As the ground beneath me disappeared, I instantly began frantically pushing mana into my flight enchantments. Unfortunately, they weren't exactly fast at turning on.
To prevent myself from falling into the abyss of rotating, serrated teeth that seemed to never end, I did what any normal and sane person would do.
I grabbed onto the beast's tounge.
The slimy, springy appendage had stayed upright, like a pole sticking out of the dark abbyss. It was sinking down, but quite slowly, since the beast would probably tear its tounge apart if the pink appendage touched any of its teeth.
I grabbed onto it for dear life, making the pole-like toungue sway from side to side quite a lot. It even ended up scraping against several teeth, but no enraged roar came from the worm's gaping mouth.
'It probably doesn't have vocal chords. Can't imagine where it'd fit them.'
Unfortunately, the toungue started descending much more rapidly, forcing me to let go of it and launch myself off it to at lest get at much height as possible. As I started falling once more, my flight enchantments finally spurred to life, and they immediately slowed down my descent.
When I finally stabilised myself in mid-air, I was already fully inside the worm's mouth, encroached by teeth on all sides and with the opening above me closing worryingly quickly.
'The fucker's closing its mouth.'
I strained myself to fly up as fast as possible, although it didn't really make a difference since the enchantments were already running at full throttle.
After the longest second of my life, I reached it. But at that point, the gap was almost closed already, barely wide enough for my head to go through.
'Oh HELL NO!! I'm getting out of this dark shithole right now!'
I clasped my hand onto one of edges of the worm's mouth (the lips?), and pressed the side of my head against the other, then used every available enchantment to its fullest to try to pry the damn thing open. The interior walls of the mouth were closing in at a worryingly fast pace all around me, and as the teeth started scraping against my legs from below—
The mouth muscles finally gave in, and as it was shoved open, I propelled myself out of the murder trap of a mouth that the worm had.
But, unfortunately, I wasn't able to catch a break, as the ground rumbled and the worm, five meters tall and over fifteen long, made its way outside, its shiny chitin exterior creating unsettling screeches as it scraped against the ground.
'That's fucking scary. Shit.'
The worm slithered around, trying to reach me. It was extremely fast for such a gigantic creature, and a worm at that, but I agilely hopped back, weaving between trees, forcing the worm to plow through them or dive underneath them.
I had already turned off flight since I didn't want to burn too much mana, thinking I would probably need as much of it as possible to kill this beast. I could probably run away, but the levels were just too tempting, and what danger could an ambush predator pose once its ambush failed? I felt like this fight should be fairly easy.
I was wrong.
After the worm confirmed that it couldn't reach me, the earth around it started forming itself into spikes, and they were tenekinetically hurled at me at scarily high speeds.
I could dodge them if it threw two or three, but as the creature got more irritated, it started hurling them in groups of five, six or even seven from all directions, making some of them impossible to dodge.
And, let me tell you, those spikes were hard. Like, they penetrated through mythril no problem, and even gave the adamantium plating below some issues.
And the creature wasn't only throwing spikes at me. It was still surrounding me, propping its maw wide open and diving below the earth, only to pop up a couple of seconds later on the spot I had been standing a moment before, creating another huge hole in the ground.
The first time it did that I was caught off guard, and the worm swallowed my lower half completely. I barely managed to avoid getting swallowed by firmly latching onto the outside of the creature and stabbing its face over and over with my retractable blade until it let go of my legs, which had come close to being shredded once more.
I wanted to fly up to lessen the dangers of such an ambush, but that would heavily decrease my manuveravility and make me basically a living target for earthen spikes.
'How troublesome...'
A spike came from behind and I was forced to block it with my arm to prevent it from hitting my backpack. This had already happened a few times. I had managed to somehow keep the giant leather pack from suffering any major damage up until now, but it was seriously hindering me.
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So, without a second thought, I threw it onto some relatively far away bushes, praying the padding between the glass vials would prove enough to prevent them from shattering.
Once again avoiding an ambush, I decided to finally go on the offensive. The worm wasn't very tough, and although my blade had some difficulty piercing the outer hard skin, the interiors were fairly squishy.
