From South America, Robert went straight to the Gurglock Ocean. He dove underneath the waves and teleported frantically, going through essence like a space rocket went through propellant back in the day. He found that he had neglected his Space affinity so far. He started to lean heavily on that affinity throughout the night. He also forced his mage armor spell to develop to the point it could reach stage 1. He found that it would be his favorite Force spell. But who wouldn't want a personal Force field?
He spared no monsters that came within his detection range. He dealt death wholesale, cycling between drain essence, magic missiles, void lances, spatial distortions, and abusing the blink spell to move past the next group of monsters. The only times he paused was when he sensed a deviant Gurglock. Those could have unexpected powers and he treated them as he treated the contenders in the tournament. With extreme prejudice. After the kill, he checked to see if killing the deviant had triggered the manifestation of a Prime Vestige. So far, no luck.
With each kill or a hundred, the pressure in his star increased. The primal Ether it generated merged with the excess essence and turned into aura, increasing its brightness. Robert was going to either have a surprise or getting extremely disappointed. Would his talent evolve again when he upgraded his star, or would it just ignore and move on without change?
What he couldn't do was to let it devolve but he doubted it would happen. It usually happened only to those who artificially boosted their ascension with artificial means, like alchemical supplements. Robert's growth was entirely organic and he was taking these quests to give him a lot of challenges. He knew from the pressure that he was going in the right direction.
Dross essence gathered in his body from spending too much energy. He dove into the liminal void and cast purge essence several times, forcing this dross to leave his body by either disintegrating it with Void essence or pushing it out along his void veins.
He also found out that the rate essence drawn from the Void Gates of Nirvana depended on his heart rate. Whenever he was excited, nervous, or angry, his void heart filled faster. But it still didn't beat meditation. While his void heart recharged in the liminal void, Robert pushed the free essence from his artificial core into his void heart, to grow it. He was nearing the end of the first stage, with its capacity reaching close to 160%.
When he was full and fully refreshed in spirit and mind, he went back into the fray. Robert went around the planet, killing and killing and killing, leaving entire seas dyed black and red from the gore and blood he left behind.
*
*
He paused his slaughter when he sensed a spatial anomaly. Approaching carefully, he found a passage freestanding in the middle of the ocean. Not a single rock for miles. He reached the passage and checked the other side. He only sensed water. It made sense. Passages had no filter as to what moved to and from through them. Connections between watery realms would eventually reach a pressure equilibrium. Robert marked the location in his mind palace's floating representation of the planet and moved on.
The next strange event happened when he approached the location, he'd killed Carcinodon. The mutagenic combination of Life and Unholy essence was still floating as a cloud in the ocean as cancerous blobs of biomass floated inside. He went around, disintegrating these blobs and freeing the poor monster souls caught in the mutagen. He felt relief that this realm had no turtles. He would loathe to see what this dangerous essence cloud would do to them.
Though his willpower was many times stronger than at the beginning of their expedition into the interspace, Robert felt at his wits' end.
He retreated to his apartment in the Academy campus and sat on his bed. It was time.
He dove into his Ethercosm and admired the growth of his spells. Some of the new ones were ready to take in a concept and go to stage one, while void heart could take its second concept. But that had to take a back seat. It was time for another apotheosis.
Releasing the hold on his star, it went supernova. A piece of it split and became a new star, as the power washed over his soul and into his body and the two prime vestiges.
The orbs appeared once more, and they spoke.
"The Emperor's guests stay only because of his magnanimity."
"Gaze with innocent eyes upon the magic of the world."
Robert trembled. His eyes went to the gates upon which he tossed two stars, an act most of his peers would judge him insane for. This was Gwen's true regret. That she missed the opportunity to evolve her talent multiple times. It begged the question. Should he have waited until he had more stars to sacrifice?
Most likely not. He couldn't allow that much greed taint his heart. It was good enough.
He used the time he had to sleep and recover. He had to start his day of adventuring, or he wouldn't keep his schedule.
*
*
Italy, the foothills of Mt. Etna.
* *
The Sun was about to banish the shadows of the night from the peninsula when Fairy-Robert appeared above the mountain.
His improved eyes saw a massive flow of Fire wisps flowing from the active volcano and descend down the slopes, where trap arrays caught them and channeled the wisps to a gathering facility. When the rift cataclysm wrecked the planet, Mt. Etna awakened with an Ultraplinian or Novarupta eruption. It reached into the high eights in the VEI index, topping the most catastrophic eruptions ever witnessed by mankind. The amount of ejecta and magma boiled the Mediterranean for hundreds of miles and connected Sicily to the Italian Peninsula, turning the boot into a clown's shoe.
Passages to hot realms of all kinds opened in that environment. And one of them was Robert's goal.
The clan of Fire Archs who controlled the region had, surprise, surprise, ties to the old criminal families who controlled the region before the cataclysm. And they were very averse to strangers delving into their passages. This was one of the missions Robert had to undergo in secret.
