Sol spun around instantly, his spear snapping up, the heavy, dark obsidian tip pointed directly at the source of the voice.
His reflexes, newly upgraded by the Layer 2 Dreadwing, were absurdly fast. His body moved faster than conscious thought, one second, he was staring down at the shattered skull of the boar, and in the next fraction of a heartbeat, his body had completely pivoted, lowering his center of gravity into a perfect, flawless combat stance.
The golden essence in his Sun Core flared, ready to detonate.
He expected to see a spirit warrior who maybe had stumbled here, or maybe an assassin from a rival tribe. At worst, he expected so weird speaking beast lurking in the foliage.
But... there was no beast. There was no warrior or assassin rival tribesman.
Sitting casually on a massive, moss-covered petrified boulder about twenty feet away was a girl?
Sol’s eyes narrowed, his newly enhanced senses sweeping over her. Instantly, every single survival instinct he had honed in the Great Orrath started screaming at him in absolute, deafening panic.
She didn’t look like from the Veynar. In fact, she didn’t even look like any human he had ever seen.
She possessed a humanoid shape, and was tall... nearly as tall as Sol... with an elegant, statuesque figure that radiated both grace and raw power.
Mind you after various level ups, his height was considerable, much taller than these already tall primitive humans
Her skin was a flawless, pearlescent lavender that seed to faintly catch and reflect the dim light of the ravine. Her hair was a beautiful river of lavender that fell straight down past her shoulders, moving slightly despite the lack of wind, almost as if it had a life of its own.
But the most striking, alien features were the two elegant, perfectly smooth obsidian horns curving gently back from her temples, and her eyes.
Her eyes were striking... large, almond-shaped, and most importantly... they completely lacked white sclera.
They were pitch black, housing irises that looked like swirling, glowing red-violet nebulas.
A long, slender tail, swished lazily behind her, tapping a slow, rhythmic beat against the boulder.
She wasn’t wearing the crude animal hides or heavy bone armor of the local tribes. She wore a seamless, form-fitting outfit made of an unknown, pitch-black material that seed to actively absorb the light around it, accented with faint, glowing violet lines that pulsed with a strange, otherworldly rhythm.
She was, without a single doubt, the most terrifyingly beautiful creature Sol had ever laid eyes on.
But it wasn’t her looks that made the cold sweat break out across the back of Sol’s neck. It was what his senses were telling him.
He couldn’t feel her.
Normally, his evolved perception could read the ambient essence radiating off any living creature. Everything in the Great Orrath had an essence signature. The trees, the mud, the dead boar at his feet, even the ambient air... it all humd with raw essence.
And his enhanced perception allowed him to read those signatures like an open book.
But when he looked at the girl sitting on the rock, he felt almost nothing. It was like looking into a total, absolute void. There was no essence leaking from her. There was no heartbeat echoing in the quiet ravine. She seems to be there, but not there at the sa ti, as if she existed entirely outside the natural laws of the world.
"Who are you?" Sol demanded, his voice low, rough, and completely devoid of the cocky arrogance he had felt just ten seconds ago.
"Your reaction ti is acceptable," the alien girl said. Her voice was incredibly smooth, carrying a strange, sharp cadence that made the tribal tongue sound like a foreign song. "But the pointy stick is unnecessary. If I wanted to ambush you, I wouldn’t have spoken."
He didn’t lower the spear an inch.
The girl didn’t look threatened. In fact, she looked incredibly amused.
She just sat on the branch, one leg dangling casually, resting her chin in her hand, looking down at him with an expression of profound, detached curiosity.
She tilted her head, her violet eyes dropping from Sol’s face to the massive, ruined carcass of the Stone-Back Boar lying in the muck.
"I have been watching the local peoples for a few cycles now," she said. Her voice was smooth, lodic, and carried a strange, echoing resonance that seed to happen directly inside Sol’s head rather than passing through the air. "Mostly, they just poke at things with sharp sticks, or rely on the crude, borrowed spirits of the local fauna. But you..."
She hopped off the boulder.
She didn’t jump down, nor did she fall down. Gravity simply seed to politely ignore her. She floated down, the tips of her sleek black boots touching the filthy mud without leaving a single ripple or sinking even a milliter into the muck.
"You just walked up to a Layer 3 terrestrial mass and scrambled its brain with pure, unassisted kinetic output," she continued, taking a slow, casual step toward him. "No spell weaving. No elental discharge. Just raw at, bone density, and a highly volatile internal furnace. It is delightfully barbaric."
Sol’s grip on the spear tightened until the wooden shaft creaked. His eyes tracked her movents. She wasn’t moving fast, but the space around her seed to warp slightly with every step she took, compressing the distance in a way that made Sol’s brain hurt.
"I asked you a question," Sol rasped, channeling the tectonic weight of the Great Badger into his boots, anchoring himself to the earth.
"Who the hell are you? And what do you want?" Sol demanded, his voice a low, rough growl. "You’re not from the Veynar tribe. You sure as hell aren’t Zharun or Zerith."
The girl’s lips curved into a small, amused smile. It was a beautiful smile, completely devoid of outright hostility, but it held the quiet arrogance of soone who knew they held the superior hand.
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