043 NEW STAT BLOOD
[Moments before that]
Damen stood heaving among the pack, blue ichor dripping from his hands. The hound he had stabbed still writhed on the ground, not yet dead… but it was no longer a threat to him.
Despite managing to project a meta blade from his hands using the Assassinate skill that he learned from the fortress, the skill was still not strong or efficient enough to deal with the pack of hounds.
Then another lunged at him. Its weight crashed into him, throwing him off balance.
He felt teeth closing in and braced for the end. There were just too many of them… it was impossible for him to beat them.
"So, this is it? This is how I die… How comical", he sighed.
A year of fighting, clawing his way up from a pitiful miner, becoming the person that he is now… someone with a future… and now he would die here, ripped apart by alien beasts.
His hand pressed to his chest as though accepting his fate.
As his fingers brushed the amulet he had picked up at the auction, the Eye of Ra, a sudden warmth spread through his skin.
Another hound leapt towards him.
Instinct jerked his arm forward. His fist shot up at its neck, knowing that his Assassinate skill was useless against the blue blood.
"Spliceee"
But to his surprise the beast's throat burst out in a spray of blue.
Damen froze at the sight.
His eyes widened at the gore dripping from his knuckles. "Did I break its neck with my bare hand?"
Damen didn't only project a meta force from his Assassinate skill, he severed the head from the creature. That wasn't what his skill was meant to do.
"How is that possible?" he asked himself.
Then he saw them.
Bones…. Jagged and pale, were jutting through his skin, that were sharp as blades. Bone blades grew out from Damen's knuckle like it was an extension of him.
"What the hell… this is not how Assassinate is known to manifest?" he asked surprised.
The next hound charged before he could think. His training took over. He moved quickly as his newly acquired bone blade sliced across its throat.
The hound collapsed instantly, its head severed.
He stared at his hands, trembling. "What happened to me?"
But there was no time to wonder. More hounds came.
And this time Damen wasn't helpless. His body moved as if it had always known how to kill with his bone blades.
Throats opened. Arteries spilled. Hounds in the dozens dropped in heaps at his feet.
Breathless, he muttered, "How… how did I kill so many?"
But more unbelievable than his skills at killing, it was his endurance. Despite the strenuous fighting, he wasn't tired at all.
Those moves should have drained him, left him staggering.
Instead, every kill fed him. A rush surged through his veins—faster, sharper, stronger—like an endless flood of super-adrenaline.
"What's happening to me?" He asked again, his voice shaking, but not with fear. It was with awe and possibly even exhilaration.
The packs are eyeing him suspiciously now after so many of their kind had fallen to him. They knew he wasn't a simple pushover, and they were strategizing.
Their hesitation gave Damen time to think, and a thought gnawed at him recalling his situation.
"Why were all of them after me? An entire clan of hounds? Not just a few strays… it's just not logical. Even the worst jinx isn't this unlucky…it's like the hounds were specially targeting me", he asked.
His eyes narrowed as conspiracy thoughts were forming.
"Someone had engineered this."
Damen remembered suddenly about the button tag they had pinned onto his jacket. He tore it free immediately and crushed it with his fist.
The device sparked in his grip, its faint hum dying.
Then it happened.
The pack pulled back all of a sudden.
The alien beasts who had been frenzied to murder him, now slowly slunking into the dark. The nearest few hesitated, uncertain, but Damen's bone blades were ready. He quickly finished them.
Then there was only silence.
"What is the deal here?" he asked himself as the pack retreated.
The truth became obvious. It was the Veyrans.
That tag that came from the Veyrans wasn't a tracker to help them organize and coordinate… it was a beacon. They'd sicced the hounds in the cavern to come out from their lairs to bury him here- drawn by the frequencies in the button tag.
Damen remembered one of his theory class.
There was a kind of instrument that could manipulate the minds of unintelligent creatures, drawing them to certain points for specific purposes.
Like a Pied Piper's pipe.
The Veyrans must have created such a device, but it wasn't used for farming purposes, it was used to channel the hatred of the shadow hounds towards him- the bearer of the button tag.
Damen's jaw clenched, glancing toward the shimmering lights of the command post. His fists tightened at their sight, "Those bastards wanted me dead. They'll get their surprise in return X 1000 more."
But the important thing for him was knowing what to do now.
"Should he return to the command post now? Or leave and find his way out on his own?" he asked himself.
He is not going back to the command post. Not yet.
"I can't go back without figuring out the bone blades", he thought.
Damen also has another secret bursting from his knuckles- the sudden appearance of his bone blades. Nobody could see what he had become.
There could be unexpected consequences. The Veyrans could use this as an excuse to parade him as a freak. He couldn't go back until he understood more about what was happening to him.
Then he decided.
He took the opposite direction from the command post, going further away before entering an unknown tunnel.
When he was certain there was no alien blue blood around, he raised his phone to take photos of his body, to see if there were other anomalies besides the protruding blades.
The lens showed him a body drenched in blue gore, but there were no other protruding appendages.
"It's only these blades on the knuckle", he sighed a relief. Then he looked at the photos again. "Something isn't right here."
There was not a single wound remaining on his body despite being slashed, raked and bitten a hundred times. Yet, his flesh was whole and his skin was flawless.
"Did someone heal me?" he whispered, thinking.
Impossible.
Then he realized it. This was more than healing. His skin felt denser, and harder. His heartbeat was too strong, too fast. Something had changed inside him.
Then he felt it.
A pulse was tugging at his chest. He looked down. The amulet cord was broken, yet the Eye of Ra still glowed under his skin, lodged into his flesh, fused to it.
"Dammit this thing is lodged into my chest, and I can't take it out," he hissed, clawing at it. The sapphire eye only gleamed brighter, burning blue.
Suddenly a notification came on his phone.
Damen quickly checked his mining app and received the notification.
"Congratulations, you have successfully assimilated the Eye of Ra."
"What the hell does that mean?" Damen asked in shock and touched the place on his chest where the Eye of Ra was still glowing slightly.
Then another "Beep" sounded.
"An update to your phone is available. Do you want to proceed, Y/N"
Damen presses yes immediately and waited for the app to install. When it was done, he checked the app again.
Then he found something new on the app. When he checked his own stats, another previously unknown stat appeared.
Blood: 13.
His breath caught. He's got a new aptitude stat- Blood.
"What the hell is… Blood?"
No such aptitude existed in his mining app before.
"Maybe… it's a hidden stat," he whispered.
His trembling hand touched the gem again. The Eye of Ra pulsed in answer, a sapphire glow sinking deeper into his flesh.
"If only this damn app would explain itself properly," he growled.