Novels2Search

-7-

Viktor's mind shot back to the crystal instantaneously, back into his garden of pristine wonder, or so he thought. The garden was no longer as pristine as it once was, beams of wood from the above structure falling down causing an inferno on the basement floor. It was a miracle he hadn't been crushed by falling death already.

The voices in Viktor's head all then began to jockey for position, yelling various and contradicting ideas of escape, defiance or retribution. Some even went as far as to try and remove Viktor as the head and take control for themselves. Viktor fought back, suppressing the mass of personalities before silencing them with an internal, bloodcurdling scream. Finally, quiet. Now he could panic in peace.

What the fuck am I going to do?! He screamed, he was royally fucked, he had nowhere near enough mana to fight of a determined group of people. If they have the manpower to send out 5 man scouting parties then who knows how powerful they actually are? After slightly more frantic yelling and cursing Viktor finally settled down and came to a conclusion. He couldn't stay here.

That led to a whole host of new problems however Viktor observed as he watched yet another log fall to the floor with a thump. Could he even leave? Viktor had been born in this room and ever since then he had never left. Never left the safety of his own mana infused lair. That was when Viktor remembered something Cursac had said. Foreign mana was poisonous when it entered the body. Apparently, the whole process of gathering mana involved taking in minute amounts of mana from the air you breathe, the food you eat and the water you drink and then claiming it a piece at a time, this was sped up with dungeons, them taking in all mana around them as such if they were to leave their own territory they would die almost instantaneously due to mana poisoning, their own gluttony being their downfall. Hell, the only reason he had survived just after his summoning was because of the great amounts of excess mana released into the air!

Viktor was fucked, couldn't leave the room. Couldn't stay in the room. Couldn't fight back his attackers. That was when he had an idea, what if he didn't have to do any of this. What if he brought the room with him?

Viktor began to drain his own swelled mana resolves to build a shell around his core, a shell made of stone already infused with his mana. Then he covered his now soccer ball sized frame in a layer of pulsating flesh. He then began to turn inwards, making the outer layer of the flesh into a thin membrane that when air passed through it and into the rock that covered his core it would claim it automatically making the outside mana his by way of a filtration system. It was perfect, ingenious. It wasn't enough, and he was out of mana.

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Viktor began to siphon all of his mana in the room, retreating from the rock, stone and doors and consuming his frogs, flies and plants, sucking them all into his ravenous core. While he did this he was not idle, he was building long, about 5-foot tentacles across his entire frame, he made them with a calloused exterior, with a kind of barnacle-like substance clinging to their surface, to make them both stronger for walking on and more devastating to fight with. He then went on to make his most intricate creation yet. He forced small vessels of pure mana into the stone and flesh of his creation, linking it to his core making a pseudo nervous system out of mana, allowing signals from his core to be taken to his limbs. Sometime during this, the homunculus had returned and in a final flourish Viktor disassembled him, using the mana that returned to saturate his new vessel's flesh with his mana, this would aid with claiming on the move. He was done, and for the first time, Viktor moved from his pedestal.

Viktor slinked down from the 3-foot pedestal in a languid manner, moving uncomfortably on his new tentacles. He began to move slowly toward the hole in the wall, the irregular bumps of his tentacles giving him traction on the hard earth.

Viktor soon reached his rough tunnel and began to contort himself into the tight space. From the other side, it made quite an amusing sight, an eldritch being of tentacles and evil, made of sickly red flesh and pulsating veins desperately trying to fit itself into a hole half its size. Needless to say, much flailing was involved. But finally, after the ground near the hole had been well and truly torn to shreds by Viktor's attempts, he did fit. Slowly pushing his way through the tight tunnel via muscle contractions across his frame, pushing him forward a small amount at a time. Soon he emerged from the bosom of the earth a tentacle at a time, they flopped out before using their impressive muscle mass to pull Viktor out of the hole. He scanned his environment with his dungeon sense and disembodied sight. He was outside, in the cold night air illuminated by the full moon and the eerie glow of a town on fire. The atmosphere was made uneasy by the occasional death scream from further back in the town.

Viktor didn't turn back, he didn't know who he was or why he was here. But he would find out. He did know however that there was nothing left for him there, only fire, death and lies. Viktor skittered off into the woods. Skittered to answers, to freedom. To adventure.