Chapter 67: Something of an Engineer
After Aliyah, no additional members awakened abilities. They would save the rest for the end of the trail. Hopefully, what they had done would be enough to persist through the final wave.
The central tower base camp was in full swing, around 140 adventurers worked together in relative union to prepare for the final, frenetic wave. The waves were growing more numerous and more powerful, with more bronze rank monsters manifesting than the day before, even if they added up what each tower had suffered the previous wave. Their harmony was partially enforced by their fearful anticipation—should they not sufficiently work together they would be wiped out, forced to use their tokens to escape.
Sen couldn’t let that happen—it wasn’t just him that had party members without escape tokens.
More adventurers had dropped out, dipping their numbers down from above 150 to above 140. It was many, but the remaining adventurers felt their own nerves fraying as they questioned their own decision to stay.
However, just as Aliyah and John had received many high coveted and legendary stones, the others had too. If they could persist, they had another chance at a highly valuable stone. They would stand out among their peers, as adventurers with unique abilities.
The four leaders had reworked their tactics to one proposed by Sen. Flying monsters they could do little about, but most monsters were landlocked. Earth shapers dug a large moat around the tower, then it was compacted and treated with magic to prevent water from escaping the moat. The problem was water acquisition.
Nara may have stolen a large amount of water from the ocean. She kept quiet for now.
While the leaders and their assistants were looking for a solution to the water moat issue, Sen instructed the second part of their defensive modifications.
The tower looked like a strange amalgam of defensive additions. A makeshift fortress wall had been constructed around the base of the tower. Ramparts were archers and casters could fire from safely were constructed, granting them clear view into the moat and the sky. The casters and archers could retreat into the open terraces, which could be quickly shut by dedicated metal and earth shapers.
“Oh? What’s this?”
Nara crouched before a group of three people. It was the three awakening stone thugs who were extorting awakening stones from other people. They had also chosen to rejoin the full group.
“If you’re going the villain route, you can’t go walk the same path as everyone else again.”
They were tied up and stripped down to their underwear, unable to respond except for muffled yells.
“Did the awakening stones get taken back?”
If they had a dimensional inventory ability, the only way to get them back was to kill them and then perform a looting ritual, or loot them with an ability. Dimensional storage abilities were rare, so most likely their dimensional bag was taken from them. Nara wondered where the awakening stones had ended up, but she didn’t really care.
Judging from the handiwork, they must have ended up in Conrad’s east tower. Nara had growing appreciation for his heavy-handedness. She was too conflict adverse to handle the situation herself. Even interfering in Sen’s conflict with Raja was because she had someone to dump the cleanup onto afterwards, namely Sen.
They hadn’t figured out a solution to fill the moat, so Nara offered the ocean water in her inventory.
“This much water removed from the ocean is just a drop in the bucket, right?”
Unfortunately, she couldn’t remove the water from her inventory quickly. If she used her domain door, she would have been able to create a quicker method. Her door domain was a quick link to her inventory. She could place anything inside the door into her inventory or do the reverse. With her door, she simply place all the water on the other side, then have it stream out.
She couldn’t do that here. So she sat rather boredly by the trench, a small pillar of water streaming out from thin air right in front of her. She was limited by proximity, size, and mass with her normal inventory access method, so this was the best she could do.
As she filled it, other essence users were poisoning the water with various abilities and poison potions. The moat was filled with a witch’s concoction—iridescent as if oil had been spilled over the surface. The astringent smell burnt through her nose hairs like a forest fire carried by the wind, carrying the sent directly into her nonexistent brain.
“Ugh…I go to a different world only to get a new top 3 in worst smells I’ve ever experienced. In first place…rank up gunk, no contest. That thing’s violates the Geneva convention. Maybe I should collect it? No…I don’t wish that on my worst enemy, or maybe I do? Rolling into number two, rainbow smoke. Not only are monsters a scourge on the world, but they leave a final putrid parting gift just to spite you. And number three…actual chemical warfare, a moat filled with every iron rank and bronze rank poison imaginable.”
Poisons greatly varied in the damage they inflicted as well as their supplementary effects. Taking a dip in this moat of death would simultaneously corrode, rot, desiccate, burn (hot and cold), paralyze, and bleed whatever committed the mistake of stepping inside. Radiation was missing—a small blessing for Nara who had to stand nearby. It was so dangerous, that the iron rankers increasingly took their distance one they had finished dumping their mana and poison loot, leaving Nara to bear the poison stench alone.
“The cool thing about magic poisons is that you can mix them, no issue. Abilities are designed to work together, so they won’t accidentally neutralize each other or decrease efficacy, most of the time.”
She scooted back a bit further from the edge. She conjured a large J-shaped PVC pipe to angle the water into the moat, and secured it into the ground with a few U-shaped metal bars.
