CHAPTER 138: Testing

Adam stepped through a portal to the Rift that used to belong to the Bobomon. The base had been reshaped to take up as little space as possible while sending a maximum of energy to their main Rift. It no longer resembled the labyrinthine caves that the Bobomon had used, though the Leputi still kept it as underground designs.

Several of the Leputi had already come through to scout the area surrounding the Rift, as well as to stay close within this Rift. Operators were monitoring and watching.

This base seemed like a good starting point for Adam. He wanted to test out a few of his theories with regard to the extra status and skills he had seen within his combined status. Maybe if he could imitate things that either a Grand Blood Berserker or a Soul Forger could do, he’d be able to unlock memories or pseudo skills.

Starting at this location near Memphis, where they knew more Rifts were, seemed like the easiest way for Adam to find test subjects. Things had been quiet with the invaders since the battle over the military caravan, so Adam would take advantage of that. He would attack areas of the city that had lost invaders in the previous battle to ensure there weren’t too many enemies around.

There was a lot of excitement in Adam. He had been so stressed over the last few months, with the soul corruption and fear that he would fall behind. Knowing that he now contained both Tier 5 and Tier 4 powers gave him a lot more hope. Like a typical person he wanted to rush out and gain that power.

With a smile, Adam drove from the Rift exit and headed in the direction of a merged Rift they had previously identified. The creatures there were kind of mucky, like swamp monsters. It was appropriate to Adam that the space inside of their merged Rift resembled a swamp, soft mucky ground that a person would sink into with spread out trees that resembled pine. They had long trunks with the branches and needle-like leaves higher up.

Adam wasn’t looking to get dirty, but he thought that to test berserker abilities he needed enemies that wouldn’t be obliterated at the first strike.

As he approached the invader base, he saw the boundaries clearly. Inside the base was the swamp-like area, while outside the base were buildings, roads, and other normal signs of humanity. The buildings around here were only two stories tall, a small shopping center that Adam had never been to before.

The muck creatures weren’t leaving their base boundary. There were already about twenty standing there waiting for him, while more were sliding from deeper inside the trees. Their walk was more a shuffle that didn’t raise their feet off the ground, as if they were skating on the swamp surface.

They were just below seven feet tall, green, brown, and black sludge coating them. Their heads were spheres with no features except two green glowing eyes located where a nose would be on a human head. Different colored streaks, with occasional phosphorous glow, decorated their bodies.

Arms and legs made the creatures look vaguely humanoid, but their shape didn’t seem set as they oozed around. Their limbs would thicken and shorten together or length and thin. They had a set mass, but their shape seemed able to adjust. No hands and feet were shaped properly at the end of their limbs, instead ending in a sphere of gunk. They probably had some mechanism to shape them when they wanted to grasp things.

Adam parked his motorcycle about twenty feet from the monsters, leaving his weapons behind. All he brought with him was a piece of paper, which he read as he approached. It was a list of descriptions about skill types that berserkers used. Instead of specific skills, since there were a lot of variations on berserkers and their skills, Adam wanted it vague. He didn’t want to try for a particular power, since there was no telling which skills future Gregor had chosen.

As Adam stood outside the boundary, the muck monsters never left their swamp. They would swing their arms at him, like a wooden switch, or they would thrust the hand spheres forward.

Adam would swat or block them without looking up from his reading. They were weak attacks though upon contact there would be a squelching noise and then some of the greasy ooze would stick to his skin. As long as it wasn’t poisonous, Adam could probably burn it away once he activated his heat.

The paper had a lot of descriptions, but it boiled down to just a few types of powers. Absorbing energy from attacks and redirecting that energy was the first type. [Kinetic Impact] was in this line. Explosions of energy were included in the next type. Lots of intimidation skills that could cause loss of control in weaker targets didn’t interest Adam much, since he already had two skills in this camp. Then there was a huge variety of skills that increased strength or other stats to keep the berserker stronger than their opponents.

