CHAPTER 329 – EARTH WORMS

They knew exactly what they were facing. Harry had described it in detail, but they still went through the normal routine with the scouts confirming the layout and threat level of the nearby area with their remote sensing skills.

“Monsters everywhere,” Everlyn told them with a laugh. “They have two attacks. The first one launches high velocity shards of rock, two or three per second. Their speed is not outlandish as they only travel fifty percent faster than a fast pitch in baseball, but if they hit, they’ll either bruise you through the armour or cut you if your skin is unprotected. If that’s not working, they have a spike which comes out of their forehead they’ll use to try to impale you. From a defence perspective, unsurprisingly given the environment they’re almost invulnerable to earth and air magic.” She smiled apologetically at Toni and Keikain as she informed them of that problematic fact.

Michael frowned. “What are your thoughts on our battle formations?”

“The standard will work. Tom is the primary tank, Clare next in line if it’s only one or two that he can’t handle. If it’s more than that, Usko can use his shout. Both you and Soetanto need to keep fifty percent of mana in reserve in case Usko needs to step in. And if he does you both know what to do.”

“Overload him with healing.”

Everlyn smiled at that response. “Pretty much.”

They went outside. The howling wind was as horrible as Harry had implied. It stung as it lashed him all over. It was pretty much as expected. Living Rock moved to shield his extremities, and he wondered if his choice to forgo specific protective gear was wise.

Thor was making desperate hand signals to him. He guessed he was trying to ask if Tom had reconsidered, did he want protection from the elements now. The big man, after all, had a colourful scarf wrapped around his face.

He shrugged non committedly to be honest he had made a mistake. The conditions were worse than he had mentally calculated, and it would be nice to have something to protect himself with. He responded by miming a pained wincing face and plucking his skivvy to try to show that it wasn’t doing much to hold off the horrid environment. .

The wind was so strong it was almost impossible to talk.

“Nice and pleasant out here, isn’t it.” Toni mused. Her hair wasn’t even moved by the howling wind. They all glared at her and she laughed delighted by their reactions.

“Focus, we have incoming,” Everlyn snapped, using her party chat to communicate despite the wind.

Tom’s eyes followed her, and he cast Dead Healers Touch without thinking about it. The monster, which was the thickness of a small bear but two metres long recoiled its charge briefly stopped as it spasmed in pain. The heavy skin on the front of its face melted away as his spell finished its cast. The creature recovered, and it focused on him and accelerated back to full speed almost instantly. He remembered his role and sprinted forward to open up space between him and the others.

The monster closed to thirty metres and obviously judged itself to be close enough. It came to another abrupt halt and started spitting missiles at him. He had already moved so that his friends were not behind him. A flood of information was hitting him, but he focused on Earth Sense. He could feel the trajectory of the approaching rocks.

It shot earth missiles, he remembered, and that was why he could sense the projectiles from so far away. The worms were launching stone at him. A smile split his face. That would make this a lot easier.

Time slowed down, and he swayed out of the way of three of the stones and had a crazy idea to neutralise the last projectile. It was like a light bulb had gone off in his head. His neurons were firing crazily as they worked to bring a host of memories together. A seed of potential, the moment when disparate efforts formed something special.

It only took a fraction of a second for him to decide to try it. Everything fit together too perfectly. He was conscious of the weight of the stone armour that he wore. It was not great at stopping a hard blow, but that was not how he used it. Initially, it had been a training aid, but then he had learnt to create tendrils of stone to negate the air blades two zones ago.

That had felt clever, but it had been deflecting air, a substance without momentum behind them. The same technique wouldn’t work here, but that was not the only skill that he had developed in his current unsuccessful obsession to force an evolution of his skills into an earth domain. An earlier now abandoned effort where he had tried to use Throw Rock against stone bouncing off him. It had worked, but he hadn’t manage to direct the bounce accurately enough to incorporate the technique into everyday usage, but it had proven a throw was not needed to trigger the skill.

All he had to do was combine the two concepts, and it was so obvious now that he had thought about it.

Time had slowed dramatically, but the last missile was moving so fast he didn’t have time to think, only to do.

His mind was already in his rock armour with Earth Manipulation active to allow him to move effortlessly while wearing the otherwise restrictive stone. What did he need? His focus split in parts, threads of thought concentrating on the required outcomes.

