Capture evolve survive 2, p.1
Capture, Evolve, Survive 2, page 1
Capture, Evolve, Survive 2
Dante King
Copyright © 2024 by Dante King
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
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Immortal Swordslinger
Bone Lord
Chapter 1
The two half moons hung in the sanctum night sky like a couple of half-lidded eyes. This rather sinister impression was added to by the fact that these twin moons did not wax from right to left, but from top to bottom.
It was an—in a word—auspicious night.
From his hiding place in the middle of a dense bramble bush, Mark Erickson's thoughtful brown eyes scanned slowly across the boggy marshland below.
Next to him, pressed up against his side in a manner that was a little distracting, was Beth Cotton. The moonlight leant a wonderful angelic quality to her bright blue eyes, pale heart-shaped face, and blonde hair. Beth could very well have been the perfect personification of the American girl next door.
Mark shifted his position.
"You're fidgeting again," Beth whispered, a trifle reproachfully.
"Sorry," Mark replied. "I'm still getting used to having a sword at my hip. They never seem to mention the logistics of wearing a sword and scouting in any of the movies I've ever watched. Seems, the more you wear one, that the movies are only concerned with how badass they look."
“And that’s a small one.”
“Hey, it’s not the size, it's what you can do with it, Miss Cotton.”
“I’m just pointing out that the gladius was, all things considered a itty-bitty sword when compared to, say, an odachi or a dadao, or even the wonderfully esoterically-shaped flamberge.”
“That’s the one with the wiggly blade, right?” Mark asked.
“It translates to flame-bladed, but my point was that your sword is smaller than those examples,” Beth whispered.
“You’re lucky I have thick skin.”
“You’re lucky I have a scholar’s patience, Mr. Erickson, so that I can put up with your jokes.”
“Touche.”
"You could just keep it in your loot bag," Beth pointed out.
Mark grunted his grudging agreement at this. "I just like having a weapon handy on me. I like the idea that I can summon something and grab my gladius if things are looking really hairy."
"Speaking of really hairy," Beth said, and she reached up and ran a finger down Mark's bearded cheek.
Mark snorted softly as he reached out and moved a bramble that was obstructing his view. "I don't think I'm quite at the Grizzly Adams stage yet."
Beth smiled. "As a designated monster tamer with a slowly burgeoning monster menagerie, isn’t Grizzly Adams someone you're trying to emulate?"
Mark glanced at the fine-looking girl next to him. "I don't mind the beard," he whispered, leaning in closer. "But I'm not sure if I could pull off the squirrel-skin hat, or whatever it was he wore."
"No," Beth agreed. "Seriously, a wolfskin cloak is much cooler."
Mark grinned. He was certainly glad of his feather-lined wolfskin cloak and hood now that night had fallen. It was chilly out in the mysterious marshlands that he and Beth had spent the day traversing.
"Not too many people remember that Grizzly Adams wasn't always a wild man," Beth said in a low voice.
"No?”
“No. He started off life as a cobbler. Then, after a fire destroyed his family business, he went off to join in on the great California gold rush of 1849."
"How do you know all this stuff, Beth?" Mark asked, looking at the quietly-spoken blonde with renewed amazement and interest.
Beth shrugged. "I told you. I read a lot. And although I was only teasing you about your beard—I quite like it, by the way—Grizzly Adams gave up on society and adapted to a life out in the wilderness. He collected and tamed many wild animals, including, of course, grizzly bears, but also elk, wolves, foxes, and deer. The similarity between what you're doing and what he did isn't so far-fetched."
Mark grinned. "Well, Beth, that's certainly the most interesting non-compliment I've been given today."
"You're welcome," Beth said, smiling.
Mark refocused his attention through the snarled, twining branches of the bramble bush that they were in the middle of. The tangle of vegetation that Mark and Beth had taken up their positions inside was located on top of a small hillock that, along with some other hills, rose from the fetid marshlands like boils from the landscape's boggy skin.
As they looked down across the strange otherworldly vista, their breath misted slightly in the chill air in front of them. Mark wasn't worried about it being seen. It was why he had selected the bramble thicket as a place to scout out the country.
He wasn't sure how many miles they had covered in their first day of travel into the marshlands, but he could feel the muscles in his legs burning. He was half tempted to slip one of his stamina sap crystals under his tongue. On reflection, though, he decided against it. He'd get a boost of energy and be able to keep on going for a while longer, but he would inevitably have to pay for it in the morning.
Don't be hasty, he reprimanded himself. This kind of exploration is a marathon, not a sprint.
"So, what do you make of it?" Mark asked Beth, as he tried to keep his mind off his own weariness.
