Their builds were similar, and Rune didn’t want to go carefully, so he adopted the upgraded juggernaut style, he could also call it Lounae style but it had another more suitable name.
The most brainless, instinctive, and direct style ever, the behemoth style.
Rune’s advantage was his reaction speed and fast decision-making due to his specialty, Lounae’s advantage was her cohesion specialty. He didn’t know exactly what was the effect but till now, anytime he sparred with her, he never successfully breached her armor before she did him in.
When he punched her or anything else really, all his strikes acted like he was striking underwater, and at least half of their potential was lost no matter how perfect they were.
Every time he successfully punched her, she didn’t flinch and just counter-attacked harder, every strike she linked took 2 000 armor, and his only defense was to try and punch her away from him, which he failed of course.
His battle plan was that as long as he canceled the momentum caused by her strikes, she would have to adapt to his rhythm, he couldn’t be pinned to the ground and wouldn’t be.
However, his desire to finish the fight fast was visible, he rarely blocked and focused on the offensive, where he could evade he chose to make a quick side-kick to make an exchange in place of canceling everything.
Nevertheless, a prospect remained a prospect whatever the circumstances and Rune could only limit breakages while being little by little pushed into a corner. The overwhelming offensive, he couldn’t stop, he could struggle but it only accelerated the result.
Lounae style was like entering a quagmire without any other choice but to fight her, and then without knowing it, your legs were already 50 centimeters deep into quicksand.
The reason she even wanted to fight him was that for her, he was a unique opponent who brought a unique situation where she couldn’t push even if she wanted.
She could try and explode the ground underneath Rune’s feet to make him fall, but he predicted everything before it happened and just kicked her face before she started her plan.
The behemoth style that Rune learned from her could be summarized in one point, you can’t kill me so you need to keep me away.
The pure armor regeneration per second was huge and the only way to kill something like that was to enter a very protracted battle where you took less damage than the opponent inflicted.
Serious Rune was an expert at that, and the current behemoth Rune still had his twice slowed down temporality which he abused as much as he could. Against Lounae however, it only bought him some additional minutes.
7 minutes later, his armor disappeared, and with it, its momentum canceling, so Lounae’s following kick sent him flying.
The sparring ended like that. 7 minutes of brutal armor destruction and Rune never letting Lounae have her way.
“Woah! Nice kick Lounae! Pummel his face now!” The regulars at the side continued to encourage further violence.
“Rune is never going to learn like this! Kick his lower stomach! Lower in fact!” This one definitely had other intentions.
The sparring ended the moment one of their respective armor broke, so the two of them stopped attacking, it was Rune’s loss.
Coming back towards Lounae after getting up and recreating his armor, he continued like nothing happened, “Can we retreat now? I promise I’ll even do workouts like this after the event happens.”
‘It’s pretty enjoyable to pummel someone like that, hehehe.'
His inner thoughts remained inside of course.
“You’re the adventurer, you tell me,” was her answer, confusing Rune a little.
“Then let’s run, everyone goes at their maximum speed, the rest will adapt their speed to the slowest… And that’s not me!”
The next moment, Rune departed at 450 meters per second, immediately followed by Lounae and the regulars, no complicated discussion, Lounae was the de facto leader and she decided to implicitly listen to the adventurer’s expertise.
The slowest member ended up being one of the regulars with a speed of 350 meters per second, it impacted their retreat massively, passing from 2 hours per erosion point to 4 hours, but nobody would just leave someone behind like that.
After a week of travels, Rune passed his sense of urgency to the group by telling tales of anomalous events and reading passages from the guide.
2 weeks later, when they were approaching the border of the white zone, Rune was the first to stop running.
The breeze reappeared.
Except this time it wasn’t coming from the north, it was coming from the south. They were going against the current now.
After he established this fact with Lounae's team, the group had no choice but to accept that something was coming.
“Do you know what we can expect Rune?” A regular asked.
“The only thing I’m sure of is that there should be no way of escaping it, just watch the cliff, 5 kilometers down it’s also white, dig a hole, and it’s also white inside, so…” He left the word pending.
“Let’s just keep a tight formation in case it’s too sudden, if only we could have found a pig pack or someone here could detect the stealthed snake we could have made more preparation… But life’s never perfect!”
Everyone moved on, again, except that after some hours, everyone didn’t even need to ask Rune to know that something was coming.
The breeze was becoming stronger.
Slowly but surely, it was gaining in intensity.
40 hours later, when the group reached an erosion rate of 331 armor per second, the breeze couldn’t be called a breeze anymore.
