Sunday. After three days and five fights, everyone got a day off. The sixth and final fight of the winners' bracket would take place the next day, Monday.
And that meant Team Actus had a whole day to explore the Gurglock realm. Or more precisely, the passages connected to the Gurglock realm. Robert took the two by the wrists and dragged them to the true void. He surfed the nothingness until they emerged at the passage at the top of that ridge.
Construction teams from Samson were tearing the landscape apart. The road was moved one mile away from the passage as tectonic talents flattened the land around the ridge and skipped the climb and descent. It also made the buses save around twenty minutes of travel time. Why this hadn't been done before? Costs.
A whole passage facility was being built, with the bulkhead tunnel to keep monsters from spilling out into Earth. A lobby for two-star Archs was also halfway built already, complete with a hotel, gym, repair and crafting facilities, and finally, gathering chambers. Because the passage was in the middle of nowhere, these ancillary facilities were necessary.
The passage guards already knew Robert and Noah. When Amanda appeared with them, They all saluted their boss.
"At ease, gentlemen," She said. "We are going to explore the passage realm."
Another tidbit she was keeping from the general public and her own company was that the realm was a bit bigger than expected. These world-spanning realms came with many strings attached. To prevent any single faction from just gobbling up the world's resources, the Empire set shares that could be negotiated and bought from them.
The thought Robert had when he learned this was that "the house always wins". The place already belonged to Amanda but because it was too big, the Empire would take it away from her and sell it back. At a discount. Other factions interested in snatching a piece of the lovely weather on the other side would need to pay much more than what Samson was willing to fork over. But many paid the price for a small share just to have a presence and watch with envious eyes what the big guys were doing.
Then they ran back home and sold that information for a huge profit. Then there were the assholes who just inflated auction prices.
TL;DR; It was a shitshow of dick-measuring and shit-flinging, with a ton of money used as the medium for those activities. To make sure nobody could be happy, they all made each other's lives miserable.
Now, the realms beyond could be claimed if they were small, contained passages or dungeons. And it would go to Amanda since she was visiting them first. That is if none of them was listed in Noah's big book of passage realms. And if someone else's passage realm was connected to this one... well. Both would try to make each other's lives miserable.
Politics was missing a letter K, Robert decided. It should be spelled Politicks. Poli, the Greek prefix for many, and Ticks, those blood-sucking arachnids. Because it fitted like a glove.
And so, three intrepid explorers crossed the passage. On the other side, Robert instantly took them to the liminal void. It still was slow enough to make them drenched. Amanda extracted the water from their clothes and dropped it on the floor. Team Actus was once again littering the liminal void.
Robert took them to the first passage he mapped. The island was crowded with Gurglocks. Amanda took a shielded floating platform. They set it thirty feet above the passage and fifty feet in front of it. Then they waited.
Upon return to reality, their ears were assaulted by the gurgling sounds of thousands of Gurglocks. Robert found the first weakness of his reckless upgrade to drain essence. He couldn't cast it with friendlies nearby because it could jump at them. Amanda tossed a handful of seeds down. Noah cast a blizzard disaster. And Robert fired a wide void lance. Each Arch released their magic in a different direction.
Robert's magic eradicated a giant cylinder of monster and monster-infested water.
Tridents and harpoons crashed against the platform's shield. The shield only protected the platform itself so the humans on top of it had to dodge, block, or parry the projectiles. And watch out for deviants.
Amanda's seeds sprouted. Giant lily pads appeared over the churning waters and some on land. The lily pads' roots sought out and wrapped around the Gurglocks, draining their lifeforce to grow the lily pad. Once the pads' flowers bloomed, they released a sweet scent that caused the monsters to climb on the lily pads. The surface secreted a powerful digestive acid that started to melt the monsters, feeding the plant even more. The flowers blew up, spreading a shower of seeds that repeated the process all over. By the time the monsters figured out the lily pads were hostile, the new generation was already eating more monsters.
And Noah's blizzard turned half the island into a mini ice continent. The rain froze and fell down as hail. Somehow, this hail was extremely harmful to the monsters, freezing them upon contact as the Ice essence of the blizzard found more water to freeze. Inside the monster's bodies, that was.
Robert's void lance was powerful but it required precision aiming. Firing at a villain with innocent bystanders behind them was a no-no. The beam of Void energy would only stop when it had disintegrated its share of matter. It could very well pierce one person and then go through the ten behind the first. it wasn't limited to people either. It could destroy structures and cause massive damage if the structural integrity of, say, a building was compromised.
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He stared and thought. He really didn't have that many offensive moves. Maybe he should dedicate the day to developing attack spells for his other affinities. The first one to come to mind was to create a membrane of Time essence where time flowed at different rates. On one side, it dilated time. On the other side, it contracted time. Now, what would happen if, for some weird chance, someone was intersecting that membrane? Well, one portion of their bodies would go faster in time, while the other one would go slower.
Imagine a leg attempting to go across this membrane. The lower part of the leg accelerated and moved forward faster than the top part, which was slowed. Bam. Leg severed.