He dove toward the caldera. There, dozens of floating platforms held metallic bridges in place, connecting the many passages and generating a cooling field that allowed humans to reach them. It was a technology originally designed for the once Ether Rich Puffbloom Islands before the Fire Nation ruined the place. But the scale here was way smaller, making it more affordable. Bridging tens of miles with these platforms in what was basically an essence desert now was unfeasible.
The platforms also generated a shield around the passages, keeping intruders out. They were so reliant on this setup and the inhospitable environment that Robert found no guards patrolling the facility. Robert found the passage he needed, crossed the liminal void and reappeared right next to it, and invaded the realm.
The passage deposited Robert at the foot of another volcano.
The whole realm was a massive volcano, one and a half times the height of Mt Everest but counting from the ocean level and not the nearest mountain. Fifteen kilometers high from base to summit, it had rivers of lava flowing down its base, vanishing at the bottom. What happened to this lava was anyone's guess. The mountain's inclination went from gentle slopes to massive cliffs, from which waterfalls of lava fell freely, reminding Robert of images he saw of a blocky game many people liked to play before the cataclysm.
Fire-affinity monsters prowled everywhere. Ash rained upon the mountain, smoked cloyed the lungs and eyes. Pyroclastic rocks exploded every now and then. And as you climbed higher and higher, the Ether density increased along with the dangers.
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The fairy stopped and studied the mountain. It would suck a lot if he had to climb the volcano using feet and hands. It would suck even more if he didn't have his mage armor shielding him from the smoke. It would suck even more and more if he didn't have his upgraded fairy eyes to see the essence in the monsters' souls through the smoke.
Robert had a second star to fill now. He gazed upon the landbound creatures and passed his judgement. The verdict was a void lance through the brain.
*
*
Like a vengeful dark God, Fairy-Robert circled the volcano, doing the same he did in the ocean but without the water to hinder his movement. He went in a spiral pattern, killing, killing, killing. As he ascended, he found some flocks of firebirds who pelted him with orbs of fire. He thanked the ones harder to dodge with his mage armor, and either flew or blinked out of the path of the ones his prescience foresaw striking him in the near future.
With the "Zoltraak" void lance back on the menu and more essence than he could spend, Robert tried to widen the beam as much as he could. Twenty feet. he fired them at the sky, clearing a cylinder of all ash, smoke, and bird with each casting.
He felt unstoppable. Giddy. Drunk on power, he forgot about the flow of time as he left a dead mountain littered with burning corpses behind his ascent. Robert now fully understood why that entity sacrificed a whole realm for the sake of its ascension. These monsters were weak. Unworthy. He watched as their Ether became his with each kill. Fuel for his next apotheosis.
A full day passed. He intended to make a quick hit and run but forgot about it. His visits to the liminal void became more and more frequent as he splurged on the void lances.
Only when Robert stopped to sleep did his mind came to terms with what he was doing. He immediately threw up and changed back to his human form. He sat and focused on the Jade mind tempering. He could've blamed the upgrade to his eyes. Seeing the power he had earned coming his way was exciting and that, coupled with the birth of his second, second star had him in a happy mood.
With his fairy form's proclivities and aloofness, it became the perfect storm to go into murderhobo mode. He needed to upgrade jade mind and finish his imprint with the highest priority. A weaker mind would've turned into a monster but he wasn't strong enough to stop the process altogether.
If he had a companion with him, it would have grounded him in more than one way. Robert spent the rest of the time he had in the liminal void tempering the jade mind.
*
*
Back to reality and in his fairy form once again, Robert forwent the slaughter to focus on his target. he went straight up, crossing clouds of smoke and miles of mountain, to reach the caldera. There, circling the volcano, he found the realm's boss monster.
A fire drake. Glowing red like the magma below, it was a hundred feet from the snout to the tip of its tail. It had six limbs, two of them wings. His fairy eyes could see the three dots of light shining inside its soul. Wreathed in Fire essence, the monster lazily glided on the updrafts as it gathered in more and more Fire wisps.
Robert focused and aimed. A one-inch-thick beam of Void energy, powered by his two stars connected him to the monster. The beam caused the Fire essence wrapped around the monster to hiss and explode in a burst to envelop and cancel the beam. When the haze and smoke dissipated, all that Robert saw was an angry lizard staring at him.
He tried to cast his debuffs on the monster but the spells fizzled harmlessly against the Fire essence shielding the fire drake. He was just too powerful, Robert assumed.
Changing course and speeding up, the fire drake closed the distance. Opening its snout, it spat a glob of molten magma at sub-sonic speeds. Robert saw the future. That projectile would explode when close to him, causing a massive shockwave and spitting superheated debris in all directions. The pyroclastic bomb would shatter his mage armor and wreck his tiny body.
He blinked as far away as possible, going straight up to make gravity blunt the edge of the explosion. From there, he fired a four-foot-wide void lance, causing the projectile to explode prematurely and then a second beam, to disintegrate any debris that would come his way. This second beam went all the way down and hit the mountain slope, carving a well that slowly filled with magma.
The drake glared up and used his own version of instant-delivery spell. A beam of high-power heat struck a wall of Force Robert placed at an angle; thankful his foresight had predicted this attack too. He flew away, not to the sides but straight away, putting another three walls of Force between the drake and him. The beam of heat shattered the first and two of the latter walls, stopping at the third.
