NOVEL NEXT Chapter 49: How Am I Actually Going to Fly?
Expecting to immediately have the effects of the Enhancements applied, Dominic was surprised when another System message came up instead.
[Due to the difficulty of the Three on One Challenge, rewards are increased. You have a choice:
Double the PP reward for succeeding in the Challenge
Increase the starting level of your new Enhancements.
Note: choice must be made before Enhancements can be applied.]
Dominic felt excitement go through him: he’d half forgotten about that promise from the System in the busyness of the last quarter of an hour. Quickly thinking through the options, he came to a conclusion.
‘I think we should go for the second option,’ he says decisively. ‘Even if it only increases the level of all the Enhancements by one, that’s the equivalent of one and a half level ups, and I doubt that the first option will give that many Prey Points.’
‘Why is it only doubling the reward for a Challenge which was three on one?’ groused Leo. Dominic sent him a mental shrug.
‘Because we only killed two of them? Or because it only considered the threat level to be double that of just the alpha on his own? I don’t know. So, do you agree with me or not?’
The lion was silent for a short moment while he thought it over too.
‘I think we should go for the second option too,’ he agreed. ‘The only downside is that it will enhance things which we might not have chosen to.’
‘Yeah, but it can only improve things for us. And we might find those Enhancements more useful than we thought.’
Waiting for a moment, Dominic made his choice when Leo didn’t say anything more.
Immediately, the screen disappeared and he started feeling a tingling sensation in the area just above his shoulder blades. The tingling quickly became itching, which even more quickly turned into pain.
His nose started tingling too, and he felt something going on in his guts as well, but those sensations were quickly drowned out by the worsening agony in his shoulders. He squeezed his eyes shut, all his focus going on just breathing through the sensations wracking him.
Nausea building, he became slowly more and more afraid that he was about to empty his stomach on the ground – not that there was much in it other than blood. At the same time, he felt like clawing his nose off, the itching becoming unbearable there.
His body reshaped itself with the System’s assistance, and all Dominic could do was hold onto his sanity and do his best not to roar with pain or vomit. He couldn’t help the whimpers that escaped his muzzle, though.
Slowly, far too slowly, the agony, nausea, and itching abated. Within a few minutes, they had vanished, like they had never been there. Of all the new things the System did, that was the one that Dominic was most grateful for, yet also the most discomforted by. His body just wasn’t used to being in absolute agony one moment, and then absolutely fine the next. But at the same time, he was also very appreciative that injuries didn’t take the time to heal that they used to.
Opening his eyes from where they had been screwed shut, Dominic could immediately identify one of the differences. Large wing joints came forward halfway along his neck, visible out of the corner of his eyes. He turned his head to look at them, curiosity mixed with excitement going through him.
Barely even thinking about it, he extended his right wing out, seeing the large sandy-coloured feathered limb unfold smoothly. Clearly, the enhancement had come with the muscles and neural pathways needed to use them, which was rather fortunate. With a slight swoop in his stomach, Dominic briefly considered how much of a waste it would have been of an Enhancement if they’d ended up being uncontrollable until he’d learned to use them. He’d had enough flailing around like a cub when he’d first learned to walk in this body to last him a lifetime.
He tested its range of movement, first that wing, then the other, then both together. He could rotate the wings so the tips of his pinions could sweep forward, the rest of his wing creating something of a parachute shape – a way of slowing down his speed. Equally, he could swing the wing so that the front joint – the wrist equivalent, if he remembered correctly – cut through the air with force. Perhaps that could be a useful weapon against an opponent.
By flexing his elbow and wrist joints in different ways, he could make his wing more or less folded. He played with the different shapes he could make, marvelling at how he could almost control the individual feathers. Well, the pinions, anyway – not the secondaries, or whatever the feathers were that covered the majority of his upper wings.
He could also raise them both above his body to an almost vertical position and then lower them so they touched the ground. That, no doubt, was how he would be able to fly. However, there was one thing that bothered him.
‘How am I actually going to fly?’
‘Uh, with our wings?’ suggested Leo as if questioning his intelligence. ‘Wasn’t that the whole point of getting them?’
‘Sure, but…they’re not big enough.’
‘They look big enough,’ objected the lion. And he was right, in a way – the wings were probably twice the length of their body when fully extended. Fully folded, the front wrist joint was just behind the line of his jaw and the tips of the pinions extended a bit behind his hindquarters. But from something he’d seen, humans would have to have wings about seven metres in span to lift them, and he was definitely heavier than a human. At best, his wingspan was six metres long.
Flexing the wings, he tested them, beating downwards. The others watching him curiously quickly backed off as a thick dust cloud started forming thanks to the air movement. Dominic did feel a force push him a little upwards and when he leapt up he found that he went higher than he might have expected before. But he came back down pretty quickly too, despite trying to beat his wings while in the air.
After a bit of experimentation, he found that the best result was where he leapt into the air, accompanying his movement with a beat of his wings, then held them out steadily to allow him to either slow his descent or to glide forwards quickly.
His wings did look awesome, their colour mostly the sandy shade of his body, though with slightly lighter pinions and darker feathers along the ‘arm’ bones. Still, they weren’t quite as useful as he had been hoping. That was to say that it seemed he wouldn’t be competing with any birds any time soon.
‘What are you complaining about?’ Leo asked with a heavy dose of exasperation. ‘You wanted wings; we’ve got wings. And I for one hope that the females are going to be happy with them.’