She smugly wiped her finger across her mouth, unduly self-satisfied.
“I may be something of an engineer myself.”
*****
The sun of the test of survival began its final descent behind the mountain valley. The beautiful jungle sunset was tinted with ominous gold and red. On Nara’s map, innumerous red dots flickered into light, painting the interface an unbroken red.
They had done all they could—they could only hope it was enough. Nara had already made her rounds across the jungle, first afflicting then killing all the bronze rank monsters she came across. It was a tactic she could only adopt because of time. Without it, a single bronze rank monster was a far tougher enemy.
The jungle echoed with screeches and roars, a cacophonous orchestra of out-of-tune instruments. Some monsters killed each other, thinning the wave enough to move. They would undoubtedly make their way to the tower, eventually, seeking with animalistic instincts something else to kill.
Essence users stood tense. John and Eufemia with their infant auras could sense the growing monster horde. Even those without an actual aura power could feel the tension rising.
As monsters charged in an unorganized horde, the first traps went off. Explosions of force, fire, and earth rocketed throughout the jungle, as if it had been shelled. Sen was using Nara’s map function to optimize the amount of monsters they would kill, but it was unnecessary. So thick was the carpet of monsters that each and every trap had killed with peak efficiency.
A common trap ability was Rune Trap, which Aliyah had herself in her Magic Essence. Eufemia had copied the spell, both placing as many as time and mana allowed across the jungle.
-------
Ability: [Rune Trap]
Spell
Incantation: “Emplace a mark of power.”
Cost: High mana
Cooldown: 1 minute
Effect (Iron): Create an explosive rune that will disappear after a short period. The rune can be set to trigger by proximity, caster trigger, or both.
--------
The monsters pushed forwards, their bodies crushing one another as well as the ones that had died before them. Another ring of traps rocketed off, directed through a chain of communications from Sen’s instructions.
A few monsters had dashed out of the tree line, some stumbling from the damage they had already sustained. They fell into the moat. Those unable to swim or not immune to poisons corroded in the death moat, struggling to swim or crawl to the other side. Nara had to stay at the base, repeatedly looting the monsters that died to the moat or else the moat would fill up. Since Sen was the strategic commander, a group of two adventurers temporarily joined their group. One was a defender, and the other another melee attacker.
Besar Desan was their temporary defender, with the Elemental, Might, and Resolute Essences for the Avatar Confluence. He was strong, sturdy, and flexible with a variety of elemental attacks.
The other was Ariel Strong, a leonid with one of Sanshi’s characteristic unusual combos. She had the Monkey, Song, and Staff Essences for the Mystic Confluence. She had undergone the full gauntlet of Sanshi’s essence opportunity system, winning or earning each of her essences over many years. She was older than most iron rankers, but not much older than Nara.
Spells and arrows rained down from above, but at a controlled pace. They shouldn’t exhaust their mana when the defenses were holding.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
A few monsters made it past the moat. Massive grasshoppers with spikes growing out of them in some child’s poorly drawn idea of a dinosaur jumped across with massive leaps into a crowd of awaiting iron rankers. Some were simply shoved back into the corrosive moat with blasts of force or wind, while others were quickly bisected.
The fliers all made it over, but were smoothly taken down by archers and mages. Any still surviving on the ground were speared by weapons.
The battle progressed smoothly, perhaps even easier that the battle of days before. Their planning and preparations had a significant impact, lifting the spirits of all the adventurers who had been saturated with anxiety.
Nara took a short break from the fight, but she couldn’t be entirely idle. She still had to regularly trigger her looting power. After her shift of looting, she’d pass the buck to another aura based looter, Andreas. John couldn’t loot the area by himself unless Nara was nearby, so she’d join the two in a party when it was her time to rest.
“Nara,” Sen said over voice chat.
“What’s up?”
“According to our scouts, three bronze rank jungle trolls have manifested simultaneously from different directions. They can bypass the moat and destroy our ramparts.”
“Can’t other people handle it? Not complaining, I just got this loot thing I need to do.”
“Those with escalating damage enough to handle trolls with high regeneration are rare at iron rank. Two other affliction specialists will handle the other two, but we need a third person.”
“I don’t even escalate that fast.”
“You’ll be paired with those who also deal rending damage—wind essence and force confluence users. John and Andreas will handle the moat. We’re sending you to the closest troll to hopefully avoid this issue.”
“Got it, I’m on it.”
A nice thing about being joined by Wind Essence users was they often had mobility support abilities. Not everyone had Nara’s mobility, so this greatly aided their passage through the jungle.
Nara shot off ahead. She had mastered her gravity cannon, as she called it, and dashed ahead to get started on the troll first, her sole reason to join this strike team.
