Dungeon Hunter: Act I

One Point To Lee

As my health bar plummeted, my killer snatched their blade immediately from its sheath of my back. If I were being honest, it hurt more going out. Imagine for a moment, if you will, the feeling of millions of claws tearing the fibres of your flesh apart. Then add accompanying nausea and a white-out of sight, and you're about halfway there. My back felt wet with eerily warm blood. I was surprised I hadn't blacked out from the whole ordeal. I guess I was just lucky that way.

"Stupid," the teen said, jumping back, revilement curling their top lip. They blended into the fading smoke, their silhouette eventually disappearing.

Me? Stupid? I wanted to argue, but they had a point.

I was dead.

Or I should've been.

Thank fuck the idea I'd been mulling over since the Gates appeared had borne fruit. For the longest time I'd been wondering about the wording of the singular ability I'd been granted by this fucked up apocalypse. While the rest of my team had been given at least two abilities (I was making assumptions about Tam here), I'd gotten one, and it would've been absolutely useless had I been alone. However, it used a word that stuck out to me and had been hovering in the back of my mind.

[Channel] Use a consenting party member's skills.

There were no "skills" in the system. There were, however, traits and abilities.

Like the frost melting into dew on a cool morning in spring, using [Channel] to borrow Gigi's [Stubborn] trait, my body felt as though it froze and then thawed. Just like xir trait description said, the blow that should've killed me had left my health remaining at 1 HP. What it didn't say was that, as my knees buckled, my vision beginning to fade, you'd remain at 1 HP until health regen kicked in (or someone intervened to either heal or kill you.)

I was two seconds away from being dead, and with my stats, I'd stay like that for a while.

It was good that Axel was there to catch me before I hit the ground, his arms wrapping around the deadweight of my body. I'd like to see anyone judging me stay on their feet after literally being stabbed in the back. Axel's eyes were wide, panicked, and the fear in them almost made me laugh. Fuck, it was hysterical. Axel, being scared? In what world?

Oh, damn. Was this a side effect of blood loss?

This hadn't happened before.

Gigi and Jye quickly stepped forward to defend Axel and I, their eyes darting about, alert for our assailant. Who knew what other tricks they had up their sleeve?

Still, a portion of me was supremely disappointed by our party's performance. We'd allowed a single Gen-Zer to steal the boss loot, almost kill me, escape, and put us on edge. It was a little pathetic considering it was a four (maybe five if Tam was skulking about) vs. one (maybe two if we included whatever that shadow clone had been.)

We fucking sucked.

But we only sucked because we never knew what was happening. In this new world, where abilities were literally apparently limitless, how could we ever know what people could do? We'd done our best based on what we knew. That the teenager's skills involved conjuring a clone of anyone and not turning into them was something none of us could have ever imagined. Who would've?!

Well, these last couple of battles had made one thing clear. We needed someone in our party with the sort of skill that gleaned critical information from opponents. Otherwise, we'd just keep blindly throwing ourselves into situations we might not come out of. We'd been lucky so far, really lucky. And Axel's luck had almost run out this time.

But once again I was thinking about a future that wasn't guaranteed... First, we needed to deal with this goddamned teenager.

I felt surprisingly lucid for someone at 1 HP. Maybe [Stubborn] did something to my emotions. Last time I'd nearly died (wow, that's not something I'd ever thought I'd say), hitting 1 HP had me virtually slipping out of the realm of consciousness. But even bleeding as I was, there was some sort of mental block between the pain and my receptors. When I'd felt frozen and thawed, perhaps something had changed in my body. This was a trait, and not an ability after all. Maybe they did different things?