Amanda stopped the bicycle when she noticed that the monsters' growls, grunts, and Awlwlwls became distant. She was angry at herself. Despite her tempering, despite everything, Samson's overprotective protocols demanded she was kept out of harm's way. How would she grow and ascend if she was coddled like that?
She had half a mind to go back and join Robert in the fray but she knew he would prioritize her safety above keeping the passage breakout contained. It was his job. And that made her even more livid. Robert could act as a friend and companion but at the end of the day, he was doing his job.
But Amanda was too conscientious to pin the blame for this on others. She needed to prove to them she was tough enough to take on these challenges. She needed to alter the protocol but Amanda understood that the protocol wouldn't change unless she proved she was tough enough to endure whatever punishment the world could pin on her. Honestly, she was more afraid of a wardrobe malfunction than getting critically hurt.
Cotton and Coal hovered down and landed on her shoulders.
She watched as Robert slaughtered the monsters coming out of the passage. The Void Affinity was such a cheat. She glimpsed briefly at the Netherecho and saw how he could keep up fighting. Dozens upon dozens of Ether streams flowed from the monsters and into him. His essence pool would dip as he cast his most expensive spells and then rise back up from the constant influx. Whenever a monster died, drained of all the Ether in their bodies and souls, another two would be cursed with essence drain. He even placed his spells carefully to not kill too many cursed monsters before they paid off the investment.
She looked back in the real world and didn't see Robert. Back in the Netherecho, she saw the streams of essence moving to a point twenty feet above the ground, a point that moved all the time. She noticed one weakness in his fairy form's invisibility. One could track his position through the Netherecho. Some monsters must've noticed that because they were throwing spears, harpoons, and tridents at that spot in the air.
Suddenly, the Ether streams just shifted and moved to another spot. Robert had teleported, either through using his original talent or a Space spell. The monsters had zero chance of getting him by surprise. His Time abilities would announce any successful attack seconds before it connected. And to top all that, he now had Lady Luck herself on his side. With that new tempering and all.
Watching him fight was like watching a ballet of carnage. Firepower, intelligence, mobility, evasion, and battlefield control. Robert had it all. Amanda felt envious. She pushed that feeling down and out of her soul least it tarnished the precious seed she had there in her heart of hearts. No. She should be proud. Proud of her friend. Proud of the asset she headhunted for Samson.
*
*
An hour had passed and Robert's body burned. Not because the monsters had any Fire attacks, they didn't. But because of the amount of essence, he was handling. Drain essence was almost completely crystallized and ready to advance. The efficiency was the best ever. His essence pool was constantly filling and depleting as he spared not a single mote of Ether. He poured it all on his shield voidlings and his two-star void lances he baptized after an old Japanese anime show.
He would be unconscious if he hadn't trained to increase his essence transfer capability when he enchanted those storage rings with Noah back in the abandoned city. Apparently, he needed to do it more.
Robert allowed his essence to top, wasting a bit of it. There was one experiment he wanted to do since forever but he never had the opportunity. The endless stream of fish-people coming out of the stormy passage granted him that. Flaring his two stars, Robert used ninety percent of his essence capacity casting an empowered shield voidling.
The black sphere had two eyes and was twice as wide as the normal ones. it immediately started to lash out with its tentacles, erasing the heads and hearts of the nearby monsters as if they were pencil drawings on paper. Wherever a tentacle touched matter, the latter vanished, removed from reality. Soon, the area twenty-five feet around the passage was clear of monsters and all who tried to cross the passage died instantly, their bodies carried by the water down the road.
While that shield voidling did its job, Robert cursed the ones remaining on Earth and waited as their very souls were reaped and collected as essence by him. The empowered shield voidling proved more resistant than the normal ones. Despite costing three times as much, its essence-to-matter-disintegrated efficiency was higher. It had already attacked more than four times the amount of bodies it took to exhaust one normal shield voidling and was still going.
Robert let his essence fill again as he used normal void lances to kill the monsters without his curse on them. He pulsed sense live at its maximum range and found more than a handful of monsters far away in the distance, ones who surpassed their instinct to kill the human and instead fled into the wilderness. But compared to the small dam of dead bodies forming at a bend of the road back from where Amanda and he came from, It was okay.
Stolen novel; please report.
But the Earth side of the passage was free of living monsters in its vicinity. The stragglers were filed as someone else's problem. Alone, these fish monsters weren't much of a threat.
He used his talent, went into the liminal void, and returned as human. With his boar spear in hand, he moved to stand side-by-side with the empowered shield voidling. He waited until the shield voidling popped out of existence. Robert cast haste on himself and started to hack and stab at the monsters crossing over. And since his spear was a physical object, he could attack through the passage.
