It was all Caleb could do to avert his eyes. His muscles refused to obey him. Was this what the boggarts and the others had felt when he'd released his Presence? Dread? Their bodies failing them?
Fenryr stalked closer, prowling down the mountainside like a leopard, eyes affixed on him. And it wasn't alone. Smaller wolves slunk alongside Fenryr. Three, five, eight of them, maybe more. They couldn't have been half the size of the boss – were they puppies? No, no, that wasn't it at all. They were full-grown. Just how large was Fenryr? The massive slate-grey wolf must've been the size of an eighteen-wheeler.
There was still a lot of distance between the two. Caleb was right at the mountain's base, Fenryr nearly at the peak. He could run. He had to run. He couldn't kill that wolf. Not yet.
But his body still refused to yield to him. Try as he might, it was like he'd been turned to stone.
A few of the smaller – well, normal-sized – wolves started to run, bounding down the mountainside. They'd be upon him in only a minute or two. They wouldn't have been a problem on their own, but under the oppressive weight of Fenryr's Presence was another story entirely. And if they kept him here long enough for the boss to get involved… He had to do something.
Caleb's spirit arms grew from his back. He hadn't even realized they'd faded away earlier. His body might not be listening to him at the moment, but his mind still was.
One of his clawed arms reached down and did the only thing he thought to try. He stabbed himself in the thigh.
Lucid pain flooded through his mind. It was like chains had been thrown off of him. He shuddered in an inhaling gasp of breath, felt his shoulders heave, and took a step back.
I need to look more into Presence and its effects. It seems like it's almost a manifestation of willpower and emotion. I could feel Fenryr's hunger as it stared at me. Like I was just a piece of meat. I wonder what the others felt from my Presence. Adrenaline?
Being able to incapacitate my enemies without laying a finger on them would make every fight a cakewalk. He grinned and chuckled to himself. And a bit boring.
I don't know exactly how everything works, but I'd be willing to bet that increasing my Presence stat will help me to resist others as well as make mine more effective. It is my class's second-highest stat for leveling up, after all.
One of the wolves was nearing him, about five hundred feet out and closing fast. Caleb could run, but even with his superhuman speed, he wouldn't outrun it.
He reached down and picked up a small rock, about the size of a baseball, and tossed it once, catching it in his hand. Then he had the thought to try something. Having no idea if it would work, Caleb imagined one of his spirit arms overlapping his real arm. Perhaps their power would be combined.
As soon as he imagined it, the spirit arm moved, covering his real arm like a translucent sleeve of pure energy. Like armor. He could still see his real arm – it just now had an extra layer over the top of it, half an inch to an inch wider around it.
That got him thinking about all of the different ways in which the skill could be used. He'd been simple-minded before, content with just creating extra fists. That worked well enough, but the skill was called 'Spirit Self', not 'Spirit Fists' – there was certainly more that he could do with it. He just needed to get more creative.
Hypotheses for another time. Right now…
Caleb grinned, wrapping his fingers around the rock, reared his arm, surrounded by the glowing energy, backward, then threw. The stone blurred in the air, whistling as it streaked toward the charging wolf. It cracked into its forehead, broke completely through with ease, and exploded into the mountain with a resounding crack. It died instantly.
Despite the distance between Caleb and his kill, the energy still rushed toward him, entering into his back as he was already turning and running.
***
He only stopped running once he could no longer hear the howls. There was a small rocky crevice that he squeezed himself into, pressing his body through a thin crack too wide for any of the wolves to fit through.
Inside was a small cave, no larger than his old apartment. The walls were rough and jagged, the ceiling low. It could've been a nice place to do a little bouldering before, unfortunately, climbing even the most difficult routes wouldn't prove a challenge now. Oh well, he had new challenges to face. Bigger ones.
The only light in the cave was a sliver that came from the entrance, a crack of yellow painting the dark rock and giving just enough to see by. The sun would be going down in a few hours, and he didn't want to hunt at night, not so near that terrifying wolf.
