CHAPTER 267 – EFFICIENT KILLING
Tom understood he was being dragged into a True Dream, but he was physically wrecked. No matter what the nature of the content was there would be no waking up straight afterward to shout warnings. If it was about Vidja, she was by herself.
After the six or seven such dreams in quick succession, he recognised immediately that he was once more experiencing a moment in the insect’s champion’s life.
It stood over the scout who had given the instructions to try to fool Tom’s precognition.
Fury flooded through it, making its antennae’s quiver.
“You screwed up.”
The scout cowered by tucking its legs down and dipping its head so the mandibles were not visible. “Our method of randomly reversing direction did not work. They predicted our actions and adjusted which way they were running. Try as we might, we were not getting closer.”
“Because your half-baked idea failed.”
“I warned you that we might not stop the precognition. We had to change our approach. Take a risk and we knew we were doing a loop of zones, but how the geography of these zones worked there were zones that could be a shortcut.”
“You said this could let us catch them.”
“I said if they were cleared like the others, we would catch them. I never guaranteed anything.”
“You failed. The quest is still active. We’re done with this layer. They were raots and they’ve escaped us now. That’s on you.”
“I warned you that was a risk—”
“You warned me! No, you had a simple job to do, and you failed.”
“It was a gamble. How was I supposed to know that the zone would be like this.”
“You’ve put all our lives at risk. This may take over three days to crack.”
“I’m confident that I can help solve the puzzles. With my help, it will be two days tops.”
A surge of blood lust filled the champion. “And pray, why would I trust you when you got outsmarted by a raot?”
“I did not get outsmarted.” The scout protested. “They were beyond our ability to capture.”
“How dare you! They were no better than raots.” Fury exploded through the champion and the scout visibly lowered itself. “Your instructions were at fault.”
It knew that wasn’t the case, but there was a need to show dominance. The others would have noted the failure of a simple hunt. It didn’t want them to get ideas.
“I did all I could…”
It blurred forward. It’s mandibles closing on the scout’s throat even while its frontal arms tore the carapace away from the rest of its body. The scout died in seconds, and it shoved its mouth into its brain cavity and sucked out the juices.
Not as good as the raot blood, it thought in annoyance, but better than nothing. ”You failed me.” It declared for the listeners. “After this zone is cleared, we rush to the centre. We have a duty to perform.”
The dream broke apart, and Tom sighed mentally in relief. Vidja had survived. The immediate threat had been averted even if the existential one of the dragon remained.
Endorphins flooded through him and if anyone was watching him, they would have seen his body relax and the stress edges in his face fade away. He fell into more pleasant dreams. These instead of dealing with him killing other humans or people he knew dying, they revolved around him defeating the dragon in a blaze of glory. After which they were showered in rewards that made the ten million experience they had earned, to that point feel like an insignificant entrée.
He awoke snuggled into the bedding with the blanket wrapped over him while the sounds of magic explosions, grunts of efforts and the calm voice of his friends encouraging each other reached his ears. He was in a Zen state and it took a couple of minutes before he realised he was listening to intense combat. There was no rush to react. They clearly had everything under control. Tom assessed himself. The edge of hysteria that his sleep exhaustion had imparted was not so apparent. Physically, he was better, but his chest was hollow.
Jingyi! Tom howled the name in his head. In the horror and haste of trying to protect Vidja’s team, he hadn’t given himself the chance to grieve. He had liked the man even while he had feverishly disagreed with his decision not to accompany them into the trial. The poor man, to have suffered through the tutorial, grown in Existentia and then to have been ended so casually by bad luck. He had resisted peer group pressure and taken the safe route, only to discover that it was anything but. A freak occurrence, a new tunnel being created into the space he was calling home. A threat he had to run from into a trial that was supposed to give him a chance.
Instead, he had run into the insects.
Tom could feel the water in his eyes. It was difficult to accept Jingyi was dead, he was the guy who had survived in the underground despite the monsters in the area being far higher ranked than he was. A survivor until he wasn’t.
