Day Five, Atop the Cliff (3)

I'd meant to tan the hide first. When I tracked down the one I'd left out to dry and ran a hand over it, the leather had gone stiff as a board.

There are any number of ways to tan a hide, but the only two I actually know are chewing it between my teeth and beating the hell out of it.

Put raw hide like this in my mouth and chew?

…….

They say if you can't control your strength and you pound too hard, the leather tears. I'd have to cut it anyway to wrap the claw spear's grip, so I didn't much care.

Hmm. The fur had set into it along with the rest. I'd have to get that off first.

I glanced down at the claw spear, then shook my head. Try to shave fur with that and I'd ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠have nothing left but rags. Better to build the fire back up and burn the hair off — cut a scrap first, and test it.

I dug the buried remains of the campfire out of the ground, got a flame going fast, and carefully started singeing the fur still clinging to the hide.

The problem was this. Detection or not, if I couldn't control the work with any precision, this was what I got.

I'd been burning fur for a good while. Detection warned me, and I still reacted too late — the hide I'd been scorching went up in a sheet of flame. Hair that had been shriveling in the heat suddenly caught, and I startled so badly I flung the whole thing. I'd only half-scraped the fat, some of it was still on there, and a full day of drying had left it eager to burn.

It wasn't a total loss, though. Held in the smoke, it had visibly started to soften.

Not too close. Not too far.

I beat the hide for thirty minutes until it gave a little, then used the horn awl to punch holes at intervals along the edge, threaded branches through them, and stretched it wide until it opened like a fan. After that I spent an hour carefully singeing it over the flame. The fur burned away, the leather loosened enough, and I quickly cut it into long straight strips and wound them round and round the claw spear's grip.

With the horn awl I bored holes through the leather at the start, the middle, and the end of the handle, whittled wooden pegs to fit, drove them in, and filed down whatever stuck out. For a first attempt, it was a damn fine grip.

Too thick to close one hand around, but I'd be using both anyway, so it didn't matter. Make it too thin and the handle would snap the moment I swung. Even if the leather stiffened again, I'd already fixed it in place. That ought to hold, right?

Come one in the afternoon, I tore a bite off a strip of emergency rations, chewed through a handful of leaves, and called that lunch. Then I cut the horned pup's hide thin and long, knotted the strips end to end, and made myself a cord.

Having tools really did open things up. I liked that.

I was reminded all over again how useful otherworld survival studies and interdimensional biology were, and I offered a quiet thanks to the people who'd put that knowledge together and spread it. Even now, scraps of survival lore kept surfacing and locking together with Detection and Analysis, spinning out one practical use after another.

If I hadn't had that foundation, what would have become of me the moment I was summoned into the Phase World?

Frozen in terror right after the summoning, shaking, then bitten to death by that bastard of a dog. Even if I'd somehow gotten clear — a fall off the cliff, into the river, drowned. No idea where to hide or where to rest, blundering around until the giant woman spotted me. Dead.

Not knowing the plants of this world were edible, starving until I finally tore into some leaves — except by then it would have been far too late, my strength already spent. Dead of hunger all the same. Rolling through the mud, never noticing the giant mole was coming, guard down, and it had me. Dead. Letting the sight of a little horned pup lull me, a fight breaking out, a horn through the body. Dead.

Dead, dead, dead!

And I wouldn't have been able to make tools, either. No wonder the survival rate right after a Droplet Cascade really was under ten percent.

Probably only the physically solid adults made it through — and among them, only the ones with special talent and training, or people overflowing with skill and instinct, or the simply lucky. Anyone young, or past thirty with a body already gone stiff, would be dead.

Hah.

Looked at that way, I'd been lucky too. Most of what I'd been through were situations so tight that dying where I stood wouldn't have been strange at all. So the fact that I was still alive — and that I could make a weapon at all — was entirely thanks to education.

The weight of information settled on me all over again as I looked the claw spear over.

The hilt, if that was the word for it. Anyway, I tied the cord around the thickest part of the shaft and tried it over my shoulder. It hung there looking sorry for itself, but it didn't drag the ground. Even if it did, I'd be climbing the cliff, so it wasn't a real problem…….

"……Hmm. Leaving the blade of the claw spear bare like this doesn't sit right with me."

If the wind swung it and that edge so much as caught me, I'd be hurt badly.

