shelly could be tamed with affection and kind words? Did it work on other girls too? Did this world just have a set of game algorithms and rules instead of good old-fashioned love, friendship and attachment? Just level up ‘taming’ to forty with a girl to get a date? Then to seventy for a first kiss? Was that how it was? How boring and predictable it must be to live in such a digitized world!

Apparently, confusion and fear showed on my face. The Huntress looked worried.

“What is wrrrong, Serrrgeant? I do not mind. I like it. Is like returrrning to carrrefrrree youth. Motherrr strrroke my ears when she put me to bed. Well… At least I think she did.”

The second message told me that Shelly apparently had nothing to do with it. The Taming skill was leveling up because of something else entirely. But what the hell was going on?! I jumped up from the makeshift bed and rushed to the surface, losing my footing and nearly breaking my leg on the rubble-covered stone stairs. As always, my low Luck made itself known at the worst time.

Limping, I got upstairs and saw a terrible scene: the massive Marsh Mistress towering over the giga-komodo unfurled on the ground. She was hungrily sucking the nutritious juices out of the dead Dinotard! The armored idiot must have unfurled himself at the worst possible moment and got bitten by the venomous cruel arachnoscorp wandering nearby. Or he uncurled, paid no attention to the approaching danger and paid for his carelessness.

Damn it! It took so much time and effort to train that feeble-minded lizard. And it was all a waste! But… what’s this? The taming bar, which I could still see over Dinotard’s corpse, was filling up! Twenty-two percent! I raised my eyes higher and didn’t believe them, because the bar went up with them. It couldn’t be! I was taming the Marsh Mistress!

I’d seen some video games where there was only one way to tame certain monsters: feeding them your own pets. Apparently, it worked that way here too. Crazy. Dinotard was deflating fast, like a balloon with the air escaping. Forty-five percent tamed… Forty-seven… Fifty…

Was it my imagination, or was the taming bar filling up slower? Dinotard had been a big beast in life, but now he looked small in comparison to the Marsh Mistress, even tiny. Or was that him getting smaller as his insides were sucked out? With a shiver, I realized that one giga-komodo wasn’t enough for this hungry giant.

I was right; after a minute, the overgrown spider threw aside the already empty corpse of the dead reptile. The taming bar stopped at seventy-three percent. Damn… Where was I supposed to find a second giga-komodo? And while I chased it around with a lasso in the local fields, the taming bar would drop… Then what? Feed Shelly to the cruel arachnoscorp? No! The very thought frightened me. Sacrificing Whiskers wasn’t an option either, and my kitten would have been a morsel to the Marsh Mistress anyway. In the meantime, the massive arachnoscorp turned and began to leave.

Then I made a decision!

“Hey, where are you going? You’re still hungry!” I shouted, walking out of my hiding spot, waving and limping toward my death.

The Marsh Mistress turned back slowly, cautiously, as if not believing her dozen eyes and expecting a trick from me any second. I kept approaching, keeping my voice deliberately quiet, spreading my arms to show I had no weapons.

“Come on! Eat me! I’m big and tasty! I just hope it’s enough…”

I didn’t quite catch how the monster did it. Still fifty yards from me, the Marsh Mistress took a single leap and landed in front of me, piercing my neck with the venom-covered stinger on the end of her abdomen as she landed. It hurt like hell! Next, her sharp mandibles tore flesh from my chest. My hit points were dropping rapidly. The Marsh Mistress wasted no time saying grace. She was going to eat her human snack then and there. But I was watching something else entirely: the taming bar as it filled up! Seventy-four percent… seventy-seven… eighty-two…

“Yeah, I know… I’m tasty…” My tongue twisted and my legs shook. I fell down to one knee.

I wasn’t going to make it… My life would end before I could train the monster. I tried to reach the Marsh Mistress to use Calming Touch, but my outstretched hand felt empty air. The scene muddied before my eyes. I could no longer trust my vision. Eighty-nine percent tamed… Ninety-three percent…

I saw a message; a successful Physique check. Then, almost right away, a successful check for venom resistance. I perked up. I could still fight! All I had to do was survive a little longer. Shame I’d left that roast meat on the sticks. Food would have helped to recover my Health Points right now. Although… I opened my inventory and threw a handful of red berries into my mouth, the ones I’d collected by the faraway forest. Then I ate the ‘wild garlic’ and an unfinished piece of fried fish.

Regeneration seemed to be kicking in. For the next few seconds, my health bar wavered between three and four percent.

“Meow!” I glanced down. My ginger kitten was hovering around my feet.

Idiot! Maybe he thought I wanted to play some fun game, and that’s why I ran out of the basement. It’d be a shame if the Marsh Mistress ate the naive little critter… My eyelids were already closing in the sleep of death. I had lost all hope. Then it happened.

