With a sickening crack, Lament’s tip broke through the beast’s skull and continued on into the brain shielded beneath. The monster squirmed and squealed as the final vestiges of its life left its eyes, and sunset oozed from its many wounds, clumping its fur and reeking strongly of iron. As the Alpha wriggled its final time before falling limp, Brock sighed.

Another dead end. The beast was incapable of speech. Hell, it seemed to be barely intelligent at all. It was like talking to a brick that had been dropped before it became the wall.

Trying to brush away the coating of blood that covered his front and failing, Brock dismounted from the mongooses bony back and stepped back onto the sands, wincing from his many wounds. Claw marks adorned his body and beneath the torn fabric of his clothing, one could even see deep puncture wounds from the beast’s deadly fangs. Fortunately, none were all that bad.

It’s… difficult without Augments or Techniques. Around him, other, smaller mongooses lay dismembered and still, their blood spurting out and seeping into the sands of the same colour.

Unlike Shamal, these creatures had no special gimmick aside from being fast and were mostly just super fucking annoying to kill. The Alpha itself, Alsharq, sat at a respectable level 81, while its minions all sat at a similar level to the previous Alpha. From the way the levels were scaling, Brock held fear that the boss of this Source was going to be an E-Grade.

Blood the colour of oil dripped from Brock’s nose, and he wiped it away. He was used to it by now.

So far, he had killed two of four Alphas, leaving his hopes to fall upon the final two remaining. As he witnessed his chance at life slipping away death by death, Brock felt stress begin to heat his face and hasten his breath. He did his best to calm himself, but it was still there, weighing on him.

“Good try buddy.” Brock spared one last glance for the Alphas corpse lying before him, before he continued on in his journey.

He had kind of figured out that Alsharq was the equivalent of East, which led him to believe that West might be the most powerful moniker in all Sources, not just his own. At least, from what he’d seen here, Shamal – or North – was weaker than Alsharq. He did wonder why that was but didn’t care enough to pursue the thought.

As he rolled his shoulders and listened in on the sound of his feet crunching sand underneath, Brock idly recalled the golden mist that he’d received after killing each Alpha back in the jungle city. He hadn’t seen any such phenomenon here, nor had he received any sort of quest, much to his surprise.

…Was it a special case back a few months ago? He frowned. Does that mean the System was trying to keep me alive? Huh. It did a terrible job.

The ensuing walk through the orange region was fairly… well, boring. It wasn’t until Brock saw a new colour brewing on the horizon that he finally felt something other than boredom, and he sighed in relief. There was a startlingly small amount of other monsters in the current region, and Brock had a feeling it was because of the mongooses hunting everything around.

If what he’d read on Google still applied, they were rather territorial.

Despite that, however, Brock wasn’t too keen on sprinting the rest of the distance, his skin sticky with sweat and back warmed by the hot air, even with the temperature control his Augment still managed to afford him. It wasn’t travelling through his paths, so there was no issue. He’d tried to up the temperature enough to create flames, but he couldn’t alter the degrees high enough for the air to combust.

Constitution had allowed him to ignore the woes of his varied environments to a startling degree as of late, but there was still nothing worse than being hot. The fact that the sun and its heat was now magically effective didn’t help either. Must be a hole in the System’s magic ozone layer or some shit.

Instead, in an attempt to take his mind off both uncomfortable factors, he closed his eyes and turned his attention inwards. A ghostly form representing himself appeared in his mind, populated by overlapping networks of pathways and a core of power within its chest. Idly, Brock zoned his attention in on his pathways.

They were, as he expected, still in tatters. Although, to his joy, they seemed to be beginning to heal up somewhat. He couldn’t see nor perceive the energy that was preventing their regeneration, but he had to believe that it had begun to dissipate and allowed for some regeneration.

What did sour his mood, however, was that with how slowly they seemed to be healing, it’d be a few months, maybe more, before they were good to go again.

Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Brock sighed. The howl of wind responded.

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Slowly, his attention ran along his pathways, until finally ending up overlooking the centre of his power. His Ascendancy beat powerfully, sending waves of healing energies through his paths with each throb. It was surrounded by a positively radiant aura of crimson energy, a few sizes bigger than the last time he’d checked it.

One level from the camel, plus another one from the mongooses were the culprits for that.

He spared a moment to check on the other faucets of his power, namely his Augments and Technique nodes, but they were doing fine and had remained entirely unchanged. As Brock retreated back to the real world, he felt himself becoming giddy.

He’d heard out and about that the next level one gained a Technique at was 60, from which he was only a single level from reaching. Most probably, he’d achieve the threshold after the next Alpha, especially considering that the mongooses had pushed him well through to the peak 59. As his feet finally stepped onto blue sands, he wondered what kinds of Technique he’d be able to choose.