I looked around, gathered a heap of reasonably thick branches, caged the blade in a round tube like an oversized straw, then peeled thin strips of stem, twisted them, and bound the whole thing tight. Temporary, but I had a spear sheath. This would do.

After that, for practice, I snapped a thick branch and used the horn awl to shape a wooden spear identical to the claw spear. How bitter would it be if the real weapon broke while I was drilling? Its durability wasn't anything special. I'd have to be careful with it.

I picked up a branch about the claw spear's length and ran high thrusts, mid thrusts, low thrusts, lateral shifts. Thanks to Detection and Analysis, I could feel my form settling into something that actually worked. Three hours of sweating and swinging the wooden spear, and with the two of them to lean on, I managed to lock in my stance and balance to some degree. On top of that, the wooden spear had come out sturdier than I'd expected. I could use this as a weapon too.

The more weapons, the better.

It was past six, closing on seven. The sun was thinking about going down; the sky had gone to sunset. Cliff-climbing practice could wait until tomorrow.

I'd sweated so hard the mud was sliding down my body in a filthy film, so I washed off at the river, smeared fresh mud back on, and crawled into the doghole.

Inside, I ran Detection and learned something I hadn't expected. Phase Power didn't penetrate earth very well. Then even an Aberrant would have a hard time sensing me, wouldn't it?

My own Detection, though, punched straight through soil and water alike. Impressive, I supposed — except it refused to let me sleep.

Even if Phase Power let you endure without rest, sleep did more than clear fatigue. You couldn't just write it off as lying down and snoring……. What was it again? Sleep relieves fatigue, and the brain's metabolism and blood flow drop. During sleep, calorie burn falls to almost nothing, and immune function rises. Sleep itself is a defensive posture the body takes to protect itself. I'd read that in one of the medical books Dad was studying, so it had to be right.

……I needed a fix for this, and soon.

When I reached the egg-shaped den at the end of the doghole, there was hardly any smell, and the snugness of it was genuinely pleasant. I'd worried the blood-stink from the night before last — when I'd vomited blood and thrashed like a lunatic — might have soaked into the place, but I'd covered it with soil, and there wasn't a trace of it. Lucky.

Thanks to Detection I could see the shape of the burrow even without light, so nothing about it was inconvenient, and the surrounding bedrock looked solid enough that the tunnel wasn't about to come down on me. I couldn't honestly call the place good, though. Stay too long and claustrophobia would set in. If it weren't for the safety, I never would have crawled in here. Cozy is cozy, but still!

Chewing the leaves off the branches I'd brought with me, I closed my left hand around the Phase Stone, felt the Phase Power flowing into my body, and checked how much had piled up.

Hmm…… eight hours of absorption, and only thirty. No. Not only. That was a full tenth gained.

Skin contact seemed to take Phase Power in better. I'd kept the stone in my pants pocket the whole time; if I'd been holding it, I figured it might have climbed by sixty. So what I'd absorbed between half past eight and eleven in the morning was thirty-five, and what I'd drawn from the Phase Stone in the afternoon was thirty. Current Phase Power: 365, then.

Compared with the start, that was 2.65 times higher — but I had no idea where a number like that sat among ability users, and that grated.

I'd learned something else, too. Unlike the Phase Power that spread from a dead Aberrant, or what I pulled from a Phase Stone, the Phase Power drifting in the air barely soaked into the body at all. Near the giant woman's corpse, where air and Phase Power had stood at a ratio of one to nine, it had climbed by nearly ten an hour. Back to an ordinary mix, it didn't even seem to rise by 0.01 in an hour. Put that way, it felt like a waste.

Anyway. Claw spear on the left, wooden spear on the right, the Phase Stone turning over in my left hand, I started hunting for a way to actually sleep.

If I cut the number of detectable objects as far as it would go, wouldn't that do it? Detection was an ability like any other. I ought to be able to stretch the range and shrink it. I spent a while raising and lowering the number of targets, feeling the ability out, and managed to bring the detectable objects down to five hundred.

Maybe because I'd grown used to Detection over the last few days — I'd been sensing a little over a thousand, and now I was picking up somewhere between three and four thousand objects — cutting that to five hundred was…… something, at least.

A few thousand detections sounded like a great many, but once you actually had the ability, even that turned out to be a small number. Take an ordinary tree standing at the cave mouth right now. How many leaves were on it? A conifer would be misery to count, but that broadleaf had 892 leaves hanging from its branches. Treat every one of those as moving, and a single tree meant 892 separate motions to detect.