Damn. It couldn't be that easy.
It wasn't.
When Robert tried to make the spell he imagined come true, he couldn't set one side with the different effects of the other. The very space around the membrane started to act weirdly and then exploded. If he had to explain, it was as if the threshold between the two effects had no idea what time frame it should follow. It was like graphing a function that went from y=9 straight along the X axis until x=10 but also went from Y=3 straight across the X axis from x=10 and onward. What was the function's value at exactly x=10? 9 or 3? The world didn't like confusing math, had a migraine, and then blew the thing up, breaking space.
Wait.
Robert cast his prototype spell at a gurglock. The monster's own essence blocked the spell from entering its body so it formed right next to the monster, crumpled. That only accelerated the process. The essence exploded, cracking space around itself, space that coincidentally happened to have a monster right next to it. Big cracks formed in the monster, severely damaging it. The monster died of internal bleeding a minute later. It was a very expensive spell to kill a single monster.
"What was that?" Noah asked. "You created one weird explosion in the air, then you blew up a monster."
"New spell. I was going for a Time divide effect, then found out that causing math paradoxes in time blows up space."
"Makes sense!" Noah said. "Cast more of this spell. You might come onto some insights."
The monster horde was overwhelming Amanda's lily pads. The plants were killed faster than they could reproduce. And through their grunt language, the gurglocks already knew to tear into those green disks before the disks could eat them.
Robert was staggering his casts of the new spell so he could figure out the specifics. One obvious one was that the best place to blow space up was next to the head or the heart. Doh. He also experimented with giving the explosion a direction. Right now, a lot of its energy was wasted breaking space without monster flesh in it. Like the air around the creature.
He tried bending the membrane but that only caused the spell to fizzle.
What worked to give it some direction was to create two membranes. One had a contradictory time speed, the other hovered a bit away from the first one but had the same dilation or contraction as the first one's side that was facing the second membrane. The second membrane stabilized the space on that side, pushing all the explosion into the first side.
But it almost doubled the essence cost and didn't redirect all the explosion's power. Only about seventy-five percent of it. Comparing three-quarters damage for twice the cost to dealing half the damage for the normal cost, the winner was obvious.
Robert shelved that spell for future investigation.
It took them several hours but they finally managed to clear the passage island. What they did was to kill the monsters on the island, then the monsters that came trying to either earn glory or dinner, pick one. Eventually, the gurglocks learned that getting on the island meant death and gave up trying. Then they had to kill the gurglocks on the other side. These were pissed because their sunbathing session was cut short. Or something like that. It wasn't like anyone there understood Gurglock.
*
*
They crossed the passage. The sunny meadow was very beautiful. It had these grassy mounds here and there, perfect for sitting. The scenery made them wish they could set down a picnic, or just lay on the grass and take a nap. Noah stayed behind near the passage to defend it against stray gurglocks who didn't get the memo.
Amanda yawned. Robert felt some pressure on his tower of iron will. He took Amanda's wrist and dragged her back, gesturing to Noah that he should get away as well.
"Mental effect," He shouted over the roaring rain. "That realm causes people to calm down and get sleepy. Wait here, the two of you."
Robert went back and drew his spear. He slashed one of those mounds that looked perfect for sitting and found a half-devoured gurglock inside. He looked at the vegetation and then fired a void lance at the ground in a thirty-degree angle downward. The grass screamed. Robert left that realm.
"Good news," Noah said. "It's not a known realm."
"Bad news. The grass is alive and carnivorous."
"Oh!" Amanda clapped her hands. "Can you get me a sample? I have a containment box here."
It was the same glass case used to keep Prime Vestiges from talking all the time. But the box had enchantments to keep noise and Ether from entering or leaving the box.
Robert went back and cut a patch of grass off of another mound, putting it inside the box.
Noah documented the passage so Amanda could claim it. They went to the next passage.
The scene repeated itself. They killed a lot of gurglocks, more fish-men monsters came onto the island to see what was going on, and the humans killed those and their cousins. It was past lunchtime when they cleared the new passage gate.
The passage realm on the other side seemed to be made out of big stone bricks. It was some sort of underground maze entirely made out of ten by ten by then feet cubes of air and walls. Robert could sense monsters inside the maze.
"This is a dungeon," Noah said. "We need to clear it first before we can claim it."
Amanda seemed happy. Dungeons are realms with quirky rules that have only a single point of entry. They usually have some treasure that can be harvested or obtained after each complete clear. But they can be stronger than what the delvers believed. The first clear is always the worst.
"Should we go in?" Robert asked.
"I think so. We are already here and if we go to clear a third passage, we'd have wasted the whole day. The Ether concentration inside this Dungeon isn't that high and hundreds of gurglocks went inside already so it isn't full of power. Between the two of you and me, we have a pretty good chance of clearing it. If we can't, getting out shouldn't be a problem. And if we cannot clear this Dungeon, then it is more valuable than we can imagine. A Dungeon that can challenge four stars is a very precious resource."
"Because four stars who cannot progress will do anything to reach five," Amanda said.