So, I was saying that I wanted to measure my dad’s radiation, right? Well, we had quantified it into parts, namely sigil levels. I wanted to call it power levels or spiritual pressure, but Doc. Phisher gave it a name that proves he is too disconnected from society: The Phantasmal Human Assessment for Radiation Total. Yeah, I’m not measuring my dad's power level with the P.H.A.R.T. scale.

  So I spread some rumors that we were developing a scale called the sigil intensity meter. Sim for short. There were some things that we didn’t account for. As an example, the greater sigils seem to account for half again more radiation. The captain has two basic sigils and a Sim score of six while I have Greater Visionary Chronicler. That gives me a score of 9.5. Tomorrow, hopefully I will get to measure my dad.

  Day 97, Owen Landers

  5..4..3..2..1

  As soon as the points of spirit came off cooldown, Silas tore open a portal and stepped forward at the same time. He flailed in shock as the portal failed to manifest and his foot hit rock, tripping him, and landing him on his face. Silas rolled to his back, opening his interface. He was certain the spirit was available and it was, both points free to use.

  Getting to his feet, he tried to open another portal. Nothing happened. It wasn’t that he couldn’t connect his sigil to his spirit, when he tried opening the portal to the base, it felt like an invalid target. He had felt this happen once before, back at the dragonkin camp where a portal was present. Silas had also felt that it wasn’t an absolute rule, if he had more spirit he could push through the resistance.

  Closing his eyes he tried to think of a nearby location, one out of the range of any disturbance caused by a surprise portal. Unfortunately, the one downside of portal travel was not stopping to see the sights. Silas had several memories of the area, but they were all located around that lake. The image of the kaiju fox and wolf dragon was seared into his memory.

  The cockroach pile. He had a vivid memory of that. Concentrating on the pile he tried to open the portal. Nothing happened. Silas growled, kicking a rock in frustration only to hurt his foot. That led to a string of curses that caught the attention of a pack of German Raptors.

  For once he was happy to be attacked by some monsters. Hefting his mantis blade he chopped into winged reptiles. A few months ago a few raptors would have been a problem, but with his armor and weapon, they couldn’t do much to him. Five minutes later he was standing in a mess of feathers and broken scales breathing heavily.

  He felt helpless. Maybe taking out his frustrations on a bunch of monsters wasn’t healthy, but he didn’t have time to care about it. Helplessly, he kept trying to open portals, getting nowhere.

  “God, I need to get back,” Silas looked up at the sky. No response came from the cloudy purple sky.

  If bending space wouldn’t work then it was time to get walking. Silas climbed down the side of the formation. The scorpion rhino had thankfully gotten injured killing the last group of dragonkin and had wandered off to nurse its wounds. Or it died, Silas didn’t particularly care so long as it wasn’t waiting to eat him.

  He landed in the dirt and looked around. Blood and scorch marks covered the surrounding area along with scraps of flesh. If flies were a thing here, they would be carpeting the area. Silas started running to the base, which was only two miles away, normally a problematic distance, but he could sustain a sprint nearly indefinitely.

  Several monsters tried to stop him, including a steel mantis, which he would have stopped to kill in any other situation. Silas wasn’t necessarily faster, but he could maintain the breakneck pace for far longer. He remembered reading somewhere that endurance was the one thing that humans had on most animals, and that seemed to hold true.

  He had sent Bella and Samantha back only a few hours ago, they should be fine. The dragonkin were smarter than Silas had believed, but he still believed they would struggle with a rock wedged in the small pathway. As he ran, he kept trying to use Portal Manipulator getting nothing every time.

  A large spider monster blocked his path, popping out of a burrow like a demon tarantula. Silas growled as he shoved the mantis blade into its maw.

  Notice: Flesh Lord has partially resisted Arachne Canis venom

  The body fell to the ground as a burning sensation started pulsing up his arm in time with each beat of his heart. Was this venom or acid? Silas gritted his teeth and pulled out one of the final pieces of beholder meat and ate it. While it did nothing to clean up the poison, it healed all the damage it caused. Opening and closing his hand, Silas made sure everything worked, barring the burning moving through him. It did, which meant he would just have to work through the pain.

  He quickly purified the monster, snatching up the sigil. Something that likely had to do with venom. With a brief thought, Silas attempted to open another portal. He had already started running and jerked to a stop when the portal actually snapped open, revealing the inside of the base.