"By it, I suppose you're referring to that winking light down there?" Beth asked.
"I am."
"Well, I would say it's coming from a fire," Beth said.
"Those were my thoughts, too," Mark said.
"And it's a controlled one," Beth said.
Mark nodded. "Which would make me believe that it's not some kind of monster. Although monsters like my ignifer can control fire, I've yet to see one of them get a blaze going just for the fun of it."
"It might have been a fight between some flame-based monster and something else," Beth suggested.
"Maybe," Mark conceded. "I just feel like it looks too controlled, too purposeful. It's not growing and it's not shrinking. It looks to me like it's a campfire that's being fed."
"A fair-sized campfire, then," Beth said. "We're quite far away from it. What do you want to do?"
Mark considered that, but only for a moment. "I want to go down there and see what that light's all about."
"I thought you were going to say that.”
“Must be that Grizzly Adams pioneering spirit, huh?" Mark quipped.
Beth gave him a gentle nudge with her shoulder. "Do you think it's wise to try risking the way at night?" she asked dubiously.
Mark weighed up the pros and cons of this. Once more, it didn't take him long to come to a decision.
"No," he said. "No, I think trying to navigate this swampland at night would be foolish. I mean, it was hard enough going today, being able to see where we were going and pick out a path. I don't think I'd want to risk it at night. It would be just about as good a way as I can imagine of ending up balls deep in sucking mud."
"Colorfully phrased," Beth said, "but I think in the circumstances an accurate prediction of what might happen."
The terrain stretched out below them like a dark, vegetative, tangled carpet. There was an eerie stillness hanging over the scene. Thanks to the two half moons, which Mark supposed were technically providing enough light for a full one, the swamps were illuminated and gilded in white and silver. Pools of water, which had been slick and black in the day, dotted the landscape below like puddles of mercury.
Occasionally, even from the distance they were scouting at, Mark could see the surfaces of those pools rippling as unseen creatures disturbed their depths. Wisps of noisome steam rose from a few of the pools too. The steam curled into the air like spectral beckoning fingers before dissipating into the night.
"Come on," Mark whispered. "Let's head back to that little scooped-out clearing we found on the other side of the hill."
Looking relieved, Beth nodded.
Mark led the way, crawling through the tunnel he had managed to cut out of the bramble thicket with his gladius. They had crested the hill an hour earlier. They had hoped to get an idea of the lay of the land. They had gotten that, but they had also seen something else. It was then that Mark had spotted the orange glow. A fire, or so they believed, twinkling through the trees below.
In the last light of the dying day, it had been clear that the ground that separated their hill from the firelight was uneven and treacherous. It looked like more of the same sort of terrain that Mark and Beth had traversed from the moment they had entered the marshes.
It was dangerous terrain. Deadly dangerous. The kind that didn’t give second chances. It was a rather unpleasant mix of sucking mud and tufts of coarse, waterlogged grasses.
There were trees around, but they were stunted things. Their trunks were knobbly, knotted, and nodular. They looked like wax statues of trees that had been left too long in the sun so that they had warped and drooped down towards the surfaces of the bogs and pools that they must have gotten some sort of nutrition from. Mark had leaned against a sad-looking black willow at one point and it had just toppled over with a depressing splat.
When Mark emerged from out of the mouth of the haphazard tunnel he had cut, it was to find his lupus waiting for them.
The sleek, agile, and powerful wolf-like predator blended perfectly into the gloaming that was falling over the marshes with its midnight black fur. It turned its glowing eyes on Mark. Those eyes could fire a burning beam of orange energy. Knowing that was a great source of comfort to Mark.
Mark nodded at the lupus. “Sentry, anything afoot?”
The lupus let out a low negative growl from its throat. Mark had tasked it with watching the entrance to the tunnel he had cut so as to make sure that he and Beth weren't snuck up on by some denizen of the marshes while they were scouting out the fire.
Mark held out a hand and helped Beth to her feet.
"Thank you," she said. “Quite the gentleman.”
"My pleasure," Mark replied. “And that is quite the inaccurate statement.”
The beautiful blonde engineer class woman brushed off her trousers. Then, hand in hand, they headed back to the hollow where Mark had a mind to pass the night.
The lupus padded along at their sides. Its ears pricked and its nose twitching. Mark was pleased to see the way that Beth absentmindedly and good-naturedly occasionally swatted at the lupus’ bushy tail.
She’s become as comfortable with that killing machine as if it was a Labrador, Mark marveled. Amazing, considering that same killing machine came within a flea’s pecker of eating her.
