After leaving Caroline rolling on the ground laughing at him, Robert went to the Gurglock passage.
He was very close to igniting his third star and he felt a need to do it now. It might be the mental impressions of his previous life or his precognitive abilities warning him but he had the feeling that if he didn't advance today, bad things would happen.
His advancement was unparalleled. What took years of regular delving for most, he accomplished in less than a year. It was all due to his wholesale massacre of the Gurglocks. Inspired by the entity who destroyed the entirety of the Gravity Slime Caverns, he was doing a close approximation in that realm. Though he tried to spare any particular region from depopulation. Not to mention all the powerful Archhumans he killed and fought against. All of those challenges and deadly fights contributed to the growth of his star.
But while the ascension from one star to two was automatic, each successive star required a great feat as a catalyst for the ascension. Those same Archs who took years to grow their second star were the same ones who found a bottleneck and stopped at two stars ninety-nine percent. That last percentile point would evade them forever exactly because they took the slow and safe path. It was the same for every Archhuman. Grow comfortable in your laurels and you'll stagnate.
As he appeared in the lobby, he took in the smell of new furniture and shiny surfaces. The staff on site all saluted him. After their show of affection at the tournament gala, the rumors of them dating only gained strength. Robert found he didn't care.
But the hub was coming together nicely. Amanda invested heavily into this hub, hoping to attract two and three-star powerhouses to delve into the dangerous seas. It was all a show, though. The passages were too far away for normal travel, the weather was crap, and the monsters stubbornly refused to come close to the surface, for some unknown reason.
While some Water Archs and those with adequate talents or powers could dive and survive in the abyssal depths, the realm still needed to prove itself profitable to attract such explorers. Right now, Amanda didn't want to spend the millions of dollars to fund an expedition instead. So, the big building, passage containment, and delving hub were just a bit show of strength. When finished, the Samson logo atop the facility would be seen easily from almost anywhere on the Imperial Academy campus. And perhaps that alone would be enough to keep the facility running.
But with Robert here, everything changed. He could access any of the seventy-two passages in this realm in the blink of an eye. The Minotaur Dungeon refreshed every four days, respawning the monsters and treasure. While it was slow for a Dungeon, it was better than nothing. The potions it produced were valuable enough to be worth their time.
Robert crossed the passage. The facility on the other side, a fortress to withstand Gurglock attacks that weren't happening anymore, was finished. He walked down the corridors, through open bulkheads meant to seal the path on either side and to keep Earth secure, and reached the outside.
He talked a little with the security guards posted at the wall towers, then used his main talent and went to the other side of the planet. There, he found an area that had the most virgin ocean surrounding it. Virgin as in he'd never killed anything nearby.
Robert used his secondary talent to become a small and fast fish. Diving down into the ocean, he swam around, searching for a big monster.
After half an hour of exploration, a pack of gurglocks approached to try and make Robert their dinner. He replied with carefully aimed void lances, killing three gurglocks. The others scattered in panic. All life and monsters avoided the places where his spells carved holes in the ocean.
He thought it was weird. But he kept going. Deeper and deeper, searching for signs of potent lifeforces.
He found what he wanted after two hours of exploration. He felt it was partially a waste of time but it couldn't be helped. The water behaved as a solid in the liminal void, restricting his movement. And going to the near void to move through the water made it impossible to sense beings in the reality dimension.
But now he had a lock on what he believed was a three or four-star monster.
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Robert looked at the creature swimming underneath him and couldn't believe it. It was a hundred-foot-long shark, whose body seemed to be covered in tumors and welts. As he sensed its lifeforce, he noticed that more than 80% of the shark's body was tumors. Yet somehow, the tumors weren't killing the creature. If anything, it was empowering it.
He decided to call the big shark Carcinodon. A portmanteau of the Latin word for crab (cancer) and megalodon, the ancient giant sharks of fuck-it's-a-lot-of million years ago.
He found the tumor shark's brain and fired a surprise Zoltraak void lance. It cleaved a few inches into the monster's skin and shed a lot of blood and meat debris into the water. The dense essence in the monster kept the attack from doing further damage.
In hindsight, it only made Carcinodon go into a frenzy. The cancerous boneless fish created cavitation bubbles as it shoved the water with its fins to align with Robert and rush forward in a mad dash. Its maw opened to reveal dozens of rows with hundreds of crooked serrated teeth each. Life, Unholy, and some unknown essence swirled in Carcinodon's gullet. The stage four prehistoric shark was on the hunt.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Robert fired three more void lances at its open mouth, hoping to score deeper wounds through the inside. It seemed like the shark ate the spells with no effect other than making it even angrier. He cast haste on himself and slow on the monster, then fled. Swimming for his life Robert instead aimed wider beams at the creature's fins. A fish without fins was both the fish and the barrel, easy to shoot at and kill.
Carcinodon did something and the waters around it started to become turbid. His danger sense shone like the rays of the sun under a brat's magnifying glass on the metaphorical ant that he was. The mix of Life and Unholy essence in these waters was foreboding and dangerous.
Robert drew deep into his Essence stores and sent two-star void lances at the monster, one after another. Each spell stripped a layer of the monster's flesh, starting with the snout. Weak and low on fuel, he used his primary talent to refuel in the deep void. Returning to the same spot, he kept the barrage of spells going.