Just by testing the wind speed with a compressed energy orb, the wind speed was beyond 300 meters per second.
“Hehe, that’s completely stupid! The amount of energy needed to make wind accelerate to beyond sound speeds is physically too f*cking huge!” A regular commented by using an energy-infused voice spell.
“That’s tier 4 for you! I wonder what’s coming after that! Hahaha!” Another one replied.
The atmosphere in the group was a little tense, but after Rune and Lounae discussed that they couldn’t do anything more and could just accept what was coming, everyone just started joking about what horrible things could happen.
20 hours later the group had no choice but to stop.
“Ah… Ah… Ah… I can’t advance anymore… So… Strange…” The slowest regular couldn’t resist the wind anymore.
“I already did everything I could, momentum to keep me grounded, step by step for maximum adhesion but there’s nothing else I can do…”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
He wasn’t the only one in this state.
The fiercer the wind, the slower their retreat, even Rune and Lounae couldn’t go beyond 100 meters per second anymore.
“Let’s make a hole in the ground, make it large enough to make sure even an explosion wouldn’t cause us to be buried,” Lounae announced that their team wouldn’t advance anymore.
Rune knew that if the wind kept getting stronger he wouldn’t be able to escape so he assisted in it.
Soon, even the other regulars wouldn’t be able to exert enough strength to escape the growing wind, so there wasn’t really another choice but to make a hole in the ground and be ready for anything.
“I don’t know if this wind can be linked to the flatness of the zone but it’s a possibility, I would really like to see a monolith now, I don’t know how they can possibly resist this wind considering they diminished their momentum efficiency and also…”
Rune shared his thoughts that he always kept to himself, but having nothing else to talk about the group tried to give absurd reasonings.
“Maybe they switched their build to the occasion? I read in a biography that some monsters have multiple builds…”
“Fusing their rocky body to the ground to massively increase their mass?”
“Energy glue? Hehehe,” even Lounae participated.
“Sigh… Your imagination has no limits… Anyway, I have those ropes that came with my expedition goodies, can someone grip it while I take a resistance test with me as the test subject? I want to go fight the wild like a true adventurer!” Rune had something he wanted to try.
“Ai! I’ll keep a tight grip! Go fly like a kite!” A regular came and helped him make a security knot before ending with 2 pieces of rope for double resistance.
Stepping outside, Rune infused his voice with energy before announcing it, “Ok, I’m jumping and opposing no resistance in… 3… 2… 1…”
And he jumped while releasing everything.
Can an energy armor block wind? No, it can’t.
It was the same reasoning as blocking air, natural poison, or heat, a part of it was blocked, sure, but if Rune tried to force his armor to completely block all the wind, it would be like telling it to block an infinite number of punches going at the wind speed, reducing his armor to shred in seconds.
An energy armor was a very specific type of spell, it was a spell used to block damage coming from the living, anything containing energy, living flesh or animated flesh, remains belonging to the physical realm…
An anti-environmental armor was another type that relied on a whole other type of mastery than the energy compression one.
The moment he jumped, the wind acted like a truck and in seconds his speed increased from nothing to 50 meters per second.
“Ohhhh! Come back here little kite!” The rope was suddenly gripped and brought back by the regular, a scrawny-looking human with a good sense of humor.
The rope didn’t break, and even after 5 minutes it held on, so Rune concluded the test and came back to the hole.
20 meters deep for a circle of 30 meters in diameter, he dived in and made all his remaining ropes appear before saying, “If you want to defy the wild like a true man or woman, then secure yourself, competition brings improvement and self-reflection!”
Rune then proceeded to secure the end of his rope to a 5 meters tall rock weighing tons and went outside.
The motivational cliche sentence was made into a quick joke by Lounae and the 5 regulars, but in the end, they all did the same.
“Ah! Rune is really a true adventurer compared to those we saw when we were deployed to all the different advanced camps,” they even thought about doing fictional boot-licking to make fun of the situation.
By now, the wind’s strength was increasing visibly, Lounae deployed a tower similar to Rune’s one, except it was bigger and made a lot more a bip and boop, she reported the current happenings of the white zone with very precise time periods associated.
Nothing less was expected from a rululu.
…
“1 000! It reached 1 000 meters per second! It’s nuts!” A regular who was on all four exclaimed when they passed through this threshold.
Even Rune and Lounae were on all four, adaptation was going very fast with all that was happening, their eyes, for example, would dry the moment they opened their eyelids, so multiple proposals to keep that from happening were tried but their physiology wasn’t adapted to this environment, and the only answer was to create a full rocky mask to cover their sensitive head.
