Solipsism: Chapter 8 (Patreon)

Aexilica was nowhere to be seen, and I, stupidly, spent a long moment standing tall and looking for her before I remembered my situation. Just in time, not a second after I ducked the whistling projectile tore through the space my body had been occupying just moments before. I landed hard and painfully, but not nearly as painfully as I would have with a pebble lodged in my guts. 

Without wasting any more of my time or life, I got to crawling along. There were boulders all around, but enough space between them that I wasn’t exactly cramped. The real claustrophobia was knowing there was an enemy out there with a weapon capable of killing me in an instant, and apparently nothing else to use it on.

I forced myself to calm down, to think. I hadn’t killed a man- he was just a figment of my imagination. I wasn’t going to die now, I was already dead from that truck. None of this mattered, none of this was a threat to me. This world was mine, and it could do nothing to hurt me. 

The thought actually did restore some semblance of relaxation to my wits, and let them begin approaching my problem more constructively. Where had the sling been fired at me from? 

I glanced back to the spot I’d almost been hit at, then around to the nearby boulders. Obviously the firer would be taking cover, but he must have been in one of the spots that had a clear sight to where I’d stood up. That narrowed things down. What else?

There’d been no impact sound, no stone on stone or stone on soil. So the angle had taken the sling bullet well out of earshot before it actually hit anything. That narrowed it down more, in fact there were only two spots I could see which might have been occupied by a person shooting from that angle. 

Slowly, I plucked a rock from my pocket and hesitated. Tossing a stone, even gently, would make a…Well, a stone sound. Sharp, loud. Not at all like a person. Unless I was fighting a moron, he wouldn’t fall for it.

So I improvised, concentrating on the rock with my power over matter and letting it soften, weaken. I gave it an experimental squeeze after a moment and found it was still unyielding- did my power not work on stone after all? I couldn’t know, and didn’t have any choice but to try this anyway, so I threw it. The noise was…

Odd. Certainly not typical rock, it sounded too soft and muffled. At the very least no loud cracking accompanied it. Not a footstep, but-

The sling bullet hissed through the air, and I heard it shatter against stone. I looked around, trying to spot movement, but didn’t. What I did manage was to pinpoint the origin this time. Only one angle could’ve been fired from to send stone on stone at that place, out of the two I guessed my enemy was hiding. Slowly, I started crawling to circle around and catch it from behind.

Below me, the ground was hard. Jagged, sharp. I resisted the urge to soften it up before I crawled over, knowing it would cost me precious moments that I didn’t have to spare. The night’s chill seemed nowhere to be found, wind softer, air warmer. Adrenaline was lighting a fire inside me, burning away the fatigue and aches of all my travels. Despite myself, I grinned.

Maybe I’d still freak out when actually staring death in the face, but this was the most fun I’d ever had. V.R didn’t come close to this kind of immersion, TTRPGs didn’t give me as many options. I was truly living in another world, if one in my head, and it was my oyster. I cleared the last few metres to my destination, then got up to squat and ready a charge.

The charge came, and I scurried like a great and mighty gerbil fighting for the sanctity of its cage. There was a big boulder where my enemy would be, obscuring me until the exact moment I vaulted it and heroically scrambled over the top as I failed to clear it in one go. I dropped down to the other side, raised my fists and…

Realised my enemy wasn’t there, turning slowly to stare at the place I knew he would be. The place with the clearest sight line to my current position, which, obviously, he’d lured me into with his previous shot. Moving around secretly, just as I had. I froze, watched the sling start moving, felt my blood run cold.

Then Aexilica came down on him from behind, knives in hand. She moved faster than I had, so fast I barely even caught it. She just dropped like a cat, rolling and coming up with blades already flashing. The man stumbled, fell. He landed hard, twitching and bleeding, and Aexilica put her blades in him again before he could have even thought about retaliating.

Less than a second, and she’d killed a man. I suddenly found myself with an idea of where the other attackers had gotten to, and felt somewhat chilly at having seen the affair. 

“Th…Thanks.” It really was irritating how my body kept betraying me. Stammering words, trembling limbs, all despite my mind keenly insisting that the fabrication before me was just that. 

“It was nothing.” Aexilica replied, squatted down now and rifling through the man’s clothing. They seemed mostly to be wool, and left a lot of bronze flesh bared. He was a scrawny thing, like most of the people here, probably closer to five feet than six but not particularly short for the region. 

No, it was more than that. 

“It was deliberate.” I noted, thinking outloud. “You used me as bait, waited and hid while the two of us scurried around knowing that even if I lost, the enemy would give away his position. No, you already knew where he’d be going. You waited for him to expose himself by attacking me so you could catch him off-guard.”

As I said it, I found myself getting angrier. She just straightened up and, surprisingly, met my eye without the slightest hint of shame. 

“It was the best chance to win, I don’t have a long-ranged weapon.”

