Shiv walked through the woods, no longer injured in either his fingers or his leg. 'Must have been thanks to the deity.' He was swinging his stick randomly at vines and other things as he went. Earlier, he had set it on fire and focused on it, telling it not to burn. And it didn't. He now had a glowing, burning stick that wasn't burning, and he was wacking random things with it.
He had a sudden flashback to Blaze doing almost exactly the same thing, and laughed. 'I'm becoming like Blaze, aren't I? Well, as long as I don't start taking after that Shaggy Old Dog, I guess I don't mind.' He whacked a particularly skinny tree, envisioning a sharp sword in his hands, and the stick… transformed. It changed shape until it was sharp and had the same shape, though not the same color, as the sword he had envisioned.
The tree was sliced in half and simultaneously burned.
He stood there, frozen. He'd just been messing around, and now here he stood with a glowing, flaming, stick-sword in his hands.
"Maybe the Brit-Without-The-Accent didn't actually mess up, and actually did help me out." Either way, he didn't think anyone else could do this. "It's time to experiment!" He thought back to three experimenters he'd killed the day before.
"I won't end up like them. I'm not arrogant enough." He reassured himself.
With that, the experiments began. Seeing as how his ultimate goal was to destroy the world, he focused on how he could use his powers to fulfill that goal.
Throughout the day he continued limping along and combining different techniques he came up with. His favorite so far was what he called Lava Lover, and he couldn't wait to try it on live opponents.
His opportunity came much sooner than he ever thought it would. Upon scrambling up a tree to avoid a small herd of deerbucks, he found to his consternation that there was a group of people in the tree just ahead of him. They had their eyes glued to the hideous creatures below them, and some of them were even holding their breath in fear. The forest around them was completely silent. Shiv had learned early on that the deerbucks were the apex predators, and that not even the birds and bugs would make noise when in their presence. Which was how Shiv was always able to avoid them: when the forest went silent, that meant it was time to climb as high as he could with the utmost speed.
Shiv sat on his tree, momentarily frozen. 'I guess I'm not the only cowardly tree-climber' was his only conscious thought as he ducked behind the trunk to keep out of their sight when the frozen spell passed.
The monsters passed out of sight, but the people remained frozen in their tree, staring all around them as the forest slowly came back to life. They looked terrified that a new group of monsters would jump out of hiding and eat them the moment they started climbing down again.
'That is actually very likely, though.' Shiv thought as he climbed a bit higher and closer to them, intent on getting a better look.
Several minutes of tense silence passed on the branch below him, once he'd gotten suitably close enough, till one of the folks, a woman, spoke loudly above the chirping birds and buzzing bugs. "That was too close, Briggs! You said you knew these woods like the back of your hand, but I'm willing to bet you don't even know where we're at."
"Quiet, woman. They might still be near us." A small man hissed at her, his eyes still glued on the ground below.
There were a total of eleven people spread out along the branch, and they all looked tired and worn down. Several of them even nursed strange injuries in the form of metal blobs that looked like they'd been melted onto their skin.
"I still think we could've taken them." The only woman in the group grumbled.
"We're already so hungry it hurts. Yet now you want to go using your magic and make yourself actually starve?" Another of the group, this one with a good portion of his face burned horribly, replied with disgust.
"If your fat mug hadn't burned all the food in the village, we wouldn't even be in this situation." She snapped back.
This reply ticked Burn Face off, and he replied angrily in what was almost a yell, "If I hadn't burned the place down, you'd be dead! It's only because of me that we were even able to get out of that situation alive."
'They don't have strong country accents like most of the people who live here.' Shiv noted. 'What village are they talking about burning down?'
"We should never have been in that situation at all!" The woman replied with venom, and turned to the short man. "What possessed you to take the job from that tomato-growing fatso, anyway? I told you that we never should have become involved with stuff like that. Now we're going to starve to death!"
"You were singing a very different tune when the man flashed that bag of gold at you." The short man replied tiredly. He was clearly at the end of his rope. "Besides, we have all that wheat from the town we burned. All we've got to do is make it to these experimenters and have them make it into bread for us."
'Ah.' Shiv figured out which village they had burned down, as well as who these people were. He also figured out that they needed to die. 'The only question is how…' He decided to stay quiet and watch, seeing if an opening would present itself. He was only one person, and there were eleven of them. The odds were not looking too favorable, but his mind had been made up.
The bandits eventually gathered the courage to climb down from the tree and continue moving slowly through the woods. Shiv climbed down as well, and took his shoes off. Now, his skin was always in contact with the ground, allowing him to manipulate it whenever he wished.
Despite being slowed down by his wounded leg and the necessity to remain even quieter than usual, Shiv was able to keep up with the group, if only barely, as the sun set.
No opportunities presented themselves.
…Until they reached the ruins that replaced the laboratory. Though 'ruins' was a flattering word to use for the scorched hole in the ground. The man with a burned face lit a few branches on fire and passed them around.
Then, all hell broke loose. When the bandits figured out that this was their destination, an argument broke out among several of them, with much yelling, anger, and energetic waving of the torches. Then, they split up into duos with one torch per duo, under the short man, Briggs', direction, and began exploring the woods around the hole.
One duo was headed directly toward Shiv, who was underneath a group of bushes. He manipulated the earth a bit of ways in the woods to make a knocking sound, hoping it would attract their attention.
It did.
The two of them stopped and glanced at the rest of the group going their separate ways, looked at each other, shrugged, and went to investigate the noise.
Shiv followed, crawling on his belly till they were behind a particularly big tree. Then, he resisted the strong urge to test out Lava Lover. 'It's too loud for this situation. I need to be stealthy.' He berated himself.
He stuck his hands into the dirt and concentrated. 'Sometimes, the simplest attacks work best.' The dirt underneath the two men erupted, and two thin spears grew out of the ground with incredible speed at such an angle that the protruding objects only pierced the men's heads.
'Two down, nine to go.' Shiv though, his confidence increasing.
He got up and checked their inventories, finding much of the same stuff he'd found in the bandits' inventory a while back.
With that done, he limped in the direction of the next closest duo, managing to easily stay hidden in the oppressive darkness.
Suddenly, the darkness disappeared, as if the world was listening to Shiv's thoughts, and wanted to make his life difficult. Then, just as soon as the entire world lit up, it became just as dark again. Shiv froze. His night vision was gone, so it seemed to him like every bit of light had been sucked out of the forest.
Ba-BOOM!
The sudden explosion of sound came from above, and just about blew out Shiv's eardrums. He dove to the ground with his hands covering his bleeding ears. His thoughts were of the bombs and grenades of his home planet.
Soon, a quiet hissing began to overwhelm the extreme increase in noise from the forest animals. The hissing quickly turned into a pounding, and soon that pounding was the only thing he could hear.
What he could feel… was rain. Hot, heavy, wet rain. A large portion of it was turning to steam as it came into contact with the ground, lowering visibility by a dramatic amount. The rain that wasn't steam was quickly forming large puddles and turning the earth into thick, slippery mud.
'This world sucks.'