The scout had not been a semi acquaintance like those who had been murdered. He guessed Gita was in a similar category, but she had been more Everlyn’s friend than his own. Nor was he Sven who had been tortured by his own psychological demons and whose death had not been a surprise as a result. This was a real friend of his, a proper companion who had been destroyed by powers beyond his control.
The external forces delivering the death blow was what was getting to Tom. When it was other humans doing the killing, it had not hit him that hard. This was different. It illustrated how deadly Existentia was, how despite being cautious and trying to make safe decisions it could still crush you in an instant.
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He and everyone else here were way out of their depths. Compared to the true powerhouses out there they were all nothing. He suspected against ancient native supremacies even the dragon was a dust of mote.
Any of them could die at any moment no matter how impeccable their instincts were. At the end of the day, there were power gaps they couldn’t cross and there were no guardrails to protect them here. A single monster of the sapient type could sneeze at the wrong instant and accidentally destroy them.
Tom flicked the blanket off his face. He could wallow in a feeling of hopelessness or face the world out there and do what he could to guarantee their survival.
Cold air greeted him and a dull, angry red sky. There were clouds up there that added streaks of grey and texture to that otherwise broken red, but it was not a colour that evoked anything but dread in humans. To him it looked demonic. Only to him, Tom knew that there were sapients out there that would see this sky and think it was like home.
With a sigh, he unclipped himself, rose to his feet and assessed the battle. Everlyn was next to him not participating. She was relaxed as she watched the others fight.
They were engaging what had to be the fornaca, ugly monsters the size of a medium-sized horse just with a lot more arms. They were apparently weak. The piles of fresh corpses attested to that. Further afield, other mounds of bodies were evidence his group had shifted positions three times before this after the numbers they had slaughtered became too much.
Toni waved her hands and the creature she was aiming at almost disintegrated into multiple pieces. They were apparently ridiculously vulnerable to air attacks.
“You’re awake and not screaming at us.” Everlyn said finally. “Good news I assume?”
“Yes, they got themselves locked into the puzzle zone. We shouldn’t see them until the end.”
Everlyn laughed at hearing that. “The one we wanted to trick them into. That’s funny. I hope they get caught and when the zone collapses on them that it puts them through the worse pain they’ve ever faced.”
He glanced at her and smiled sadly. Her eyes were slightly red. “So do I.” Tom agreed. Both of them knew it was extremely unlikely. The insects, unfortunately, were too high a rank for a zone out here to trap them.
“Almost worth spending fate to see if we can eliminate them there.”
Tom whistled in appreciation at that suggestion. “That would be…” he stopped himself from getting caught in emotions and he thought about it carefully. If the insects had zero fate, it might work, but that was not the case. They would have some, and if his team was attempting to jinx them at a distance, their contributions would be diluted. He chose his response carefully. “That would be futile.”
“Really? You had me convinced that fate can do anything…”
“Hey!”
She laughed.
“Maybe if we put enough into it.”
She laughed harder at that. “I wish.”
“How long was I out for?”
“A day. Well, a day and a half if we’re being accurate since you last stirred. As far as I can tell, this zone doesn’t have a day-night cycle, just that.” She nodded at the sky. “Continuous foreboding light.”
Tom did the calculations. They only had a day to satisfy the quest. He went to take a step forward to help, but Everlyn grabbed him.
“Don’t stress about it. The zone kill quest is easy. We’ll finish it without problems. The only remote wrinkle we’re facing is finding the healers.”
“When you claim the quest’s easy, does that mean it’s finished already.”
Everlyn shook her head. “No, but in twelve hours, give or take two it will be done. Maybe ten,” she corrected after a moment of thought. “We’re making good time.”
Tom looked around more carefully. The fight was going ridiculously well. The monsters seem to be susceptible to both Keikain’s and Toni’s magic types because the air blades and earth spikes were tearing them to shreds.