Explosions of energy seemed like the most interesting to Adam and would greatly enhance his current kit. The memory of future Gregor using [Gladiator’s Approach] ended in an explosion after teleporting. The explosion was part of the real [Gladiator’s Approach] skill, but there were a lot of other explosion skills too, so Lashtam reassured him that berserkers usually had multiple.

After putting the paper in one of his fireproof pockets, he took a step back. With how optimistic Adam was feeling, it took a minute for Adam to summon enough anger to pulse the heat and run the river. He remembered the horrible things he had seen. Thoughts of General Carmichael came to him, trying to sour his own people against him after Adam had been nothing but generous. That did the trick.

The river became rapids. Adam used [Body and Soul Shaping] to draw more of the power. He realized he could shape the conduits that brought the energy from the river of his soul into his body. They became narrow at the exits and wider where they were drawing from the river.

Pressure developed inside. His power wanted to flow through the conduits but were being bottlenecked. The roiling river pushed as hard as it could, and Adam felt it was probably a bad idea to leave it for long.

Adam rushed forward, drawing the pressurized energy to his right hand, trying to prevent another situation where he blew off his own arm. Remembering the Testudinates, he realized these muck creatures probably didn’t have blood, so keeping his body parts intact was a good idea. Adam’s bike did have a cooler with a few blood packs in it now, at his father’s insistence, in case he did need extra regeneration.

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When Adam stepped into the Rift boundary, he ducked a flinging sludge arm and then punched forward. He took the energy that he was holding back in his fist and tried to turn it into something else. Force to knockback, heat to incinerate, energy to shoot out as a projectile, these were all thoughts Adam had in that moment, trying to trigger some kind of attack.

With the force of a jet plane crashing, Adam’s fish struck the nearest creature in the chest. His hand went through it. Then he felt the energy release.

Adam’s hand caught fire. He winced. That wasn’t what he wanted to happen. Plus, it hurt. The energy hadn’t gone anywhere. He felt it just kind of release. One moment it held firm like a ball, the next it popped, superheating his hand and then just backflowing through the rest of his body.

Feeling the skin crisp and dissolve, Adam realized he needed to carry even more blood bags.

There was another unintended consequence as well. The muck monster his hand was inside caught on fire. It ignited quickly like oil. Adam jumped back, outside of the boundary, while trying to put out his own burning hand.

He watched as the fire almost instantly spread throughout the creature’s body. It flailed its limbs, striking more of the creatures standing nearby. They also ignited. Several tried to move away in their slow skating motion, but the fire spread too quickly.

When it went down their legs, it touched the swamp. Lines in the swamp caught fire. Those lines led to the trees. Those also ignited.

Within a minute, everything was burning within the merged Rift. Adam went to step backwards, to escape from the intense heat being given off, when he heard a whizzing and bubbling noise. He looked at the creature who had caught fire first. It was boiling from the inside. Pressurized air was shooting jets of superheated steam out of its exterior which was bubbling from the heat and pressure.

Then the creature burst. Grossness of all kinds blasted out in all directions, splattering neighbor creatures. Fire was carried by the material of their body, igniting wherever it landed.

Adam was splattered along with everything in the area as the muck monsters exploded. First, they popped one at a time and then whole groups burst. Their greasy ooze touched almost everything, leaving little bits of fire as it continued to burn.

Telmapalus “Sludge Spreader [21]” slain. 2,098 XP gained.

Telmapalus “Muck Raker [18]” slain. 1,527 XP gained.

Telmapalus “Sludge Spreader [22]” slain. 2,126 XP gained.

Telmapalus “Sludge Spreader [19]” slain. 1,845 XP gained.

Telmapalus “Pack Coagulator [25]” slain. 2,372 XP gained.

Telmapalus “Sludge Spreader [16]” slain. 1,295 XP gained.

Telmapalus “Muck Raker [19]” slain. 1,752 XP gained.

…

Telmapalus “Glutinous Absorber [32]” slain. 18,613 XP gained.