The different ideas had to come together.

There was not going to be sufficient time, so he triggered Crystallised Moment.

It only gave him an extra second, but with the compounding of the time dilation from his dodge that became six. Hopefully, the extra time would make his ambitious attempt a possibility. Instead of having half a second to react he was going to receive a total of nine. All he could do was pray that was going to enough to link the component steps together.

A section of stone at his chest softened under his control. It was right at the point the final incoming missile was going to strike unless he did something to change that outcome. He wanted to expel the rock perfectly in line with the one that the worm had shot. He started to calculate the trajectories but then stopped.

There was no need.

The functionality he had already constructed in Earth Sense provided the exact trajectory, weight and speed of the approaching stone. Back against the air blades he had used this knowledge to intercept them. Now he flexed his control to send a lump of stone flying from him with the aim of intercepting the incoming attack a few metres in front of him. As the rock he was controlling reached peak velocity and left contact with the rest of the armour. He triggered Throw Rock, and the missile shot away from him at a speed that almost matched the incoming projectile.

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All of Tom’s skills were combining to create the desired outcome. Even Accurate Throw was drafted to support the attempt, its calculation engine being turned to help with something a lot more exotic than usual. It was incredible to him how the epiphany had utilised so many abilities.

Time snapped to normal as his dodge calculated the dilation was not needed because he was no longer in danger of taking damage.

There was a crash in front of him as the two projectiles struck and his slightly bigger one won the fight. The spray of shrapnel went sideways and back toward the worm. The largest and fastest moving pieces travelling tens of metres before they fell out of the air with a pitter patting against the ground.

The monster paused…

It assessed what was happening and realised that despite its barrage Tom remained unharmed.

Madness seemed to fill its eyes, and then it charged him. It humped forward. The raw speed it could generate from what felt like ungainly motions was immense.

Time instantly slowed, but no alarms went off.

He slid his feet to the left and with the enhanced speed was easily able to shift far enough to evade that nasty spike that came out of its forehead. As he dashed to the side to avoid it he examined the enraged monster. His taunting spell had hit the creature in the forehead and torn away almost an inch of skin. He could see the skull underneath and behind that would be the brain.

Briefly, Tom considered stacking his spear skills and trying to target the weakness. One good thrust should break through the bone and finish it, but the timing wasn’t right. The attempt would be safe with the force transferred back from the strike being more than enough to knock him clear of its horn. It would have been easy, but he chose not to attempt to kill it. Instead, he continued the steps to the side, while watching it the entire time in case it did something unexpected. It didn’t beyond swinging its head at the last moment to try to hit him with its horn. Black Dodge did what it was famous for with his lightning fast six times boost reducing to merely double speed, which meant there was nothing he could do to prevent the horn from smacking into his thigh. It was a glancing blow, so there was no danger of the tier three armour being pierced, but it still felt like a fist had hit him.

Tom allowed the force to push him aside, and he converted it to a roll in order to increase the distance between him and it. The worm screeched to a halt and tried to spin to follow him. Everyone attacked with their various weapons. He saw Vidja’s glaive briefly sparkle with the blue of Power Strike. It crashed down on hard skin toward the back and may have gone deep enough to draw blood, but did no significant damage.

None of them attempted to target where his spell had peeled the skin away. This engagement was not about killing it as fast as possible instead it was intended as a learning opportunity.

It lunged at him again, and this time he poked with his spear. The slowed time and his skill let him cut a thin line over the damaged area, but like them he didn’t go for the kill and was careful not to strike to hard in case the bone in the forehead was weak.

Tom accepted another hit but controlled the fallout by striking his palm on the top of its horn. It flicked its head and pushed him up in the air as it flashed underneath him.

He landed.

It was turning once more.

“Throw Axe,” Michael yelled to warn everyone.

Tom dropped his plan to charge it and shifted sideway away from the monster. Michael’s axe expanded to a ridiculous size and went hurtling past to slam into its side.

It went halfway through.

The worm jerked in surprise. Its ability to undulate to drive itself forward was compromised.

In the wound, the axe returned to its original dimensions. The attack had done a significant amount of damage, but not as much as expected. Tom could remember the first goblin that had used it and how it had cut one of his meteorites in half. The healer had never extracted that level of power from the skill, but it was usually good enough to get a one shot kill. The fact that it hadn’t sliced the worm in two was testimony to the monster’s resilience.

