CHAPTER 300 – BLOOD BOILS

The four chosen assigned to the secondary force flew away, angling on a course which would take them deeper into the zone. The rest of them turned to follow the route Keikain had planned. Together, they marched back toward the wall.

Thor, without comment handed the end of a tentacle to Tom. He accepted the awkwardly shaped stinger. When he had processed his own tentacle, he had gotten to understand the physiology. It was bulky being the size of a water bottle from earth. Thick, sturdy carapace, that when activated, ejected a stubby ten centimetre long horn. It was squat and ugly but tapered to a point as sharp as and pin head.

A drop of venom formed on the tip. Tom studied it with interest. “Tier three?”

“Yeah,” Thor answered. “But we can’t sell them on the auction house. The system won’t let us.”

“We hacked them off and they’re tier three?”

Michael next to him grunted in an unsurprised manner. “About what I expected. It was a powerful monster, but as Thor said we can’t sell the parts. Remember, when you use this your job is to minimise the amount of venom you inject. That’ll make my job easier.”

“I know.” At the tip of the horn was a fully formed drop. It glittered purple. With a piece of cloth supplied by Thor, he carefully flicked most of it away and used the unwieldy object to poke his stomach. The horn penetrated and delivered the tiny remaining bit of poison.

Nothing happened.

The venom was… Tom tried to understand what was happening.

Healing Tranquillity let him check directly, but there was no sign of venom… it was gone.

He mentally replayed the scene, and there should have been enough. Suspiciously, he peered at the stinger and then re-primed it so the horn vanished into its sheath. Then he activated it and the horn popped out. Another purple drop formed on the tip. It was almost identical to the first one though it might have been slightly smaller.

“Tom,” Michael warned.

He ignored the healer and thrust the horn into his stomach. This time, he was watching the interaction of the venom with his body. The moment it appeared and the purple liquid spread to his blood, his internal magic responded and burnt it away. He chuckled when he realised what was happening. This was a stinger he had harvested himself from, a tentacle that had stabbed him during the fight.

“Tom that was too much.”

“Stop fussing. It didn’t work the first time, so I upped the dose. Or more precisely, the title worked too well the first time. This is one of the venom’s I’m already immune to, so my body purged it instantly.”

“Oh,” Michael dropped his hands and the healing spell he had been preparing to burn out the foreign magic in Tom vanished.

Casually, Tom threw the stinger away and, as they had predicted it vanished in a flair of light. While selling the venom would have been profitable, the trial wasn’t about to allow it.

Thor passed him another stinger, and he injected it without hesitation.

Pain flared.

He hissed in surprise he hadn’t expected something to directly target pain receptors. With the aid of Healing Tranquillity, he partitioned the venom and stopped it from spreading. “This is annoying. It’s pain based.”

Michael gave a sympathetic smile and tapped his exposed stomach. Magic flashed, and the healer’s dedicated spell burnt away the venom. It was more effective than Tom doing it himself. “You didn’t expect this to be easy did you.”

“No, I didn’t.” Tom admitted. “But I didn’t expect any of the venom’s to be tailored to pain.”

“Really?” Michael looked at him curiously. “I’m not at all surprised to hear that it has that property. Pain is a good way to distract an enemy. That shock might be enough for the Hydra to get a window to get another strike in and that’s ultimately what it’s after. It doesn’t need the first or the second strike to kill you, it’s an attritional based fighter.”

“Yes, that’s a pretty speech. It sounds exceedingly plausible. Not a surprise with it benefiting from hindsight and all that.”

Michael smiled. “Lots of things are easy to argue after the fact. But… Tom… you know you don’t have to do this. The chances of you ever running into anything else using these specific venoms again is almost zero.”

“I know. But there’s always a chance.” He made a give me gesture to Thor, and another was handed over.

This one was the opposite. It numbed the wound, and his title did nothing. They fixed it and moved on. One after the other until he had gone through the pile and gained immunity to four more venoms. It was not a great haul and as Michael had said it was unlikely, he would ever run into these versions again but his title was powerful and building up an array of venoms that couldn’t touch him had to be the right long-term play.

They reached their next target. It was a giant otter with two tails and with his defensive meteorite swarm spinning around him Tom leapt into battle. It possessed both a supreme level of brute force and deceptive agility. He was knocked flying multiple times only to have the creature bound after him. The others peppered it with magic and physical attacks. Thor cracked a knee, Rahmat took out an eye and then one of Clare’s chaos bolts finally became something more. There was an impression of an evil beyond imagining and then boils spread over it skin and burst.