The most trees that had ever filled my detection radius of eighty meters was seventy-eight. I hadn't counted the leaves, but if I used that five-year-old tree as the baseline, it came to about seventy thousand. Push the detection count as high as it would go and I could sense about ten thousand objects — and leaves alone already made that look like a joke.

Branches moved too. Grass on the ground swayed with the wind and got picked up. Add the insects crawling over it and the bugs in the soil, and the number turned monstrous. Of course, right now every living thing was dead, killed by the giant woman's roar.

Which was why Detection worked by filtering set conditions in the brain, until what I actually perceived were only the movements that didn't make sense, or the parts that felt wrong. Leaves, branches, and grass swaying in the wind were normal, so they got filtered out. What registered was a horned pup trotting around, trampling grass, chewing leaves, tearing at the dirt with its front paws. That kind of thing.

It was a mercy the conditional search — the filtering — happened on its own. If it hadn't, the sheer volume of information might have blown my brain apart.

I kept cutting the detected objects down and down, and then the range, locked at eighty meters, gave a little twitch!

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

What? Yesterday I'd squeezed my eyes ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠shut and open, trying to stretch the range and shrink it, and it hadn't budged a hair. Now it was suddenly rippling.

I strained until my head rang. Forcing the object count down while I poured everything I had into the range, a headache started climbing.

I held the concentration for twenty minutes. In the end it only twitched and rippled that once, and after that there was no response at all. Reducing the objects had at least paid off a little — down to 482 — but trying to go any lower felt like it was overloading my brain instead.

"Pwah!"

I'd been holding my breath in a rigid posture just to focus, and it still hadn't worked. A little bitter.

I let the tension I'd wound so tight come loose and opened my eyes — and in that instant my vision stretched, as if someone had strapped a telescope over my face!

"Hrngh?!"

I startled, and I was trying to work out what had happened when my sight snapped back to normal.

"Uh……."

I closed my eyes again, ran Detection, and opened the map in my head. In the direction I was facing, a fan thirty degrees wide had registered out to three hundred meters! Everything inside that field had been analyzed and detected, and the count was 19,732!

Desperate not to lose the feeling from a moment ago, I steadied myself with everything I had…… had I done it like this?

"Whoa!"

My vision stretched out again, and the drop in my chest was exactly like falling out of bed in my sleep. I flinched.

"No, no! Forget that!"

The Detection and Analysis I'd been concentrating were drawing the direction, the distance, and the range I was looking at as a map inside my head.

Damn. That was insane.

A change I hadn't even imagined. This wasn't an application of Detection. This was a change in the ability itself. Should I call it Telescopic Vision?

I had several abilities, and trying to name them with labels that hadn't been fixed left the shape of them fuzzy in my head in a way I didn't like. I decided to sort the classifications properly.

Right. As the broad category, I'd gather everything I had and call it Search. Under that: Detection, Analysis, Clairvoyance, and Telescopic Vision. For the rest — the map, and Premonition…… should I put those in too?

Premonition, I'd hold.

Good.

I whipped my gaze up and down and side to side, checking what Telescopic Vision fed me, and it arrived in a slightly different shape from Detection. Put simply, Detection sensed the form of every object inside a round droplet. Telescopic Vision sensed its range the way you'd fire a pulse of ultrasound in the direction you were looking.

It wasn't ultrasound, though. I could check behind a blocked object, and to either side of it. The difference from Detection was this: Detection updated in real time, while Telescopic Vision refreshed in pulses, the way a sonar sweep does. Analysis and Clairvoyance still worked while it was running, of course.

Anyway, it was fascinating, sweeping high and low and left and right — though one part of it stung. Peer into earth or water, and from that point the remaining distance dropped by about half. A different mechanism from Detection, most likely. Even so, having a long-range sense put me in a good mood.

Oh. Telescopic Vision burned a fair amount of Phase Power. I'd only had it on for about ten minutes, and Phase Power had already fallen by ten. One a minute?

And I'd set out looking for a way to sleep, only to develop a new ability instead. Considering day five was nearly over…….

I might actually be a genius. Heh.

Shame no attack technique had come of it. Give me a ranged option and I could use ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Detection and Analysis to pick things off safely from a distance.

Ugh. Telescopic Vision just switched on.