So, before it went back down, I ran towards it and carved a nice, deep slash on the creature's side, a good seven meters long. The creature silently thrashed in anger, and dug itself into the earth before I had time to do more.
'I don't know if I'll be able to get enough good cuts in to take this thing down before running out of mana. I might need to use that...'
I immediately threw myself to the sides as I felt the vibrations in the earth below me, the telltale sign that the worm was about to appear below me. I had learned my lesson the hard way.
And barely a couple tenths of a second later, the ground disappeared once more, and the aberration once again appeared, facing me with its maw wide open.
'It's now or never.'
I rapidly pushed a huge amount of mana into the enchantment on my forearm, as I split the rest of my focus into dodging earth spikes. The enchantments finished charging after a few excruciatingly long seconds, and I pointed my arm squarely at the worm.
A circular plate in the middle of my hand moved to the side, revealing something resembling a gun barrel inside. And right after, a concentrated beam of fiery mana shot out of it, leaving a smoking trail and flying into the innards of the beast thanks to my careful aiming.
Of course, that careful aiming forced me to take the full brunt of two earth spikes which I was unable to dodge in time, but they only hit the upper leg and lower back, which didn't have any major enchantments.
The beam of fire went straight into the worm's esophagus, and exploded inside the beast, making a mixture of smoke, blood and other, grower substances come out of its maw.
'It's still alive!? Tenacious bastard.'
I didn't give it time to recuperate from its shock as I rushed it, blade drawn, and started slashing at its joints wildly. I wanted to use the magic plasma gun again, but even though the first shot had been fairly safe it had overheated pretty much everything around it, meaning my whole forearm, and using it two times consecutively would be pushing it.
The beast's mind was in a mess, making its magic control much weaker, so it could only summon two or so spikes at a time. That barely counted as an inconvenience at this point, and I was able to slowly whittle down the worm, which continued thrashing around and throwing me away quite a few times, refusing to just stay dead.
It even made me crash against trees (and topple them) over two times, merely with a whip of its tail or head. The attributes it sported were not just for show.
Worse still, it started regaining some mental fortitude by the end, throwing more and more spikes at a time, but at that point it was already (thankfully) dying from blood loss.
Eventually, it stopped thrashing around, and a slew of notifications assaulted me. It hadn't been a pretty battle by any means, and I'd suffered quite a lot of damage, but the rewards spoke for themselves.
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Level Up!
Nine new levels all at once! I was now level 23, only two away from getting a new skill. I highly doubted it would be combat-oriented, but it had to at least be useful for something, right?
Dismissing those thoughts, I pondered whether to spend the whopping 180 stat points I had or to hold onto them for now, and decided on the latter. Who knows, maybe after getting the level 25 skill I might want to use them all on Capacity or Intelligence instead of an even split like I would do if I used them now.
I took back my bag and sighed in relief as I confirmed nothing was broken, and regretfully left the monster carcass behind. I had no room to fit any of its parts in my bag, no matter how valuable they may be.
The rest of my journey north continued without any major hickups, with the closest call being the one time a patrol team of wyvern riders flew above me, forcing me to hide in the thickest patch of forest I could find.
I also crossed some travelers and merchants on the roads, but fortunately the church didn't seem to have made public any info about me, meaning they were pretty much clueless I was a fugitive.
I even managed to sell some monster innards and some of the more common wares in my alchemical arsenal to the merchant that looked the least... pious.
What I sold was worth a ton, and I could've probably gotten more than double the cash had I sold it in a city, but since I couldn't exactly do that in my present situation, I had to let the shady merchant scam me a little and buy it off me for around 2000 Kayds.
Oh yeah, the common currency on the continent was the Kayd. The name came from K.D, which was apparently the acronym for Kilo-dollar, meaning a thousand dollars.
And while that meant I now had about two million dollars on me, with the exaggerated inflation that had occurred these past millennia, a thousand dollars was barely worth more than one buck back in the 21st century.
So, the money I had gained was only about what a person with a relatively well-paid job would make in a month.
In any case, after about two weeks of voyage, I finally reached the frontier region.