Skill-Eater: Prison World Saga-Chapter 152: Steal
Edge’s chains went surging out of his wrists like a pair of angry vipers. They crossed the open air in the blink of an eye and plunged into the gaping wound the behemoth had carved into the padamas’s body. Since the lizard was on the verge of death and still half paralyzed by intimidating roar, it wasn’t in any shape to resist the intrusion when the living links reached its core.
He found himself standing inside an immense cavern, lit up by glowing mushrooms the size of office buildings. Sprawling networks of crystals jutted out from the ceiling, glittering against the dark stone like stars studding the night sky. There was an underground river running through the middle, blanketed by a thick coating of dark green moss.
Wherever the padamas was from, it was unlike anything that Edge had ever seen, although it didn’t feel wrong in the way that the blightlings’ cores had. Regardless of the details, he didn’t have time to appreciate the view. Even with the outside world slowed down to a crawl, the lizard was going to die at any moment. And he had learned from what he’d sensed during his battle with Warren that being inside a core when its wielder died would probably kill him too.
He didn’t panic. It just meant that he had to act fast. There were five skills living inside the lizard’s core, including the cloak of invisibility that he’d had his heart on for days. He couldn’t see it until it brushed against him by chance—a sensation like feathers running across his skin. In that moment, he was sure it was rare. A perfect selection to fill his last empty skill slot.
Vibrating with greed despite his treacherous predicament, Edge willed his chains to claim the rare skill and drag it out of lizard’s core. But then something strange happened. The animated links flat out refused to take the power for their own.
He was deeply confused. He would normally have had to fight tooth and nail to stop his chains from going for the rarest skill available. But on this occasion, Skill-Eater simply didn’t want it.
Some beasts had skills that weren’t suited for human use, but Edge had the sense that it wasn’t the problem this time. He tried again, but the result was the same—a flat-out refusal to claim cloak of invisibility, no matter how strongly he insisted. Shit. I don’t have time to figure this out. I’ll have to trust that my core knows what it’s doing and pick something else instead.
With the rare skill out of the running, his choices were down to two skills that he was certain were high-ranked uncommons.
The first took the appearance of a thick mantle of fur. It looked comfortable and warm, like a beast’s version of a heavy winter coat. Edge was slowly gaining the ability to sense what a skill did, even without getting a taste. He had the impression that it offered considerable protection against the cold, or possibly temperature change in general. It would be useful to have at some point or another, but it wasn’t critical, so he quickly moved on to his other option.
The second skill looked like a tail covered in thick black spines. It was the one that let the lizard fire off its tail spikes like javelins, creating a powerful ranged attack. This must be what it used to take down the turret at the first farm we passed.
He could tell that if he claimed the skill, it would let him fire his fingernails instead. If he were to rank it up high enough, the power might one day become a decent, if somewhat gruesome, ranged attack—something that he was sorely lacking.
He didn’t have time to ponder his options, so Edge decided to go for the first skill. He doubted that ranking up the other one would be a wise investment. Not when he could get a better attack that would be effective from rank-one and put the experience into his other skills instead.
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Since the fur wasn’t dangerous or highly mobile, his chains were able to capture it easily. They wrapped tight around the coat and then yanked it out of the lizard’s core. The instant that Edge snapped back into his own skin, he shadow stepped and began moving away from the behemoth as fast as he could run.
A heartbeat after the world turned to mist, the behemoth’s jaws closed around the lizard’s head—popping its skull from its spine like a grape plucked from the vine. Meanwhile, his chains tossed the padamas’s skill into his mouth. While it was distinctly unfun to chew up a mouthful of fur, it wasn’t hard to eat. The flavor, on the other hand, was quite pleasant, although Edge didn’t have time to enjoy it at his leisure.
The skill tasted like a cool breeze on a warm day. A hot fire on a cold night. A bath that was the perfect temperature to relax and unwind. As soon as he swallowed, nearly choaking on the fur on the way down, a message from the System appeared.
You have Extracted the skill: Regulate temperature [passive] (uncommon, rank 3).
Would you like to slot regulate temperature now?
As Edge had been hoping, the skill would protect him from temperature change in general, not just insulate him against the cold. Regulate temperature was certain to come in handy, since biomes with higher concentrations of magicytes frequently featured extreme weather conditions. Combined with repel water, he now had significant protection from the elements.
The instant that his new skill snapped into its socket, his mind returned to his body, which was streaking away from the behemoth in the opposite direction of the crew. He turned off shadow step to conserve mana, sprinting like a madman for the breach in the fence.
While he ran, his Guide formed a menu in front of his face that was easy to see through, displaying a message that he absorbed at a glance.
You have accumulated sufficient experience to cycle-up your core. Your new cycle is [12].
You have three attribute points awaiting allocation.
A feral satisfaction went coursing through his body on reading those words. As he’d been hoping, the damage from [Extraction] had been enough to finish the lizard off. On top of pillaging a new skill, Edge had just stolen the kill from the behemoth—granting him the experience from the padamas’s death, along with the rest of his team.
It made him wonder if beasts relied on experience to cycle-up and evolve too. It was a question that he learned the answer to much sooner than he expected. Because that was when a furious roar broke over the clearing, tinged with the rage of an apex predator denied its prey.
The high-rank skill froze him again, but he shifted into shadows to counter the effect—allowing him to move once more. The behemoth was pissed. In addition to having a huge chunk of experience snatched from its jaws at the last possible second, its dominance had been challenged. The first part of his plan had panned out. Now, Edge just needed to make sure that the big bastard knew that he was responsible for the theft.
He couldn’t remain in shadow form if he wanted the beast to chase him. Instead, he turned off the skill and offered the hulking dinosaur a one finger salute with his left hand. Meanwhile, he chucked a flashbang at its head with his right, before leaping through the fence and away from the farm.
He looked over his shoulder after the device detonated. To say that he was relieved to see the furious giant racing for him like an avatar of destruction would be a monumental overstatement. But he was glad that it was coming for him instead of the rest of the crew.
While he was running low on mana, he knew that the behemoth was too. It couldn’t afford to keep roaring to slow him down. The magicytes were too thin here for its reservoir to recover quickly. Besides, Edge had already shaken off the skill’s effect enough times that the beast had to know that it wasn’t going to work.
Instead, it was going to chase him down the old-fashioned way—relying on its size and overwhelming advantage in attributes to close the distance. The immense predator let out a scream saturated with the promise of death, then started barreling toward him like a bladed battleship.
Ok, that worked. Edge kept on sprinting while drawing on every point of Speed that he had. Now I just need to survive my success.
