ACaL Chapter 2 - Spirit of Gold

Way too many giant teeth? Check. Pointed muzzle wide enough to swallow me whole? Check. Mottled, gray-black fur that blended seamlessly into the bare stone behind it? Also check. That sure was a slaughterwolf! A very big, very hungry looking slaughterwolf. At least it wasn’t fifth-order? It's the little things, you know? Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

I quickly broke eye contact––something, something, take it as a challenge––as though that would in any way help me evade its attention. Slaughterwolves were the nightmare monsters that could be rarely found in these mountains––and you pray to whatever gods you believed in that you didn’t.

All creatures of ona, monster and adventurer alike, were created with a starting Skill that helped define your future progression. For adventurers like me, that meant a unique skill based on your past life. Mine was called [Fury of a Chained Soul]. As much as I didn’t like it, it certainly fit. For monsters, who were created wholly from ona with no soul to serve as a template and repository of memories, each variety had a Skill that every monster of that kind would have from ‘birth’.

For slaughterwolves, that Skill was [I Hunt, I Kill, I Feast] and it was, as some of the other adventurers liked to say, ridiculously broken. I didn’t remember the exact text––some long-dead adventurer had unlocked a skill that let them temporarily borrow skills from monsters they killed and they’d used it to catalog a huge number of starting abilities––and I knew it varied slightly from tier to tier, but I knew the gist of it.

It was something along the lines of ‘[Tremendously increase all parameters while hunting your prey. Tremendously increase all parameters while fighting your prey. Moderate chance to permanently gain stats and skills from consumed foes.] Basically just total bullshit all around. They were one of the only creatures in the world that could exceed the usual Skills cap for their species; sure they only got four unlockable slots, but that didn’t matter when they could accumulate a dozen copies of a goblin’s [Makeshift Cunning], a golem’s [Metallic Strength], and who-knows what other Skills in a matter of weeks.

Even worse, while Orbs of Enlightenment and Orbs of Enhancement––both of which were needed to unlock a new Skill––were quite rare, that didn’t really matter to slaughterwolves. Sure they would use them if they found them, but unlike most monsters, who nearly never had more than one extra Skill beyond what they’d started with, they could easily accumulate Skills without ever needing to find either.

There were maybe a handful of monsters more dangerous than slaughterwolves, but thankfully none of those spawned outside of fifth- and sixth-order areas. I doubted the kingdom would still be standing for long if second-order plague drakes started spawning in the many Green zones near cities. I guess at least it wasn’t a dragon? Small mercy.

I didn’t know what to do. In all honesty I just wanted to cry. Sometimes it really did seem like the universe was out to get me. It was kind of funny, in a horribly morbid way at least. I had been fifteen years old when I’d thought I’d found the opportunity of a lifetime. Instead I’d spent three years toiling away as a slave until my soul could no longer take the punishment inflicted on it daily. Now here I was, looking at the opportunity of a lifetime. And what did I get? A kick between the legs and a knife in the kidney apparently.

The slaughterwolf sniffed loudly, its massive nose twitching. Then it opened its jaws and roared, a physical hammerblow of sound and air that pounded against my ears and shoulders. Spittle rained down around me as I desperately tried to hang on, hot and burning like acid against the exposed skin of my face. Clearly this slaughterwolf had eaten something like a rock wyrm for its [Melt Through Mountains] skill.

I looked at the Orb, still glowing gently just a few inches away from me. It promised riches and power that I could scarcely imagine. Using it for myself had hardly crossed my mind––I was just a third-order adventurer. Most of my skills were completely unupgraded. I still had six entire unlocked Skill slots. I had never even used a Purple Orb in my life, much less a red or Gold one. The thought of using it for myself had honestly barely crossed my mind before I’d discarded it. I simply wouldn’t get good use out of something so… valuable compared to what I could exchange it for.

I looked up at the wolf. It hadn’t moved yet, still simply staring down at me from the ledge where I’d fought the golem. It had only been a handful of seconds since I’d first seen it, but it felt like much, much longer.

The moment it decided to come for me, I was dead. I couldn’t out run a fourth-order golem, much less a slaughterwolf. I certainly couldn’t fight it, and its nose would let it track me down no matter where or how I hid.

As I was now, there was literally nothing I could do. But, perhaps… I could change that.

My hand shot forward and closed around the Orb. I felt the mental trigger appear as my fingers brushed the unnaturally smooth surface and, without giving myself a chance to reconsider, flicked it.

The pain came first––this was really not the way you were supposed to do this. For best results the Adventurer’s Handbook recommended using Orbs of Enlightenment after at least three days of meditation and ona-focusing exercises to attune your spirit to the specific wavelength of the Orb. The first time I’d used an Orb of Enlightenment, a Brown one I’d found during one of my very first trips out of the capital, I got too excited and used it after only a few hours of preparation. That had been a mistake.

This was very much not a Brown Orb. The ona within it was literally five orders of magnitude denser. More than that, at the time my ona had also been Brown, same as the Orb. I was very much not a Gold adventurer.

