NOVEL NEXT Chapter 9: Training
By the time Dominic was satisfied that he should be able to get some use out of his newest Ability, the sun was balancing just above the horizon. Still, he felt it was time well spent since he’d been able to answer a few of his questions.
First of all, and the most important in his mind, was that his flesh was unaffected by the acid, unless he held it in his mouth for more than thirty seconds or so. Even then, it only began to burn slightly for a few seconds before even that faded. Evidently, acid resistance had been conferred not only to the enamel of his teeth, but also to the soft tissue of his mouth.
Actually, to his soft tissue in general. When he dropped a little on his paw, he’d discovered that it took some time for it to eat into his skin as well. Even when it did, it only made a small divot before it lost potency. He’d feared that the reason for this might be because the acid he was using was far less potent than that of the skeets he’d got the Ability from.
That fear proved to be groundless: when he tested a similar drop on the rhino’s skin, Dominic saw the acid eating just as quickly though the rhino’s thick hide as it had through Dominic’s body before. So clearly acid resistance, or lack of it, was a thing.
A second important point he spent some time over was exactly how to use it. After the sensations he’d experienced during levelling up, the fact that the acid emerged from a new gland beneath his tongue was fairly obvious. To ‘fire’ the acid, he had to curl up his tongue.
The faster he moved his tongue, the more force was applied to the wad of acid, sending it to a maximum current range of three metres. For a ranged attack, that wasn’t far at all. Dominic suspected that that was a good part of the reason for the skeets hanging out in the canopy above their potential prey’s heads: gravity helped do half their job for them. Though their slow speed when knocked off was probably also a motivation.
He had hopes that the range would increase as the level of the Ability did too, or that practice might strengthen whatever muscles were causing the propulsion in the first place. Direction was determined by the angle of his head, meaning that he would have to get much better at deciding exactly how to hold his jaws so that the acid went where he wanted it to go – not half a metre to the right of his target. Again, practice should make perfect in that particular activity.
Figuring out how to imbue his teeth with the acid was another question, and one that took a little bit of trial and error. In the end, he found that the best strategy was to lift his tongue three times in quick succession with his mouth closed. Then, using his tongue to guide the acid, he coated his two top canines. They seemed to absorb a fair amount of the liquid the first time he did it and he’d had to repeat the process three more times before they stopped; subsequent times only the first coating was absorbed or none at all.
Dominic had to guess that his teeth acted as some sort of reservoir for the acid and the more he used them, the more acid he’d need to replenish. He’d have to confirm that with use, though.
Fortunately for him, the acid wasn’t nearly as nasty tasting as the skeets’ acid had been. He wouldn’t say it was exactly nice – rather like sour sweets without the sweet bit – but he didn’t feel like he needed to rinse his mouth out every time he’d coated his teeth, at least.
‘We’ll have to be careful not to bite any females or cubs,’ Leo commented. He’d been fairly quiet for most of the experimentation time, but had piped up now and then with a suggestion for something to try.
‘I don’t tend to bite either,’ Dominic pointed out. ‘That’s probably more your area with ‘mating bites’ and all that’.
‘True,’ agreed Leo dolefully. ‘What am I going to do now if the female tries to bite me while we mate? Or tries to pull away before I’m done?’
‘Too much information!’ Dominic shouted at him, wishing he could put hands over his mental ears. If a human had asked him the same questions, he would have given the guy a wide berth, probably warning his female friends away. Being a lion, however, meant that he didn’t feel nearly capable of chipping in on the situation.
But skewed though Leo’s priorities might be in human terms, he had a point – with his teeth like this and remnants of acid no doubt coating his mouth, Dominic would have to be careful with any friendlies.
‘Wait, that means that I won’t be able to groom anyone else,’ he realised, not sure how he felt about that. While licking another lion seemed rather disgusting to his human brain, his experience so far had been that grooming felt lovely and Leo’s memories showed him that mutual grooming was an important activity for reaffirming social bonds. The lionesses hadn’t started doing it with him yet, but that was probably because he was still the ‘newcomer’. But if he couldn’t take part in that social activity when he was more fully accepted…?
Well, he’d have to cross that bridge when he came to it. Maybe he’d just have to be very careful about how he angled his tongue and made sure his mouth was clear of acid before starting. For now, he was more confident in his new Ability to bring pain to his targets, something that would surely come in useful.
He hadn’t needed to compete with any lions to do his tests: all the lions were sleeping on the ground, having eaten enough to curve their bellies like little hills. Dominic had eyed them with a bit of exasperation – even his own pride who had eaten not that long ago had decided in the end to gorge themselves and were still laid out just as much as the new pride were.
