Questionably Terminal Velocity

It felt like his entire respiratory system was on fire, and his face was likely to join it at any moment. John tried to think about his next move while he recovered, but his body could not spare the resources necessary for complex thought. All he could do was wait- wait and breathe.

It was well into twilight by the time John was able to do something beyond **** down oxygen. His chest was still heaving and he was still dripping sweat, but he was able to sit up and consider his situation. Even if it took a few minutes, John’s energy was returning faster than expected, just like after his first skirmish. No amount of athletic **** any of his gym teachers had put him through was ever able to push John to the limits he’d just endured; if they had, they would have needed to carry John out on a stretcher. His powers, namely Endurance, made an incredible difference. He just wished he had something to drink.

Note to self: keep a bottle of water in your inventory. Also, raise Endurance.

With his inventory in mind, John pulled out the one item stored inside that he thought might help and Observed it.

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Gamer Treat
Item - Restorative
A scrumptious snack for good boys. Restores health and stamina.
Recovers ~10hp
-

“Well shit, this thing is actually worth a damn. Thanks, Goddess.”

John popped the treat into his mouth and was assaulted by a flavor that was anything but scrumptious. It was a vaguely meaty, grainy yet mushy sort of biscuit with an almost fishy aftertaste. With effort, John **** it down. The effect was immediate: he felt a coolness wash over him followed by a sudden burst of energy. The treat, disgusting as it had been, was like a nap in cookie form. John’s already accelerated recovery completed in an instant, heart rate and all. He was still sore enough to feel the residual burn in his muscles but not enough to be bothered by it. Even his thirst had been taken care of.

With the most pressing issue taken care of, John was able to take in his surroundings properly. He had climbed all the way to the top of the canyon and now sat a stone’s throw from the cliff’s edge. The land all around was flat and featureless save for the oversized wooden pitons holding taut the canopies that shaded the valley below. They were secured with thick, coarse rope that wound repeatedly around the anchors like moorings on a pier. Each canopy had three or four of these bindings on either side of the canyon, spaced at random intervals. Overall, it didn’t seem like the construction had very much structural integrity, but little of what the Kobolds built did.

Finally standing, John walked to the precipice and looked down. He had to shake off a wave of vertigo before he could fully take in just how high up he was, some distance fully beyond his ability to estimate. The tents below were small enough that he couldn’t make out any details, all but one. As John had hoped, a large, hexagonal tent was positioned on the side of the camp he could not see previously. There was a wide berth between it and the surrounding tents and the interior gave off a soft, orange glow. If the chief was anywhere, it was there.

So then… how do I get down?

The ladder was obviously not an option; provided John could move the rock out of place, he would have to deal with the tide of enraged Kobolds that would release. There were no other similar openings nearby as far as John could tell, which was probably for the best. Any convenient way down would also mean a convenient way up, something his pursuers would have taken advantage of by now. That left the only other feature around, the canopies. If any of them were to fall from one end they would almost certainly reach the canyon floor below, even without considering the unspooled length of rope that kept them up.

He had time. John could cut the ropes off each anchor on this side of the canyon, unwind them, and tie them together to make a long enough line to climb down quickly and (relatively) safely. For all his failures in P.E., John had always done well at the rope climb. Whether it was due to some natural aptitude or his overall lankiness, he did not know. Either way, he was pretty sure he still remembered a few knots from his parents’ ill-fated and short-lived attempt at making him a Boy Scout, enough at least to make a secure line. Maybe.

I should probably look this up, just in case.

John retrieved his cellphone and pulled up his browser only to realize that he had no reception. Of course, special equipment was required to access mundane networks while within a barrier; John knew that somewhere inside his head, nestled with the rest of the knowledge he absorbed from the book. Even so, he was so used to having the vast knowledge of the internet available at all times that it hadn’t come to mind. John sighed and put the phone away. He would make do with what he remembered.

The knots tied to the massive leather patchwork were as chaotic as the canopy itself and tied too tight for John to bother figuring out. Fortunately, he was equipped with a universal knot remover. The bronze knife made short work of the first tether and the loose end succumbed to the power of gravity. It fell slower than John expected, almost like a blanket caught in a light breeze... if the blanket weighed several hundred pounds and was a few football fields long. Maybe at that scale the drag was great enough to compensate for the thing’s mass? That made sense to him.

John was always better at Biology than Physics.

Science aside, John repeated the process on the wooden anchor and unspooled the rope. Thankfully, it stored in his inventory like any other item despite its length, apparently 100 feet if his inventory screen wasn’t just rounding it even. He wasn’t sure how much he’d need, but it was a good start and there was no shortage of material available. The only issue was the lack of light, solved easily enough by holding his phone in his mouth as he worked. It was effective but kind of gross.

It was when John had just finished cutting off the second of the three ropes that he noticed something was wrong. He began to hear a series of scraping and clicking noises from below with increasing frequency. John took his phone in hand and peered over the edge, but even with the phone’s screen he couldn’t see far enough to notice anything out of the ordinary. The sounds persisted; a quick switch over to the flashlight app shed enough light to reveal the source, startling John nearly as much as the Kobold his light landed on. It was one of several Black Claw warriors scaling the cliff face with nothing but their claws, only a few meters below. He remembered seeing them crawl along the canyon walls earlier but still hadn’t expected them to climb the entire height of the canyon so quickly! There must have been an alternate route that exited somewhere partway up.

