CHAPTER 286 – DESTROYING STONE ELEMENTALS
The stone elemental moved with deceptive speed, closing in on Tom and his companions. Its monstrous instincts driving it to attack the sapients who had entered its territory. That white glow that the misfired chaos bolt had produced was a problem. It was a material blessing and was substantially elevating its speed above that of the rest. It was not an ideal situation. Monsters at this rank fought with set patterns and once he had memorised them, a simple speed boost wouldn’t have worried him. But now… against a creature that he had never battled… that extra quickness was concerning.
But… he focused on the here and now.
The conditions he fought under couldn’t be helped. Anger, irritation and frustration were dangerous emotions when you were fighting for your life, so he suppressed them. All he could do, right here and now was retreat to the moment and rely on his hard-earned battle instincts. With a thought, he turned his torso into Living Rock, not for its defensive properties but for its weight. He charged the elemental while using his tier three pants to boost his effective mass.
With the two spells working in tandem, he transformed into a juggernaut.
Then he was in range and his dodge skill exploded in alarm. Multiple vectors of attack were tracked and the damage numbers associated with them burned themselves into his brain. The counterattack, three lashing whips of rocks paled in comparison to the main collision.
His shoulder against its centre of mass.
His instincts screamed at him, telling him to avoid it. Options were available, it was not too late; he was not committed to the action. A teleport to the side would turn it into a glancing impact or he could burn his new trait and phase through the elemental, avoiding it in its entirety.
It wasn’t lethal, Tom clung to that fact. It would not kill him or prevent him from fighting, but it was going to hurt.
Instinctively, his eyes shut.
There was no avoiding this. From a strategic perspective, the collision he had orchestrated was the best option. He clamped down on the instincts to avoid it. There were mitigating factors that were to his advantage. Usually flesh and bone against stone was a losing proposition. But that was not what was going to happen. Black dodge would limit the damage. His living rock nature would temper him further. Most importantly he would survive. The aftereffects were not too terrible. His magical skills told him that.
It was just…
Crack.
It was deafening… he could not hear a thing. The shock wave washed through his body as he crashed into the monster… as he slammed at speed into a pile of extra dense stones.
The force of it reverberated through him.
An impact of rock cracking magnitude.
Thanks to his boosts he had evened out their weight differential… somewhat. Instead of him exclusively bouncing off, their similar weights meant they were both affected. They rebounded away from each other and he could feel the spreading cracks in his shoulder from the impact. It felt like the air had been expelled out of his stone lungs and his healing warned him that at the point of contact a good half a centimetre of skin had been reduced to dust.
As for the cracks… his healing held his body together.
He landed on wobbly legs and reflexively coughed.
A fine dust was expelled from his mouth. That impact had been ridiculous. He righted himself fully and faced the enemy.
It was piled together.
Recovered.
Its magic sustaining it just like before the collision. The dynamics of the fight, thankfully, had been changed. Its attitude towards him had evolved. To it he was now the primary enemy and a threat as a result it was watching him cautiously.
A disintegration spell shot by him, weak and pathetic. It struck the monster and a single rock, one of the smaller ones was reduced to dust.
Internally, Tom winced at that result. That had been a misfire of a usually powerful spell. It was one of the new spells they had got. Another emergency option that was easily influenced by fate. A magical spell that had a range of outcomes like a chaos bolt, but not as varied. Specifically, it didn’t have the capacity to produce side effects that were more than a two-metre-wide sphere. It meant it could be used closer to allies without risk of an upgrade that would endanger their lives.
The particular version that had wiped out a single rock appeared to have been reduced to a tier zero rank.
The pile of rocks lunged at him with vicious intent.
No! he thought as alarms went off. It was not a normal attack. It had activated a skill!
There was no avoiding its strike. No clever teleports that could evade it. No phasing through the strike as the inherent magic in the ability used would counter than evasive option. Physically blocking was…
Tom’s spear materialised and fended off some of the blow, but not all of it. It was far too strong for him. A boulder the size of his head landed a solid blow on his chest.
Tom slid backwards.
As always, Healing Tranquillity let him track damage. It mollified him somewhat because physically he could feel bits of his chest crumbling away. He winced at the magic expenditure it would take to heal that type of rampant damage. It had been a big blow and both pectoral muscles had been pulverised. Luckily, with living rock activated his body strength and movement was more magical than structural. On a flesh and blood body, he wouldn’t be able to use his arms through that amount of damage but in his current form, while noticeably weaker he was not out of the fight.
Another disintegration spell shot past him. It struck the second still alive rock pile that Clare had intercepted. Tom smiled as the higher tier version of the spell obliterated what was left of its target. The damage multiple when the variable disintegration spell evolved into a stronger version was significant. It meant that the spells would work as theorised and that he only needed to hold on and didn’t have to destroy the elemental himself.
Help was on the way.