My spirit felt like it was on fire. Like, literally. I knew what an ignited soul felt like––it was what had ultimately killed me the first time around, and this hurt exactly like that.

A concentrated ball of golden ona forced its way through my skin, tore up through my arm, and roughly elbowed its way into one of the empty slots open in my spirit. Imagine having a hot iron pressed against your chest. Now keep imagining that, except it's not pressed against your skin, but rather deep inside you. Also it's not just your chest, but sort of everywhere and nowhere specific all at once. Oh, and no amount of pain tolerance will ever make it get any less painful because its not happening to your nerves, but rather the very essence of that which makes you you.

Anyway, needless to say it didn’t feel great. Very not great in fact, but I digress.

An eternity of pain passed in a heartbeat and then it was over. My torn and burning spirit stitched itself together, the genius framework that had summoned my soul to this world turning what should have been a permanent, debilitating injury into a momentary inconvenience.

I felt… different. Stronger, certainly, but not in the way I expected from something like a ‘Tremendous boost to all physical parameters’. I felt strangely floaty. Like a massive iceberg bobbing in the ocean waves. That wasn’t really it, but I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. It was like a stiff breeze could pick me up and blow me away, and yet at the same time I felt as solid as a mountain.

The slaughterwolf growled, the sound low and deep rumbling out from the back of its throat. My action had very clearly not gone unnoticed and it was pissed. Before it could act on that anger, I desperately focused on the new star blazing in my chest. Once again the nearly imperceptible framework of mana binding my body, spirit, and soul together jumped into action. The barely-decipherable feedback my new Skill was giving me faded slightly as words floated into my mind.

Slot 5: Unlocked -> Unchained Spirit of Ona

• Base - Gold - Tremendously increase the effect of internal ona concentration. Activate to convert Body to Ona Spirit. Activate to convert Ona Spirit to Body.
• Upgrade 1 -  Locked
• Upgrade 2 -  Locked
• Upgrade 3 -  Locked
• Upgrade 4 -  Locked
• Upgrade 5 -  Locked
• Upgrade 6 -  Locked

Well, it was certainly not a very long description. The text the framework gave me for my Purple collar was more than twice as long and the only two public Gold skills I knew of were both considerably more verbose.

On the other hand, what I could see was just as ridiculous as I had expected. Just the first part alone was utterly wild. The highest comparable buff I’d ever heard of was merely a ‘Mild’ increase. A ‘Tremendous’ increase was four entire levels higher than that and only Gold skills and skill upgrades could grant that kind of boost.

Furthermore, an increase to the ‘effect of internal ona concentration’ was one of those crazy buffs that all high-order adventurers hunted for incessantly. It was a compounding boost that scaled multiplicatively with Skills, items, and, most importantly, order. For a Brown adventurer, it was barely a boost at all. For a Gold, the boost could increase their abilities by an entire order of magnitude or more.

Even if this had been everything the skill did, I doubted I would have been too mad. Even if I never found the Gold Orb of Enhancement I needed to unlock an upgrade slot for the Skill, it would still likely be my strongest boost for decades, centuries even, to come.

Thankfully that wasn’t all, because I wasn’t actually sure the boost I had gained from it would be enough to escape from the slaughterwolf. The second half of the skill was… odd. It was pretty straight forward in theory, but I had no idea what an Ona Spirit was, nor what the effects of converting my Body into one and back might be. It sounded a tad sketchy––I quite liked my body and needed it to live––but the framework was supposed to prevent the acquisition of Skills that just straight up killed you. Hopefully that meant it was safe to use.

I felt a massive buildup of ona right above me and my eyes flicked up to see the slaughterwolf staring down at me with its jaw open and a rapidly growing ball of swirling dirt-brown energy floating between its teeth.

Oh great. It had a ranged Skill too. Lovely.

I briefly weighed my options. I’d recently upgraded my fourth Skill, [Chainbreaker], with a Blue Orb of Enhancement. The Skill could now theoretically be used to negate opposing spell-type Skills, but I’d never had the chance to test it against anything more dangerous than some Brown spikecupines. In theory that should be able to stop this attack and then I could try running away.

On the other hand, doing so would likely drain a huge amount of my rather limited usable ona. Even just using it against those weak monsters had been unreasonably costly, but that was about what you had to expect when it came to such an open-ended Skill below fifth-order.

Realistically, the risk taker in me, that part of my mind that pushed me to face ever-steeper challenges and roam further and further away from civilization, had already come to a decision.

“Unchained Spirit of Ona,” I whispered, gently prodding my new Skill with a tiny droplet of ona. The vocalization wasn’t really necessary, but it tended to help the first few times you tried to use a Skill.

Gold flashed within me and suddenly everything seemed to fall away. Sensation, senses, and all the fear and worries I’d been carrying for so long vanished in the blink of an eye. The constant pressure around my neck and wrists went with them––my items were still there, I implicitly knew they were and could feel the comforting thrum of the strength they gave me––but the psychological weight, the constant reminder of those horrible years of darkness and pain, suddenly didn’t feel nearly so heavy.

I felt impossibly light inside. And then a stream of head-sized rocks punched straight through my body and continued out and down towards the valley far below.