Leo ran to the left, uphill, and Hugh to the right, downhill. Both pumping their legs as fast as they could.
“He’s firing his laser!” Leo screamed as the giant, forty-foot-long, flat, armored centipede landed from its previous rearing back and blasted the beam at Hugh.
“I know!” Hugh screamed as he barely got out of the beams attack area, his tail tucked over his back between the wings he always kept folded. The beam of light carved through the forest, blasting small trees in half and burning larger ones till it sailed out into the sky, past the drop of the mountainside where it was too low to hit the trees.
Leo gave a slight frown through his concentration. The blast was nearly on par with Chester’s bolts, although wider—probably less damaging if clipped. But still.
Leo moved into a crouch and under the spiked outer shell of the centipede, then slashed upward with his sword. He did twenty damage, failing to score a critical—this creature was an extremely simple insect made giant and covered in armor—it had a huge resistance to critical hits.
But it had over-extended on the attack and Hugh had gotten around it. He ducked down himself, got his claws under the creature, and exploded outward as hard as he could. The creature went upward, but Hugh wasn’t quite able to flip it going uphill—which would have ended the fight. He did, however, hold it and begin chewing at its underside.
The creature tried to curl around, but it couldn’t quite managed it. Leo did his best to add to the damage—and keep it distracted—but Hugh was the obvious MVP here, with yellowish bug guts pouring down over him and he ripped at the underside, widening the hole he had made.
The creature was clearly very low I.Q. even by animal standards, and the position Hugh had acquired should have ended the fight. But the centipede tried to blast Hugh again by curling under and shooting Hugh from beneath. The blast of light energy fell short, slamming into the sloped ground underneath them all.
The massive explosion that followed threw Leo uphill, doing seventeen damage from the blast radius and subsequent slam into a tree. But Hugh was tossed downhill and kept rolling after the explosion with a yell of “By Merdrek’s nuts…”
The creature fell back to he ground, yellow viscera still falling to the ground, and started toward Leo.
But it was even slower than before, making keeping out of its blast even easier. Leo threw rocks at it with his mind to keep it distracted and rushed around the side again as fast as his legs could carry him. They had already determined that the bugs of this world didn’t adapt to tactics they had seen at all, so he just replicated the earlier tactic against his wounded and slower foe.
The blast missed him by quite a bit, and Leo turned and slashed the mandible and then the eye in two quick strikes, finally getting his critical. The thing reared away from the strike, and Leo slashed its unarmored underside and then leapt away as it came crashing back down.
He dismissed the damage and bleed notifications, backing away but still keeping away from its face. The giant insect was already dead, it just didn’t know it yet—but it might have another Light magic blast in it. His caution proved unnecessary, as after just a moment, the creature began jerking erratically and then, after a few seconds more, collapsed.
Leo whistled at the notification. That thing had been Level Eighteen—it had made him almost fifty percent of level—it would have been closer to two-thirds without his marks and such raising his experience cost. It was also the second one of these bugs they had fought, and he had made Level Seventeen. A year without leveling, and now, three days into this new dimension, he had leveled again.
He quickly picked Telekinesis, Rank IV.
Telekinesis, Rank IV
Spend 3 (4 x.8 = 3.2 round) essence and move a single object, up to 37.9 pounds, up to 30 feet away per occult at speeds up to 65 miles per hour, modified for net damage change, controlling it for 6 seconds. If attacking, does 1-10 base damage. Damage, speed, and weight modified by magical and telekinesis altering abilities. (Current damage 3-32 (1-10 x1.64 (magic) x1.34 (Occult) x 1.2 (affinity) x1.2 occult telekinetic specialty)
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That’s a huge damage increase from the last time I was using these abilities consistently. I also wonder what abilities I can get now that I have Telekinesis IV open. I should probably get the next stage of armor as well…
Leo also put two points into his Toughness again. He was getting bigger, but also more solid, somehow—and he really wanted to be harder to kill. His sixty health became sixty-seven with the increase, and he felt the stretch in his body that told him he’d likely gain another inch or so in height.
Hugh, covered in guts, came climbing back up the hill to stare at Leo. “I accept, you say. Just ‘I’ll do it,’ you say. No thought, no checking… nothing.”
The world they were on—Tsao’Tu it was called—was a one-point-two magic world, which meant that nothing funny was happening with his experience gain.
“’How many companions can I take with me’ is a question you could have asked,” Hugh grumbled, trying to scrape the goop off of him. “Perhaps, even, ‘how far is the challenge?’”
