Chapter 19 - Billy Gets Bun Rushed

After a few more minutes of resting, the group headed out again. Billy brought them directly to a section where the forest opened up into a large meadow. Dozens of rabbits hopped around, playing amidst yellow flowers. Two large trees stood near each other off to one side of the meadow. Billy smirked. The area around the trees was suspiciously empty of life.

One of the rabbits split from its group and took a few hops towards the adventurers. Roland approached, clicking his tongue quickly and extending a blade of grass to the animal. The bunny opened its mouth, slowly revealing a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. Roland yelled as he jumped back, whipping a vial of liquid at the monster.

The vial rotated twice before slamming into the rabbit monster. The glass shattered, drenching the rabbit in liquid. Instantly, it began to melt. It barely had time to screech before it had melted away, motes of light blowing in the wind.

Billy stood there, mouth agape. “Roland! Why didn’t you use that against the elk?”

Before Roland could respond, however, the meadow grew eerily silent. Every rabbit for as far as the eye could see was deathly still, staring directly at the trio.

The party turned and bolted it as fast as they could back into the forest. A tsunami of white and brown fur blobs rushed in after them. Roland pumped his legs furiously, but was soon winded. Billy fared a little better, but his shorter legs worked against him. Rhinus seemed to be in the best condition, despite his heavy armor.

“We need a plan!” Roland gasped, trying to keep up the pace.

“We need a choke point,” Billy yelled. The rabbits were catching up. Truthfully, they had been inching closer even at the party’s full speed.

“This way!” Billy veered to the left, squeezing between trees and scrambling under logs. The other two followed, but barely. Rhinus knocked a few trees over with his hammer, trying to slow the mob. They popped out next to a massive fallen tree. Its trunk, even on its side, rose a good thirty feet in the air. They raced down to the other end of the tree, their stamina bottoming out.

“I can… I can hold them for a bit,” Rhinus wheezed.

The three adventurers waited as the sound of a thousand branches breaking flooded the forest. They had the massive fallen tree to their left and a thick canopy of broken branches above, leaving the right side wide open. The undergrowth in the direction they had come would slow the bunnies a bit, but not much. Each individual rabbit could easily go anywhere the humans could.

As a disorganized hoard, though, they faced a little more trouble. Monstrous rabbits bit and tore at each other, trying to squeeze by one another to reach the humans first. Eventually, they resorted to simply eating their way through the blockade.

As rabbits started leaking through the wall of trees, Rhinus raised his hammer and slammed it down, smashing the ground.

“Sacred Wall of Protection,” he bellowed.

As he did, a ginormous wall of earth shot from the ground, slowing the hoard’s advance even further. The wall glowed with yellow script and, as the little monstrosities tried leaping over it or going around, it flashed a brilliant yellow. Every time, the rabbits would turn around and start savagely attacking the wall, ignoring the three intruders.

“Do you have anything flammable?” Billy looked over at a panting Roland, who nodded eagerly, taking out vial after vial of orange liquid and placing them on the ground.

“Can you make more?” His hopes were dashed as Roland shook his head weakly. He could only make a single one per day, and had already made one that morning. In all, there were six vials of flammable liquid.

Billy motioned for the others to help as he started throwing vials at the wall. They smashed and smeared orange goo everywhere. Then, he lobbed a few over the wall and into the hoard. Rhinus didn’t seem in any condition to help and Roland seemed petrified at the thought.

Roland, finally catching his breath, looked at the boy in horror. “This… This is alchemy-grade dragon’s piss.” At Billy’s snort, he explained further. “We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t blow us up with half of the forest!”

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Billy just shrugged. “It’s the forest or us, Roland!” With that, he lazily pointed his wand over his shoulder at the soaked wall and started walking away. He tugged on Rhinus’s arm, helping him along.

“Drop the wall, Riney. Now come on, boys. Badasses walk away from explosions. ”

Rhinus gratefully released his skill. The wall instantly disappeared, lacking any of the mana that had been keeping it in place. As the hoard burst through, no longer held back, they were doused in the orange liquid that had been smeared all over the wall.

A cone of fire blasted from the wand.

