The light of day seemed to be coming up, or going down, over the horizon, in either a sunrise or a sunset. Either way it was more than enough light to see by, as bright as noon day in Epidas in fact.
The place I had appeared in seemed to be some sort of cityscape, however it didn’t seem to be ‘lived in’ from what I could tell; there was a slight rotting smell in the air, almost like there wasn’t any active rot but the rot had been so great before that it had woven itself into the surroundings, the buildings and infrastructure seemed to be breaking down and deteriorating, and piles of scrap that must’ve once been vehicles and other things littered the streets and sidewalks.
Looking up, I could see a dome structure enclosing the city. Many different buildings rose up to touch this dome, almost like they were holding it up, keeping it from crashing down onto the city below. It would’ve been a sight to behold, but what must’ve once been a magnificent city was now a ruined cityscape.
A city huh? There must be some valuable things left here. I just hope the buildings won’t come crumbling down while I’m inside them looking for that sweet sweet loot.
After getting a handle on my surroundings, and seeing that I wasn’t in any immediate danger, the System messages popped up.
[Time Requirement: Survive for 160 hours]
[Forced Task: Get rid of 1,000,000 points worth of hostile entities]
A grinding task? This brings back memories of my days spent playing RPGs, both on Earth and Epidas.
I started walking down the cracked city streets looking for monsters, or anything hostile that might be lurking around. However, no matter how far I walked, there didn’t seem to be anything anywhere, the city seemed to be completely desolate. This was very confusing, according to the Forced Task there should be swarms of hostile entities, but for some reason the streets were completely empty. But this didn’t stop me from exploring the streets, it could just be that I had spawned in a location very far away from anything after all.
Walking down the abandoned streets I began to notice something, my skin was burning, but I didn’t even feel hot, in fact I felt somewhat cold because of the misty ice-steel ring. Looking at my skin I noticed some faint burns on my arms and legs, but they seemed to only really be on one side of my body. I was somewhat confused as to what was causing this, but then I noticed that the side with the burns was also the side that had been facing the ‘sun’ the most, or at least where the sun seemed to be below the horizon.
Could it be radiation? That’s bad, radiation damage is difficult to heal. I better get inside one of these buildings and take care of this before it becomes a real problem.
Looking around at the nearby buildings I wondered which I should choose to shelter in. It seemed like I was in a business district of the city, with stores and entertainment buildings around me. I chose the largest shop that I could see and ran towards it, wanting to get out of the sun’s rays before they caused even more damage.
Barging through the glass doors of the building I was able to get out of the sun’s direct rays, but there was still non-direct light entering through the windows. Thankfully it seemed that the store would’ve been lit mostly by artificial illumination when it had been active, so all I needed to do was walk deeper into the building to avoid the sun.
Walking deeper into the dark shop I looked around trying to discern if there was anything of worth. The shop I had walked into seemed to be some kind of clothing store, with racks devoid of clothing, and dust covering the floor. It seemed like time and the environment had turned the clothing into dust. However the dust on the floor was disturbed and had many different trails and footprints tracking through it. This detail made me cautiously look around with more care.
Barely visible within the darkness of the store were faint flickers of movement, and slight reflections from eyeballs looking directly at me were hidden within the darkness. I shivered when I noticed the hidden life stalking me from the shadows.
Dang that’s creepy! I didn’t think that everything else would be hiding in the buildings, but I guess even the natives don’t like the radiation from the sun. I guess this is as good a time as any to grind out my Forced Task. It seemed like whatever was hiding in the shadows was afraid of the sunlight, so, theoretically, I would be able to kill them without worry.
Although I was eager to complete the Forced Task as soon as possible, that didn’t mean that I would rush into things without proper information. Using a spell to allow me to see into the darkness, I was able to make out what was lurking in the shadows.
The shadows lit up and I was able to make out many different kinds of creatures hiding in the dark. They were all vastly different from one another, with some standing tall and lanky, some were large and slow, and others crawling or scuttling along the floor. There were various colors of flesh adorning these horrendous creatures, ranging from charred black, sickening blue, infected red, ghostly white, and some even had corrosive green leaking from their bodies. Their biology was all vastly different, but they all had one thing in common, they looked designed for violence and war.
Considering the state of the city outside, these monsters must be some sort of biological weapons or something. Whatever they are, they don’t look easy to kill, and I don’t favor my chances of fighting in close combat with some of these monsters, especially not such a large group of them.
Using long ranged magic was certainly the only way I would be fighting these monsters, but what magic to use was another question. Earth magic wouldn’t be feasible, the materials used in a city, even if they had been neglected for a long time, would be difficult to effect with magic.
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Mental magic didn’t seem to work on these monsters, it made sense though, they were probably engineered that way. Those two were currently my most practiced offensive options that I could use at the moment, but they didn’t seem suitable in this situation.
What kind of magic should I use then? I mean, I can use any kind of magic, at least theoretically, because of my magic core color, so I could always just try messing around with a new type of magic. But if I’m going to do that then I should try to find out what is most effective against these new foes.