“Did you make a level?” Leo asked, not responding to Hugh’s complaints. Hugh complained a lot, but he was always there for Leo, the adventuring group, and his own family.
Plus, they had already hashed out Leo’s quick acceptance about thirty times of the last two days. Probably more.
Hugh was silent for a bit, then muttered, “Yeah, I’m Level Seventeen. A lot of the way to eighteen.”
“Then why are you complaining?”
Hugh grumbled something unintelligible.
Leo was paying half attention, glancing at the bug. “It’s interesting. I’ve been thinking about this world, and more so, this place they’re sending us to. We’ve been seeing a ton of huge bugs, right?”
“What was that joke you like to make? I remember it like I was right there… because I was?”
Leo chuckled. “Sorry, just building a hypothesis out loud.”
Hugh didn’t say anything, just watching Leo.
Leo stared at the weirdly unchanging scenery. The inside of the city had been beautiful, and while Leo caught occasional flashes of the same beauty out here, it mostly felt like every other thick deciduous forest on a mountain slope Leo had seen in a nature show. The only thing truly unusual about it—that he hadn’t also noticed in the city—was the huge number of bugs he had just been talking about, and their preposterous sizes. Some of the nonmagical ones were as large as great danes, and they were everywhere. Leo had slain one, and determined it was an insect—exoskeleton around a mostly liquid center, not an internal bone in sight.
The magical beasts on this world were mostly bugs that seemed to have ‘gigantism’ as their one method of getting stronger, plus a basic magical attack.
There was clearly a much higher oxygen content in the air, and the air was thicker as well—a higher pressure atmosphere. Leo never got tired, and could keep at his maximum far longer. But the dominant lifeform that wasn’t intelligent was insects—and, so far, he hadn’t seen anything like a eusocial insect, although there were a couple that he thought were pollinators—and many of the trees were more advanced than this world would indicate, just because they flowered and bore fruit, indicating in turn that—
“Leo!” Hugh said, and thumped his tail on the rock. “If you’re going to have these long, we-sit-here-and-do-nothing thoughts, at least share so I’m not bored.”
Leo shook himself from his musings, speaking partially in Middle Averian and partially in English, hoping the tongues ring would translate what he was saying. “Well, I think we’ve come to a world that is very new. As in, our world is far older. Not old like the Crone was old, but old as in millions of years old. The animals here haven’t advanced evolutionarily very far in comparison. I think it matches fairly close to the Carboniferous period of my own world’s long history…”
Hugh snorted. “By Merdrek’s broken brain, Leo, most of the important parts of that were in your native language and the tongues ring tried to give me paragraphs of information to make it make sense. Just give me the easy version.”
“I think most of the animals and magic beasts on this world are really underwhelming for their level.”
Hugh glanced at the Level Eighteen bug they had just crushed. “I mean… maybe? Why do you think that is?”
“It’s hard to explain, but basically, animals abilities advance over generations the same way things like metal working got better. An axe of copper with a least magical effect is weaker than an axe of steel with the same least magical effect, right?”
Hugh nodded, his brow furrowed in comically obvious concentration.
“And human heroes tend to be stronger, because we get more tricks and perks than most—which makes us better on level. These animals are like the opposite—no perks, no weird tricks, only the most basic abilities, and probably a bad build as well. They just got loaded up on magic, basically, but did little with it.”
“Well, that works out for us,” Hugh said. “I mean, I don’t want to go up against an advanced, Level Eighteen mega-bug with the equivalent of a great build. It might kill us.”
“Right, right… but have you considered what this means?” Leo said, his voice becoming more and more excited.
“Hmm?”
Leo waved his hands. “We can easily level here. Very easily for a bit since we’ve encountered two of these Level Eighteen bugs so far. ‘Farm them’ in the parlance of my people.”
Hugh was silent for a bit. “That sounds amazing… but shouldn’t we get the others, first? I mean, I know the winged elf people said that only one person and his chosen companion could go on the quest at a time, but is this whole region restricted? I would want Zun to be able to make levels as well—and I’m sure Neha and Andul and Rez would like that.”
Leo paused. It was a good point, but still… “Let’s at least try and find the bugs as we go. I’m sure we’ll need the levels as we work on this quest.”
Hugh nodded. “Yeah…”
Then he made his eyes stare in different directions. “Huh… I guess a few levels would be helpful, Leo. Since you signed us up to get a gift on a quest without checking, huh. Which turned out to be a raid on dragon lands. You dingus.”