‘Yeah, but I wanted to fly,’ muttered Dominic sulkily. ‘As for the lionesses, let’s see.’ He trotted over to Sekhmet who had been watching him with interest for a while, even as several others had taken the opportunity to nap for a bit. ‘What do you think of my new wings?’ he asked her with Telepathy.
She eyed him thoughtfully, then came closer, inspecting them with eyes and nose, then batting at them lightly with a paw. Thankfully, she kept her claws sheathed. Finally, she rubbed her chin on them and then rubbed her whole body against Dominic, flicking him with her tail teasingly.
‘Interesting,’ she judged. ‘Soft. Prey now?’ she asked with a mischievous glint in her eyes. Dominic bared his teeth and snarled softly at her, though sent her a feeling of amusement over their connection to reassure her that he was responding to her teasing in kind.
‘Try it, and see how it works out for you,’ he challenged. To his surprise, she actually took the challenge more seriously than he was expecting. Enough to actually leap at him, though her sheathed claws and the gentle bite she got in due to his surprise told him that she was just playing.
Dominic reacted willingly, giving back as good as he got, and they ‘fought’, exchanging blows and bites, tumbling and rolling across the dusty savannah ground. After a few moments, Jenkins joined in, though Fang and Lionel both decided to stay aloof, as did the amesheks. The albuhas looked too nervous to join in either.
When they stopped, a signal in Sekhmet’s body language indicating that she’d had enough, Dominic found that he was feeling a lot more comfortable with his new appendages. The play fighting had helped him actually get a feel as to how they worked with his movements.
They did restrict him slightly: he wasn’t as flexible with the wings pressed to him. And even if he did apparently have the muscular and neural connections necessary to use the wings, using them adeptly at the same time as moving the rest of his body would take work. However, he was pleased to note that he could still roll, could still twist, could still pounce without them getting in the way.
They also offered another part of him which could be attacked, and a lucky bite from Sekhmet had brought him up short and interrupted his movements: the equivalent of having his arm held behind his back hadn’t been pleasant. Still, with practice, he could definitely see them becoming more of an advantage than a liability.
However, there were more changes following that fight with the albuhas than his wings alone, though they were definitely the biggest. Dominic decided that it was worth taking a little bit more time to check out the developments: he didn’t know when the next fight would be.
‘Alright everyone,’ Dominic said through the Pride chat. ‘Let’s just move a little away from the blood, then we’ll rest for a bit longer before continuing to our destination.’ So saying, he collected a few bodies which hadn’t yet been Consumed, then led them over the next hill where he stopped.
Rubbing affectionately against Sekhmet, he lay down, then shifted to reposition his wing so he wasn’t lying on it. She flopped next to him, her head on his flank on top of his wing. A moment later, Jenkins came to join them, lying down behind Dominic and pressing against his back and half-lying on his wing. Interestingly, Lionel and Fang both came closer, though they didn’t dare actually touch him, instead lying a wary body’s length away. The two amesheks lay down together, as did the albuhas. In a short space of time, they were all relaxing.
Comfortable with his Pride, Dominic pulled up the changes to his status screen.
Status of Dominic Martin Cole / Leo
Species: Lion (body) / Human (mind), Two-Souled, Chimera
Level: Evolved Beast Level 22 Tier 2 (Path of Evolution)
Progress to Evolution: 606/615 PP
The first thing he noticed was that he’d got a chunk of Prey Points from somewhere since they’d finished the fight with the albuhas – 50, to be exact.
From the Challenge? he wondered to himself. But I chose to double my Enhancements, not my Prey Points…unless I would have got a hundred instead if I’d chosen that option?
There were a number of other small changes – various of his current Abilities gaining a few percentage points here or there from use. The only really interesting one was Powerful Swipe which had levelled up.
Powerful Swipe (T0) level 4 –> 5 (6% to level 6) – Use stamina to enhance the damage of your swipe. +15% - +110% damage increase for 2-63 stamina per second.
Apart from that, Dominic concentrated on the four main changes. The first was his new Ability.
Airborne (T2) level 2 (0% to level 3) – Carried by the air and wind currents, you are at one with the wind. At least, perhaps one day. Control your weight to decide the influence gravity has on you. +- 0 - 5% weight.
‘Huh, that could be rather useful,’ Dominic commented to Leo. Reducing his weight, that is, the effect that gravity had on him…. Hmm, that had potential.
As for the other changes, interestingly, Feathered Wings was classified under Offensive Abilities. Reading how its main System effect was to increase the damage of attacks from the air, that made sense.
- Feathered Wings level 2 (+10% to strikes from the air)
Keen Nose had apparently been combined with his existing Sinuses, improving them significantly.
- Sinuses level 2 –> 4 +10% –> 30% range; +5% –> 20% intensity
The last one was also under General Abilities, the newest on his list.
- Wide Diet level 2 (current diet: 80 - 100% non-poisonous, non-rotten meat; 0 - 20% non-poisonous, non-rotting plant matter generally edible by other mammals)
It was interesting that it hadn’t been combined with Carnivore Constitution, but since it seemed to be mostly focussing on what he could eat rather than contributing to his health directly, that made sense. On the other hand, Dominic did remember how he had been offered the opportunity to take an enhancement on level up to widen the diet of which he was capable of eating, which surely would have fallen under Carnivore Constitution…. Not having the answers, Dominic had to just shrug and move on.
And move on was exactly what they needed to do now. They had a dungeon to find and beat. Again.