It humped towards him but badly injured it was easy for him to dodge and the others exploited the gash Michael had left to finish it off.

They stood staring down at the corpse each of them assessing its capabilities in their own ways.

“Anyone object if I autopsy it?”

They all looked at Usko in surprise.

“What’s with that look? This thing’s something we haven’t fought before and flesh and blood. An autopsy will reveal the best locations to stab it.”

Everlyn shook her head. “No, it’s fine. Go ahead, we do autopsies at the start of each zone as standard practice for the same reasons.”

Usko approached the opportunity with enthusiasm and used his two axes to dice it up. A high level skill was used because the cuts were effortless and he exclaimed in appreciation as he uncovered something interesting that the rest of them couldn’t interpret. He was methodical in his approach, cutting from the tail toward the head. Occasionally, he would pause to point out weak points for them to aim at. The folds in the skin on the outside were deceptive. It felt like the seam was the weakest spot and should be targeted but not when you assessed the entire monster. There were cartilage rings that protected the locations immediately underneath the hide seams. Physically attacks were better off targeting the thicker part of the skin as it allowed them to avoid the extra armour. Surprisingly, it only had a single brain, so aiming for the head was the right call. But the skull had thinner spots that Usko promptly demonstrated. To kill it you wanted to target the ear canal or the bones near it or just under the central horn.

If Tom removed the skin in either of those locations, it would make it far easier for everyone to kill it. The previous location he had targeted had not been a weak spot, in fact it had been a reinforced area. If Tom had struck the visible bone with his full force, the blows would have achieved nothing.

With the lesson in the monster’s anatomy completed, they spent an hour drawing the creatures in one by one in order to familiarise themselves more fully with the worm’s fighting techniques. There were immediate improvements from the extra knowledge. Michael, when he used Throw Axe was able to split the worms in half every time as he targeted the unintuitive thick hide sections. For Tom, he used Dead Healers Touch on the correct locations, which made it easier for those without massive piercing attacks to eliminate one. Rahmat, with his new fancy spear had no difficulty landing the kill shot when the bone was exposed. If he had to go through skin, it usually took two or three blows. Tom had a lower tiered spear and fewer skill levels and so he needed three or four strikes to punch through the same locations. Luckily, his fighting style presented him with lots of opportunities to do so. It meant he was more than capable of racking up the kills.

Satisfied with their work and having killed everything locally, they started to move forward. Six worms burst out of the side of a cliff. Tom tagged them and then over twenty projectiles were spat at him. Crystallised Moment and hasty projectiles unleashed from his chest armour let him shatter four of them and he weaved to avoid most of the others, but despite that he still took heavy hits. The six monsters obviously thought their combined attacks would be sufficient to punish him as they kept up the barrage for two or three seconds longer than normal to put their total launched missiles at close to a hundred.

Finally, they grew bored and charged him. In close combat, all the difficulty went out of the fight.

The team then systemically started to eliminate them.

Abruptly, Everlyn stopped firing her arrows. “Incoming.” She pointed with a big grin on her face. Tom followed the finger, wondering how many how many more enemies it was going to be this time..

There were no worms instead it was the chosen flying in. They were travelling close to the ground, even lower than what they usually did and rather than going over a canyon they went up and down.

Time slowed alarmingly, and he shifted his attention back to the fight. There were four worms still alive and one of them were lunging toward him with its spike heading for his chest. A teleport and twist ensured the spike only went through the skin on his side. It was more a graze than a puncture wound.

“Take them out.” Thor growled.

It was like a switch was flicked.

The chosen were too far away to help but there was only four still alive, and they all focused on killing them. Michael claimed one with an axe that took a head right off. His spear flared with Power Strike, a Lunge combined with Enlarge put the tip of his weapon through another’s brain, a third had an arrow slam through an eye and the last which had retreated to spit rocks at him was torn apart in an abrupt conflagration of magic. From what he could tell, two chaos bolts had upgraded simultaneously, which meant not much of the worm survived in chunks larger than his fist.

With the battle over, he turned to face the chosen. They had emerged from the canyon and were only two hundred metres away. Harry waved excitedly from his perch on the elder. Tom did a head count instinctively and frowned.

A middle was missing.