Everlyn saw him regarding the air mage curiously. “Exactly. They’re extremely vulnerable to air, same to earth, but not to quite the same extent. Harry’s capitalising on that and has created the ritual equivalents of remote turrets.” She pointed at rituals that have been scribbled after the side. They would glow with a magic, as they concentrated their power for fifteen second and then shoot out an absolutely devastating attack. If the monsters were smarter, it wouldn’t have worked, as an intelligent enemy would have sent someone to run through the rituals. That would probably have been sufficient to disrupt the carefully crafted lines and generate too much instability for them to continue to function.
But the dumb monsters ignored the threat, so every fifteen seconds from each ritual a devastating blast of energy was released. “Those air blasts are a mix of air blades. They shouldn’t be combat effective against a rank sixteen. On a human, they would have left a graze and a bruise, but nothing more. Against these awful looking things, it’s like they’re being hit with bazooka.”
Rahmat grabbed a spear checked its end and then used his thrower and launched it almost two hundred metres.
Boom!
The blast of noise and the spray of dirt generated was significant. “That’s a big explosion.”
“We’ve invested in hundreds and you’ve been sleeping through them for hours. Most of them landing a fair bit closer than that.”
“I feel I’ve slipped so much in Existentia. After the tutorial, I couldn’t imagine being that unresponsive to environment stimuli.”
“You’ve adjusted well Tom. We’re all different people now versus what we were on the first day under the dome. Humans have always won by banding together and relying on each other. It’s how we conquered earth and how we’ll forge a place for us here.”
“Why so many exploding spears. Seems like a costly option.”
“Harry’s idea and a good one. It speeds things up. We set up, let Harry put down some rituals and then draw nearby monsters to us using the loud explosion. When one lands everything within eighty metres is aggroed and the fornaca’s are perceptive and smart enough that they chase the cause of the boom back to us. When we’ve eliminated them from an area, we move on. It’s surprisingly efficient.”
“And you don’t feel the need to scout.”
She shook her head. “There’s no need. It’s a one type of monster zone and with this technique advanced knowledge of their positioning is not required.”
“Fair enough.”
“I do have something I want to talk to you about.” Everlyn said cautiously.
“What?” Tom asked suddenly feeling suspicious.
“Not that…” she grumped. “Yes, I know I overreacted. Gita’s death really…” she shook her head and wiped her eyes. “I think my grief got too much for me and caused me to blame you when I shouldn’t of.”
“Is that an apology?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, it is Tom. I screwed up. Happy?”
“I guess. The pressure this competition puts us all under is ridiculous isn’t it?”
“We’ll do what we have to. But what I want to talk about is you know that tier five dual daggers of rot.”
Tom remembered that very well. The stress he had been under to make sure it didn’t scratch him. “Of course. It was a nasty weapon.”
“No one’s offering anything reasonable, and Thor doesn’t think it is sensible to drop the price any further. One of the ideas floated was instead of selling it we should install it into your golem. It’ll give it some nasty melee abilities.”
“Only against flesh and blood.”
“Yes, and no. It’s still tier five. Even if it can’t use a special ability, it remains sharp and nearly indestructible against the enemies we’re fighting. Plus, most of the monsters we face are flesh and blood. That rot ability will get a workout.”
“I don’t know if the rot is fast enough acting to make it worthwhile incorporating it.” Tom observed thoughtfully. “It’s not a challenge to incorporate it in the golem. All I have to do is adjust the spell form slightly, but as always, there’s a chance of friendly stabs. Might be better not to risk it.”
“And how many friendly fire incidences has your golem had so far?”
“With this weapon, it would only take one.”
She raised her hands. “You don’t need to make a choice. And no one will force it. I just wanted to be clear that the component is available, and it’s powerful. You decide whether it will improve the golem or not.”
“I’ll consider it.” He touched his neck. The tier three stone had been fully absorbed while he was otherwise occupied. With nothing urgent to do, he ducked into his system room to confirm the outcomes.