When one of the regulars announced that one of his eardrums just collapsed from the wind, nobody ignored the mask anymore.
Everyone also took off their uniform or in Rune’s case, his special clothing, the wind was literally ripping them apart and keeping them on equaled having them disappear the moment an opening of a millimeter was created.
“With this wind, I could travel to the source of the anomaly so easily… What a disappointment…” Not one to ignore the infinite possibilities, Rune kept having stupid ideas from time to time.
“Didn’t you say you wanted to explore an apocalypse zone in the future?! Such wind should be relatively easy right?!” A little joke which Rune appreciated.
“Can any of you even have the talent for that?! I at least got a path with my cohesion stats specialization already prepared, hahaha!” Proud of his full double anti-environmental specialized cohesion path, Rune kept spreading this fact on their faces.
“Who the hell would have 2 potential specializations in anti-environment! You’re useless! Wait till our leader Lounae makes you taste her combat cohesion and sustain cohesion effects in a specialized build!”
“The jealous ones can only rely on their leader I see! But I have no ego, so I can say it now!” Rune turned his head to face Lounae’s expressionless face.
“Spare me! Please! I’ll call you mistress anytime!” It seemed that the situation made his inner teenager hormone-boosted side appear.
The group’s antics continued till the wind speed increased in a timespan of some hours from 1 000 meters per second to 2 000, and the 2 regulars had to retreat inside the hole. After that, everyone talked much less and focused on resisting the wind or doing strange tests.
Rune tried to advance by crawling, but in a minute he only advanced 10 meters, and even then it was so hard his masteries leveled up.
*Ding* Body Control: Basic Humanoid Body reached Tier 2 Level 58
*Ding* Body Control: Basic Prolonged Body Use reached Tier 2 Level 58
‘That’s some good training, I never really had an opportunity to train crawling on the floor with a wind at more than 2 000 meters per second coming at my face…’
Rune endeavored to train like this for the rest of the time.
When the wind reached 4 000 meters per second, he retreated to the hole, it was increasing so fast that he was sure Lounae would have to retreat in a few dozen minutes top.
And true to his thoughts, the wind reached 5 000 meters per second half an hour later, prompting her to return.
With her also stopping, Rune decided to let some of his thoughts out.
“If… If the wind suddenly stops, The best decision is to immediately escape and run towards the border… At least that’s what I think, all this wind should gather somewhere and create a counter-force... And the more meters between what will be coming and us the better.”
Appearing uncertain at this advice, one of the regulars asked, “Are you trying to tell us that when the wind stops you’ll go no matter what we say?”
Nodding as an answer, Rune made his position clear. Being socially awkward and shy with strangers certainly wouldn’t keep him here.
The wind howling in the background made the situation more creepy than it should be, or even needed to be.
The regulars looked at Lounae, which still acted and answered like in the beginning, “Follow the adventurer’s instinct. What’s the worst that could happen? If every meter we didn’t retreat when we had the occasion represents one health damage, then just because we’re facing the unknown and don’t want to risk it we would die… And I don’t want to die yet.”
A clear partiality towards safety against uncontrollable events showed through what she said.
The following hours were only spent dozing off and looking at the wind speed, which kept increasing till it plateaued at 20 kilometers per second.
For a whole day, the wind remained at this speed, but the event that affected even the underground didn’t appear, so Rune made sure that everyone was rested and ready to run at a moment's notice.
The most unperturbed in their group was Lounae, meditating to increase her fundamental spirit masteries, Rune having nothing to do also did that, not like he could do anything else.
*Ding* Spiritual Fundamental: Perception Control reached Tier 3 Level 34
2 days of active training only gave him that, he was past a third of the way to make this mastery reach tier 4
…
The wind stopped.
The howling vanishing was a give-away and Rune immediately stood up with the 6 others, nobody hesitated, from 20 kilometers per second to nothing? Highly, highly abnormal.
Everyone ran at their maximum speed, with the slowest pushed by peer pressure to accelerate and go further.
“How much time do you guys think a wind at 20 kilometers per second needs to reach the source of the anomaly?” A regular asked this question that sent chills down the spine of Rune and probably the others as well.
Nobody answered and just let this question answer itself, they would know anyway.
“If you want a fact I can tell you one: The event will probably contain a high dose of what's causing the erosion. Do with that what you will,” the same regular acted like Rune, making a hypothesis based on what he considered logic.
Rune was only focused on being ahead, only using sounds and his sphere to detect an anomaly.
And while still in the middle of nowhere, at an erosion rate of 325, the event started.