Reflections on the Warpath - [An Isekai Progression Fantasy]

The Berserker's Bite – Relic 1/3

This dagger amplifies its user's rage, channelling their wrath into power. If the dagger's wielder cuts themself with the blade, they gain a surge in power proportional to the volume of blood spilled.

At a cost to their health and sanity.

Uses remaining 1/1.

After this relic has been used, it will not count towards your relic count for leaving via the exit hub.

Jay closed the ominous system screen, the first he'd seen since beginning the tournament.

So the relics aren't just exit tokens…

Jay used a roll of tape to tie his new dagger around his right ankle. He made sure not to nick himself and wrapped a few extra loops around his calf just in case.

The relics' power made them even more useful to Jay. They were possibly the only way to gain an advantage over Amaya and Ezekiel. If Karis found him fast enough then the Flaming Tomb gladiators would likely be empty handed when they faced off, making each relic Jay found all the more valuable.

The Berserker's Bite already gave him a trump card to play if things got dire; there might be even better relics waiting for him out in the jungle.

So what am I waiting for?

Jay and Ping floated down to the jungle floor and began their hunt for relics. They travelled perpendicular to where he thought the exit hub was, attempting to circle around the building. Jay assumed the exit hub was near the centre of their arena, and wanted to remain relatively near to it while still keeping enough distance between him and his teammates.

The incessant chirping insects concealed Jay's footsteps as he stalked through the rainforest. In his first minute of searching, Jay didn't find much except another boggy trough filled with viscous, sludgy mud.

It had no gigantic hippo pawprints embedded in it and told Jay nothing about finding a relic, but it did give him an idea.

Jay dove into the mud, coating his tracksuit a deep brown, the weight of wet earth clung to his back before sloughing off and he made sure every inch of bright red was obscured. He chuckled as he smeared more mud over his face, wondering what Akira would say about their colour coordination when they eventually met up.

Camouflage probably wasn't what the coliseum, or its audience, expected from the advancement tournament. Skulking through the trees draped in compost didn't exactly make for exhilarating watching.

But Amaya had forced Jay's hand when she picked him at the start of the second round. He needed to survive.

Ping dunked herself into the dirt before rising back into the air and spinning like a pinwheel. She looked half shield, half wet dog, as she flung off half the mud she'd just coated herself with. Jay snorted as he too emerged from the mud bath.

Now hidden from both eyes and ears, Jay resumed his search. Aside from the thousands of moss-covered trees and the millions of chittering insects between them, Jay didn't come across much as he stalked through the forest. He occasionally heard metal clashes and muffled thuds to his right, further from the exit hub, and debated investigating them but decided against it.

Even if they were ragged and battered after a tough battle, Jay didn't like his chances against an entire team of gladiators.

Instead, he prowled further through the forest in an arc around the exit hub. After passing four crumbling ruins that caught his attention but not his interest, Jay stumbled across a cave carved between two gigantic buttress roots. The roots sprawled out onto the rainforest floor, gnarled tendrils fanning at least five metres from the tree trunk.

Jay rested his hand against one of the roots, running his fingertips against its coarse, weathered surface. While all the neighbouring trees radiated life, this one felt… weak. The root bark felt drier, ashier, and looked almost greying.

Smaller, curtain-like, roots and vines covered the cave's entrance. Even Jay was surprised he'd spotted it. He was fairly confident no other gladiators had entered the cave, some of these plants looked like they hadn't been disturbed in months, let alone the few hours since the advancement trial had started.

Jay made three loops around the enormous centurion of a tree that marked the cave's entrance, each time scouting the distant brush for any other gladiators. After confirming that nobody was near him, he stared down at the obscured cave entrance.

No time like now, I guess.

Jay gently pulled some of the overhanging vines aside, careful not to slash into them or make any other indication that they'd been disturbed. If another trio found the entrance and cornered Jay inside the cave, he'd have almost no hope of escaping them. He checked the plants for any sign of tampering, but they seemed untouched.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He had to slightly crouch as he entered the cave. Initially, Ping flew just in front of him. But for all the protection she gave, Jay would rather see where he was going when walking into the unknown. The shield had to settle for protecting his rear.

Jay released a breath he'd been unknowingly holding in. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he gulped down a ball of spit.

Five paces into the tunnel, Jay walked up to a wooden archway propping it up. The warped wood looked ancient but still sturdy. Hairline cracks snaked their way down its beams but Jay still had faith it would hold the cave up. Strangely, despite the archway's clear age, Jay saw a layer of dust coat its side but not a single speck of moss or mould.

In a rainforest? How?

A slow sigh escaped Jay's lips as he investigated the arch.

His throat tightened. The oppressive air pushed against his skin. Almost clamping it shut.

He activated Eye of the storm immediately.

Nothing moving ahead of me.

The clutching sensation around Jay's throat released. He looked behind him. Nobody there either.

Jay held in a scratching cough as he looked back at the wood frame.

The air's fucking dry in here, that's why there's no mould.

But how the hell is it so dry in the middle of a rainforest?

