Chapter 435 - Reign of the Crowned IV
None of the monstrous lineages that inhabited the Langgbjerns ranked within the norm, but few were quite as bizarre as the humanoid golems scattered throughout the mountains. They shared one face between all of their members, a distinctive, square-jawed visage with a thick, wild beard and a head as bald as an eagle’s. No one knew precisely whose form it was they took, but they agreed on all of the specifics. Every single statue shared the exact same height, the exact same hair, and the exact same scars. They all had perfect six packs, bulging biceps, and prominent phalli.
Still, despite their outward similarity, their strength spanned a wide range. The southernmost species sat in the mid 1500s, and considering that they needed only to eat the almost-true ice produced by the lower-leveled stropharia, one might have been inclined to suspect only paltry growth. Said suspicion, however, rang false.
Ingesting the ice assured a full 500 levels. Some of the particularly compatible went even further and grew to the mid two thousands. And it was precisely with one such specimen that Chloe found herself engaged.
Despite their tough exteriors—they took on all the properties of their new, icy material—the statues were far from close combatants. Using a bizarre combination of magic and physics, they specialized in flinging chunks of ice at their foes from afar. Though certainly curious, the unique means of attack secured the species’ status as a predator. Their projectiles were launched with such force that their impacts far preceded the sounds that marked their sudden arrivals.
Chloe, however, was largely unaffected. Her army might have suffered a fair bit of damage even from a single golem’s assault, but she had long abandoned the legion on account of its speed.
It just couldn’t keep up. A rogue in all but name, the maid darted through the trees at a blistering speed, easily swerving out of the way of the statue’s bullets. Having spent the past few weeks rushing through the mountains, she had hit and shattered the 850 wall. And since then, she had become the fastest member by far. With a top speed that was almost on par with Durham’s, crossing the mountains seemed like a quick and simple task. But in reality, she could only maintain her terminal velocity for a fraction of a second. And even then, it would drain her legs and leave her immobile for at least a day. For long distance travel, she could only maintain about sixty kilometers per hour.
Her almost pitiful average speed prevented her from escaping the ice-throwing statue hot on her tail. It was fortunate then that she had no need to escape.
Her most powerful thrall dove from the sky, slammed its beak into the statue, and claimed the kill for its vampiric master. The beast in question was a griffon, and not a fledgling like the one that the party once fought. That much was clear from its size.
Unlike the massive toddlers, the adults were rarely more than a meter long. They shed their unnecessary mass with age and became tiny bundles of pure muscle powerful enough to punch holes in hardened ice.
It was only by chance that Chloe had happened upon the griffon’s body. She caught it right as it was knocked off of the sky and thrown into the side of the mountain. From his lack of comment, she suspected that Panda might have had something to do with its arrival, but he made no claims, and she refrained from voicing the suspicion. Either way, it was a major contributor to her ability to traverse the mountains.
She waited for her log to confirm that the statue was dead before calling the griffon back to her side, and pressing a finger against the cat-bird’s forehead. The effect was immediate; by receiving her blood, the servant was able to repair its damaged beak and return to perfect condition. Being corpses, thralls no longer possessed the ability to restore their health and mana over time. Any damage they endured, including the microfractures that resulted from the stresses of one’s continued existence would need to be actively repaired.
The maid shivered as a gust of wind blew by. Quickly shoving her hand back into her uniform’s pocket, she took a deep breath and broke into another sprint. She hated the sensation of the cold winter air completely flooding her lungs, but she didn’t have much of a choice. The cloth mask she wore over her face wasn’t enough to block it out, and there wasn’t any time to make anything out of the local wildlife.
She kicked off another tree and continued springing her way around the mountain. She wasn’t going straight up, but a mix of up and around—the path that best followed the tracks Panda had left behind in the snow.
All of her roadblocks came in the form of monsters, but even they were few and far between. The central regions were peculiar. The established rules that governed the rest of the mountains went ignored. The predators used the marches as opportunities to hunt and grow their power; most of the newly spawned were long dead by noon.
The raccoon tracks came to an end after about an hour of lateral climbing. Panda himself was waiting at the end of the trail, his arms crossed and his face a smug grin.
“Down here,” he said. “This next part will be a bit of a detour. We’re gonna have to head downhill and skirt around the next three mountains.”
“Do we have to? That seems like a waste of time.”
