CHAPTER 274 – METEORIC FURY
The day went much as the first one had gone. They found kobolds and destroyed them.
That night, he did not push to receive a True Dream, but one occurred, anyway. He shared the mind of the artefact creator in Selena’s squad. They were talking about making friends with others and whether Vidja’s team descriptions of what occurred was an elaborate hoax or not. The disturbing consensus in their mind was that it was probably accurate. An acknowledgement which led credence to the dragon threat, which in turn improved their willingness to play nice. The option to rob the other humans was not taken off the table, but to most of them it was no longer a high priority. It was good news, but with the strange static resisting his skill the dream only lasted a handful of seconds. There was insufficient time to make a proper assessment on the whole group. All he knew is the mind he was sharing had changed his opinion. The artefact creator was on his side.
Unless they’ve found a way to fool your True Dreaming skill. The treacherous part of his mind whispered.
He awoke. They fell into the same routine and, as planned just before lunch; they reached the zone doors with nine extra ore.
“Do you want it for your living rock?” Everlyn asked.
Tom shook his head, and they were passed instead to Thor to sell on the auction house.
They went through the zone doors and there was ding of the new quest and presumably the completion of the old one. They did the normal dance of checking notifications and he skipped past the new quest just noting it had a kill focus.
Instead, he checked their performance in the preceding level.
The previous zone has been cleared as a team effort.
3,212,000 experience total has been assigned. This consists of.
* Experience for monster kills adjusted for rank differences and scaled down because of an increasing number of kobold slayer titles amongst the participants. (2,267,000).
* 50,000 experience for each person to collect twenty ore. (900,000).
* Plus 5,000 for excess ore collected. (45,000).
Tom snorted slightly at that last line. It was not a surprise at all to find out that the extra ore beyond the twenty needed to leave was awarded significantly more experience than the stuff that went to the quest.
He kept reading.
Your contribution is 12.3%
Total experience awarded is 392,000.
Tom registered that number and almost danced on the spot. With that bonus, he had… it was going to be enough he was sure. “Show current experience?”
Experience: 1,439,121
More than what was needed. “Show saved traits.”
Crystallised Moment. Cost: 448,000.
Intangible Avoidance. Cost: 1,220,000.
Channelled Damage Mirror. Cost: 1,000,000.
He immediately purchased the trait Intangible Avoidance and then winced as the cost of both of the other traits increased by a flat twenty percent. He had known that penalty was coming. The next trait would be forty percent, and then the penalty would double with every new one after that. If he was forced to purchase extra levels, which seemed likely, then he would have to suffer the trait prices soaring because of that as well.
With a thought, he brought up the new skill he had created. Already Tom could sense something funny happening.
Trait: Intangible Avoidance.
This is a passive skill that acquires a charge every 3 hours and stores up to a maximum of 5 charges.
The use of the charge is controlled by an invisible spirit that has a sensing dome around the individual that is equivalent to a level 1 version of the tier 10 skill Sensing Dome. The spirit will then use this information and an understanding of the individual’s capabilities to fully phase through attacks or partially shift to avoid others.
As a rule of thumb. One charge is sufficient to evade two mortal blows delivered by creatures at the same tier as you.
Increasing levels improve efficiency of partial charges, time to acquire charge and level of Sensing Dome spell.
There was a throb of tension, a dissonance between this ability and Fate Weaponised Black Dodge. Instinctively, he knew the cause. “Show threshold ability.” He croaked the words out. More text appeared.
Threshold Bonus 4: The user will be granted a sense of the relative danger of the attacks likely to hit him. This guide to damage will respond to planned body movements, allowing the user to forecast the effective damage reduction of different strategies.
This is not an oracle derived ability. It is limited to the user senses, understanding of the enemy with a slight modifier of partial access to monster knowledge inherited from other people who have received this threshold benefit in the past.
Reading the text, he understood the cause of the problem immediately. The threshold used all the user senses and the new trait provided additional senses but blocked their use. That was what was causing the clash.
It was lunchtime and his fate pool was near full. He was not spending nearly enough on the dragon, but this was too good of an opportunity to let go. He spent a hundred fate with the image that the sensing dome skill would become available for use by his other’s skills and abilities.
If he was successful, it would provide an immediate boost to his ability to sense incoming attacks, and then if he was lucky, it would also then be available when he evolved his domain.