I started to observe the monsters more closely to try and discern what their weaknesses might be. However each monster was so different from the next that what might be a weakness to one would be a strength of another, it just didn’t seem like any one magic would be suitable. When I was wondering whether or not I should just try to learn some kind of flesh magic, I realized that they all seemed to be avoiding the sunlight like it was the plague.
That’s it! If these are indeed engineered weapons, then they must’ve been given a weakness that could be exploited should they ever turn against their creators. It seems that there is something about the sun that these monsters can’t handle, or at the very least try to avoid for some reason.
Considering my own experience with the sun outside, I wondered if maybe radiation was what these monsters feared. Well it wouldn’t hurt to try something. The monsters hadn’t attacked me thus far, so I decided that I was fairly safe where I was at, and began to experiment with my magic, trying some spells I already knew and overloading them to try and modify their effects.
Spell overloading was a commonly used method when spell casting, it was even taught to children. However most only slightly overloaded a spell, allowing them to slightly alter its shape, trajectory, or strength; it was something that everyone did but nobody really pushed the limits of.
Not pushing it was understandable though, overloading a spell became exponentially more difficult and dangerous the more it was overloaded, but along with this danger and difficulty came equally as many benefits. If smaller levels of overloading allowed small tweaks, then much higher levels of overloading allowed for much greater changes. Even morphing the spell into a completely new spell was possible with enough effort and practice, though it was much harder than it sounded.
In the end I settled on a light ball spell and began to massively overload it, and I was able to turn it into a light beam fairly easily. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but the more I experimented the better I was able to manipulate the spell into something that would suit my needs.
I spent almost half an hour experimenting and honing the spell to get what I desired, but the whole time I was experimenting and refining my magic the monsters didn’t make a single noise, besides some slight movement across the floor. It was eerily creepy, and I might’ve preferred if they made at least some kind of sound, their silence was disturbing, almost distracting. However, I thought that this was natural. A weapon doesn’t make noise unless it has to after all. I tried to ignore the grinding silence and focus on refining my attack spell.
During my time tinkering with the spell, the sun never brightened past its initial levels, meaning that it was still in a ‘sunrise’ or ‘sunset’ position. Despite this it was still just as bright as noon day might be in the outside world, and I would hate to be subjected to the kind of radiation I might receive should it ever rise above the horizon.
Like this, about an hour and a half had passed since my initial foray into this ruined city. My light ball spell had reached the point that I desired, a focused beam of intense radiation, but it was still an incredibly unstable spell. It's a scrappy solution, but it'll at least be usable, if a little dangerous to myself, but hey you work with what you’ve got.
I noticed a few minutes ago that the sunlight had begun to darken, and the diverse array of monsters lurking in the shadows began to grow more active and restless, their stares became piercing, and they focused on me like how lightning might focus on a metal rod. I figured that I should test out my new cobbled together spell before my saving light fled fully into the ground.
Getting up from my seated position I did some light stretches before turning to face the crowd of monsters. Normally I would try to avoid calling living things monsters, even from within my own mind, but these creatures couldn’t be described in any other way. They looked like a genetic experiment gone wrong, with each one going wrong in its own different and horrifying way.
I recast the very simple spell that allowed me to see better in the dark, and began charging up my spell while looking for the best target to test it on. I found the tankiest largest monster I could, and decided that it would be the perfect test dummy. It didn’t look capable of dodging, even with its many short legs, and its armored plates covered its massive body; it was a stress test, start with the toughest challenge and work your way backwards from there. If my radiation beam worked on the tankiest looking target, then it would surely work on the others, and if not then I would know the upper limits of my new spell at least.
After a few seconds of charging, I fired off the beam into the middle of the large monster and it arrived almost as fast as a blink. Even though it was a light based spell, it wasn’t as fast as light, magic was weird like that. The beam hit the target, and immediately a ferocious roar escaped the monster's large maw. The beam was short-lived, but it left a large scar of burned flesh and crumbling armor plates in its wake three times the size of my fist.
It was much more effective than I imagined, and even though it didn’t seem to do much beyond surface damage, this was the toughest looking monster I had just hit. I found the result of my spell quite satisfactory. However it didn’t seem that the effects were quite finished yet. Almost like a spreading corruption, the nasty burn on the monster began to spread from its origin point, leaving crumbling armor and ruined flesh sloughing off of the monster’s body. After about 4 seconds the damage stopped spreading, leaving a crater almost as wide as my entire body and half as deep.
I swallowed at the visible damage my spell had caused. I would never have expected my spell to do so much damage, to the point of leaving a crater of destruction and leaving the toughest monster severely injured.
The other monsters looked at the severe injury as one and then back at me without any change in expression, though some of them started to tense up their muscles seemingly in preparation, getting ready for when they could rush towards their newest target. Even the injured monster stopped after its roar, not making any further noise, like it had only roared as a signal to others rather than a roar of pain.
A cold killing focus permeated every action these monsters took, and I was starting to think that maybe I was in for more trouble than I could handle. Hopefully these monsters are worth more than 1 point each, I really don’t want to have to kill 1,000,000 of them.