Chapter 143: Struggle For Survival

เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มี.ค. 2569 03:11

Chapter 143: Chapter 143: Struggle For Survival "THE... FFFFUCK!!!" The scream was snatched from Sol’s lips almost as soon as it was born, swallowed whole by the sudden, violent roar of the wind. The breathtaking view... the dying orange pyre of the sun and the colossal, shimmering pale moon... was pulled upward at a sickening speed, as if a celestial curtain had been yanked toward the heavens. The horizon tilted, flipped, and then vanished as he entered the grey-violet maw of the ravine’s mist. The "overdose" in his body, which had felt like liquid lightning just seconds ago, now felt like lead. Gravity didn’t care about how many bird souls he had eaten. It was a cold, impartial judge, and the verdict was a downward acceleration of $9.8m/s^2. The fall felt like it lasted a lifetime, a suspended eternity where the only reality was the whistle of air through his teeth and the grey rock of the cliff face rushing past him like a blur of high-speed static. The sensation of falling didn’t start with fear; it started with a profound sense of irony. "This is it," he thought, a jagged, psycho-edged laugh bubbling in his throat even as he plummeted. "What a way to go. Transmigrated, fucked, beaten, killed, and now I’m the first man in history to kick himself into an early grave." For a moment, he accepted his inevitable demise, he looked at the moon receding into a tiny silver pinprick and thought, "Well, at least I didn’t die a virgin again." Images flashed through his mind, projected onto the canvas of the rushing mist. He thought back to the quiet, intoxicating obedience of Nia, the way her eyes looked when she surrendered. He felt the phantom warmth of Evara’s soft body against his own. He even remembered the forbidden shock of that first handjob by his aunt... memories of skin, heat, and raw sensation. It all passed through his brain in a flash, and then... a cold, sharp realization struck him with all its might. He wasn’t content. There’s no way in hell he could accept this. He wasn’t finished yet. He had just been transmigrated into a world of endless possibilities and untapped power. There were so many more beauties to conquer, so many more "Elites" to humble, and a whole primitive world for him to burn or build as he saw fit. He hadn’t even scratched the surface of this new life, and he was damned if he was going to let it end as a red smudge on a rock. His whole body suddenly jerked, and survival instincts immediately kicked in. He desperately flailed around his body, his fingers clawing at the empty air, but unfortunately, he wasn’t son of some bird, so obviously he couldn’t fly, but he refused to give in. He forced his eyes opened and looked below and through torrent of wind stinging his eyes, he saw saw a massive, hanging curtain of vines, but they weren’t a safety net, and had been ravaged by the fall of that beast before, shredded and dangling like tattered ribbons. But due to the turbulent winds in the gorge, they were lashing against the stones, whipped into a frenzy. Sol twisted his body in mid-air, a violent, coiling motion that made his joints pop. He used the Blue-Neck Strider vitality in his legs, to kick off the air itself... a desperate, frantic movement that gave him just enough lateral momentum to swing his trajectory toward the vines. He hit the first cluster of vines at a speed that should have snapped his arms. "ARGH!" He didn’t conveniently catch them in a heroic grip. He slammed into them, like a bird hitting a window. His fingers clawing desperately for a tiny flicker of survival. The vines were slick with damp moss and covered in tiny, serrated thorns that shredded his clothes instantly. He tried to catch them with his body, the friction burning through his skin, but his weight and momentum were too much. SNAP. The vine gave way. Sol plummeted another thirty feet, the world spinning in a nauseating blur of grey and green, before his flailing hands caught themselves in thicker, gnarled vines. His arms were nearly jerked out of its socket, the pain white-hot and blinding, but he didn’t let go and used the momentum to move towards a dense cluster of vines. SLAM! He slammed right onto the dense cluster of vines, and even though he wasn’t stopping, the snapping vines acting like a series of failing brakes, slowed down his descent, as he clashed through one cluster of vines to another, like a literal pinball in a vertical machine of death. CRACK. He saw the floor of the ravine rushing up... a jagged graveyard of boulders and fallen trees, and even though he had slowed down, falling directly like that would lead to him becoming tomato paste. "Not... like this..." he wheezed, his vision spinning. But his eyes suddenly caught something, just there, in the center of a small clearing of crushed ferns, was a massive, matted-black mound. The beast. It was the body of the beast, he had just helped down below, its massive bulk having carved a literal crater into the damp earth. It was a grotesque, broken mass of fur and bone, but to Sol, it looked like the softest bed in the world. With one final, lung-bursting effort, Sol moved, angling his falling body toward the bear’s massive, fatty stomach. SQUELCH. THUD! With a dull thud, he finally slammed into the beast. Sol felt the air leave his lungs in a single, violent burst, leaving him gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come. He bounced off the bear’s stomach, the creature’s thick fur and layers of fat acting as a literal meat-cushion. For a long time, the only sound was the drip of water from the cliff above and the distant, dying echoes of the wind, whistling through the gorge. He lay there for a long time, staring up at the sliver of moon visible through the mist, the only sound his own ragged, wheezing breath. His vision was swimming in Charcoal-tinted spots. Every inch of his body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder.

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