I hesitated at that, wanting to contradict her. But she had at least half a point. 

“You could’ve…Told me.” My voice was raspy from being strangled, and it hurt to talk. I regretted wasting the pain on such a pointless complaint. Of course she couldn’t have told me, not without giving the game away. Aexilica didn’t even humour me with a response, just walked over and held something out.

A knife, I realised. But not like hers. Hers had metal blades, bronze I thought, but this one was dark and black, almost transparent at the edges. Obsidian? 

Yes, obsidian. It looked cool as hell, though I wasn’t sure how effective a piece of glass would be in combat. I took it anyway. It would’ve saved me a lot of trouble a few minutes earlier, and probably left me cleaner after I escaped with my life. 

I looked back up to find Aexilica frowning, lip curled as she eyed me.

“What?” I asked.

“Did you shit yourself?” 

I paused, and shifted where I stood for a second, feeling for…Ah. 

“I’ll go and clean up in the river.” I replied, feeling my face burning like I’d just spent the last hour trying to break down a door with it. We didn’t speak much for the remainder of the night, which I was more than a little grateful for. 

Come morning, I hadn’t gotten much sleep. The adrenaline took almost until daybreak to wear off, and even once the physical effects died down I found myself a good deal more paranoid than usual. 

We were up early and moving barely less so, back on the road, trudging along. Everything hurt. I was hungry, getting hungrier by the day I knew. Aexilica was still insisting on rationing, insisting I had enough food to keep me strong, and maybe I did. But I didn’t feel it. Days passed as we went. 

At the very least, I got the chance to work on my powers. Across the board. I started checking my stat sheet periodically, figuring it was my deactivating brain’s method of letting me know what I could do in this world, and on the third day I was pleasantly surprised by a change. 

ATTRIBUTES;

Strength 3, Speed 3, Dexterity 6, Stamina 2, Toughness 4, Alertness 7, Charisma 1, Intelligence 9

FUNDAMENTS;

Energy 2, Matter 1, Force 1, Entropy 1, Cognition 1, Space 1, Time 1

Willpower 10, Attunement 2

A couple of things jumped out to me, the most notable, obviously, was the advancement of my energy Fundament. It had pushed up from one to two, which meant…Something, probably.

Or almost definitely. This was just a construct of my own subconscious- even the bit of my subconscious that was trying to actively convince me this world was real had implied as much- which meant that I could derive some meaning from it using my own experiences. Unless my grey matter was so mangled that it was utterly random and just firing off memories without any rhyme or reason. Since there wasn’t much to do in that scenario, I assumed the former.

RPG stats meant RPG rules, right? Well no, but it was one possibility. I’d checked my sheet after winning that fight, so I knew it wasn’t combat that had bolstered my powers, but there were other possibilities. Travelling every day was an achievement for me, and if I wasn’t getting typical “experience points” then it might just be that this was a representation of my abilities. I’d certainly worked hard enough on improving those, practicing my rock throwing and energy transfer every day. I’d been practicing matter, too, mind, but with a good two days’ head start on energy it made sense that the latter would be farther ahead.

This wasn’t entirely academic- knowing how I’d improved the Fundament would be needed to reliably improve others- but it was also only the second most pressing thing. The first, obviously, was the improvement itself. 

Energy two, over one. What difference did that make? I did some testing. I couldn’t tell whether I was throwing things much harder for one thing, I thought there were more violent colisions but that could’ve just been wishful thinking. My power seemed a bit easier to use but, once again, the difference was slight enough that I couldn’t be certain of it. 

Well, that was the good thing about a big fucking hike. There was literally no reason to not do boring things when your surroundings were already banal to the point of making you disassociate. 

Heh. Me, disassociating. From these surroundings. Funny.

After a while I gave up on measuring whatever improvements my power might have gotten, and turned instead to testing its limits. I’d done a good deal of work establishing what they were already, but there was every chance my improvement would manifest by making one or more of them a bit less strict. It was a good call. 

Range was unchanged, I still needed to touch something to affect its energy levels. At first. But after a few hours of messing around- another ten miles or more in torture measurements- I stumbled onto something interesting. One of my experiments, where I was tossing stones into the air and trying to move them without quite making contact, sent the rock flying away. But oddly. There was a sharp crack as it moved, rather than a silent, instant acceleration, and it was spinning as if I’d punched it rather than willed it into motion with intent and my powers alone. 

I did some more experimenting, playing around with what I’d seen. Eventually, I pinned down what was happening. I caught the ripples in the air, the glimmers of motion and, after kicking up a bit of dust from the arid plains we were crossing, confirmed what it was.

These rocks looked like they were getting punched because they were. I wasn’t transferring energy to them now- not directly. I was conjuring something into the air, something almost invisible, almost weightless, but very solid. Obviously, I started playing around with this too. 

And whatever it was I was making, it could go a hell of a lot farther than arm’s reach.