  Silas let out a sigh of relief. One that was short lived. No one was inside, all the sigils were gone, and the supplies were scattered. No one was present. He narrowed his eyes, feathers of all things had been stuck to the walls by what looked to be congealing blood. A pair of broken spears lay against the wall and the hilt of a knife sat by the entrance. Cracked drums of water were lying haphazardly against the back wall.

  He had been right. He was too late. Still, there was hope, Bella and Samantha had inflated vitality and Mandy could regrow whole limbs. Silas considered closing the portal and crawling through the tunnel to see what happened outside. It was a thought that only lasted a moment. If anything was outside, he would be serving himself to it on a silver platter.

  Closing the portal, he waited a painful minute. He had lost at least forty seconds doing this, but he wouldn’t be saving anyone if he got his head bitten off. The next portal was supposed to open right in front of the entrance. It failed, but that was expected. Silas could not open a portal within another creature, which meant something was indeed waiting to bite his face off.

  The water then. All monsters here seemed to be at least a little hydrophobic. So the next portal was just below his feet, facing up. The other side was just below the level of the water. Liquid started bubbling as Silas fell through. As he never broke the surface he didn’t even make a splash. There was even a good chance the portal hadn’t been noticed, the backside was a cloudy purple not dissimilar from the sky reflected on the lake’s surface.

  Holding his breath, Silas swam through the lake. It wasn’t big, and it wasn’t deep, though it was slowly expanding. At its lowest point, it was likely only six feet. Silas’s current theory was that the conflict between the kaiju had made a low point in the bedrock that rainwater collected in. That and evaporation didn’t seem to function correctly without a sun.

  When the water was shallow enough for him to reasonably stand and fight in, Silas jumped to his feet and dashed forward weapon raised. There were no monsters, well none aside from Steve who was probing a body with his remaining antenna.

  Silas froze at what he saw. There was a patch of blood off to one side and the dirt had been disturbed like a large group of monsters had been here. None of that was what caught Silas’s attention.

  The reason he couldn’t open a portal just before the entrance wasn’t due to a monster. Hanging from two spikes shoved through her forearms was Lehka. Blood ran down her arms before soaking into her clothes.

  “Steve, no!” Silas yelled as he rushed over, batting the cockroach away from the woman.

  He reached up to pull Lehka down, then hesitated. She was a mess, burn marks covered most of her body and a leg had been removed at the knee. A bloody mark cut horizontally across both eyes and her gut was a mess of gore and scorched meat. Lehka would have bled out if the dragonkin hadn’t cauterized it. Silas would have still gotten her down if it wasn’t for what was holding her to the rock formation.

  Galvanized metal pipes, likely sourced from that semi truck, had been stabbed through the radius and ulna, severing the arteries running along the forearm. The horrible burns that fused the flesh to the metal were all that was keeping her alive.

  Even if he did get her down, what then? Cauterization was a last ditch method of sealing a wound for many reasons, but the important one in this situation was infection. Unlike Samantha, Bella, and the Mongolians, Lehka couldn’t safely raise her body temperature to three hundred degrees to burn it out.

  Silas reached up, stopped, then pulled his hand back. He was not sure what to do. Growling, he balled his fist and punched the formation. Silas almost wanted more monsters to kill. What the hell could he even do? His mind went to solutions that were more and more extreme. Things like cutting the pipe out and burning the injury closed again. His lack of tools was never more apparent. No saws, no needle and thread, and no disinfectant.

  There was a way to save her, though it was a small chance. He could pull her down and hide her in the base. Silas would then need to find and kill one of those fuzzy squid monsters for the healing sigil. Then he would need to kill the chief dragonkin and his whole tribe, then go through the portal find someone to hand the sigil before the portal naturally closed, drag them to Hell, and teach them how to use their sigil to heal Lehka. All that would need to be done before she died, a point that did not look far off.

  Silas scoffed at himself, “How the hell can I do that?”

  “help…” Silas’s head snapped up to look Lehka in the eyes, or at least what was left of them.

  “I’m here,” Silas said, “What happened?”

  “It hurts,” Lehka started crying. Her cheeks shifting cracked the scabs and caused blood to leak down like tears.

  Silas swallowed his bile. The International Humanitarian Law forbade mercy killing and while he wasn’t currently on earth, he still didn’t want to kill a fellow human. Especially one that was an acquaintance on her way to becoming a friend. The least he could do would be to be there for the last moment.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Reaching up he grabbed one pipe in each hand and pulled them free. It was surprisingly easy, Lehka was fairly small and Silas was closing in on a world class physique. She whimpered at the pain, then started coughing, spattering Silas’s face with specks of blood.