Yes! My health was fully restored! I pushed away the bloody mandibles trying to close in on me again. Enough! You’ve had your pound of flesh. No more eating master! My head span, but the wounds on my neck and chest were fully healed. Just to be sure, I’d need to use some Anti-Adder to neutralize the remainder of the venom in my body. But that was just a detail. The important thing was my new many-legged pet towering above me, ready to go where I told her and tear apart anyone I pointed at.

☠ Marsh Mistress. Level 88 Cruel Arachnoscorp. Female. Sergeant’s pet.

“Serrrgeant, you arrre insane!” It seemed Shelly had had time to come outside too, and was watching my suicidal actions with wide eyes.

“Maybe. But now I have a feeling we’ll have no problem getting you accepted into Pan’s Landing. And it’s going to get a lot easier to fight off the night beasts!”

Climbing onto the giant and deadly eight-legged monster, I beamed with joy and thought that I’d never need another mount in this world; the Marsh Mistress would fill that role. I was mistaken. It was midday by the time we reached Pan’s Landing, after noticeably enriching our knowledge of the local forest fauna and the surrounding sights. The Marsh Mistress was too large to use the usual animal tracks or squeeze between trees, so our path around the forest deadfalls was long and circuitous. We couldn’t have moved less directly if we wanted to. Map out our route and you’d think you were looking at a child’s crayon scribble. I got lost almost right away, losing my sense of direction in the monotonous forest. The compass was a liar and a cheat. If it weren’t for Shelly, who could somehow still orient herself in the dim light of the impassable woods, I might never have found the way back.

In addition, the Marsh Mistress was very slow and entirely unsuited for long hikes. She tired quickly. She needed rest and food. Lots of food. Fortunately, we had no trouble at all surviving in the woods, so I managed to regularly feed my insatiable pet. The Riding skill turned out to be very useful. It helped a little with the arachnoscorp’s stamina and movement speed. All the same, I cursed everything under the sun while we made our way through the woods. Especially when the Marsh Mistress saw no other way to get through than to climb the trunks of giant trees. No roller coaster could compare. We held on for dear life to the chitinous growths on the arachnoscorp’s exoskeleton, hoping that we didn’t fall off from two hundred feet up, if not three hundred sometimes. We hoped even harder that the Marsh Mistress didn’t decide to scramble along the branches upside down, hanging beneath them. She could do that.

As for the pet’s combat capabilities, though, I had no complaints. The massive arachnoscorp tore apart any of the small creatures we met in mere seconds. Also, after I reached level ten, I got the chance to pick two new skills for Sergeant. Without hesitation I picked Monster Riding, which raised the Marsh Mistress’s attack and defense. What we had now was a true machine of death, with whom few of the forest dwellers could hope to reckon. The only creature roughly equal to us in size was a level 77 Nine-horned Grudger — a monster that looked like a six-legged triceratops with extra horns and spikes. It spent a long time howling at the Marsh Mistress and waving its sharp horns in warning, but in the end decided not to tangle with the disturber of its peace. I could only approve. I wasn’t at all sure who would have won.

Based on all the above, I wouldn’t say the Marsh Mistress made a particularly good mount for traveling. She seemed better suited as a siege monster for capturing enemy fortresses. She could easily climb over any wall and gobble up the defenders. Or, on the contrary, a fierce and reliable defender as if designed by nature itself to fight and kill waves of aggressors at a time. And to die if she met a stronger enemy than herself; the Marsh Mistress had no chance of running away from anything.

Finally, Shelly and I made it out of the woods.

“There is the village,” my companion pointed a paw at the river flowing downhill. I could just make out the island with its high palisade. “Your crrreeping crrrocodiles are therrre in the shallows.”

I directed my mount down the slope, to the drawbridge. Ashot was standing guard. He saw the approaching monster from afar, reached out for the gong hammer to sound the alarm, but then saw me riding atop the cruel arachnoscorp and stopped.

“Woah..! Got a new pet, Sergeant? Congratulations! But we’ve been a long time waiting for you. The creeping crocodiles won’t catch fish without you. And you didn’t come back last night or even in the morning. Your sister is worried sick…”

Julie’s shriek of joy interrupted the Baker. She ran out of the common house toward me.

“Brooootheeerrr!”

I hurried to jump down from the Marsh Mistress, lifted my little sister up and span her around as she cried tears of joy. Julie cried and tried to tell me through her sniffles how worried she’d been. She hadn’t slept all night.

“Varya was worried too,” my sister whispered to me, as if revealing a closely-guarded secret. “She even went to the werewolf village to find you this morning. But nobody there spoke human. She managed to figure out from the veichs’ gestures that they hadn’t seen you today.”

“They saw us. Not this morning, but not so long ago,” I smiled, remembering the wide eyes of the Hunters we’d come upon in the woods. “Shelly’s uncle will probably come to Pan’s Landing tomorrow, if not today, to find out how to tame cruel arachnoscorps.”

“Hey, we have visitors,” my sister changed the subject. “A group of human newcomers arrived in the village. Four at once! They’re asking to join the village. Three of them I’ve never seen before, but I know the fourth already. You know him too. It’s that guy you fought in the snowy pass! Badass!”