Nash’s POV
I reach to my new acrobatics skill, that is still skyrocketing compared to most other skills given it has yet to cross the level 100 threshold. However, like the others, I knew that it would become a slog after it crossed that threshold and approached my level.
My newest enemy is some 100 meters away, but it is of a new kind:
A ball of vines come alive.
Its body grows a long tendril with nature magic and it strikes at me, I dodge rather than directly contend against it. With Qi in hand, I infuse my will into that tendril and try to control its very body, but a protection very similar to my avatar skill rebuffs me. It's immune to nature control.
Over subsequent attempts with my natural nature connection, I feel the slightest give, but the help is so insular that it almost doesn’t seem worth the effort. Especially given that any alteration I make will take hours or even days even with my newfound experience from the last few months of training ‘nature control’ without Qi or Mana.
Staring intently at it, the screen pops up cone again but I dismiss it even before it registers to see that it tried to make use of the distraction.
Living Vines, Lv. 301
I dodge another attack, with a rolling low to the ground before springing behind its trailing lib and attaching a tiny web of fairly delicate roots to the limb. As it passes over other trees, those little root tendrils try to attach themselves and restrict the movement of the mob with very limited success. This makes nearly no difference. It doesn’t even compare to what I had been achieving against mobs closer to my own level.
But I’m not just fighting an enemy one threshold higher than me, it’s and though I do have my advantages, the skill gap becomes more obvious than ever. Like myself, the higher skill levels translate into more flexibility and greater speed for maneuvering its body.
And not only that, I don’t even find out what its ‘weak’ point is supposed to be.
My mind runs every possibility, and I even scrape the bottom of the well of ideas. Chemical attacks might work, but I don’t have gallons of toxins, nor does its chemistry lend to an uncontrollable chain reaction seems likely. Its body composition is stable.
There are no markers nor weaker tissues in its body which is all but one solid mass of roots.
No strange symbols for me to decrypt, no meaningful restriction of movement given its anatomical properties, nothing that screams attention as most of the other mobs.
I try to approach, to see if the higher danger or closer distance will reveal anything further. But when I get within about forty meters, its moves get way more dexterous. A pair of punches don’t cause any damage. Their aim is to drive momentum into my body and make me lose my step, and their success puts me into a tight spot.
I try to sprint away, but the tiny delay allows a dozen other limbs to swing and form webs that I have to either dodge or
Then when I’m almost home free, a root fully manages to enwrap around my foot. Slowly developing instincts honed for battle makes me act instantly. I shed that part of my armor while powering a strange little formation that makes my skin as slippery as a fish’s, if not more. But even as I loosen the muscles of my foot and try to make the most of my momentum, the mob has too tight a hold.
I halt mid air.
Gravity asserts itself, and I start to fall to the ground a few inches below me. No need to panic just yet, even if I now know for certain:
The enemy is going to catch up.
I form three sets of runes, fire, nature and wind. Not with any specific plan in mind, but ready to convert the massive draw I’m summoning into useful forms.
Free Form Magic, which is a skill many lower level people try to get away as far as possible from given the dangers comes to the forefront of my mind. But I don’t approach it lightly, nor do I need to go the full route to get most of the benefits, as even a single rune cell to transform Qi into a certain element helps constrain it and limit the danger.
Willpower explodes from me and I manage to create a proper fire blade. It reaches and manages to sever the root though even that makes it lose cohesion. But free from the enrement, I guide my tiny fall with wind magic.
Nature, creates a structure on the world around me, so that I can move with my own muscles and I push to gain momentum.
The system takes issue with my overt use of Qi, but training and desperation fuel my motions and I don’t even feel the strain just yet. Though I’m careful not to infuse any of the trees around with nature Qi, least the system destroys them before I have a chance to make use of them.
And if my life doesn’t require their sacrifice, all the better.
A step later, I glue my feet to the ground with way more strength than I normally would use, to both give me the grip and avoid another similar situation as its vines taking me away from the one small advantage I have. The mob seems, for a brief instant surprised as it aims its focus on where I had been heading. But I don’t keep going straight, or even sideways. Instead, I aim to eh sides leading even a little inward, following the clearest path in a full sprint.
It only takes a fraction of a second for it to readjust, but I manage to edge the roots through one of the few gaps large enough for a human. Especially with my long limbs.
I want to take off in an absolutely all out sprint, but with the restrictions around me and how often I have to weave my path, that would be bad on so many levels that I don’t even take my own thought seriously.
Instead, I hold the ever accumulating amount of mana and even a hint of my Aether ready for anything.
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And then as I’m drawing closer to freedom and with the thousandth direction alteration in what felt like a year, but was probably closer to 3 seconds. Thousands of runes form around it in a system skill that I had yet to see from anyone. Its mana infuses it, and an area some 20 meters wide with me almost at eh perfect center glows tieh magic. Complex patterns of runes are mimicked from around its main mass of roots. I get the briefest of glimmers of an actual weakness. But staring down the gullet of the beast is not the time to ponder the weakness in its teeth.
Even with all my vaunted power, the instinctual recognition of runes, time that seemed to move in slow motion, this semi inteligent ball of roots could keep up with me through sheer level advantage.
Getting caught would be a death sentence for me. Not without skills of equivalent power, that would let me leverage and restrain it. Even with this skill level, the speed of a level 199 nature control and its level 301 bears no comparison. Let alone my much lower level skill, sitting just above 120.
Maybe I would be able to survive its blows relatively well for a while. And if it was a more normal enemy, I could tank a similarly strong opponent long enough. But this enemy works in a different way. Its first real blow would just leave me open for its subsequent thousand.
I have to shift the battleground so I explode with Fire and Nature Qi.
