Early morning, the second day of Summer Vacation. Robert went to Florida. In the heart of the Everglades, a coven of witches controlled a passage. They charged five thousand dollars to delve, paid upfront. Robert entered the lobby and found a seductive woman manning the front desk. Some Archs rested in the lobby, it was a rather common setup.
"Hello, newcomer," the witch greeted him. She wore a purple pointy hat. "I'm Melas, with whom do I have the pleasure to speak with?"
Funny. Melas was Salem spelled backward.
"I'm Robert—"
"KYAAAA!" A soprano voice shrieked. Robert didn't need to look to know a girl was pointing at him and squealing.
"What is going on?" Melas asked.
The delvers went into a heightened state of alertness.
"It's the Imperial Champion!" The girl shouted. "It's him! Him! Robert Blaze!"
Robert returned the kindness with a wry smile. He waved.
"Holy shit, it's him!"
His precognition didn't alert him of an attack but he sensed danger anyway. People started to talk excitedly and surround him.
"Order!" Melas shouted. "Behave like the two-star Archhumans you are, dammit!"
"Can I have an autograph? Please sign my shirt!" The girl said as she took the Minotaur armor shirt from her bag.
"Hey, shout the line! Cease your Aggression!" Someone requested from the back.
"You cease your racket, dammit!" Melas cursed. "Champion, what brings you to our humble passage?"
"Didn't you guys post a commission for the hydra's venom glands?" Robert asked with a smile.
"Robert! Have my babies!" Some guy shouted from the back.
"Shut the fuck up, dammit!" Melas cursed again. "He's having my babies!"
"Sorry, guy in the back. I'm not looking for a relationship right now!" Robert joked. "And you are not my type!" He turned back to Melas. "So, the hydra glands. Did you or did you not post a request?"
"Yes, we did. Entry is five thousand dollars."
"Give the guy a discount!" The guy in the back shouted.
"I can pay," Robert protested.
He paid and crossed the passage, hearing the rumble of feet rushing to follow him. But once on the other side, he went to the liminal void.
*
*
On the other side, Robert found a vast, murky swamp with endless stretches of waterlogged terrain and dense vegetation. The air was thick with a low mist that covered most of the ground, making it hard to tell where one was stepping. He moved away from the passage and waited until he could return to reality.
To him, that was not an issue. Robert used his secondary talent and flew around, searching for the hydra. The reason he was flying in the real world was so he could hunt the mutant alligators, crocodiles, snakes, and spiders. This realm didn't feel like a normal passage realm. It was as if someone had dreamed of a worse Everglades, and locked it in this place.
Robert fired void lances at everything that moved. Whenever possible, he aimed at the heads. He collected the bodies in his storage rings and kept moving.
He located the hydra an hour later. It was a three-star monster with incredible powers of regeneration. If you severed a head, two would grow back in its place. The extra heads shriveled and fell down after a day, though. The hydra was physically impressive and each of its nine heads could spit venom up to a distance of a hundred feet horizontally. The venom could be released as a cloud (with a shorter range) or a jet.
Robert flew up, hovering a hundred feet above the monster. He wished he had a second star but this would need to work. He fired a wide and thin void lance down like a guillotine, striking the "neck" of the hydra, the place where all the heads connected to the body. The spell cleaved down deep furrows to either side but only sunk a few inches into the necks.
The hydra went berserk, most heads pointing up and squirting venom. But the velocity that could propel these jets of venom a hundred feet horizontally would only go so far vertically. The venom didn't reach halfway to Robert.
He shot another and another spell, each carving deeper and deeper in the neck. The hydra howled in pain. Without a target and blinded in pain, the monster started to attack everything around it. Trees were uprooted and tossed far away, and water splashed everywhere. Green venom, thick and sticky, covered almost everything around the hydra. But its regeneration talent didn't kick in because no heads were severed. Robert kept the barrage of black blades.
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Eventually, he cut the necks, seven of them at once. He quickly fired another void lance but failed to prevent the hydra from growing fourteen new heads. With fourteen perfectly healthy necks.
Dismayed, he used his main talent to recover his essence. Back to reality, he wondered if the hydra could regenerate its body. He discharged his void heart on the monster's back, withdrew to the liminal void, and repeated everything from the start. The creature's though hide, high essence levels, and bulky mass made disintegrating its body a tough job. Half an hour later, he managed to carve a hole through the monster.
The answer to his question was that no, it couldn't regenerate its body. But it could surely endure quite the punishment. With the body dead, the heads soon followed. Robert felt a big flood of essence enter his body as his star shone bright with a lot of latent essence. Even though he'd cheesed the encounter, his star still recognized the effort.
Robert moved some heads to the ring he crafted with Noah because it could slow down time. He went back to Earth.
Back at the lobby, Robert turned in the corpses of the monsters he killed along with the hydra heads. That netted him a bit more than two hundred thousand dollars, plus the bounty. Before the delvers could bother him, he vanished.
*
*
Brazil, the Amazon rainforest.