“It’s infectious! Run,” Michael screamed.

Tom was sprinting away before Michael had finished yelling. He didn’t need to be told what he had sensed. Primal instincts had taken over his legs. His heart beat in a thundering crescendo. He had to move, flee, create distance. His entire body demanded it, and nothing could make him stay near the creature. Whatever the chaos bolt had summoned was not of this world. It was evil, incarnated, and contagious. Every cell in his body knew that, and he needed to escape.

As he fled, he saw more boils forming all over the creature, including on spots where boils had previously burst. They appeared, a fist sized space that, for a moment only frothed… the skin distorting like hundreds of maggots were moving under it… and then the area behaved like boiling milk in a microwave. You could see them starting to foam. A bubbling of skin, a deepening red and then whoosh they expanded and exploded out of the container.

Blood splatting everywhere and where those spots landed new boils were created.

The otter screamed in despair and pain and didn’t follow as he sprinted away. Tom ran heedless of his direction. His legs straining to extend the distance between him and whatever that was. His rational mind took over after a little over half a kilometre of mindless sprinting.

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It still wasn’t enough distance.

He searched for a target and noticed Everlyn standing on a distant ridge her body heaving as she sucked in oxygen. He detoured not breaking from a sprint as he did so. Everyone had the same idea, and he was the third to arrive. The others were coming as well, but he ignored them and focused on the doomed monster. He had to see and couldn’t pull his eyes away from it.

Less than a minute had passed, and the otter like creature was still alive. It was wailing, shuddering, and burrowing its head. Covering its ears with its paws and pushing its skull against the ground like that could save it. From the safety of a ridge almost a kilometre away, they bore witness as boils burst and reformed and the monster could do nothing but scream out its pain.

Four minutes, that was how long it lasted and it shouldn’t have taken that much but the boils also partially healed when they burst. It was inhumane, the word evil remained on his lips, but eventually it died. Then five minutes after that the portal magic consumed the monster’s body and thankfully splashes of blood that had spread up to forty metres away were also burnt away by those flames as the otter’s entire body, including blood vanished.

That ultimate complete destruction of the malignant spell broke the curse. Collectively, they sucked in their breaths as they were released from the hypnosis.

“That was some demonically evil shit, Clare,” Rahmat observed.

“I know,” she answered. They were battle hardened survivors, there was very little that could rattle them. Despite that, she looked nauseous. “Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of regularly using something like chaos bolts.”

“I don’t,” Keikain said quietly. “They allow us to hit beyond our weight class and to be honest we have no choice.”

“None at all,” Tom agreed.

He could do the maths as well as everyone else. Without the edge, the chaos bolts were giving them. Without the extra experience they got from clearing zones faster, they could not keep pace with the rapidly scaling difficulty of the layers. It had been obvious that Phil had been monstrously powerful when they had met him. Tom was thinking if anything they had underestimated just how much ahead of the rest of them he had been. It would have taken more than luck to have descended through the layers so quickly and more than a ten rank advantage if he was being honest with himself. The New Zealander had other stuff going for him.

They continued on and none of the battles were memorable as the first four and soon enough he was settling down to sleep. A pre-cooked meal was handed to him while they set up the campfire and he fell asleep.

The true dream struck him immediately.

As always, Tom was very conscious of placing the where, why and who of his new situation. He instantly understood that he was not in the body of a competitor race but rather a species that had existed on Existentia for hundreds of generations.

The body he was in was old and had seen a lot. Literally tens of generations and despite the fact that his physical shell was failing he was by far the most powerful of those gathered. He was teaching them the way of the spear domain, he who had been taught by a master whose skill was two tiers higher was the best they had now. He had struggled for so long but… it had been a futile effort because none of his students were able to match his tier six spear domain. The deterioration in the quality of each generation continued even if the number of individuals who reached their third class increased to offset that loss.

Their race was paradoxically stronger, but fundamentally they were weaker. The ability to teach the new generation was what set successful races apart from declining ones and he feared they were entering the territory of the latter even if the physical area they were masters of was larger than ever.

It was a losing proposition.

Lots of middling powerhouses would always lose to a single true power even if their levels were identical. Quality mattered.