“I mean, unless you want to die.” Panda pointed a paw at the area behind him. “You see that treeline over there? That marks the start of jittern territory.”
“Is that supposed to be a big deal?”
“Let’s just say I’d be betting on the house,” said Panda.
“How many days would I lose?” asked Chloe.
“Are you really asking that? Do you need me to remind you what happened last time?” he said, with a sigh. “You literally wasted twice as much time not listening to me.”
“It might be different this time.”
“Goddammit, relax,” he said, with a sigh. “You’ve still got another two weeks until they reach her.”
“What if they get there faster!? You said they know where she is!”
“Well, I mean, yeah, but…”
“How much time would I lose if I took the detour?”
“Well, you’ll need to go around three whole ass mountains. At your current pace, that’s what, two, three days?”
Chloe balled up her hands. “Three days is a really long time.”
According to Panda’s estimates, they were already cutting it close. At her current pace, she would reach Arciel on the same day as the inbound hunters. Even if she did manage to squeeze in before them, they wouldn't have any time to rest or otherwise prepare for the encounter.
“Yeah, but it's either that, or you cast the die and pray for a twenty.”
Chloe pursed her lips and fiddled with a needle before slowly taking a breath. “There isn’t enough time not to take risks. We might not make it if I don’t do everything I can.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Well, alright,” said Panda, with a shrug. “It’s your life.”
He watched her go with his grin ever growing. He couldn’t help it. She was so easy to manipulate that she may as well have been a child.
She was brave, he would give her that, but with its concept only widespread throughout the Langgbjern range, he doubted that she truly understood what it meant to enter a crowned domain.
At its core, the concept was akin to the time dilation zone that Lana so often employed, or perhaps the ever-night mountain that the herrings had borrowed from Claire, a zone of control that an individual exerted. Within its bounds, it was the domain’s creator who defined the rules of causality.
Though powerful, the skills that produced such functions were heavily limited in scope. They were immutable, bound to a specific set of predefined rules birthed at the time of their creation. Still, their maintenance remained inordinately expensive. Even Lana's, a tiny bubble that modified a single facet of reality for exactly one individual therein, ran over a thousand points for every second of continued operation.
So what then was the cost of a domain that spanned three mountains, capable of reshaping reality precisely as its master perceived?
The answer was best provided by way of ley line enumeration; there was so much mana in the air around the jittern sub-range that it was nigh on par with Valencia. Granted, not even that was enough on its own. The monster that ran the domain bolstered the mana density even further, for it was only by overwhelming the ambient magic that it could fashion its castle.
Though rarely accurate, the castle descriptor proved particularly apt in the jittern case. Sized more like a small country than a single residence, the square-walled imperial palace spanned three hundred kilometers in every direction.
The outer bulwarks were dyed in a brilliant red. Most other buildings either shared the shade or found themselves in teal or white. Either way, the roofs were the same bright yellow. Featuring upturned eaves and bountiful ridges, the seemingly forbidden palace was home to one of the Langgbjern’s most powerful.
From what Panda had gathered, there were roughly twenty different rulers that governed the icy peaks. The jittern king was one such number, controlling one of the most magic-dense domains outside of Elysium itself. He was perhaps the third or fourth most prominent, standing directly ahead of the rooster king that dominated the south and the undead dragon that ruled the westernmost fortress. And yet, his domain was one of the few that remained largely undistorted.
It was really just his palace and his citizens to which his influence gave birth. In that sense, the crowned beast was effectively a god. And in fact, had he been worshipped by anything beyond his own creations, he very well could have become a celestial.
There was no way that Chloe would be able to emerge from an encounter triumphant.
Her best bet was to avoid his gaze.
But in that, she had already proven herself a failure.
___
Claire silently shook Boris free of his bloody patina as she joined the line in front of the rooster king. It had been a full week since Sylvia first set out, but she was still slogging away. The fox had checked in a few times since, but she spent most of her time out in the wild apparently racking up experience with Panda and Allegra. Her progress seemed incredibly absurd. In just ten days, she had gained six full racial levels.
The lyrkress had made a fair bit of progress herself. She ventured out of the rooster’s encampment each morning to participate in the frenzy and earn what experience she could, though she often had to compete with her fellow disciples. Though the idea reeked of Claire’s influence, she was only following suit. It was a part of the group’s routine to go out into the forest and hunt until they had either eaten their fill or run out of prey. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it doubled as a means of recruitment. They would often engage those that caught their eye and challenge them to see if they were worth their time.