The spotted the jungle troll. It was a strange deep green color, the color of jungle leaves made out of flesh and skin. It stood four stories tall, but even this height did not surpass the tallest trees of the jungle. Its path of shaking and rustling was enough to determine something large had manifested in the jungle, her guide map had been entirely unhelpful. She couldn’t tell the troll from any other monster around it. From its arms and body, vines grew from it in strange flesh and plant ropes. They smacked the forest around it as it walked, destroying jungle in flora-on-flora violence, if fleshy vine ropes could still be considered plants.
It’s path was slow. It swung its arms, crushing jungle trees and plants with wide, sweeping blows. She dropped towards it at terminal velocity, scratching her sword down the length of it’s back.
--------
-[Dimensional Instability] has been resisted.
-[Dimensional Rupture] has been resisted.
--------
“Damn stupidly high Recovery attribute,” Nara muttered.
Not only did the Recovery attribute govern health, stamina, and mana recovery, but it also determined resistances and reduced the effect and duration of afflictions. A higher recovery stat meant increased ability to maintain your internal equilibrium, which meant that the environmental effects such as high heat or bitter cold were also less effective.
But resistance was a numbers game. She teleported to the top of her node stack, dropping down again and again, drawing pathetic cat scratches against the troll’s back. Nirvana’s bow form wasn’t strong enough to puncture the troll’s tough skin, so she could only resort to this method.
Thanatos stuck to the branches, throwing bolts of dark flame at the reddened scratches, like trying to infect an open wound with an air-borne virus. Those scratches were already healing, but Thanatos had succeeded.
-------
-Thanatos has inflicted [Vulnerable].
-Thanatos has inflicted [Umbral Burn].
-------
The hardest part about fighting higher rank monsters was their resistance to iron rank damage and iron rank effects and afflictions.
Vulnerable was an important affliction that reduced resistances. Unfortunately, it was still subject to resistance. Nara hoped for a way to get around that. For now, she just had to grit her teeth and attack multiple times.
But once was enough.
“From order to disorder.”
Entropy took hold, and she got off her own duo afflictions plus Thanatos’s own.
She hung back, shooting a way back from the troll into relative safety. She had bothered it enough that it stopped sweeping up the forest like some furious housewife, turning its attention towards her instead.
She couldn’t stay still for long. They were in the thick of a mini monster surge. Round, baseball sized birds, pherators, pestered Nara, their long and pointed beaks like ice picks shooting towards her to spear at her flesh. She danced with them in a tree top battle, desperately protecting her eyes, while streaks of flesh and skin were torn away.
She had nearly forgotten that iron rank monsters were still a threat to her, overconfident in the advantages she had demonstrated against a singular and slower bronze rank monsters.
She dipped deeper into the canopy, using the plants and trees as obstructions against the bird swarm. Her sword skirted against monsters, occasionally slicing a wing off to drop the monster to the ground, where it was no longer a threat.
She yelled expletives when a pherator managed to stick her right eye. It stuck there for a moment, similarly stuck, ripping at tearing at her soft exposed organ as it pulled itself away. She stumbled, then covered her left eye with her free hand to prevent her vision from being taken away entirely.
She had to suppress the sudden and growing terror of losing half her field of vision. She wrestled away the whisper in the back of her mind telling her that she had lost vision in her right eye forever—magic could grow it back, easily, for an iron ranker. Her Earth sensibilities only amped her fear now, and she pressed them back down, though her hands still trembled.
She hadn’t wanted to know what it’d feel like to have a needle stuck in her eye, a video game classic, but now she got to experience it in one of the worst ways possible. She would have had no complaints if that particular experience remained vicarious.
Node jumping rapidly forward to gain distance, she bought herself enough time to uncork a healing potion and down it, spilling a bit over her face because of her trembling hands. Behind her, the pherators incessantly screeched, their gleaming needle beaks more ominous than they had been moments before. Did they have intelligence to aim for her eyes, or had it been animalistic instinct to target vulnerable organs?
She couldn’t use another potion for a while, but hopefully she wouldn’t need it. She may have overreacted and used a potion for a non-life-threatening injury, but she told herself that losing half of her vision warranted it to lick her own mental wounds.
She experienced the strange sensation of the flesh of her eye stitching itself together, her right side vision patchy like light poking through a moth eaten curtain. She looped back towards the troll, pherators still following behind her incessantly.
A ball of wind intercepted the pherators, tearing apart the feathers and wings needed for flight.
“Thank you!” Nara said, flashing a thumbs up to the wind essence user that had caught up with her.
She hadn’t yet figured out a plant to deal with the pherators, but not she didn’t need to. Encio was right, again—a partner in adventure greatly increased survivability. She logically understood he was right, but only now understood how right he really was. Almost no one else was as single target focused as she was. A random adventurer easily handled what Nara had been on the verge of a panic attack for.