The fate swirled around him.
Inside of him, the skill and trait clashed. Each of them resisting the push to evolve or to adjust to accept the other. Probability wave forms were created within him. A host of possibilities, like what had occurred when he had consumed the evolution potion. Some of them were terrifying to him; a shattered trait where the spirit that formed the core of the ability was destroyed. It gave him access to all the components of the spell directly but everything would be restricted to the speed of his thought.
It would not be as effective as the existing trait where the spirit would be able to react against things that were too fast for him to perceive. There were attacks and traps out there that were on a different level. Slowed time from his dodge skill would not be enough to let him react to them. Losing the spirit protection in the trait would be a disaster.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
There was an outcome where his dodge skill was diminished, but Living Rock was merged with the new trait. His defensive capability would be increased, but actions like turning his hand to stone to get something out of the fire would become impossible.
It was not the worse outcome, but it was not perfect.
Another was the default option where the skills and trait remained separated. That wasn’t what he needed to happen. He wanted the trait to evolve to allow the output of the Sensing Dome to be used by other skills.
Fate swirled around him. It was influencing the clash and what should probably have been limited to some initial tension that died down without action kept escalating. To something where change was needed or else skills would shatter. The invisible energy kept influencing probabilities. One by one the different wave forms collapsed.
There was a ding, and the message appeared in front of him.
Trait Intangible Avoidance has evolved to trait Intangible Avoidance.
Internally, he laughed at the system message. Something had happened, but not enough to change the traits’ name. He checked the description with a feeling of hope inside him. A single line had been added.
The output of the sensing dome spell will be shared with other skills possessed by the user.
Tom sighed in relief. His skill was pounding with a headache. Touch Heal flared, but there was no direct damage to fix the pain. His entire body, brain felt unsure.
He opened his eyes and flinched at the light.
“Are you okay Tom.” Michael asked in concern.
“I’m fine…” he stuttered. “Just incorporating a new trait.”
Michael looked at him in concern for a moment and then shrugged. “So, this zone is more lucrative than the first ring.” He stated clearly, continuing a debate that had been ongoing while Tom was in the system room.
“We can’t conclude that.” Keikain argued. “You have a sample size of one. Yes, this zone gave us experience of three point two million, but it was split over two teams. None of us got over ten percent.”
“I did.” Tom volunteered to a few glares. “Only twelve.” He clarified hurriedly.
“Which means,” Michael said triumphally. “The human share of experience was still over two million seven hundred thousand, which was more than the previous zones.”
“What did everyone else get?” Tom asked having missed the rest of the conversation.
“Our contributions were all pretty consistent,” Keikain answered. “Between eight and ten percent. This ring is optimistically worth more experience, but it’s not a significant amount and until we’ve cleared some more, we won’t know.”
“Enough. It doesn’t matter.” Everlyn said. “Let’s complete this zone quickly. Tom, you need to spin up your meteorites for this. Hopefully, we can crush it within three days.”
“Perceptive one.” Everlyn almost jumped because it had snuck up on her. The rest of them were not surprised. They had all seen it coming and everyone was so used to what they did before speaking that none of them had reacted to its approach.
“Guys,” Everlyn hissed. “A bit of warning next time.”
“Perceptive one. From the quest description, these are non-sapients it means we may bring destruction of heavens down upon them.”
“How murderous are we talking about?”
“Perceptive one, you have a sense of our skills. I’m comfortable each of us are worth three to four humans.”
She nodded. “Okay. If that’s the case, we’re going to split up into two teams. Rahmat and Tom leading one and I’ll lead the second.” She caught Tom’s eyes. “I’ll take the inner side you kill on the outer. At night time tomorrow we meet at the next gate.”
“You think we complete the quest in a day and a half?”
“If the chosen are as powerful as promised, then easily.”
“Perceptive one. My words are ironbound truth.”
“Let’s do this.” Tom said grimly. It was time to unleash their power.
He summoned the meteorites, consulted his memory of this tile in his mind, and then walked away. Their team split without words. The second elder, two middles and the smallest joined his group along with Rahmat, Michael, Toni and Harry.
Everlyn’s team had the rest of the humans and five of the sanatios chosen. They went in the opposite direction.