Despite the Time spells giving Robert a huge advantage, Carcinodon used something that allowed it to move ridiculously fast through the water. It was as if the liquid's friction and resistance vanished. Carcinodon approached and chomped down on Robert. His response was to fire a two-star void punch from his tail fins.
And yet, the teeth ripped into Robert's fish tail, sending a wave of pain. Worse yet, the flesh started to bloat and tumors spread. He used purge essence and his own Life essence to regain control of his own physiology. Not wanting to waste more time, he shapeshifted into another species of fish. Healthy once again, Robert fled.
Hurt by the void punch, Carcinodon stopped and thrashed, sending ripples and waves of pressure along with that nasty essence combo all around it. Robert used the opportunity to slap the monster with an upgraded drain essence. He canceled the spell in the next moment as the sickening essence he stole invaded his body. He felt it trying to corrupt his cells and make him develop cancer. He purged the foreign essence with the spell of the same name. Next, he tried mind blackout but the spell didn't take hold. It just momentarily stunned Carcinodon at a huge Essence cost.
He noticed that the monster slowly healed its wounds as more cancerous mass grew over them, making the already grotesque monster even more hideous. Robert kept firing his void lances, thinned to a quarter of an inch wide to increase potency and penetration power. He needed to keep the pressure and keep the monster wounded to outdo its regeneration. The normal spells were way more fuel-efficient since the artificial satellite core was a 4% discount on any spell, whether it cost 16% essence or 32%.
Carcinodon picked up Robert's presence and came straight at him. Robert fled, leaving behind a wall of force parallel to the shark's path. With any hope... Yes! The shark either ignored or didn't sense the plane of Force that was sideways in front of it. Carcinodon slammed into the edge of the wall, his own momentum betraying it as the front of the shark split in two. With only reinforced cartilage to protect its body, the creature was teared in two up to its mid-section.
Robert cheered, then looked behind him and almost drowned in horror. The two halves of Carcinodon were regenerating with the wall of force in the middle. Without the ability to weld both halves together, Carcinodon was doing like the hydras from Greek mythology who would grow two heads every time one was severed. Cycling jade mind, he focused and looked at the monster carefully. Inside the regrowing heads, he found the brains, exposed. He used thought acceleration and aimed.
The two-star void lance struck the brain hemisphere and vaporized most of it. The left side of the head went inert. Readjusting his position, Robert fired another beam at the right half. He missed the brain but struck the nerve stem going down into the body, paralyzing the monster. A dive into the deep void and a full essence pool later, he caught the right hemisphere, leaving the monster with a diagnosis of cerebral death.
But the lifeforce inside Carcinodon would not relent. Tumors started to grow and bloat the ancient shark, making it quickly lose its shape and become a humongous blob of flesh. The blob started to pulsate as if breathing, sucking in clear water and breathing out tainted water. The cloud of essence-infused water only grew.
It reached Robert and he reacted by fleeing into the liminal void. Trapped by the immovable water around him, he had no recourse but to slip into the near void and move away. He returned to reality a quarter of a mile away.
Robert started to fire void lance one after another into the monster, trying to extinguish its lifeforce and kill it once and for all. A fourth dive into the deep void made him dizzy as he found his dross essence concentration too high. He cast purge essence to cleanse his body. He realized that Carcinodon was using some of its limited brain power to keep the tumors contained. Without a conscious mind, the cancer started to grow without restraints.
The mix of Life and Unholy essences in the tainted water spread faster than normal. Robert watched as entire schools of fish mutated and grew enough tumors to become deformed balls of flesh. And anyone swimming at a normal fish's speed had no hope of escaping the cursed ocean.
Seeing as nothing else in his arsenal would work and loathe to touch the creature, Robert did the only thing he had left. He cast drain essence on the monster, fully knowing he wouldn't get any useful essence for himself. Worse, he had to use purge essence periodically to cleanse him of the contaminated Ether the monster was made of. He also used sap stamina for whatever good it made.
Hours passed. Carcinodon was now a blob of tumors the size of a football stadium. All life, whether fish or monster, avoided the area. The cloud of cancer-inducing waters stretched for two miles. Robert no longer had the range to cast his spells on the monster, instead relying on his satellite to keep purging his body of the contaminated essence his drain essence was still taking from the monster. It seemed like the monster's stores of essence were inexhaustible.
Then, a massive suction started to draw all water into a single point, in the middle of the contaminated water cloud. Robert tried to swim away but his fish form was too weak to fight against the currents. he locked himself in a resilient sphere, anchored to space itself. He applied raw Void essence to erase the water, then reverted to his fairy form inside the empty bubble.
Robert had to keep reinforcing his resilient sphere with more essence to fight the enormous water pressure and the currents. The planet's Coriolis forces created a whirlpool all the way from the surface, drawing air down and creating a funnel a mile deep into the ocean.
His drain essence and sap stamina spells ended on the other side. He felt his second star bloom with raw Aura, slowly ticking that precious last percentile point.
Then, whatever was sucking in a cubic kilometer of water filled itself and exploded. The shockwave smashed the resilient sphere like it didn't exist. Only Robert's foresight saved him as he used his primary talent and escaped into the liminal void.
It was almost a copy of what happened in the Gravity Slime Caverns. The shockwave moved at a snail's pace through the liminal void, meaning it was many times faster than the speed of sound in the real world. It pushed the water away, revealing the stormy skies above. Robert flew back to the surface. The pressure in his soul was increasing.
He was ready to ascend.