The pherators charged at Nara’s savior, but the soft red haired elf put up a barrier of wind, shredding them and blowing them back. For a spell caster, the elf was surprisingly mobile and defensive. She expertly timed her mana intensive wind-barrier, which forced the pherators into a predictable pace as they charged in and were blown back. She used blasts of wind and pulls of vacuum to herd and kill the birds like a bloodthirsty sheepdog. With each pass, the swarm was shredded in size.
Nara could more easily deal with the few that charged her, picking them off with swipes of her sword. The were animalistic, and had gone for Nara’s eyes out of instinct, not intelligence. With the new elf as the prominent threat, the swarm’s focused changed. Even though she tore them apart with ease, the pherators didn’t think to focus the more exposed Nara.
They had destroyed the swarm of pherators, so the two regrouped with the jungle troll extermination unit. Another essence user had cursed the troll so it’s skin had softened like it was water-logged, far easier for Nara and the others to damage. Nara stuck away, flinging arrows at it to speed up her affliction growth. Her aim still sucked, but the troll was a massive target. Horseshoes and hand grenades—as long as she pointed her bow in the general direction, her shot would hit.
She was flinging pine needles at a redwood tree, but eventually those pine needles evolved into metal needles, and then, into sharpened steel pipes.
The troll wildly swung its arms. It had deadly amounts of power for its rank. A single solid swing was enough to kill an iron ranker.
Monsters, unlike essence users, did not have balanced attributes. In video game terminology, they had massive constitution, and then their other stats were unbalanced, dependent on their nature. The troll had huge regeneration, health, power, and toughness, but it struggled to swat at the essence users that were haranguing it like gnats. It’s senses and reactions were dull and slow.
Nara thought min-maxing was valuable in many video games. It still was there, but reality differed from video games. She grew a greater appreciation of essence users’ path of balanced attributes, although they’d only truly shine at later ranks where even magic casters were difficult to kill. Attacking the backline became less of a viable option when the backline couldn’t be one-shot.
The greatest threat of the troll was its flesh-vines that hung off of its body and arms. As it swung, those did too, deadly ropes that snapped around like iron chains attached to a propeller. They cracked through wood and sent splinters flying though the air. Thankfully, they also killed much of the swarm around the troll itself, the bronze rank damage easily crushing and ripping apart iron rank monsters.
It was slow progress—Nara didn’t have hours to let her afflictions grow beforehand. The troll was distracted, swatting at the air and stomping its feet like a child throwing a tantrum. It was no longer a danger of attacking the central tower and destroying their defenses, so the team slowly picked apart chunks of flesh from the troll.
Other than the wind spell caster elf, most mobility types like Nara were mana and stamina efficient. The spell caster elf focused on killing any iron rank monster that tried to attack them as they dealt with the troll, and the rest of them continued their assault. Even a weak arrow from Nara grew in damage, until the prick of her magic arrow sheared off tire-sized green and red chunks from the monster like non-vegan slices of watermelon.
The troll’s regeneration could no longer keep up against the gradual damage escalation. The damage growth of rending damage from Dimensional Instability was linear, but Dimensional Rupture did rending damage based on instances of Dimensional Instability, which meant it scaled twice.
It’s not like magic is mathematical.
She swung her sword with a bit of recovered boldness. It shorn off a large chunk, a cut ripping across the troll’s shoulder blades wider than the cut she inflicted was.
It was simple—Dimensional Instability was better for high damage attacks as a multiplier while Dimensional Rupture was better for low damage, quick attacks, since it triggered a fixed amount of damage regardless of the original attack. She had two main tactics based off of this dual characteristic.
The troll was limping, bleeding from several massive cuts around its body. Various other abilities impeded its ability to regenerate. It was time to end it.
She crouched against its neck on its back, her sword poised. The troll’s inflexible arms could not reach her while other adventures distracted it. She activated World’s End, the corona of annihilating energy forming around her sword.
She swung, the sword further enhanced with resonating-force damage to dig through flesh, as well as incidental and targeted buffs from the adventurers around her. The trolls’ neck split, her sword cutting though its already damaged neck like a hot knife through butter. The head drooped forward, no longer sufficiently supported with neck muscles to hold its massive weight up. Threads of skin snapped as the head dropped to the group, troll body toppling behind it. It fell into the forest, crushing monsters unluckily enough to stand in it’s shadow. The body broke away into particles of silver, blue, and gold light, proof of the transcendent damage that had dealt the final blow. It vanishes in those silvery speckles, no rainbow smoke left behind.
-------
-[Jungle Troll] has been wholly annihilated. It has been automatically looted.
* 10 bronze spirit coins
* 100 iron spirit coins
* 10000 lesser spirit coins
* 1 monster core (bronze)
* Jungle troll flesh (bronze)
* Crown of the Jungle (bronze)
-Loot has been added to your [Astral domain].
-------