For three days Tristan had attempted to get the piece of ore. For three days he failed. Tristan had assumed the tortoises to be dumb beasts, but they had shockingly accurate memories. It allowed them to adapt to him in the same way he had intended to learn of their movements. He had gone in, sure of victory, only for one of the mythical beasts to squat in the only exit.
The rock was too unwieldy for him to climb the walls with, a combination of excessive weight and small size kept him from climbing over the creature. He had tried to use Vulcan’s gravity blast on them, only for it to be absorbed by the shell. Tristan knew it should not be surprising that a creature living around a powerful absorption treasure would pick up the affinity.
He would have given up a long time ago and moved on, but Vulcan claimed that he could not pass up this opportunity.
“No, you need to grab that. It's a piece of molten kharkodine!” Vulcan exclaimed.
Tristan had been confused by Vulcan’s slate of swear words. The artifact tended to have a clean mouth, but this stone had him popping off with words like ‘molten’ and ‘slagging.’ Words that felt far too normal to be used like that. Tristan was more partial to ‘blind gods’ and ‘forsaken’ as there was a little rebellion wrapped up in saying them.
“What exactly is this kar-ko-din?” Tristan struggled to pronounce the word correctly, even within the bounds of a telepathic conversation.
“Blood steel.” Vulcan said like that explained anything, “You don’t get it, that is a disembodied kern.”
“So a tier whatever reservoir filled with absorption?” Tristan still did not get what the big deal was. Sure a god level reservoir would have a massive storage easily eclipsing Vulcan. However, unlike Vulcan, Tristan would have to manually fill it.
“No, it is a force primed to be used on any creature or item,” Vulcan said, “You could use it to get absorption as a force.”
Tristan had guessed something similar, but absorption was not something he needed. Consumption and infusion did many of the things that absorption could. Would the force help? Marginally. Tristan was far more interested in the near invincibility that adamance offered.
It would be easy to assume that absorption made things more durable, and it did in a roundabout way. It simply reduced the energy imparted to a given object during impact. This would be great if getting shoved around was an issue, but Tristan weighed nearly four hundred pounds. In armor, he would get close to six or seven hundred pounds. Getting pushed around was not an issue for him, at least not within the same tier.
In short, Tristan was not sure it was worth the waste of time. Regardless of the time wasted, he was running out of food. Vulcan’s fire kept the underground hideout warm, and snow was easy to melt into water, but food was more scarce. Not that Tristan had gone looking for it. All he knew was that the natural hibernation instincts of animals had been thrown off by Viral’s heat wave.
It probably meant little to the herbivores who were able to stockpile nuts and other foods, as the temperature wouldn’t affect their reserves. The predators were a different matter. They would be hungry and Tristan intended to take advantage of that. He was confident in killing everything but the Drake if he was able to get the jump on them.
Drawing his knife, Tristan slit his palm. He barely felt it, the blade was so sharp and thin that it did not even transfer enough of the frigid temperature to his skin for him to feel it. He put his knife away and clenched his fist. Blood dripped through his fingers and onto the ground. He walked a few hundred feet away and smeared some blood on the trees and snow.
Tristan did this in several other directions before sending a small amount of consumption alloy into his hand to eat any infection. A wave of healing alloy finished closing up the cut a few hours later. Tristan had considered waiting in his hideout, but that would handicap any advantage a surprise attack could give him. Instead, he decided to wait in one of the trees.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Despite the situation, Vulcan’s demands for him to wait had given Tristan huge amounts of free time while recovering from his bouts with the tortoises. They were not particularly dangerous opponents, just durable and intelligent. Every time he showed up, their aim improved and their tactics adapted. It would not be long before they realized that they could just hide the blood steel in their mouths and turtle up in their shells. He did not have a way to get through the black bone as it resisted his knife and absorption was particularly effective against bludgeoning damage.
He waited, crouched in the tree. And waited. A part of him had assumed that the blood would act like a magnet, drawing all the beasts in. He had never considered that there might not be any around to smell it. Every so often he would go to his hideout to warm back up, but nothing ever showed up.
That evening Tristan was lying on his bed, when he asked Vulcan, “You’re from the same plane as Conni, right?”
Vulcan sent a nod, “Sort of. I’m from the same place as Conni, but the idea of separate planes is a new one. At least relative to the world’s history.”
“What do you mean?” Tristan asked.
Vulcan sent a shrug, “I don’t know. I died in the war that ended with the creation of the separate planes. Being dead really puts a limit on my current information.”
“So it was a war between the Steel Saint and the three gods?” Tristan asked. They had displayed ludicrous amounts of power, but not what he would expect from someone able to split apart a world.
“Ehh,” Vulcan sent over a so-so feeling, “They were strong, but not big enough to have a world war revolve around them. Neither am I, just in case you are wondering.”
Tristan stared at the ceiling, “Who were you fighting then?”
These were some of the questions he had been unable to ask while Vulcan was healing. After Viral appeared he knew there were things scarier than Vulcan out there, however a war between such beings seemed unreal. Like two natural disasters deciding to settle their differences with a fistfight. It was not something that was within the scope of Tristan’s imagination.
“The sects, they banded together under a man named Infinitus. He named himself after one of his more esoteric forces, at least that's what I think. We fought, I died, the end,” Vulcan mentally shrugged.
Tristan wanted to ask more, but he felt that it would be rude. Many warriors in the Caldera had been reticent to speak about their pasts. Too many friends were dead and torn apart by beasts. While beasts weren’t involved in Vulcan’s demise, he still watched his friends be killed. Tristan was a firm believer that the most dangerous monsters wore human skin.
The silence stretched between them. Tristan was about to try and get some sleep when his metal sense got a reaction. Near the edge of his range, a few shapes moved through the snow above. Wroughtwilers, Tristan was sure of it from how little concentration it took to feel them.
He jumped to his feet and made his way to the hatch. While he did not like the idea of eating a dog, he would rather do that than starve. He had just opened the metal hatch when one of the wroughtwilers abruptly changed directions. Tristan jumped out of the shaft to receive the charge, it still had to travel a hundred feet to get to him so he had plenty of time to get ready.
Something wet spattered across Tristan’s face a moment before the wroughtwiler arrived, jumping through the air. Tristan slapped the canine aside with Vulcan. Only when the body stopped rolling did Tristan start to understand the situation.
He stared at the upper torso, front legs, and crushed head of a wroughtwiler. The entire rear was gone, torn away by something large. Placing a hand to his face, his fingers came away bloody. Then he paid attention to the sounds.
The pack was not baying and howling from the excitement a hunt would bring. They were whimpering and barking in fear. Another crunch came out of the darkness silencing another beast. Tristan could not see what was happening through the darkness and tree cover, but his metal sense let him know that one of the canines was floating. Or being lifted by something.
Tristan looked at the half wroughtwiler at his feet. There was his food, it would last for at least a few days. He could safely go back into his little hole in the ground and ignore what was going on. However, he would not get another chance like this to challenge a mythical beast while having most of a pack as a distraction.
From his experience, the wroughtwilers would fight to the death against anything that hurt their pack. Tristan could use that. He would have no better chance to kill whatever this was than right now. So he slunk towards the floating wroughtwiler. A hundred feet was not much, and he closed the distance quickly.
What he found was not what he expected. At first, he thought it was a bear, however, the arms were too long and ended in four enormous claws. It had a small round head and was covered in armor with fur poking through the joints. Tristan watched in shock as the creature tore the wroughtwiler in its hand in half before chowing down on the soft viscera inside.
Tristan watched wide-eyed as the top half was casually tossed aside after its ribcage was emptied out. He had attracted more than one type of mythical beast.