7 – Harsh Survival

Dark Bolt: Somber power requires fuel. Sacrifice a finger (0/1).

Alexandra stared at the skill quest for Dark Bolt for long minutes. Instinctively, she knew that a simple mental command would be enough to complete the quest. A finger. That was what the journal was asking of her.

A steep cost.

Which finger would be sacrificed? She didn’t know. Hopefully not a thumb. Perhaps her left pinky would be the least handicapping, but it didn’t look like she could choose.

She shook her head. It was too much. The fight with the goblins had been close. One more hit of her sickle and the injured one would have died, completing her quest.

She turned her attention to her other skill quests. Summon Lesser Fiend still required her to make a deal with a demon. With no idea how to even get started on that, she discarded the thought. Anyway, Alexandra was no fool, and this sounded like the worst course of action she could take.

Selling her soul for a goblin? She hadn’t fallen that low.

Thus, her only choice was Inflict Weakness. Well, that, or giving up her streak.

Inflict Weakness: Damage a living being enough to reduce their strength to 0 without killing them (0/1).

Regretting that she hadn’t asked how attributes worked while she was in Lanterne, Alexandra turned the pages of her journal to check her status. Sure enough, her own attributes hadn’t changed.

It raised more questions than it answered. Was she not injured enough to, at least temporarily, lose a few points of strength, constitution, dexterity? She certainly didn’t feel at her peak. Perhaps these sorts of variations wouldn’t show up on paper. Perhaps it took more than physical damage to reduce one’s stats.

She didn’t know. Couldn’t know.

But she could try making it work.

For that, she needed to capture an animal. Alexandra had spent enough time walking through the plains to know that the flower fields were teeming with life.

Catching something wasn’t going to be easy, though. Her best bet was probably one of the many insects crawling on the ground. She knelt down, and inspected the dirt under her feet. Sure enough, there were a few ants, an earthworm, something that looked like a beetle… Was it a beetle? She wasn’t sure.

She pinched the earthworm between two fingers, and brought it to her eyes. It was squirming, clearly confused at what was happening.

A frown etched itself on her face. How much strength did a worm have? Not much, right? Did they even have attributes?

Only one way to find out. She strengthened her grip. The worm went still almost instantly. She loosened her fingers and it hung limp.

Alexandra stared at it for a moment. Then she set it down carefully in the dirt, as though that mattered now, and stood up.

Too much. Far too easy to overshoot with something that small. She needed something with more margin. Enough strength that she could feel it draining without killing it.

Something bigger.

A bird? No, she couldn’t see herself catching a bird.

To be fair, she couldn’t see herself catching anything. It’s not like the critters that called the plains of Baleria home would run into her arms. Even less so when her intention was to torture them.

Her stomach churned.

She snapped her fingers in quick succession, pacing around. How did hunters do it? Guns? Well, she had no gun. Perhaps a bow? But even if she could maybe find one in the village, she didn’t know how to use it. She’d never hit a target before nightfall.

Stopping dead in her tracks, her hand brushed on her belt. A trap!

It felt… possible. Not a sure shot, but worth a try.

How hard could it be?

Her vest loosened as she unbuckled her belt. She unstrapped her sickle. The belt was leather, just long enough for a snare, albeit a short one. Next, Alexandra shifted through the plants around her, looking for some that seemed edible.

She was aiming for a rodent. A mouse, or something like that. Did they like seeds? Probably, right?

Her eyes landed on a sort of sunflower. It wasn’t quite the plant she remembered from earth, as this one was twice as tall, and colored purple instead of yellow. But the disk was covered in seeds.

With a pull of her sickle, she cut off the flower head. Since it was too large to fit in the loop of her belt, she further cut it in half, and one more.

Then, she cleared a small patch of dirt, placed the bait in the center, then tied her belt around it. She lay down under the cover of a few tall flower stems, her arm fully extended as she held the tip of her snare trap.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Ready to pull.

Just waiting for a poor rodent to walk into it…

She waited.

The plains were indifferent to her plans. Wind moved through the flowers in slow passes, bending stems and releasing pollen in small drifts. Something buzzed near her ear. She didn’t move.

Five minutes. Ten, maybe. She had no way to measure.

The bait sat undisturbed in its clearing. No movement in the grass around it, no small curious nose appearing at the edge of her cleared patch. Nothing. The flowers swayed, and the world continued without any particular interest in her quest.

Her arm was beginning to ache from being extended. The ground was harder than it looked, and there was something wet—a worm, probably—crawling onto her leg. Without thinking, she poked the side of her cheeks. The bleeding had stopped. The pain was there, muted.

Still nothing.

She found herself watching an ant navigate the edge of her cleared patch, detour around the flower head, and continue on its way.

After what felt like considerably longer than it probably was, she became aware of a smell. Faint, but there. Something animal and warm.