Robert popped to the side of the fourth wall and fired three thin void lances at the monster. Each caused the same reaction, disintegrating some of the Fire essence shielding the drake and detonating another chunk of the energy. But he dealt no damage to the creature.
Angered, the drake spat three pyroclastic bombs straight up, and fired the beam in sequence. Robert saw a vision of the drake's three stars shining in unison as they drew essence from the free-floating mass around the drake as the beam fired, and that no number of walls of Force would stop a three-star heat laser.
Without a way to evade the combined attack, Robert resorted to his primary talent. He moved to a spot half a mile underneath the drake. There, he deployed his fairy mansion and sat on the rooftop in his human form to meditate. He needed a quiet mind and a calm heart to deal with this monster. It was more tenacious than the other three-star creatures he faced and had an enormous amount of essence available, more than any three-star had any right to have.
That must be its talent. The drake could store excess Fire essence in his shield, using it for defense and offense. This was a battle of attrition. Whoever ran out of essence first would lose.
Back to reality, Fairy-Robert gave up on overpowering the monster. He first needed to get rid of that Fire essence shield, then deplete the drake's reserves before he could go for the kill. With his upgraded fairy eyes, he took measure of what the creature had available and kept firing his void lances at the monster, noticing how much each lance took from the shield's stores.
They danced atop the volcano. Robert noticed that the fire drake was taking in more essence from the volcano as it gathered whenever they were between attacks and maneuvered around. But he had no recourse to cut him off from this source of extra Fire essence. It just slowed down his predictions.
Each time Fairy-Robert avoided his three-star heat laser, the drake became angrier and angrier. The rate with which it drained its reserves increased as it frantically attacked, at the cost of precision. The fairy proved impossible to pin down, no matter how much the monster changed its attack patterns. The combination of his small size, superior air maneuverability, the haste spell doubling his personal time, and two teleportation powers, of which one granted Robert a lot of time for tactical analysis, recovery, and repositioning, proved to be an strategic advantage.
Robert's heart ached to dominate and tame such majestic creature. But he was sure he didn't have the Mental bandwidth to control this three-star drake even if he released all of his tame creatures.
The ballet of light and darkness went on for hours. Robert had drained more than fifty stars worth of essence from that shield, according to his calculations using Dinniman's theorems. But the fire shield was faint now. The next void lance he fired singed one of the scales.
The fire drake screeched in outrage. Bright white light came out of its scales as the drake used some sort of Fire spell similar to the ignite muscle some melee-oriented Fire-affinity Archhumans had. The spell overheated the muscles with Fire essence and increased their performance in all aspects, from explosive power, to potency, to the reaction speed. It had a huge drawback of causing some muscle damage if kept on for too long but Robert doubted that whatever the fire drake did would matter.
The advantage he had from his haste spell vanished as the inner magic the fire drake used also doubled its movement and reaction speed. Robert found himself forced to go on the defensive because the drake was now slightly faster than he was. Only judicious uses of the Blink spell and the boost of accelerate thought allowed him to stay a step ahead of the deadly monster.
Robert was the definition of a paper canon. He didn't want to know what one of those Fire-laced claws would do to his tiny fairy body. Or how he would fight this beast without the ability to fly. Perhaps he should've left this bounty for last but he was so overconfident after receiving a talent upgrade that he let his impulses get the better of him.
Regardless. he fired wide void lances to increase the chances of hitting. He had no time to aim. Only the sound of the explosions let him know his spells were connecting to the enemy. Victory was close. The Void Emperor would not be denied.
The fire drake slowed down, getting out of Robert's spatial sense range. Turning around, Robert fired another wide void lance at the monster, striking it in the rear thigh. Baffled, Robert spared a second to analyze the situation.
With its Fire shield gone, the fire drake was returning to the volcano. What a coward! Robert gave chase, firing wide void beans at the monster for psychological effect. The creature still had a full two stars of essence in his stars but didn't want to risk. It was going straight into the lava!
Robert used his main talent. He reappeared on top of the drake, clung to a spine, and rode the creature down. He counted the time in his head. It wouldn't do if his next visit was a short one.
Once forty seconds had passed, giving him more than an hour in the void, he used his talent again, taking the drake along with him. He did the same as with the headmaster, dragging the drake into the true void immediately.
There, he let go, putting some distance between the two. The drake moved sluggishly as the void devoured his essence, staring at Robert with frightened eyes. Robert watched as one of the drake's stars winked out of existence and the second was rapidly dimming. He grabbed the drake once again and pulled him back to the liminal void, dropping it in the air.
The remainder of the drake's soul became Time wisps, which Robert gladly took. The lifeless body floated mid-air, frozen in time.
Robert had to drag the creature down to the volcano surface before he could harvest his prize. Aside from the usual leather, horns, fangs, and claws, he also got a pile of intact Fire-attuned scales, the quest target. Then he went to town and also harvested the drake's heart, brain, eyes, testicles, and firebreath glands. The meat was inedible even with his biomass absorption talent.