Despite being bigger than other passages, there was only a certain amount of monsters that could cross at once. Disorganized as they were, the monsters' bloodlust worked against them. They pressed and pushed against each other while the ones behind pushed them forward, causing chaos and allowing Robert time to stab at their throats. He found a spot right underneath the fish monsters' toothy maws where he could cut their airways and cause them to suffocate and bleed copious amounts of dark putrid blood. The coughing and hacking monsters went into a panic and tried to flee while holding the cut open, causing even more chaos right in front of the passage.
His muscles started to ache from the exercise. He cycled his lavi flows tempering, healing his muscles and working them out for double gains. Robert's mind was working at more than three times a normal human's mental speed. The combination of haste, thought acceleration, and his mental palace's passive bonus compounded their benefits, multiplicative instead of additive. To Robert, he was swinging the spear in slow motion, giving him time to aim even while frantically stabbing and slashing. The water-infused blade repaired itself by shifting metal along the blade, repairing any nicks and cracks it took from striking at the hard scales.
While Robert exerted his body, he gave his essence channels time to heal. A trickle of biomass moved out of his biomass absorption storage and healed his body with supernatural-quality healing. While his healing spells on others were barely acceptable, Life affinity was great at healing oneself.
His arms and legs felt like lead. But his essence pool was full. After fifteen minutes of holding the line at the passage, Robert felt it was time to switch again. Fifteen minutes equaled one day in the liminal void and he took his ticket out of harm. The world around him froze in a comfortable and familiar way. Robert was a denizen of the void.
He summoned a couch he took from the Puffbloom Islands and slumped on it. His body hurt and since its biological functions were halted, it would ache the whole day. He focused on his lavi flows tempering and reconstruction, using the two abilities to bring the body back to a perfect state. Then he took a nap.
*
*
Back to reality in his fairy form, Robert let the monsters cross the passage, cursing them as they went. Whenever a big monster or a deviant moved through, he would use a void lance to kill them. When he got a good essence influx going, he placed a shield voidling elite (as he decided to call the two-star version) to stop more monsters from crossing over, letting the cursed ones walking on Earth refill his essence pool.
Another hour passed. This proved to be the least exhaustive tactic to keep the passage breakout contained. But the pressure on the other side of the passage lessened. After hundreds of their brethren tried to cross and died, the monsters on the other side became wary. The shield voidling elite currently defending the gate wasn't lashing out all the time. Only when a monster dared set foot outside did a tentacle shoot out of the black orb and punish the creature for its transgression. A minute would pass before another dared to cross the passage – or was pushed through by its peers.
The ridge was coated in gore. The smell was unbearable but Robert had already adapted to it. The dark blood had painted the ridge and both sides of the road in its slick and sickly color. Death wisps flew to and fro because the carnage tainted the Ether in the area.
*
*
Fairy-Robert sensed Amanda coming back. She was walking alongside the bicycle. The puffblooms were on her shoulders and Freddy was inside the basket. He would ride there too if he was moving barefoot.
Invisible, he checked the shield voidling elite's stores of essence and found them satisfactory. He flew to meet her.
"Hey, Amanda!" Robert greeted.
"Hey, little guy," she beamed at the spot his voice came from. "Did you have lots of fun?"
He could sense the sadness in her voice. But it couldn't be helped. Robert had a job to do and that was keeping Amanda safe. He couldn't guarantee she wouldn't get overwhelmed by the monsters or stumble into the range of one of his shield voidlings. The situation was more dangerous than the monkey swarms because Noah wasn't around. He was sure the teacher had a way to tell the odds of a battle. With Noah around, each combat felt like a training exercise as the professor was always available to intervene. Here? It was every Arch for themselves.
His employment directives demanded he keep Amanda safe if he thought she was at risk of getting injured.
Maybe it was something that could be changed but it wasn't up to him to do that. They needed to talk to Samson and let corporate decide. On the slider between keeping Amanda safe and letting her grow, where did they feel comfortable?
But the threat now was much less than at the peak of the passage breakout.
"Amanda, how comfortable are you in keeping the monsters contained now?" He asked. "I'd like to go to the Academy and ask for help."
She nodded at him and smiled. "Give me ten minutes to grow some plants and you can go."
Robert nodded. Amanda went around the passage, planting her poisonous thorny bushes, the grenade-launching prickly pears, her sturdy blood-drinking red bamboo, and some vines that ended in flycatcher mouths the size of a chair. The vines could move as if they were long necks and the biter pods were ready to snatch a tasty snack.
On top of that, Freddy added some illusions to make it seem they had even more plants. It was hard to tell which one was real and which were illusions unless you had some spatial sense like Robert.
"There, All set," Amanda said.
"I'm leaving Cotton and Coal with you to provide backup. They will only attack monsters that come within ten feet of you."
"Sure."
Robert used his talent again. This time, he dove deeper into the void, resurfacing inside the Academy campus moments later.