His own opponent Tom realised was still rattled by the original collision. White glow or not, it was not moving as fluidly as it had been. His spear spun and smacked into the rock pile he was fighting. A brief flare of enlarge knocked two pebbles away from it. It was little more than a distraction, but that was his role. The monster responded. Three arms composed of over thirty fist sized pebbles burst out from it.
Over half its mass was invested in those tendrils and they flailed at him, trying to squish him like a human would a bug.
Dodge kicked in. He teleported and spun, but the artificial tentacles of the elemental didn’t quite behave like a whip would. The momentum cancelled and then they reversed toward him, travelling as fast in the new direction as they had been in the old.
Tom blinked in surprise. Reversing the momentum was a useful ability. The vectors of the three attacking tentacles were clear along with the different options to evade them. He remembered the strike to his chest. He had to avoid them. Any collision would hurt. He limboed backward to avoid them. They reacted. He dodged further. Like a chess game, the opponent reacted to him and the tendrils moved to corner him instead of them all trying to squish him. Physics could only be stretched so far and even enhanced with his dodge skill he could only move so fast.
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He duked left to avoid two of them.
The third… it was unavoidable, and he braced for impact.
Nothing.
A chosen’s shield had appeared to protect him.
Thank deus, he thought. He had been hoping for the interjection, but he wasn’t sure the chosen had fully registered how hard the elemental was hitting. The fight hadn’t stopped. All three tendrils kept coming, trying to crush him. He threw himself backward and triggered a second teleport as they adjusted faster than should have been possible.
Then he saw the opportunity: he spun the butt of his spear and used the enlarge skill to lengthen it by a foot. There was a crack as it impacted one of the tentacles two thirds of the way down. The stone had already been cracked, and it shattered under the force of his blow. Over twenty rocks went flying as it lost control of the magic.
It was like a switch flicked and all the stones returned to its body as the elemental clearly realised that the tentacle arms, while greatly increasing its ability to hit an enemy it also left it depressingly vulnerable to counterattacks. Now, as a single mass of stone, it surged towards him, trying to engulf him.
His sideways dodge took him out of range.
The next few moments were fast and furious. Chosen shields snapped into place occasionally and his full attention was focused on keeping him clear of the pounding rocks.
Fate built inexorably around him.
It lunged forward and the sheet of rock it was on crumbled and it slid down into a small crevice, buying him more time. A stroke of luck, Tom thought with a small smile. In the normal course of a fight, you wouldn’t have expected a stone elemental to lose its footing.
Tom used the time he had gained to glance around. The other elementals, excluding the one Clare had briefly clashed with had not reached the main group. They were all safe and uninjured.
He spun to the side. A number of disintegration bolts struck his opponent. Each of them, unfortunately, were only tier zero versions, so they wiped out only a single stone and one of them, which hit a larger rock didn’t even do that. It only reduced the individual stone’s size by about a third. That was the problem with the variable outcome spells.
They often failed completely.
Tom didn’t care. If they needed an extra boost, then fate would enhance the spell to something deadly. That was the point of including variable outcomes spells in their arsenal. They would be there and deadly when they were needed. As for this fight, it was a statistical fact that eventually one spell would upgrade and when that occurred, this battle would be finished. For now, it was probably for the best the battle was extended to give him a chance to learn more of their attack patterns and offensive skills when he wasn’t under life and death pressure. He kept spinning, dodging. More spells landed, but hardly affected the elemental. For some reason most of them seemed to fail. Finally, one crackling with energy flashed past him.
Memories of exploding chaos bolts had him retreating instinctively. Logically, the caution was unnecessary. He knew that, but he created space quickly in any case. The bolt expanded to about a metre of diameter and destroyed most of the remaining mass. The few stones that had survived being obliterated fell under gravity’s touch and cluttered on the ground. He watched carefully to see if the elemental reformed, but they remained inert.
His companions had cleaned up the rest of the battlefield before focusing on the one that he was fighting.
The battle was over.
Tom ran a hand over his chest and shoulder. There was a significant amount of lost mass. He slumped to the ground and picked up one of the stones that used to be the elemental. With a thought, his skivvy disappeared, and he glanced down at the missing rock in his chest and shoulder. “Annoying.” He declared as he moved the rock and began to fuse it to the largest gap in his shoulder.
Michael frowned, and it was clear that he wanted to help, but knew with Living Rock that his type of magic could not help regenerate the missing stone. “That came from the initial collision didn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“You caused it. Why take that type of risk? Even with Living Rock you’re not built to take blows. Your thing is dodging. It might be safer to stick to your strengths.”
“Kind of had too,” he grimaced as he remembered the force of them colliding. “Lightning Enrage isn’t going to work on them. I had to get their attention and protect you guys somehow.”
“Are you sure about that genius?” Keikain challenged him. “Did you even try or did you just assume.”.
Tom winced at that accusational tone. It had nothing to do with the battle. The earth mage was angry at him. Neither of the two cursed had gotten over his order for them to focus on the fate benefits of their bloodline. Keikain responded with anger and Clare refused to talk to him, which hurt more. Both of them knew his orders, supported by the oracle question were the correct logical choice. But… logic was not always enough to triumph over emotion. They were suffering, and it bled through into their actions.