All three adventurers were blasted off their feet as the explosion shook the forest. They hit the ground hard, scrambling to get to their feet. Another explosion threw them right back to the ground.

The massive tree trunk next to them rocked back from the blast, then rolled forwards, threatening to roll onto them. Billy’s eyes watered as he tried helping his team get clear. The tree trunk teetered for a moment, then rolled back again in the valley that its original felling had created. As it rolled forwards again, it escaped its ditch and rumbled forwards, flattening everything in its path.

The three weary adventurers scrambled through the forest, outpacing the rolling tree and getting clear of its path. As it slowly rumbled by, they all looked at each other. The stress of the near-death experience and the spent adrenaline left them feeling hollow. The group burst into laughter, falling to their asses on the mossy forest ground.

Their shared relief was interrupted as they all felt surges of power enter their cores. Billy felt a rush of power as his core almost doubled in size. It was an amazing feeling, leaving him giddy. Neither of them was closing in on D-rank, though every drop counted.

You could grow your core in many ways, but increases from the System always had the fewest drawbacks. Growing your core through repeated item use worked, but it would slowly convert portions of your mana into the mana type of the item used. Elixirs, potions and pills had impurities which left spiritual and medicinal residues, limiting their uses. Cultivation worked, but pretty much locked you into whatever method you chose. An influx from the System, however, was clean. The only catch was that each Gift earned rewards in different ways. Combat almost always resulted in an influx of power, but doing so with your Gift always gave more.

The party cheered as they realized that everyone got a boost to their cores. They chatted as they slowly made their way back to the epicenter of the explosion.

Roland, unsurprisingly, had an alchemy-based Gift. Since receiving it, he had used it to make bank, selling temporary potions and poisons to his local Alchemy Association. The randomness of his concoctions had proven valuable to alchemical researchers. One researcher, in particular, had hired him on a semi-permanent basis, offering him the spatial bag he still carried with him.

A rival alchemist brought his employment to an abrupt end, assassinating Roland’s employer after seeing the man start to rise in prominence. Roland signed up for the expedition that day, fleeing the city for the relative safety of the frontier.

They picked over the blast zone, collecting furs, meat and other loot. Rhinus even picked up a green ability stone. The three of them talked it over and decided to try and trade it in at the outpost for one that suited one of them better, or to sell it and split the profit if none were to be found.

After discussing their mission, they decided that they needed to regroup and try again fresh the next day. Rhinus was still tapped out after holding his wall skill, not having as fast of a mana regen rate as the other two.

They arrived at the outpost to find Montgomery manning the guildhall. Womaning? Personing? Running. The logistics officer was running the guildhall, standing behind a desk. She had two ability stones to offer them in trade for theirs.

The first was an ability stone that was looted from an E-rank venom-spitting spider. It was a sickly green and undoubtedly carried a venom-adjacent power, at the very least.

The second was an ability stone looted from an F-rank human. While those were typically taboo, there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with them, per se. It was a dull gray with perhaps a smidge of purple in the right light.

The party weighed the pros and cons of each. Billy was extremely interested in the gray stone, but knew that they should go with the safer option. Without any real objections, Roland chose the green ability stone and absorbed it. His face scrunched up in a grimace as he absorbed the stone. Billy thought he even saw the man wipe a tear, but was too interested in seeing what the stone would manifest as on Roland’s skin.

On the back of his right hand, Roland now had a half shattered vial with sickly green goo exploding from it. The intact top portion of the vial was stoppered by a cork with a skull stamped onto it. At the other two’s urging, he read his status out loud.

* Transmute: E-rank. Change the properties of liquids. You may expend a large amount of mana to create a vial of a highly volatile substance that you are familiar with (up to a maximum of peak E-grade in potency).

* Diffuse I: Spray a prepared liquid in a cone in front of you.

They congratulated Roland on his new skill, quickly running out of the outpost to test it. It turned out that he could trigger his skill while holding an unstoppered vial in his right hand. The width, range and volume emitted heavily depended on the contents of the vial and the mana expended.

The three adventurers messed around a bit more, though Roland was eager to regain his lost mana. He transmuted potions and poisons until he made enough healing potions to top off the party’s health. Then, he experimented with potions until right before hitting the sack.