As a race, they understood that, which was why he had invested the last thousand years into teaching. One of them had to learn his skill. He had to pass it on and he would continue to sacrifice everything to achieve the aim.

The creature they had been sent to eliminate was down below them as they hid at the top of the huge cave.

It was the underground Tom realised, and he wondered if this was the race that had watched the circuit breakdown, but the proportions were wrong. These creatures were beetle like with short stubby arms and nothing like that scientist who had observed their progress.

Tom refocused his mind on what was happening.

“Students,” the body he was in said quietly. “We’re hunting a Wandering Blessed Serpent. The cave below is tailored wildness.”

A lot of concepts went with that pronouncement. Tailored wildness was two stages away from an actual native underground environment. There was not supposed to be anything in the area ranked above class three. The Blessed Serpent was way more powerful than that. Class three was a designation that meant any combat oriented individual who qualified for a third class should be able to beat it in one-on-one combat. The monster below was class five and probably wouldn’t even notice the best attack from someone who had just got their third class.

They had to kill it and theoretically as least based on their levels the task should have been beyond them. But cooperating could super charge their offensive output orders of magnitude beyond what raw attributes suggested.

“Are we killing it with the normal tactic?” Phillipe the nominal leader of the war band he was tutoring asked.

“Do you have a different approach that might work?”

Phillipe knocked her two front legs together to indicate no. With their strategy decided, they left the cave and spread out their feet, digging into the ceiling when they reached position. Eight of them hanging from the roof.

There was the hidden blip of spatial storage being used, and they all produced a spear launcher and a spear. Their arms were not long enough to either wield or throw a spear. Why the weapon had become a staple skill in their empire was a mystery.

Somehow, despite the odds, it had triumphed over other techniques, and the pinnacle ability of their civilisation was now the spear domain. As a result, they all utilised spears for long range attacks. Close in their natural weapons were more effective, but for sniping something like the Wandering Blessed Serpent which they couldn’t fight in melee this approach was for the best.

Everyone started spinning their spears but apart from Phillipe’s they were all just contingencies.

The mind he was in engaged his skill and suddenly just like Rahmat had described the position of every spear was engrained on his memory. His immense skill in his domain gave him more information than most. In addition to sensing all spear’s and spear like weapons, he could see related domains and the result from his students were disappointing. Some domains were not stretched properly, the densest part was not around Phillipe’s weapon. “Susack wrong spear. Talbot focus better.”

The domains of the two he targeted shifted as ordered.

“On three,” Phillipe said, and then she counted down. The spear on the launcher spun through the air travelling far faster than their arms could manage and then it unleashed the weapon.

Instantly, all eight domains were on the spear and one by one they overlaid the skills they wanted. Tom sensed Power Strike, Enlarge, Inevitability, Fate Rejection, Critical Wound, Bleeding and three others that he did not recognise. As it flew, the teacher used its own advanced domain to make sure the abilities fitted together and then a moment later the heirloom artefact a tier six weapon in its own right was transformed into something else.

The spear skills stacked with the weapons tier six quality and they combined to become more. The projectile flying at the serpent became destruction beyond what Tom had understood was possible. It was also shrouded by magic to make its flight invisible, but the monsters sensed it in any case.

Time seemed to freeze for an instant. The serpent blinked to a new position. One of the skills remotely overlaid on the spear was supposed to have redirected the weapon to follow the target, but it didn’t trigger properly. The flying weapon adjusted slightly, but not enough. With a flex of his own domain, the mind he was in corrected the course of the spear and it slammed home right at the centre of its forehead.

It penetrated through the scales to impale the brain, but that, by itself should not have been sufficient. The wandering blessed serpent was far too powerful to be killed so simply from a physical blow. However, the domain skills overlaid on the spear made the strike so much more. Soul, magic, the entire body it was all struck at once. The dying body withered on the ground with the head pinned to the stone for only twenty seconds before stilling.

The teacher, the mind he was in sighed audibly. “That was terrible. Let’s discuss what we could have done better and then we have to visit cave twenty eight because a black abomination has manifested there.”

The true dream finished, and Tom knew that he would need to have another chat with Rahmat. The scout gaining his spear domain was critical if they were going to defeat the monster. That and… Tom mused silently in his dream… the spear launcher was just as important.

This was not a dream to be ignored. His gut told him that it was more important that most of the ones that had come before.