The corner of the gargantuan sun shade fell like the first as John backpedaled to get out of view of his renewed pursuit. The thought of taking his time flew out the window. Even if he managed to unwind the second rope, it would only leave him with 200 feet worth, nowhere near enough to make it to the bottom, and that was assuming he was able to tie the two ends together. Shattering his plan further was the fact that, assuming he miraculously anchored and threw out a line that reached the canyon bottom, John would have to fend off Kobolds the entire way down. They were dumb but not so dumb that they wouldn’t realize they could just cut his rope and be done with the invading human.

His outlook grew more dim as John snapped his head around and took in his surroundings one more time. He was properly fucked if it came to blows on this terrain, flat and nearly devoid of features. There was nowhere to hide and he had no tricks to pull, he would be surrounded almost instantly and no amount of Gamer regeneration would be able to save him. He was completely out of good ideas.

So it was time to try some bad ones.

John raced to the last remaining edge of the canopy, completely taken by the same panic he had experienced down in the caves. With their element of surprise blown, the Kobolds doubled their pace and began to clamber over the edge, several at a time. They had spread to cover a wide area and were closing in fast, weapons drawn. Two awaited him where the overloaded rope met leather. It was starting to fray under the stress of supporting the canopy alone; it wouldn’t last long, and that suited John just fine.

He swung his spear wildly and actually managed to connect with his rightmost opponent, staggering it. The second took the opportunity to sink its sickle into John’s side. The blade sliced through the leather and bit into his ribs, eliciting a cry of pain from the Gamer.

-8 hp

The wound was a sharp line of shock to his system. John had never felt anything like it before, even compared to the pain from his clawed up arms earlier that day. The way it felt to be sliced open was a red hot agony that made every breath a labored cross between a groan and a shout. It only took a small portion of his hp but, God, did it hurt!

Nevertheless, John endured. He leapt past his enemies and onto the folded line of leather beyond, doing his best to ignore the several hundred foot drop below. The Kobolds spun around, confused, in time to see John equip his dagger, reach behind himself, and cut the canopy loose.

He wished he could have belted out a snappy one-liner as he fell out of range of the Black Claws’ weapons, something witty to punctuate how well he had outsmarted them. Instead, John screamed at the top of his lungs and clutched the leather tighter than he did Moira during their **** defying ride from school. As far as bad ideas went, this ranked as pretty terrible, but at least immediate **** on impact would hurt less than being eaten alive.

John realized he was not yet dead after a few seconds of clenching his eyes shut. He opened them to find he was falling drastically slower than expected. That is not to say that he was not falling quickly, only that he was not falling like one of the many rocks he had dropped today. The canopy was billowing at its mid-point, descending only as fast as the air below allowed. While John’s end was falling considerably faster, the center drifted down at a rate that looked almost survivable. Committed as John was to not dying, he began to work his way towards the middle.

Climbing the falling canopy wasn’t too hard at first; it had plenty of imperfections and ragged stitching for John to use as handholds. Unexpectedly, it was the more level section he encountered further along that proved tricky. He and the giant, backwards parachute were both in freefall and John weighed so little in comparison that he barely exerted enough **** to affect the surface at all. It undulated freely from the escaping air below, which made finding his grip hard and maintaining it harder.

“Fine!” he grunted. “If you don’t want to give me something to hold on to, I’ll make my own!”

John equipped a knife in a reverse grip, punched a hole in the surface near his handhold, gripped the handle tight, and repeated the process with his other hand. It was clumsy at first but effective all the same. He fell into a rhythm and slowly stabbed his way to (relative) safety.

And then he waited. John found sitting around with a stomach full of butterflies, a heart full of adrenaline, and nothing to do a profoundly strange state of affairs. The only outlet his nervous energy had was to contemplate the variety of ways he would probably die once his dumbass plan finished. There was a good old reliable splat, but he could also wind up impaled on one of the many tent poles below him. There was a chance that part of his body would get caught on something and kill him via **** whiplash and, if he was very lucky, his fall might be broken by the wood of a fire pit so he could experience severe internal trauma and burning to **** simultaneously! A two for one, what a bargain!

John groaned at his untamed pessimism and tried to focus on the task at hand. He had to cut a little hole to see below himself and through it saw that his ride was soon coming to an end. With one end still tethered back at the top of the canyon, the slope of the falling patchwork was starting to increase, as was the speed of his descent. It wouldn’t be long before he was in full swing towards the opposite wall and en route to die against it rather than the floor. It was time to engage the second part of his plan. John plunged his bronze dagger through the material with both hands and let gravity do the rest of the work. The blade sliced a gash through the canopy as he was pulled down, back towards the end he had first landed on. With a little luck, and maybe some divine intervention, he hoped it would slow his dismount enough to survive.

Some might say the result was a natural consequence of John’s plan working exactly as intended. John, however, would never take credit for what was, in his mind, a horrible sequence of events that somehow worked out in the end. Either way, he did not die.

-18 hp
16 damage, crushing
15 damage, crushing
13 damage, crushing
7 damage, crushing

After plummeting for a moment, John struck the large tent just off from the center. The canvas, or hide, or leather, or whatever it was, tore under the ****, and he crashed onto a pile of bodies below. It hurt, there were several spiny edges and likely a horn or two poking into his side, but he was alive. Not only alive, but intact, without so much as a broken pinky toe.

His groans mixed with those of the Kobolds below him as everyone involved struggled to right themselves. He got to his feet and found himself face to face with a tall and svelte Black Claw that wore a mixed expression of shock and offense.

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Lazakall
Level 6 Kobold Champion
<Black Claw Chief>
The strongest of the Black Claw, she leads through right of conquest and promiscuity both.
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John propped himself up and cleared his throat.

“Hello there!”