10 - Reaper

Will woke up feeling like he was hit by a truck, and then it backed up and ran over him again. His whole body ached and groaned, complaining at every little movement he did.

His vision was filled with black spots that swam and throbbed angrily, exasperating his splitting headache that hammered against his psyche. He wagered that in his whole life, he had never felt worse than right now.

The worst of it was, of course, his ribs which while they somehow managed now to break under the bears crushing paw, were thoroughly bruised and raw, aching at the slightest movement, even breathing hurt.

By now, he had started to regret placing the fox on his chest before he fell asleep as every movement it made sent daggers of pain across his bruised ribs.

Hissing and swearing from the pain, Will lifted the sleeping fox off his chest and placed it beside him on the ground. It opened one eye sleepily and glared at him for moving it, yipping weakly.

Wincing from the motion, Will stared into the fox's pristine blue eye that he could just barely make out in the gloom of the cave, his eyes having adjusted well to the dark.

"What should I call you?" He wondered aloud, the fox sleepily closing its eye and leaning against his leg to sleep.

"What if I call you Muintir? It means family in my village, how does that sound?" Will asked, eliciting a sideways glance from the fox.

Seeing as he couldn't think of anything better, Will decided to go with that for now. "Although it is a bit of a mouthful, perhaps I should try and think of a nickname… How does Mut sound?" Will joked.

The fox opened an eye and seemed to glare at him disapprovingly, clearly, it didn't like this nickname.

Shaking his head, Will shelved the nickname and decided to come up with a better one later. For now, he turned his attention inwards. His goal was to make sense of what happened yesterday before the bear attacked.

When he did, he felt the familiar feeling of his consciousness detaching from his head and peering inwards at his body. He didn't look with eyes but could somehow 'see' the internal situation in his body.

One thing he noted immediately was that the energy veins in his body seemed bigger and more robust, as though cleansing that black gunk from his body had strengthened them.

Besides that, the biggest change was that he could now perceive a connection with his incisor teeth that he hadn't had before. He sensed that on command, he could produce venom from the spinning orb and expel it from these teeth.

This discovery left him conflicted. On the one hand, having his own special attack was incredibly useful and honestly quite cool. On the other, it was a stark reminder that he had left his humanity behind in the remains of the village. Furthermore, if he had to bite his enemies to poison them, that would be extremely inconvenient.

He would need to find another application for his venom, 'Perhaps coating a blade in the poisonous substance would work,' he mused.

After deciding to try it out when he had more than one knife that he could afford to break, Will Lifted himself off the ground, wincing from the pain.

He stumbled over to the hulking carcass of the bear, it had already begun to putrefy, stinking of rot and bile. He took out his skinning knife which had been through a lot in the past few days and began to skin the bear.

Quickly, he realised there was far more pelt here than he could ever use and that he didn't have to be conservative.

By the time he had finished gathering all the parts of the bear he thought might be useful, the fox had woken up and was nudging at his knee eagerly, looking up at him with big doe eyes.

"Do you want food or something?" Will asked as though the fox could understand him.

Muintir yipped affirmatively and jumped up and down. When it calmed down, it began pawing at the bears massive carcass questioningly.

Will looked at the corpse of the bear, noting that its frontmost paw on the left side was rotting far quicker than any other. "I think that paw is still affected by my venom so you can't eat this part," Will said slowly with a kick to the aforementioned paw.

"Stick to the other side and you should be fine," he said after considering it for a moment.

The fox walked over to the other side of the bear, mewling when it found out its little teeth couldn't break the bear's tough hide.

With a chuckle, Will walked over and sliced a piece of meat about the same size as the fox out of the bear's back, placing it in front of the eagerly waiting creature.

When he did so, he couldn't help but notice the overwhelming ease with which he had managed to cut the bear's skin and muscle. 'There's no way I would have been able to do that before yesterday… expelling that black substance and my new Atma pathways have had a profound effect on my physical strength, to what extent… I should try and find out,' Will decided.

His first test was a simple jump which while sounding simple nearly resulted in a serious injury. For some stupid reason, he decided to jump with all his strength within a cave, assuming that he wouldn't reach the roof of the cavern since it was almost twice his height.

It was much to his surprise then when his head banged into the roof, and he fell clutching his throbbing forehead.