Jay swallowed down a gulp. He had an ominous feeling that he'd find out soon enough. And that it wouldn't be anything pretty.

Jay left the dust-caked archway behind him, tiptoeing further underground. As he crept, Jay began to see several plants again, although they looked drastically different to the ones on the surface. Each plant here was rusty brown, almost maroon, instead of forest green. The vine-like plants all grew out of crevasses in the stone. They clung to their stony shells like hermit crabs, barely poking out. They had no leaves, thorns, or anything extruding out of them, yet their abrasive surface looked rougher than sandpaper. Jay reckoned it could draw blood if rubbed against skin hard enough.

He didn't dare touch it.

The plants were eerily still, although Jay supposed there was no wind in the cave to move them.

Still, it unnerved him. He clenched his fists and continued walking.

A short way further, Jay saw his second sign of life within the cave.

Well, former life.

Another strange lemur-like creature, smaller than the one Jay had seen in the treetops, lay motionless in the ground. Sandpaper tendrils coiled around each leg, stretching the dead creature's limbs apart.

A fifth tendril wrapped around the creature's body, cinching its gliding flaps around its protruding ribcage. The vine snaked up to its mouth, cramming into the corpse's throat as it entered the animal's innards.

The poor whelp looked a husk of its cousin in the canopy. Its desiccated flesh, which had lost its fur long ago, was stretched thin over a bulging skeleton. Its once-bulbous eyeballs looked dry and shrivelled like rotting fruit. Strangely, the body didn't smell anything like a decaying corpse. It didn't smell like anything, as if any odours had fled the cave long ago.

A papercut or stiff breeze could probably slice open the creature's taut skin, although Jay doubted any blood would spill out from it. He knelt towards the carcass. The coarse red tendrils clung tightly onto the dead animal's emaciated limbs, refusing to let it free.

Jay leant closer.

He flared Eye of the storm, hyper-fixating on the fifth tendril.

It twitched. An almost imperceptibly small pulse emanated from within the corpse.

Jay kept watching, but for the next minute the invasive plant remained deathly still.

As he ventured deeper within the cave, Jay saw more dried up animal carcasses entangled but the same red tendrils. At first it was other small rodents, creatures of the canopy that had wandered their way underground and never left. Then, he saw a featherless bird strangled by the vines. Its gaping, hooked beak held open by a suffocating tendril that poured down its throat.

Further in, after a corridor of withered corpses, Jay walked past a clawed, weasel-like creature.

Next, a leopard.

The faded maroon tendrils wove deeper inside the larger creature. They strangled each limb like a noose, knotting in on themselves and lashing the corpse to the ground. Tendrils burrowed through bloodless cuts along the leopard's legs, infesting the flesh beneath. Like the animal's bones, they bulged from within the withered corpse.

The further Jay walked, the more his stomach felt like emptying itself over the next dried up corpse he came across.

A faint wheeze echoed from deeper inside the tunnel.

Jay stopped.

He raised his fists, poised to react.

The pathetic rasp crept out the cave. It writhed its way into Jay's ears. Barely a whisper.

Ping drifted an inch closer. Jay pressed his steel knuckles into his cheeks.

Step by step, they descended.

The whimpering grew louder.

Every animal he'd passed in the tunnel upturned Jay's stomach, sent bile and revulsion crawling up his throat as he forced his mouth shut.

They paled in comparison to the next one.

This one was still alive.

Now closer to the dying beast, Jay saw it was another leopard. Its four legs and tail sprawled across the cave, twitching against the crimson plant's tug. Grasping tendrils clung tightly to each limb like a medieval torture device pulling the creature apart. The sandpaper vines stripped fur and left the skin raw and flaky wherever they latched onto the leopard's flesh.

The poor creature had no hope of escape.

Thin, ragged wheezes raked against Jay's eardrums like tortured claws. Muffled by the crimson vines prizing apart the leopard's jaws and straining its warped throat. The knotted vine throbbed every few seconds, and the rest of the plant's tendrils burrowed deeper inside the animal's guts.

Jay took a step forward and looked the dying creature in its eyes.

It stared back.

Pleading gold eyes beseeched him silently, bereft of a hunter's composure or even a predator's hunger.

The leopard's left eye rolled back. The other twitched, shuddering inside its socket.

Jay watched the rolling left eyeball tilt up towards the creature's skull. Bloodshot sclera replacing the animal's piercing gold iris.

A vine slithered out from underneath the creature's eyelid. The wriggling red tendril swept across the leopard's eyeball, scraping off the top layer before jerking its tip inside the eye.

The swollen arteries vanished, blood-red supplanted by a yellowing white. The tiny vine pulsated, drinking up the blood before retreating inside the creature.

The leopard's eye rolled back down. While the right eye had recovered and continued to stare pleadingly at Jay, the left stared blankly at the nothingness behind him.

Fucking hell.

Jay felt the tortured creature's pain as the animal implored him with its one working eye.

He pressed the Conqueror's fist against the animal's feeble neck.

Before common sense could object, Jay slashed open the leopard's throat.