He'd been gone for nearly eight hours by his best estimation. That left him about sixteen before he said he'd be back to the others. He didn't want to go back – fighting and training were way more fun, but they needed food. If he didn't bring any back, they'd likely starve. Damn conscience.
Killing Fenryr at his current strength would be nearly impossible. There was a six-level gap between the two of them – larger than he'd ever fought before. That alone was enough to give him pause. Add on the wolf's Presence and the pack to support it… and as fun as it sounded, it would be suicide.
Truth be told, there was nothing stopping Caleb from taking all of this very slowly, leveling up as high as he could – maybe even to the high twenties or low thirties – and then taking on the boss. But he didn't want to do that. The System had told him he needed to go fast, needed to take risks, it rewarded him for it. Reaching the peak of power was not something he could stroll toward. He had to keep moving fast.
So he sat down. Obviously.
Caleb let out a deep breath, stilling himself. He was seated in the middle of the room, legs crossed, hands on his knees, eyes closed. Reaching out with his mind, as he'd done before, he pulled on the latent aether floating all around him. It was there. It always was. He could feel it and he began to draw it slowly into him.
It was slow going just as before, but if he truly wanted to progress and grow in strength, to push himself to be as strong as he could, as fast as he could, then he couldn't just write off a training method after one attempt. If there was a way to learn to do this while moving, while fighting… Well, that would be something.
At first, it was boring. Agonizingly boring. The pull, the draw, the sluggish crawl of power slipping into him like sand through an hourlgass. His eyelids twitched. His jaw clenched. He hated sitting still. It felt like he were cutting his lawn with toenail clippers while there was a perfectly good lawn mower in the garage.
But he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay put. Breath in. Breath out. Pull the aether. Hold it. Feel it absorb through his skin. Over and over, until the rhythm of it began to dull the sharp edges of his impatience.
Time stretched. He stopped measuring it in seconds or minutes. It shifted slowly, almost imperceptibly. He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there, but the scar in the mountain that leaked sunlight had grown dim. The stone walls around him pressed closer, their jagged edges somehow more present than before. He became aware of the weight above him – the mountain itself.
The thought settled in him like a seed. By the time he took notice of it, it had already spread its roots, filled every corner of his consciousness, sucking all of his attention like water. He couldn't think of anything else.
Just stone. Solid all the way through.
His breath had slowed to a crawl without him meaning to. The trickle of aether that had resisted him before now flowed a tiny bit easier now. His body felt heavier. Like he was anchoring himself to the earth itself.
When he opened his eyes, he half-expected to see his skin hardened, turned grey, chiseled into rock. It hadn't. But for just an instant, the cave didn't feel like just walls around him. It felt like… kin.
Caleb's lips curled into a grin.
He didn't fully understand it. Not even close. But he'd touched the faintest edge of something more. He wasn't just pulling aether into himself like some idiot trying to drink the ocean through a straw. No, he'd touched a Truth.
The beginnings of one, at least.
He closed his eyes again and reached for it, trying to chase the feeling, to grasp what it meant to be stone. But as quickly as it came, it slipped away. He opened his eyes again with a sharp exhale, a single bead of sweat streaking down his brow. The connection had lasted only moments, a flash of insight already fading into the darkness of the cave's corners. However it had left something behind.
Caleb chuckled to himself, shaking his head. "Alright. I see how you are," he said. "There's more to this meditation crap than I first thought."
He checked his status screen, looking at the spot that said Truths, but it was still blank.
Truths: None
"I guess expecting it to be that easy was a bit naive, wasn't it? Looks like I've got my work cut out for me, don't I? Understanding the truths of the universe, mastering my skill and Presence, saving the lives of a few assholes, and killing a wolf that could swallow me whole, not to mention the rest of the Dungeon." He grinned. "Sounds like fun."
Caleb stood up, squeezed himself back out of the crack in the rock, and stepped into the cool night air, breathing in deep as flurries of snow blew around him. He listened for the first howls to call in the night so he could head toward them and begin his hunt.
Just as he was about to start moving, a blinding light shone from within his bag of crystals. Something was happening back at the cave, and they needed him back.