Pyotr scooped Lao up on his back and the others ran with him, trying to get away from the rapidly approaching monster. Sam looked around, and instantly wished that he had not. His enhanced eyesight made the monster appear in much sharper detail than he would have liked. It was built like a gigantic cylinder, made up of many wheels made out of yellowing bone and sinew. Thousands of staring eyes dotted its form, and multiple gaping maws could be seen on each wheel. That was how it had created such uniform furrows.
As it passed by the hole in the bones that Sam had created, one of the mouths disgorged a spray of liquified bone that quickly patched the hole. Then it set its gaze on the intruders, and started rolling towards them. It would have been quite a ridiculous monster, had it not been almost half a mile in length, and hundreds of feet tall. Anything that came between one of those wheels and the ground would be turned into a pancake. That included Sam and his party.
“What the hell? What is that thing?” Sam asked Jeffrey as they ran.
“It’s, oof, some sort of necromantic construct.” Jeffrey was having some trouble keeping pace with Sam, and he panted every few seconds as he talked. Sam noted this, and did not ask any more questions. The man needed to save his energy if they were to outrun this thing.
The only person easily keeping pace with Sam was Eduardo,and even then Sam was only using about 80 percent of his full speed. He was really pulling ahead, especially since he was outpacing someone who had allocated a large portion of his stat points into Dexterity, and likely had a class that gave regular points into that stat per level. Sam kept running, but behind him the monster was getting ever closer. The ground started to shake as it drew near, and Sam realized that they were going to be crushed soon. There was no way to outrun something that took up hundreds of feet of ground per second, at least at this level. That seemed to always be the answer to every problem within the System. Simply to get stronger. By the time that it was right on their heels, Sam saw a way out.
“Get as close to me, and follow my movements exactly!” Sam shouted over the noise of the monster. The others instantly clumped around him, and waited.
As the grinding wheels approached, Sam ran towards a large gap between two wheels. For it to have created those furrows with such a regular distribution, there had to be gaps between the wheels that it was using for this purpose. Sam threw himself between two of the wheels, and the other followed. The large discs of bone thundered across the ground on each side, and the monster quickly passed them by, continuing off in the same direction. It never turned around, and instead kept traveling towards the west. Sam was starting to doubt that the creature was actually sapient, and it was far more likely that it was being controlled by something. Everyone except for Eduardo and Sam flopped down to the ground, panting heavily. They had escaped death by less than ten feet.
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“Well, it's safe to assume that the further we go out into the world, the more dangerous it is going to get then,” Addas said with a frown. He had not been expecting this. The cyclops had already been dangerous enough, but whatever that thing was had been on another level. Sam needed to break through to F Rank as quickly as he could in order to protect the others, but he still had some time to go until he could incorporate his Dao enough to break through.
“Jeffrey, are there any ways to prematurely break through to the next rank?” Sam asked.
“How did I know you were going to ask that… Well, yes, but all of them are extremely dangerous, and only one of them would even work here. Besides, aren't you close to the next rank anyway? Trying to force your way through right now would be very unwise.”
“Never mind that. What is the way that would work here?”
“Sam, I am not going to tell you that. You might feel like you need more power to protect us, but how exactly would you protect us if you were dead? No, you will do this the natural way. I will not allow you to kill yourself in a desperate bid for power.”
Sam gritted his teeth, but ultimately heeded the other man’s words. He could wait a few more days.
“Fine. Is there at least a way to speed up the process safely then?”
“Perhaps, but I have no idea of what that is. My progression to F Rank was an entirely natural one. I certainly was not at that stage mere weeks after starting off. I meditated for a few hours per day for months before I finally broke through.”
Sam sighed, and nodded.
“Very well. I’ll just wait then,” he said. “Are we ready to go, or do the rest of you need to rest some more?” A chorus of agreements reached Sam’s ears, and he smiled.
Sitting down for a little bit of meditation as he waited, Sam made his way towards his Dao. The orb hovered there in the darkness of his core, exuding an unearthly light. Rather than losing himself in it, Sam skimmed insights off of the top of his Dao. There was a faint cloud of concentrated kernels of knowledge that his Dao constantly produced, most of them far too complicated for him to understand. There was no true mastery of a Dao, as it was impossible for a mortal to fully comprehend an entire facet of existence. Perhaps such a feat was possible later on down the path of progression, but for now Sam was merely skimming the surface of his Dao. The core of his Dao, its purest meaning, was completely inaccessible to him.
A few minutes later, he was shaken out of his meditation by Eduardo. The others had recovered enough to continue. However, many of them were uneasy.
“I feel like we should investigate that summoning circle,” Pyotr said. “It would not be wise to leave such a thing near our faction headquarters. It may be dormant now, but it may not remain so in the future.”
“Hmm. What do you all think?” Sam asked, looking at everyone else.
“It makes me uneasy as well,” Lao answered. “I think that we should find out its purpose.” The others nodded, and Sam took this in.
“Alright then. It’s settled.”