Tom couldn’t even blame them. He would hate to be in their position.
“Tom’s right,” Everlyn interrupted. “Lightning Enrage won’t work. However, that’s not important. Let’s talk about the fight. It took too long. We need to work out a rhythm where we can take these things out faster.”
They discussed all their different observations. Weaknesses they had noticed and strengths to avoid. With their collective wisdom shared they moved to fight the next group. Their approach adapted with each encounter. They shifted tactics to get Everlyn to initiate the fight from two hundred metres away. Usually, she kept the enraged monsters to below five. The team would then destroy them with ranged attacks. Tom joined in, giving his chaos bolt a run.
It was only when the pull disturbed more than expected that they varied their approach. When that occurred, Tom stopped casting offensive magic and preserved his mana to help him survive fighting multiple elementals in melee range.
The mana intensive nature of their advance had a bonus as far as he was concerned. A lot of their time was spent recharging their mana, which meant there was plenty of time for everyone to throw rocks at him. Tom focused on tracking the projectiles with Earth Sense and then reacting by hardening only a small patch of skin to deflect them before propelling them forward immediately after.
The landscape was perfect for him. Half the time the rocks thrown at him were metallic ore rather than the usual stone, and that caused problems. Try as he might, it was almost impossible to trigger Throw Rock on them. He preserved, and he felt like he was beginning to feel a resonance with the metallic ore components, but he wasn’t sure if it was a bond to the ore or the stone mixed in with the pebbles that were being tossed at him.
Nevertheless, he welcomed the challenge and he could feel his skill and control improving even if there was no epiphany to bring him closer to gaining a domain.
The elementals themselves were also a valuable resource for his development.
Every melee fight, he continued to observe the strange way the monsters moved. They had only a loose connection with the concepts of physics that he was used to, or at least the tentacles they fought with ignored the inviolable rules of Newtonian physics from Earth. Particularly the rule around conservation of momentum. The way they could reverse direction was fascinating.
From afar, it seemed like a tendril would freeze for a moment with the energy sucked somewhere else. Then the stored energy would return to accelerate the limb on a different trajectory. It was a flexible skill. In the first couple of fights, he thought they could only reverse direction, but that wasn’t the case. They had significantly more flexibility than that. They would store the energy of the swinging hundreds of kilograms of rock and then adjust the trajectory with only a momentary pause in the middle. Sometimes an appendage would come from the side and bait him into jumping over it only to have it freeze and then accelerate vertically straight upwards to hit him.
Physics told him it was impossible, but his eyes and all of his senses told a different story. There was something there for him to extract. A lesson for both his domain and to take Throw Rock to a new level of flexibility.
Everlyn held up a hand to tell them to stop. “We’re camping here.”
Five rocks were flung at him simultaneously. Someone had obviously coordinated the attack. Earth Sense, Spark pseudo domain and Black Dodge tracked their trajectories. His magic senses, the helpful spirit from his trait assessed the threat inherent in each of them.
According to the flood of information, he received none of the projectiles contained any nasty surprises. The rock that Harry had thrown got extra attention as he often infused a ritual into them to make them something more than stone. This time they were all mundane and the skin on his torso hardened in five spots.
He expected the other shoe to drop at any moment. For there to be a surprise that he had missed.
Nothing.
Clink, clink.
They all struck him almost simultaneously. It hurt to stretch his mind to respond to all of them simultaneously, but he managed it. Three of them blasted away at pace as Throw Rock triggered successfully. The other two fell impotently to the ground, one he had missed in totality the other was half metallic ore and half silver metal and his magic failed to find purchase on it.
Everlyn sidestepped a piece of stone that shot out at her.
Rahmat laughed in delight, and Tom knew he had been trying to achieve just that. To get the angles perfect so that when it bounced off Tom, it would target someone else.
“Standard approach,” she continued with an amused glance at Rahmat. “Tom you sleep, Keikain cook, Harry on defences, Rahmat,” she grinned. “You’re on first guard.”
“That’s not fair.”
She smiled at Rahmat’s exaggerated reaction. “It’s not payback. You didn’t even land it.”
“But I made you dodge.”
“But you still missed. Anyway, that’s not the point. I’m not offended or upset more excited. I think it’s a fun game. I’m going to do it tomorrow. Now everyone move. We have less than twenty minutes until its dark.”
They all burst into action. Even those not named knew what their jobs were. Thor retreated to the auction house, Michael and Toni to prepare the wider sleeping area, Clare acting as a secondary guard. Tom placed his sleeping roll on a flat piece of ground under the open sky. While it might seem to be a dangerous choice to sleep outside and expose yourselves to attack from the air, it wasn’t. When the primary enemy was earth elementals, you would have to be crazy to sleep in a cave.
He settled on the mat, shut his eyes and used his skill to send him to sleep.
A True Dream immediately seized him.