‘Let’s just hope that nothing attacks while they’re all so sleepy,’ Dominic commented to Leo. It might have been a common activity for the lions to do in the old world, but in that one lions weren’t prey. At least, not healthy lions sleeping together in a pride. These days, lions could be hunted just like anything else, whether by creatures from Earth or ones from the other planets.
‘Then I suppose you’re not willing to go and join them?’ Leo asked with only the faintest amount of hope in his voice, like he wished that Dominic would but doubted that he’d agree. At least he’d learned that much.
‘No, we rested this afternoon. Now we’ve got more important things to do.’
‘What could be more important than eating, then sleeping, and maybe a little bit of mating?’ Leo asked, but Dominic could sense that it was rhetorical: the lion knew as well as he did that there were far more important things to do now, especially if they were to get strong enough to take the Place of Power and outstrip the hyenas.
No, he had something else to test: whether he could raise Second Wind even when he wasn’t in a desperate situation.
Since the lionesses were all rather sleepy, he doubted he’d be able to convince one of them to attack him until his health was below half – maybe he would be able to get Anuke or Sekhmet to do it later – but he could still test with stamina.
And though he could just run around in circles for a while at top speed, he had an idea of a better way to run his stamina down.
Heading back to the rhino carcass, he approached an area which hadn’t been too massacred. Since the hide of the rhino was so thick, the lions had tended to chew a way through in one spot, then had eaten the meat through that hole. It left parts of the rhino’s body looking rather odd: the hide was intact, but the flesh was missing beneath.
Still, despite the best efforts of twenty-six adult lions and uncountable numbers of cubs, the rhino was probably only about half eaten at most, and some bits were barely touched. That made an excellent target for his Powerful Strike, Quick Strike, Rapid Attack, Crushing Bite, and Sharp Nip.
It didn’t take many uses of each of those before his stamina dropped to half his pool, despite his full reserves now being 320 SP. As soon as it dropped below half, he tried to trigger Second Wind.
To his delight, he saw his reserves quickly replenish. He continued running through his Abilities, though slower this time. He aimed only to use 10 - 20% of his stamina pool at any one time, knowing that Second Wind would be taking half of it away once it reached the end of its timer.
When his stamina started to dip below 20%, he stopped and lay down, resting his head on his paws so as to let it regenerate. Once it was up to 100%, he stood again and restarted.
The timer ticked down second by second, and then suddenly he grunted as he felt sudden exhaustion drag at his limbs – from around 75%, he’d dropped all the way to 25%. Losing 160 SP all at once felt pretty horrible, just like losing half his health all in one go had too.
Maybe I was supposed to raise the level of Second Wind before I started really investing in health or stamina? wondered Dominic idly. Not that that made a huge difference: he needed to invest in both of those, regardless of his level in Second Wind. Though hopefully if he could level it up a couple of times it would take less from him.
Even better to note, though, was the fact that his health hadn’t been touched. Apparently only the resource which had been replenished would be affected at the end of the timer.
Letting his stamina regenerate a bit, he checked on his Ability, hoping to see a change.
Second Wind (T1) level 1 (32% –> 34% to level 2) – activatable when under 50% health or stamina. Gain 50% of your maximum health and/or stamina for the duration of the timer. Timer: 05:00. At the end of the timer, lose 50% of your max health and stamina.
Score! he celebrated. Although it had only gone up 2% instead of the 8% it had done every time he had used it in battle, the fact that it had gone up at all was proof that this strategy would work, given time.
Getting to work once more, he took his stamina down below 50% again, and activated Second Wind. At least he tried to.
Why isn’t this working? Dominic wondered as nothing happened.
‘You didn’t let our stamina fully replenish,’ Leo answered with a lazy sort of yawn.
‘Sorry I’m boring you,’ teased Dominic. ‘And what do you mean?’
‘We have to let our stamina and health go back to full before we can use it again. Don’t you remember what it said in the original description?’
‘It’s not in the description I’ve just read,’ he argued weakly, despite actually vaguely having a memory of what Leo was talking about now. Or was he just creating a memory because Leo had said that’s what had happened? Oh well – it wouldn’t take too long for him to find out.
Resting to let his stamina refill itself, he spent time just idly thinking through some potential plans. Once it had hit full again, he once more used his Abilities to quickly get below 50%. This time when he used Second Wind, it worked.
‘Just as well I always managed to fully replenish my health and stamina in between using it,’ he thought with his stomach twisting at the image of what might have happened if he had unknowingly gone into the battle with the chimera or the scrin or the hyenas without it….
Still, now he knew what he needed to do, all that was required was to actually do it. Soon, he fell into a bit of a rhythm, determined to get Second Wind, and hopefully his other Abilities too, as high as he could before the lionesses decided that they would be willing to go on a hunt.
Cue training montage, Dominic joked to himself.