Hopefully, it was one he could actually us-

“Gagh!”

Brock choked on his next breath as his foot hit something solid in the sand and tripped him. A hand stopped him from faceplanting into the grains of blue, and he eased himself back onto his feet. Confused, he scanned his eyes over the sand, finding nothing.

“What?”

Breathing out, he knelt down and plunged his hand into the sand, feeling a hard surface only an inch below, hidden. He gave a triumphant grin, and tugged at it, finding his Strength to be adequate enough to pull the item free without the help of Oppressive Might. Brock stumbled backwards as a large stone tablet smacked onto the sands, leaving a small divot behind in its wake.

It’s… a blank stone tablet?

Brock flipped it over.

Etched into the stone surface was a worn mural, some parts rubbed away to obscurity, while others were still perfectly observable. It depicted a horde of misshapen creatures, some humanoid, others not, converging upon a single symbol that hung in the sky. For the most part, the symbol was worn away, but from what Brock could see, it seemed to be a mechanical looking eye of sorts.

His first thought was that it represented the System.

Various alien hieroglyphs ran along the edges of the tablet, but they remained unreadable to Brock, even with some of them in relatively good condition. Whatever they were meant to say, the System either couldn’t translate it, or it didn’t want him to know their contents.

The whole thing reminded him of the other stone tablet he’d found in the Source where his adventure had all begun. That one had shown a race of aliens worshipping the sky as the ground they knelt upon crumbled. Hmmm.

While both were clearly somewhat hidden stone tablets from some age long past, they were quite different in the stories they depicted. Brock’s eyes looked over the mural, but no matter what he gazed at, his found his gaze always coming back to the horde of creatures.

He didn’t know where, but… he swore he’d seen them before. Somewhere. It was a feeling deep in his gut. Brock racked his brain for even the slightest clue as to where, but he came up empty every time.

“Weird…” Brock muttered.

It was with great effort that he tore his eyes from the tablet and placed them back onto the desert ahead. He didn’t have time to waste pondering on ancient secrets and hidden truths. He stored the item in his ring for later, idly noting that his storage was beginning to get a bit cluttered, and got back to walking.

Those Alphas weren’t going to interrogate themselves after all.

**

“Are you… fucking joking…?”

Brock stood amidst a field of desolation, empty of corpses save for one. Blue sands caressed his booted feet and his eyes had fallen upon a single limp form, his expression displaying how utterly dumbfounded he was. Lament was clutched tightly within his hand, its blade a gleaming crimson and dotted with splotches of azure blood.

Ahead of him lay a monstrous cobra, its hood patterned with varying colours that seemed iridescent in the sunlight to Brock’s eyes. Two of its ivory fangs rested at the top of its throat, the remaining lengths of its body seemingly castrated by them. A mixture of blood and venom dribbled out from the savage wound and onto the sand.

Far beneath him, Brock could sense the auras of a two dozen other cobras, unmoving. Hiding. They’d done so since the monster had killed itself.

…And this is why blue isn’t my favourite colour.

It had taken only a few hours since entering the blue region before he’d found Janub, The Wise One, the reptile bathing amongst its pack in the warmth of a hovering fireball, a lack of sunlight in the face of the canopy’s shade requiring them to improvise magically. It was impressive, to say the least.

In fact, the sight had made Brock rejoice. Blue was known to be the ‘intelligent’ colour, at least from what he’d seen from the other blue Alpha and the other creatures that resided in the blue region. If any being would be able to tell him what he needed to know, it’d be Janub, he’d known that.

So, when the beast had exchanged blows with him once, before killing itself, he was rather shocked.

At the height of 94, the snake had had more than a chance to fight him, especially considering Brock’s current handicaps. Hell, he was sure he might have even lost the fight and have been forced to run for his life. Even his fight with the mongoose was a brutally pitched one, as it was a hell of an angry beast.

But no. Janub was attacked once, realised that he was more powerful than he looked, and stole his potential exp by killing itself, not willing to take the chance of furthering another’s power. The definition of a spiteful fucking troll.

He had no idea what thought process would lead a being to that action, but it had reached it, nonetheless. Brock glanced at the 59 in his status screen with longing. Fucking hell.

As for the other cobras, they had quickly fled underground using some sort of earth manipulation the moment their Alpha had croaked it. Sighing with frustration, Brock moved over and gave the corpse a kick, just to be sure. It rolled stiffly and showed no reaction.

Yeah. It’s dead. Brock ran his hand over his stubble, “Fuck.”

That only left one more Alpha, and hopefully, it knew how to speak. Because if it didn’t…

He was fucked.