  He decided to leave the galvanized pipes in her arms, there was no sense in causing more pain by tearing them free. Silas opened a portal and carried her into the base. Gently he laid her on the floor and placed a roll of fur behind her head.

  “I know it might not mean much now, but you’re safe, they can’t hurt you anymore,” Silas said.

  Those words weren’t much but he could see much of Lehka’s tension leave her. She was in pain, but fear was playing an equal role in her distress. Silas watched her chest rise and fall raggedly.

  It was obvious what had happened. The dragonkin had used another creature to flush his people out, then left Lehka behind as a message. Maybe Rekha had even betrayed them? It was unlikely, but he had underestimated the dragonkin’s scheming too many times already.

  “Si-Silas,” Lehka rasped.

  “I’m here,” he refocused on her mangled face.

  “Am I going to die?” She asked.

  Silas opened his mouth then closed it. If all the cards fell perfectly and the dragonkin just let them pass, yes there was a way. That wouldn‘t happen, their god wanted Silas dead.

  “Yes,” he answered honestly.

  Lehka actually smiled, relief filling her expression, “Then it's over. I lived a good life.” She coughed again, “They have a sphinx. Save Mandy. Save Aron. They are just kids.”

  Silas couldn’t promise that, for all he knew they were already dead, “I’ll do my best.”

  She relaxed into the bedroll. Lehka took a few more labored breaths, then went still. Silas clenched his fists, he would kill that dragonkin. He wanted to immediately charge off and fight. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be rash.

  These weren’t dissimilar to terrorists. They were monsters that served a pagan god of hunting who wanted him dead. If he turned himself over, they would still kill Bella and the others. In fact, the only reason they had value was as a method to hurt or control him.

  Silas clenched his fists. He had a brief window of time to prepare, likely only two days. Well forty eight hours, Silas didn’t think the dragonkin would be kind enough to provide water.

  Notice: Title: Comfort the Dying has been gained. Your spirit has advanced as a result

  Silas jerked back at the surprise notice, flailing as he lost his balance and fell on his back.

  “Stupid biotech,” Silas grumbled as he got back to a crouching position.

  After a few minutes of grumbling at Commune Inc., something that was becoming frustratingly common, Silas took a good look at the notice he received. He had received titles before, but not a notice. Maybe it only started after a person reached capacity? Silas wished he had more people to compare notes with, for all he knew the settings one had on their biotech at the time of the update changed how notices were sent.

  There was also a strangeness to titles. Half seemed to be similar to an Olympic award. First Greater or First Discord Purifier were actual achievements that he was certain had more to do with being in another world than any skill. However, they would be impressive titles on earth.

  The other category was strange. It seemed to have more to do with actions, ones that had an agenda. He got Foreign Warrior for fighting in the German pub and Protector of Widows and Orphans for saving Bella and Samantha. Neither would have been too strange without later titles. Enemy of Nimrod sounded like he had chosen a side and someone out there approved. Finally, Comfort the Dying, taken individually they were fine, but together, it seemed that he was being groomed to be some sort of paladin.

  While that sounded cool in the context of a game, he wasn’t a big fan of government micromanaging his life so an eldritch deity doing the same was not good. Even if that being was benevolent, he didn’t know anything about it, making it an undesirable patron.

  Silas scoffed, “What am I thinking, I need every bit of power I can get my hands on.”

  He opened a portal to the top of the formation he was in. It felt wrong to plan out a rescue next to a victim of his absence. Stepping through, Silas took a deep breath and started to plan. He catalogued all his advantages and found nothing that would give him a decisive edge.

  A large amount of stamina was good, but it mattered little when the conflict would be fifty on one. Flesh Lord allowed him to heal, extremely so if he had some beholder meat on hand.

  “Item one on the agenda, harvest the tentacles off a beholder,” Silas muttered, scratching a number one in the stone with a palm sized rock.

  Healing was well and good, but that was not all Flesh Lord offered. He pulled up the description of the full sigil.

  Greater Flesh Lord (6): Your flesh is subject to you. Operate at peak efficiency, resist poisons, and recover in conjunction with the appropriate diet. (Greater) Localized sigil effects can be applied to your entire body.