There were probably over 2,000 kill notifications over the next 10 minutes. The whole base was burning, sending noxious black smoke into the air. It reminded Adam of pictures of oil wells catching fire. The whole base just burned and burned with no indication of stopping.

Adam frowned as he watched. From a safe distance. Over a mile away. With a cloth tied in front of his nose and mouth.

That was NOT how Adam expected to test out abilities. He was even aware he had killed the base boss, but he’d have to come back once all the grease finished burning to get the control crystal, if it didn’t get destroyed from the fire. He had no way to safely pass through that disgusting area while it continued to burn.

Adam was sitting on his bike, sucking on a blood pack to regenerate his burned skin, both that on his hand and the other spots that had been burned from the ignited splatter. He had already brushed off as much of the muck as he could, but the grease just clung to him. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Plus, now Adam needed to find more invaders to use for tests. That one ended a bit too early.

The only good point was that at least he had figured out how flammable those invaders were instead of having his army march into it and a fire mage discovering it, to their own destruction. Still, that was quite a letdown.

***

Adam had been fortunate to find some of the mantis like people next. The Anthromanti. The bodies of several were currently littered around him in the streets. They moved in groups, usually a big warrior style creature surrounded by a bunch of smaller supports and soldiers. He had used his Scyrric sword to remove their limbs at the joints and then had tried potential skills on them one by one.

He held the last one, tagged as a “Phantom Scythe [29],” by the chest. It kept trying to bite him, since the head was the only part left to attack him with. After the disastrous results with the Telmapalus, Adam was now working on his Soul Forger abilities.

A connection was formed between himself and the invader as he dove into its soul and poked around. He tried different things with it, from exploring what was in its soul, to hitting targeted areas with [Soul Bolt], to trying to tear pieces of it off. He even tried metaphysically biting it.

There wasn’t a lot of luck with his attempts. The practice was helpful though. Learning more about the soul, trying to figure out where things were located, and understanding its composition would be important to making use of his abilities. It’s too bad he couldn’t capture a Red Clan member and watch their memories to learn more about souls.

While inside the phantom scythe’s soul, he found the separations for different sections. He knew about the memory area, and could navigate it rather easily now, but what was in the other soul areas felt unknowable to the current him. There were images of gases, sandstone boulders, swirls of energy that wanted to join with other objects. No map or key to identify what they all were though.

Adam kept trying things, sometimes watching a few memories, which he did not enjoy, sometimes trying to poke or absorb from the unidentified areas. He kept it up until finally there was a screech, and he was kicked out of the soul. A feeling of the soul dissipating occurred.

The connection pulling Adam back within himself, so he triggered his soul map, the [Soul Resonance] pseudo-skill, and watched as the soul on it faded, getting weaker and weaker until it just became dust in the air, swirling out of sight.

Anthromanti “Phantom Scythe [29]” slain. 2,925 XP gained.

The body fell to the ground, like the others Adam had tested his skills with. He had tried this on 56 different Anthromanti so far, with no luck. After every few groups he would take time to visit his own memory space, to see if he could find any more foreign memories touching the boundaries that he might be able to turn into pseudo-skills. So far nothing had changed.

Adam wasn’t getting frustrated, never thinking this would be an instant process, but it still felt discouraging. It was like trying to put a puzzle together with a blindfold on. Just feeling his way and hoping he could line things up right. At least the Anthromanti didn’t die immediately to the soul exploring.

With a yawn and a stretch, Adam looked at the sky. It was now midafternoon. Adam was running low on snacks, and he didn’t want the blood cooler to get too warm. Probably time to head home. He still needed to watch the records of Carmichael’s group to see if they were up to anything, and he needed to catch up on some of the sleep he missed over the last few days.

Starting up the motorcycle and flipping up the kickstand, Adam turned to face the road he had come from. In the distance he saw something…someone. They were in the distance at the edge of his vision.

Even from this far away he could tell she was the most gorgeous person he had ever seen.