Take Down Chapter 56: Who Is Ægir?

Your attack landed its mark and the snake’s health bar dropped to less than half.

“Almost got it,” you thought, sticking the landing and stomping your foot down while yelling ‘ha’.

The snake curled around to strike at you again but you were too light on your feet and had already danced out of reach, calling for ‘ha’ once more before finishing it with a well executed ‘spin’ move.

“Man,” you panted as the snake burst into crystals and floated away into the sky, “that thing came out of nowhere. Difficult too. I think I could have defeated it with 2 or 3 rounds of ‘move’ but I’m trying to upskill my other 2 attacks.”

While you were debriefing with a silently impressed Hansu, a small information panel popped up.

[SNAKE DEFEATED!]

Exp: 8 pts 

Mahi: 12

Item(s) dropped – [1] Cobra Poison

“Oooh, I got a cobra poison?” you said.

You clicked on the information icon and skim read what it could be used for, pleased to find that you could combine it with your ‘spin’ move to make the skill more potent.

“This is good!” you said to Hansu as you took your new Cobra poison from your inventory and placed it next to your spin skill, indicating that the next time you used ‘spin’ it would combine the poison with it, “I’ll see how this goes.”

Confidently, you turned around again and kept moving through the tall grasses waiting for the next snake to appear. 

You didn’t have to walk far to come across a black snake- who was less than impressed that you had appeared in its path. 

“Ha!” you shouted, stomping your foot at the snake. 

As you suspected, your attack didn’t do very much and only took off about 12% from the snake’s health bar so you called for ‘spin’ just after the snake had tried to retaliate.

The purple haze flashed out from your dancing feet and swirled around the snake, the purple now tinged with a bit of green and brown.

The black snake shuddered and exploded into crystals instantly.

“Wow?! The cobra poison is powerful!” you said out loud with surprise when you saw it had destroyed the snake in a second.

“I think I have to take back what I said about karma biting you in the ass, you seem to have this fighting down pat,” Hansu commented from behind you.

“Well, thank you,” you replied to him, proud that you were making good progress with being able to defend yourself.

While you talked, another information bar popped up for the black snake that was defeated.

[SNAKE DEFEATED!]

Exp: 7 pts 

Mahi: 10

Item(s) dropped – 1 snake skin

“Oooh, I got a snake skin,” you said, clicking on the icon.

It said you could upgrade your shoes to snake skin and would give you a little more stealth and silence when you walked so you quickly upgraded to the snake skin boots, grinning when your dancer shoes changed to knee high boots that were the same colour as the black snake.

“Well,” Hansu announced, breaking into your happy little world of upgrades, “it’s been 2 hours so time is up.”

“Already?” you asked sadly, “just a little longer?”

“No. We’ll come back in tomorrow, you’ve done enough today.”

“I’d love to do more today,” you said, dejectedly following him as he happily turned headed across the open to the teleport pad.

Hansu didn’t reply, just walked you back to the pad, up to the house on level 44, and then back on the lounge and out of game.

You felt a little sad when you opened your eyes back in the lab and looked down at your very plain clothes.

“I’m really loving being in game,” you thought as you took the nervegear off and hopped off the table.

“See you tomorrow, same time,” Hansu called to you as you left the office silently.

“I’ll be back in a few hours to continue where I left off,” you thought as you hummed a reply to Hansu then went back home.

……………………..

You couldn’t sleep, so just researched and researched until midnight came then back you went to the blacked out lab to keep grinding and collecting as many different items as you could.

In the next half hour in game, you collected 8 more Cobra poisons, defeated another 3 black snakes and even one red belly black snake that gave you red poison to use in ‘spin’. 

The red belly poison seemed to have a wider area of effect which was good to know but it also made you wonder…

“Is the wider effect due to the red belly snake poison? Or are my skills getting stronger?”

Curiously you checked you skill stats and ‘move’ was up to 7, ‘spin’ had moved to 5, and ‘ha’ was up to 4.

“I might move to level 5 now and see what boss is protecting the level… then come back,” you thought, following the track towards level 5.

As you got closer, you saw the [LEVEL 5] sign and slowed a bit. 

Ahead of you, was a decent sized stream that had different shades of blue swirling in it and you looked at it curiously.

“This stream looks a little different to the other one that I saw on level 3 that time with the beavers?” you mused, taking a tentative step forward.

Something shifted below the surface of the waters and a faint whinny sounded, echoing out from the shimmers of the stream. 

“What?!”

Suddenly the [ENGAGE] sign popped up and you stepped back in a panic, still looking around for the boss.

Just then the stream came to life, the water rising up and swirling around until it assumed the shape of a very large horse.

“The boss of level 5!” you gasped internally, looking for the name of the boss above its head.

“Ægir?!”

“Yes,” a voice spoke to you and you looked around to see who it was, “pull your orb out.” The voice added.

You reached into your pocket and pulled the glowing blue orb out.

“Hi!” it said, the blue colour pulsating as the orb spoke to you.

“You speak?” you asked the orb.

“I’m here to help you with the next steps,” it said, “Ægir, is the boss of this level and your future companion, should you wish to use him.”

You looked up into the eyes of the stallion as it stood in the now dry river bed. It’s glowing red eyes staring menacingly at you as it pulled its front legs up and reared up to full height.

“Uhh… he looks… very unfriendly,” you commented, flinching when the stallion let out a roar of challenge to you.

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Take Down Chapter 57: Water Stallion Fight >>>