  He still had no idea what on God’s earth ‘localized sigil effects’ were. It was likely designed to be used with some sort of healing or buffing sigil. Maybe if he had the Pack Guardian sigil, it would apply the boost to his entire body instead of just his strength. It didn’t matter, he didn’t have time to discover a new method and master it.

  Flesh Lord was basically high stamina and infinite healing. It didn’t cure poison, but it did heal any damage as it was inflicted. Silas couldn’t see that as too useful.

  “Alright, time to look at bone crafter,” Silas muttered.

  This sigil was his favorite. While perfect health and fast travel were excellent, this one gave him the most enjoyment. It allowed him to pass the nightly hours without going mad. At first, it had been frustrating, but he truly had a talent for sculpting and that talent had allowed him to feel the excitement of progress day after day.

  Now to see if there was anything he could do to make it more dangerous than he had already made it. At first glance, all he could think of was to fix the cracks running through his outer plate. However, that wasn’t all he could do with it. He unsheathed his blade and looked at its dull silver exterior.

  He remembered that chiton was hard to work with, folding more like aluminum than the clay endoskeletons were. Only, he hadn’t tried manipulating an exoskeleton with his greater sigil. He could alter rigidity and flexibility with an application of spirit.

  Reaching out, Silas grabbed one of the barbs on the mantis blade and focused on sending a bit of spirit through the sigil. When he applied some pressure, it bent, though it took more strength than was feasible for molding it with his hands. What if he used two spirit?

  Silas increased the amount of spirit he was using. This had been unnecessary with normal bone, as it was already easy to manipulate. He pinched the barb between his fingers, compressing it like Play-Doh.

  “So my options are between aluminum and Play-Doh?” Silas sighed. If the jump in ease of use was constant, his final point of spirit would allow him to push it to the consistency of a liquid, “Item two on the agenda, kill a mantis and use its shell for armor.”

  He paused, did he really need to stick exclusively to armor? Wouldn’t his sigil allow him to make some ranged options? Silas added making a bow to his goals. If he had a bow, then why would he shoot regular arrows? He wasn’t hunting for food in the plains of Wyoming or Colorado, he was killing an enemy.

  “Finally, harvest a few poison glands from the spider monsters,” Silas made one final mark on the rock before rising to his feet. He had one day, maybe two before people started getting executed. Opening a portal facing upwards, he got a bird’s eye view of the ground.

  Silas decided that this particular use of a portal would be called a spy portal. It allowed him to scout out massive areas of terrain, though its use would be more effective in a more flat region. The extended range of a third point of spirit cut down on his search time dramatically.

  He wasn‘t surprised when the first of his three victims was the beholder. It was the largest and moved the most. This one was particularly large covering nearly half of a formation about two and a half miles away. Silas had no doubt he could kill the thing, it would just take an ungodly amount of time to chew his way to its core. Thankfully, he just needed some meat.

  Waiting the mandatory few minutes, Silas stepped through to the top of the formation. To be safe he left the portal open, he didn’t want to get swarmed and be unable to open an escape route.

  The beholder was clinging to the side of the formation like a giant cancerous barnacle. Tentacles waved in the air from where they protruded over the side. Several of the fanged maws blinked to eyes which focused on Silas.

  He had been worried about catching the monster’s attention. Silas needed at least a few of the tentacles to come to him as he refused to fight the beholder on the side of a rock face. Thankfully, getting the attention of a creature with a few thousand eyes was relatively easy.

  The tentacles quivered as they sensed prey, Silas tensed, preparing to defend himself. It started off slowly, only sending half a dozen tentacles at him. Silas was more than ready for them. While his body might not have been superhuman yet, he was close to what a world class athlete could manage.

  And while his body might have only been peak human, his reflexes and vitality were well beyond normal limits. Six tentacles were well within his capabilities. He swung the mantis blade with one hand and grabbed the severed limbs with the other. Then he tossed them over his shoulder and through the portal. Nearly thirty pounds of meat were harvested in less than ten seconds.

  The beholder froze, as if only now realizing it couldn’t just reclaim its lost biomass. A roar rocked the formations and the one Silas was standing upon swayed unsteadily. This was followed by a tide of ravenous tentacles and an ear splitting crack as something in the formation broke.

  Stone was not very flexible, especially stone formations that amounted to little more than naturally formed pillars. With the beholder being as large as it was and rapidly ascending towards Silas, the formation was basically being turned into a meat lollipop made of stone and monster. Silas shook that horrifying image from his mind and did the only logical thing. He stepped back through the portal.