Once they left the nice welcoming cave, they were in a zone of rolling hills and trees. The threat lay in the frequent ravines that filled the place. These were often only three or four metres wide, but could be up to twenty deep.
His first target was only fifty metres away, and he guided the others there. It was a depression in the landscape that looked like it had been formed by a massive stake slapping the earth. At the edge, the ravine merged with the normal ground level, but the tip had descended almost forty metres straight down. That deepest point was almost two hundred metres away from where they stood, and there were probably thousands of these geographical features scattered through the otherwise unimposing landscape. It was like the ravines had almost been tailormade for his skills. At least, the ones that were large enough for his meteorites to shoot down. Tom knew that most of them were going to be too skinny, but the fat ones… They were perfect for him to unleash his magic down.
Better still, the monsters that filled them were clustered lower down where it was darker. From where he stood, he could see them. Lumps on the otherwise smooth ground with the first of them over forty metres away. By the bottom of the depression, they were so thickly packed that the ground almost appeared unbroken. A surface of living creatures that could almost fool you if you weren’t specifically aware of them.
Mentally, he measured the distance and smiled happily. There was no need to move closer to the enemy or do anything tricky. If he launched from where he stood it would grow to almost full size before the density of the monsters rose to the point where they were worth killing.
The lumps of rock were spinning around him. He confirmed angles and one went whooshing over his shoulder. He was targeting the deepest part of the ravine that was almost two hundred metres away. As the missile flew, the spell took hold, and it got hotter and hotter. It swept past the closest monster to him and did no damage, missing it completely. That was just physics. The creature was against the wall and his meteorite was still too small to fill the space. Then a further ten metres down the next monster was in the middle of the cave. The top of its hump got struck and knocked it to the ground. Not dead and not permanently injured. Tom was unconcerned his spell was nowhere near as fearsome as it was going to end up.
The stone kept going.
The next couple were also against the edges and were missed.
Then it hit its first target properly.
Tom couldn’t even see what happened only that the meteorite cleared the monsters from the centre of the path as it passed. Then it was entering the denser areas. The missile did not slow even as the central creatures vanished and the ones and the edge were knocked into the cliff walls. The huddled monsters clustered like penguins were destroyed as the bowling ball went through them. Dozens, maybe hundreds died as it shot through the almost tailor-made geography. Despite the collisions, it kept its speed and then it slammed into the bottom of the ravine with an explosion that he could feel through his feet.
Dust dirt, molten rock, chunks of monsters fountained up from the point of the collision.
Tom shook his head a small smile on his face. They were all not dead just most of them. The creatures that had survived picked themselves up. The one closest to Tom saw him and made a whistling sound. The tune was joined up by the ones behind it until all of them were making it. Then while whistling they started hopping toward him.
There were only thirty of the larger variety whom were rank eighteen and two or three times that number of the smaller ones that dropped all the way down to twelve. Credit for the quest was only awarded for the larger ones.
They hopped forward, giant leeches with pongo stick legs, all of them fixated on Tom and all preparing to leap at him. His spear was in his hand and the four remaining meteorites spinning around him ready to provide a defensive bonus.
They did not attack piecemeal instead they chose to clump up and charge them all together. They were obviously swarm type monsters and their instincts were guiding them.
The chosen that flanked him unleashed their ‘destruction of the heavens’ when the first got to within twenty metres of him. Fire and ice fill the area in front of him. It was like the opposing forces were dancing together as they tore to death the strange creatures. Some had their mouths and head frozen solid. Others had ice claws manifest against them and ripped them apart. The flames did the same, but with intense heat and flares of light.
The rush of monsters died before they reached them. “Good job. Why fire and ice?”
The second elder shifted to be in front of him. “Leader Tom. The melding of opposites lower the universal debt.”
“Energy is conserved.” Tom muttered as he interpreted their weird way of speaking. “From nothing, you create fire and ice. If they combine, they will cancel each other perfectly, but while they are separate, they can destroy everything that threatens them, but you haven’t had to create the energy yourself. At the end, you combine the two and then it was like they were never separate.”
“Leader Tom, maybe I should call you the perceptive one.”
He snorted at that comment. “Stop blowing smoke up my arse.”
“Leader Tom, I’m not using any magic.”
Chuckling to himself he started running, the others followed him.
They had a lot of ground to cover.