The air was thick with the scent of decay and wet earth that floated up with the steams from the marshes. It was a cloying miasma, but not a totally unpleasant one. It reminded Mark, in a way, of fall walks through forests when he was a kid. The smell of decay was synonymous with death, yes, but it was also the stench of life blooming.
As Beth said, down there is a giant Petri dish with all sorts of things burgeoning that we can’t even imagine.
The world around might have been stark and unlovely to the eyes of some, but illuminated by the dual illumination of the twin moons it became a place of interesting contrasts. Deep blacks, bright whites, gleaming silvers. Mercurial. Changing.
They reached the hollow and pushed through the naturally formed bramble hedge that surrounded the lip of it. When they were at the bottom, Mark lit a fire. He entered the peculiar trance state that enabled him to do a number of things, like harvest resources, build structures, and cook meals with supernatural speed.
Once the fire had been lit in the twinkling of an eye and was burning merrily away, Beth got their sleeping bivouac sorted. Her Fabricator’s Hammer appeared in her hand. She blurred, and a second later a small but cozy tepee—one that was tidier than anything Mark would have been able to knock up—had been erected.
While she did this, Mark got a meal ready. Before too long, Mark and Beth were sitting down to a simple, yet highly pleasant dinner of roasted venison and stewed root vegetables.
After they'd been eating for a couple of minutes in companionable silence, Beth wiped her mouth as daintily as she could with the back of her hand and said, "So, do you think that fire is coming from the same location you thought those tree houses were located when you were standing on the top of the mountain by the ruins?"
Mark swallowed. He set his simple plate aside. Then he nodded. "Yes. As far as I can reckon it, I think the treehouses were in that general direction."
"Which begs a very important question," Beth said.
"Yes," Mark said. "Who, or what, lives in them?"
Chapter 2
"I think you're right," Beth said.
Mark stirred from where he'd been staring into the fire. "What was that?"
"I said, 'I think you're right.'"
"Oh, cool, yeah. Probably. Right about what?" Mark asked.
"About the source of the firelight," Beth said patiently. "If it's been lit and it's being contained, then that would indicate an intelligent life form—not that monsters aren't intelligent. On the whole," she added hastily.
"On the whole," Mark said and gave a theatrical wink and a nod in the direction of Watson, the fursine.
Watson was the only member of Mark's monstrous quartet that he currently had within his capture orbs who had evolved—metamorphosed into an enhanced version of himself.
He had started off as a brambleclaw, a small bear-like creature with a back covered in thorny vines and brambles. Despite the fact that Watson looked like something you'd expect to find in a kid's Christmas special, Mark had been surprised to find that the brambleclaw was in possession of the kind of fearless mentality and lack of compunction, so far as violence went, that you'd be more accustomed to find amongst those who called the maximum security wing their home.
During a battle against some hideous arachnoid shrivers in the abandoned ruins of a mysterious castle, Watson had done enough damage to change in shape. It was a revelation to Mark. He had hoped that such a thing was possible, of course. Seeing it happen, though… That had opened up a whole new can of questions.
Watson was now considerably larger as a fursine than he had been as a brambleclaw. He didn't look so much like a stuffed toy. If he looked like anything stuffed, it was one of those bears that you might find standing on its hind legs in the corner of the more traditional and less PETA-friendly ski lodges.
It was somewhat of a running joke, Mark alluding to Watson as being slightly mentally unhinged. But the fact was that the fursine seemed to have a complete lack of fear when it came to battling other monsters. It was like the proverbial red mist descended and he went to town with no concern about his own skin. He also was utterly merciless when it came to dispatching foes.
The fursine let out a low rumbling grunt, leaned over, and stabbed the last chunk of venison off of Mark's plate with a long claw.
"Hey, what are you—?"
The fursine popped the venison into its mouth and chewed contentedly.
"You're a damn greedy devil," Mark said, though he grinned.
“Here, Watson, you can share with me,” Beth said. She tossed a potato at the fursine.
Watson stabbed the potato out of the air with a claw. He gave Beth a slightly accusatory look with his beetle-black eyes.
“A bit of roughage is good for the bowls,” the engineer said severely.
Watson looked unconvinced.
“Trust me, I’ve been unfortunate to see some of this guy’s ‘deposits’,” Mark said, “and they looked plenty rough enough to me.”
Beth gave Mark a long-suffering look.
"As I was saying, I think you're right,” Mark said, doing his best to stifle a chuckle.
“You mean that whatever's down there, it's likely that we haven't met their like yet?" Beth said.
Mark nodded.
He wasn't sure if this was a comforting thought or not. What was a comforting thought was the knowledge that he had four quite capable monsters at his disposal.
Usually, he amended in the privacy of his own head. I usually have four at my disposal.