Robert walked into a tribal village with longhouses made of woven grass, reeds, and tree branches. This Yanomami native American tribe survived the rift cataclysm and became a powerful faction in the Amazon. Despite having access to modern Ether technology, they decided to preserve their pre-Colombian customs. The women walked around with their chests bare, and children hanging from baskets.
The man painted their bodies and wore only loincloths. Despite that, Robert could sense powerful Archhumans in the tribe.
"Man from America!" The Cacique, chief of the tribe, called him. He spoke their native language, then Portuguese, and finally, English.
"Greetings. I'm Robert Blaze. I came to hunt the Putafungo Demerda."
The bounty monster was a humongous fungus, called Putafungo Demerda by the natives. Robert had a vague notion that the name was a collection of expletives but said nothing.
The Cacique translated his boast to his tribe. The warriors all started to laugh at him.
"Go ahead, it's your funeral," the Cacique said, pointing to the straw longhouse that housed the passage.
The longhouse had a containment field around the passage, keeping the fungal spores from crossing over to Earth. A plethora of fungi grew around the passage, inside the containment field. Robert put on the Samson SSS+ Hazmat suit, the same Amanda used, and also cast mage armor around himself. Then he had to use an airlock to get into the inside of the shield.
He walked over the passage and found himself in a fungal rainforest. Every creature and plant inside this realm was turned into fungi.
Robert used his secondary talent and turned into a fairy inside the suit. Using telekinesis, he lifted the suit and carried it along as he flew up.
Finding the Putafungo Demerda was easy. The monster towered over the fungal trees by a wide margin. Made of woven strands of fungus, it vaguely resembled a mushroom. Or a dick. The jury was split on that one. It had two green glowing eyes that stared at the chrome suit floating in the air with hatred in its eyes.
Robert reached a certain height, fifty feet higher than the tall monster. There, he set a Force platform and returned to human form inside the suit. He had to adjust it a bit because he got one arm in the wrong spot. Then he took a Fire wand. It was an enchanted item that could absorb raw essence and shoot fire. It wasn't a powerful offensive weapon but it could do the same as a stage zero flamethrower spell.
High above the fungal rainforest, he deployed his mansion. The environmental shield should keep the spores out. Robert opened the human-sized tea table that they asked Yolania to put next to the master bedroom balcony and removed his hazmat suit there.
*
*
This was going to suck. Shielded by his mage armor, Fairy-Robert flew around the rainforest, torching everything in his path. With his artificial satellite core powering it, he could use the wand indefinitely. So he cleared a huge swath of rainforest, killing smaller fungal monsters and a creature the natives called Perneecoohgu, mushroom mosquitoes. He killed thousands of the little bloodsucking fungi bugs. Five of them could drain a man into a bloodless mummy.
And the arson he promoted only attracted more and more monsters. He kept the carnage going, widening the burnt area until the Putafungo Demerda came into it. The boss monster, a three-star Nature monster, was pissed. Robert kited it as he burned more and more forest, expanding the ash clearing. He even directed his Fire wand at the ground, intending to harden it to a point where no life could take root in that clearing.
All of this was necessary because the Putafungo Demerda could regenerate its lost biomass by absorbing nearby fungi. Unless Robert burned every ounce of biomass it could use to heal itself, he would never defeat the creature.
Robert put all of his usual debuffs on the monster, including drain essence and sap stamina. The extra essence went into reinforcing his mage armor. Without it, a single hit from the boss monster would splatter his fairy form like a bug against a windshield.
Once he had a clearing three times as big as the creature, Robert went on the offensive. He flew around the mushroom boss, burning its strands. The highly flammable monster spontaneously caught on fire, surprising Robert. He flew under a massive arm that came to splatter him like a bug. Robert then flew to the shoulder and focused the flames there. Once the arm was burnt to a crisp, it fell next to the creature's feet.
Putafungo Demerda was very deserving of the name's meaning. Because the monster absorbed the non-burnt portions of its arm to regrow a smaller arm. Robert burned the new arm as it formed.
The same thing happened on the other side. but this time, Robert burned the arm by going from the fingers to the shoulder, leaving nothing it could absorb and heal.
Night came in the world outside the passage but Robert kept burning the boss. He also had to burn the critters and monsters brave enough to approach to see what was going on.
With both arms gone, Robert didn't risk burning a leg. He instead went underneath the Putafungo Demerda's cap to cut off the spore sacks hidden between its gills. Once he had enough, He used a wide void lance to carve the cap off. The two halves rejoined most peculiarly. Tendrils from the cap latched onto the stem body and started to consume it to regrow a new stem.
Robert tried to burn these tendrils but Putafungo Demerda just grew new ones. He kept burning the big monster and keeping the smaller ones from feeding it until drain essence emptied the creature's essence pool. From then on, it started to eat into the creature's stars.
That, combined with him thoroughly burning every mycelium he could find. The end of drain essence marked the Putafungo Demerda's demise.
He felt that pressure in his soul again. All the kills he raked in this realm plus the others filled his first (which used to be the third) star to a point of saturation.
It was time to recover some of his power.