Two such newcomers sat in the pits, battling against their recruiters. Frankly, it didn’t seem like either would make the cut. One was too unintelligent, perhaps even unaware of the fact that she was being tried, while the other was simply weak, on the verge of being kicked to death by a stupid pink bird.
Claire fully understood the unfortunate velociraptor’s pain. She could easily beat down the flamingo if she used her vectors, but he was almost impossible to fight without them. If not for all the levels she gained—Honkarg’s numbers were a little too high for growth to come easily—she would’ve found it impossible to close the gap between them.
A few moments of staring later, the lyrkress shifted her eyes away from the flamingo and towards the rooster in charge. He was also in a pit, offering explicit one-on-one instruction to the dual-wielding peacock therein. And it was precisely for said instruction that Claire was standing in line.
The lines trended much shorter in the late afternoon; there were only three other disciples in front of her—a tiny finch with a mohawk and an entirely disproportionate scythe, a brontosaurus with a dagger between his lips, and a paper parrot with a bladed anchor—which meant it wouldn’t be much longer.
Surely enough, it took only about ten minutes of waiting for all of the others to be dismissed. Only one of those minutes was spent in battle. The other nine were made up of lectures, slow, comprehensive explanations as to their mistakes and next steps. And though they weren’t exactly for her, Claire made sure to keep her ears raised and pay careful attention. Many of the tips and instructions were general enough that she found ways to apply them to her own techniques. Case in point, the brontosaurus’ lecture. The rooster king really hammered home the importance of range and the ways that the dinosaur could move to circumvent it. While Claire couldn’t exactly snap her neck like a whip, the principle remained worth noting.
Nodding to herself, and internalizing the lessons by mimicking the actions in the back of her mind, Claire stepped into the pit as soon as the parrot was dismissed. She immediately summoned an entire army of Borises and lowered her hips into a stance.
She had an axe in one hand and a falchion in the other. Her lips held a dagger and her tail sported a mace. Her talons were left bare, but her back hooves were outfitted with ankle blades. As if that weren't enough, she planted a dozen-odd lizards around the battlefield while also suspending another twelve in the air behind her.
It might have seemed a little excessive, but recently, it had become a natural part of her technique. The identity of each individual weapon was never quite fixed. She was flexible enough to switch freely to whatever best suited the situation at hand, but the principle was the same. A Boris on standby was easier to retrieve than a Boris that had yet to spawn. In fairness to her pet iguana, it wasn’t a huge difference. There was maybe half of a millisecond lost to the process. But against a foe as fast as the rooster, even the tiniest window was key.
Claire kicked off the ground as soon as she was ready and flew into a frenzy of blows. Her vectors, of course, were milked for everything that they were worth. She slashed and twisted, often letting go of her weapons whenever she judged that it would be more efficient than nullifying her momentum.
That part was probably the biggest part of her growth. It was far more correct to leverage Boris’ abilities only when they worked in her favour. His ridiculous flexibility was his greatest strength by far, and it was only by correcting her approach for it that she was able to draw out his full potential.
That much, the rooster had taught her on her second day.
She had implemented it and every other strategy that she had heard. She haphazardly adjusted his weight and often spawned him in inconvenient places to block the opponent’s movements. Case in point, a Boris appeared under the chicken’s arm the moment he tried to lower it, and forced him to spend more effort pushing him out of the way with a much weaker muscle.
If not for the rooster king’s rock-hard feathers, Boris could have done a lot more than just serving as an obstacle. But even as a minor inconvenience, he provided the chance for Claire to strike at the king.
And surely enough, it was once again proven to be successful.
Just as she thought, Claire soon ended up with her back against the ground, a sword pointed to her throat, and the chicken explaining the importance of maintaining her balance, even with her vectors to make up the difference.
Or at least that was what he did before a blast of mana suddenly surged through the rooster’s domain. The attack was so powerful that it completely ripped apart the barrier that gave the world its form and exposed the true sky above the one that the chicken imagined.
An army of one-legged wolves flooded straight in, descending alongside what was clearly their master.
That much was clear from the ornament that sat atop her head.
Just like the rooster, she was one of the almost god-like monsters that dominated the Langgbjern range.
Another one of the rightfully crowned.