  An often forgotten part of his portal ability took effect. Silas watched from relative safety as a forest of limbs filled the area where he was just standing. When the tentacles came across the solid back of the portal they did their standard attack. Constriction. Unfortunately for the beholder, the edges were sharper than razor blades. A few dozen more limbs were sliced off before the beholder realized that queening a literal hole in space was a bad idea.

  Silas snatched up a few more chunks of monster before closing the portal. Once he had more spirit he should experiment with using the back side of the portal as a shield. Even if he couldn’t use it like an Uno Reverse card, he might still be able to block attacks with a portion of impassible space.

  “Thank you God for making eldritch abominations,” Silas grinned as he looked down at the pile of writhing meat. He licked his lips, having to resist the urge to just dig in, “Yeah, I might be going a bit feral myself.”

  For some reason, Silas couldn’t find it in his heart to care. He quickly patched up one of the water barrels and stored the eat inside. His satchel was filled with enough to get him through anything the mantises or spiders could throw at him.

  With that, he opened a spy portal and started looking for the bugs on his to do list. Unfortunately, they proved difficult to find. Neither of them was nearly kaiju sized monsters.

  “Why am I looking for spiders,” Silas smacked himself upside the head. Anything venomous would do and he had a specific target in mind.

  With a new direction, he quickly found his target. It was something he had assumed to be dead, but wasn’t. A large rhinoceros covered in blood matted shaggy fur limped along. Its scorpion tail lay limply in the dirt, the carapace cracked in several places. The monster only had one eye and as Silas watched it was attacked by a pair of those freaky Dr. Seuss monsters.

  He felt a bit bad about crippling a monster that had killed so many dragonkin for him, but he was on a timer and his people were more important. Three minutes later he stepped through a portal to find the rhino with a brightly colored fluffy monster gored on its horn. The other looked like it had popped like a balloon after being trampled.

  Silas’s courage wavered at the sight. Exhausted and wounded the monster might have been, but broken it was not. He did not waste any time, it was distracted making this his best opportunity. Rushing forward he arched his back and chopped down on the gap between the bulb of the stinger and the first chitinous plate.

  The mantis blade only cut halfway through. Silas quickly hacked again hoping to get through before the rhino could retaliate. It took a while for lumbering monsters to turn, unfortunately, this one didn’t need to. It roared and whipped its rear end around. Silas was still holding the stinger bulb, which was half again larger than his head, and he got dragged right along with it.

  A sharp tearing sound heralded a catastrophe. The stinger bulb was only connected by a few tendons, nowhere near enough to hold Silas and the stinger to the rest of the body. He went flying into the side of a formation. Thankfully he had the presence of mind to open a portal facing down the other side opening just below ground level. This gave him an artificial ledge to sit on, out of the rhino’s range.

  It turned out to be a good thing too. While the formation stopped Silas from moving, it didn’t stop the stinger bulb from moving. The twenty pound mass of flesh, chiton, and venom met little resistance when packed behind a needle point. Silas struggled to push his rising panic down as he looked at the stiletto sized stinger embedded in his gut. Pain blossomed out from the wound like a fog rolling over a cold lake, leaving the cold numbness of death in its wake.

  He wasn’t sure what normal venom emergency procedures were. Wasn’t there something about sucking the toxin out of the wound? No, how was he supposed to suck venom out of his own gut? Even if he could the point would have deposited the venom around his kidney area from a frontal injury.

  Food. Silas shakily pulled some raw beholder from his bag and shoved the meat into his face, eyeballs, fanged maws, and all. He crunched down on the needle teeth before swallowing. The pain redoubled, as numb flesh returned to life and his body circulated a clearly lethal dosage of toxins.

  If he hadn’t been burned alive multiple times in the last few months, this would have been debilitating. Now that he was out of immediate danger, Silas’s panic subsided to a simmering discomfort that threatened to boil over into anxiety.

  He took a deep breath and said a mantra that had started feeling more distant in the last month, “Survive, get home, find Abby. Survive, get home, find Abby.”

  Grunting, he rose to his feet. Now that the poison had spread throughout his body, everything hurt. Thankfully a combination of his Flesh Lord, high vitality, and more meat than he could eat in a day would see him through. The venom would be a discomfort until it ran through his system, but it shouldn’t stop him from fighting.

  It was time to find a metal mantis and go save his people.