He glared at the little fox that was yipping with delight at his suffering. "I'll take away your food if you keep this up," Will threatened. Causing the little fox to quiet down pretty quickly.

Feeling hard done by, Will clutched his aching head and tried to figure out how much his jump had improved by. He had always been quite a spry kid but jumping six feet into the air was nothing short of inhuman.

Although he supposed that snakes were known for their explosive strength and attacks, perhaps another attribute he had inherited from his new bloodline.

The most obvious change should have been to his physical strength which had never quite fitted his tall frame. The other kids from the village had always called him lanky and spindly, insults which still kind of stung.

Only, when he looked down at his now very pale arms, there were no obvious signs of muscles or massive strength.

He wasn't sure how exactly Atma strengthened a person's body, so he didn't know if this was normal or not. Animals had gotten larger since the first impact after all but that wasn't the case for Will. He was still the same skinny kid he had always been, if a little pale since he stepped out of the egg.

', now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if my face has changed at all since getting the bloodline? I wonder if I've become irresistibly handsome?' Will held this secret hope in his heart, not daring to say it aloud due to embarrassment.

As far as he knew, nobody had ever called him handsome except his mother and she had even dared claim he was 'the best-looking boy in the world,' something which Will found hard to believe since nobody else had ever mentioned it to him.

Surely, the best-looking boy in the world would have more people telling him how great he was than his mother.

Smiling when he remembered how his mum used to try and smooth out his wild nest of hair, Will tried his best not to cry. Reaching up, he felt the tangled curls of his hair between his fingers, knowing that he would have to fix his own hair from now on was sobering and brought on a crushing wave of depression.

Only when he felt the fox nuzzle at his leg playfully did he snap out of his funk, looking down in shock when he noticed that the fox had somehow managed to eat its body weight in meat while he sat there.

"How did you eat all that?" Will asked in amazement.

The fox yipped happily jumping back over the bear and pawing at it eagerly. "Do you seriously want more?" Will asked in shock.

Yip Yip the fox said with a nod of its little head.

After he had cut off another piece of meat for the fox, Will left it alone in the cavern, walking out of the cave in search of a way to test his new strength.

'I don't really have a baseline so I won't be able to tell how much my strength has grown, but perhaps if I tried uprooting one of those saplings now, I could manage it,' Will wondered as he left the cave mouth, squinting at the bright sunlight.

He walked over to the nearest sapling and tugged on it, the tree bent and groaned but stayed firmly rooted to the ground, barely budging at all.

Sighing, Will walked over to a nearby rock and decided to try and lift it. It was a big round thing and had to weigh at least 100kilgrams.

Shockingly, Will managed to lift the rock without too much strain and that left him wondering two things. Just how strong were those trees? And how strong had he become?

Back in the village he had struggled to drag the body of a small deer back to the village after a hunt, and those barely weighed 60 kilograms, never mind 100.

He ran over to a nearby rock that was almost twice the size of the first one. Grunting and groaning he strained against this one, but it was nowhere near as easy as the previous rock.

In the end, A sharp pain in his ribs ended his battle against the rock and he was forced to guess that his strength lay somewhere around 160 kilograms an increase of almost 100 on what he was previously capable of.

With massively increased strength and an explosive jump unlike anything he had ever seen before, Will wondered just how he should utilize these attributes in combat.

Using a knife or a sword would surely be a waste of his explosive bursts of strength whereas something like a bow would be a perfect way to use his venom, creating poisonous arrows and firing them at enemies from a safe distance. He could even use his 'life-vision' as he called it to spot them behind cover.

Only… he didn't have a bow or the capability to make one suitable for his massive strength. And using a mediocre bow would be an injustice to his abilities.

Instead, he decided a spear was the perfect combination of his explosivity with his strength, allowing him to stay back from the swiping claws of beasts safely. And if he coated the spear in poison? Well, that would truly make him dangerous.

'Where can I find a suitable spear?' Will wondered, he was pretty sure one of the inexplicably strong saplings would make a perfect shaft but where could he find the most important part of the spear? The tip.

He needed something sharp and durable… something just like the bear's claws that tear rock apart like paper. 'If its claws are that tough, how strong must its teeth be?' Will realised excitedly.

For the rest of that day, he began putting together his first of many weapons to come. He named it Reaper.