Without the time or the properly honed instinct for its precise weakness, I only have to hope that raw stats will make up the difference and I pit my will against it to claim the roots it's trying to turn against me.
Thousands of roots stream from the ground. Roots stronger than Kevlar or anything I had seen outside a ‘lab test’ for Pando. And those I can’t even slow down with my will given they are all part of its body. It manages to surround me way more thoroughly than I had imagined but that’s why I instantly changed my plans and now, they are all nicely bunched up in an even layer a moment before they hit me.
Waiting a fraction of a second to maximize my effect, I shoot out a ring of plasma so hot and heavy that I would almost call it Liquid fire. It explodes from me and coats every bit of the exposed vines burning through the thinner strands almost instantly. I give weight and reality to this fire, leveraging even the smallest of advantages I have at my disposal and hoping that together they are gonna make a difference.
But then it’s time for my gambit to extract its price on my flesh as the very fire I started is put against me. I myself have given more bite and momentum to the remaining roots trying to end me.
Maybe a true pyromancer would have been able to avoid this part and I still have a measure of control that lets me mitigate some of the damage from my own attack. But having fire immunity isn’t on my skill set. The few remaining roots behind hit and squeeze me simultaneously, as an inhuman scream of pain hits my ears. Instead of trying to ameliorate the damage I’m suffering, I double down and put my willpower behind the liquid fire which just burns hotter against my skin, and that is the last straw for every one of the Living Vine’s limbs.
. Free of any constraint, and without enough limbs to come even close to closing my escape route, I take off running at top speed.
“I’m never getting that close again.”
Its attempts to get at me are feeble, but I’m not fooled into thinking this is an opportunity, if I were any closer, its shorter vines would strange me. OR another part of its rapidly healing body.
Circling around it, and trying to attack the mob from a distance, is as useless as throwing water balloons at it. Even though the danger zone is about 40 meters, I stay well outside of that. Usually not even getting closer than 100 meters.
I try to find its weakness through a couple of methods, even relying on the runes I have engraved on the tree roots under my feet. But nothing that actually threatens it.
I all but know it has something to do with that formation it activated and almost ensnared me. But that close to it even all my intuition and power would be strained to make sense of the runes. Too much to pay attention all at once. Even with two minds working simultaneously, I don’t have enough mental stats to make both of us effective combatants without the inner world and the massive brain that the seed he is linked to has.
The clock ticks down another couple minutes and though I have fought for less than 10 minutes, I sense that this is the last hour. Even if I find a strategy to get close to it, I would still be risking my life only for a chance at success.
Even the Aether floating in the air agrees with me.
Maybe I would find another way, but with the finality of my decision comes peace.
Soon I will be back on Earth and so now is the time to experiment. Now is the time to throw wrenches into the system’s plans and thought I would love to have a nuke or something to throw at the plant being, getting even basic nuclear fission had been hard enough. Nukes seemed to be decidedly off limits.
My plan however was hatched mostly out of curiosity. A curiosity about the system’s reaction and where I am.
Analyzing the outer limits of this space with the perception field, I learn with certainty that I won’t be able to leave through normal means and even opening a portal large enough for me, should by some miracle succeed, would be useless given I can’t cross them myself.
After some thirty seconds sprinting away from the Living Vine mob at top speed to create some distance. When I think it has no chance to successfully attack me while I’m vulnerable in flight, I jump up and turn on the ‘levitating’ runes. They use up a decent stream of Qi, but I doubly so with the propulsion runes having to make up for my lack of an aerodynamic body. I push way more Qi through Mithril enhanced roots within my body than I would usually need. But the exercise grows easier as I start to manipulate the wind directly to blunt some of that expense. I don’t get anywhere near a smooth aerodynamic shell, but it helps with my mana economy.
The 98 mile trip is over with a few minutes to spare on the clock without me having to pull anything extreme. Luckily the enemy isn’t even in range of my perception field. Though I do see a certain Albatros approaching.
I try to think of other solutions, but the preliminary tests I have run do put them outside my purview. The system flat out denies me the right to cross into my inner world when I open a portal. And I don’t think that is a limitation of the system.
Though even if opening a portal is still ‘done’ by the system, I’m starting to get a glimpse of the tiny runes and minuscule resource drain they induce. And maybe one day I will do away iht some of the limitations that portals have.
As one last test, just to see if I couldn’t do a little more than I had initially hoped, I take a baton like slice of my inner world and try to poke it out.
My system based perception field tells me I’m trying to poke past the limits of the universe, with nothing standing beyond. But I can feel the tree just hugging the outside of the dome with my natural version of the perception field.
The piece of the inner world also doesn’t accomplish what I wanted. It acts like I’m trying to cross not a few centimeters, but miles of space storms and strange non Euclidian space. That thin barrier is a kaleidoscope of spatial mirrors and strange dimensions where walking in a straight line is the best way to get lost.
Even my will can’t directly cross to the other side. But space and my natural perception field know that is in my ways an illusion, a limitation of the very way that I perceive the world, even if I no longer get strong headaches just from seeing space phenomenon with my perception field.
So I get ready to warp space for the briefest of moments as I return the piece of the winner that I took.
My being tunes in even as my ‘passive’ aura scares away any predators with ideas about trying to get a chunk of my stringy muscles, or even one of my nutritious bones to chew on.
All at once, I try to warp and bring a thin straw of space already in place and turn it into a piece of the inner world. But not in the real space there, but just the potential in the other any of the other dimensions I can reach. My natural space warping powers combine with free form magic and Qi.
Reality fights as the system shows its displeasure, but I’m the source and I won’t be denied. The exercise strains my will for a split second but then a connection is formed.
A connection that I fully embrace.