William oh has left the stronghold. He has taken his two strongest Vassals with him to challenge the 17th Floor. The Tangled remains, but it will not be a problem. Emilie has compromised the Illusionist and the travelling Stronghold is on the lower Floors.
- Message sent to the 2nd Floor.
They’re spread thin. Turn the giants against the Stronghold. I don’t care how you do it. Just make sure they’re all in the same place when they die. I want that set.
- Message sent to the 10th Floor.
“This is the 14th Floor?” Jorn asked, gazing up at the canopy above in awe.
“Yup. This is where I got the magic wood for that bow you never use.” Will said as he scanned for enemies. The creatures on this Floor were relatively straightforward, so they were generally easy to see coming.
“I’m sorry milord!” Jorn said, bowing deeply.
“I’m just giving you shit,” Will said, tousling his hair. “Nobody knew your build was going to do away with bows entirely.”
Indeed, there were currently four ornate bone arrows floating around Jorn’s head, brimming with murderous energy.
The kid had upgraded his secondary, Scrimshaw, to allow him to add effects to his bone tools, as long as he did the carving by hand.
That wasn’t something that he had consulted his Lord for, but Will approved.
The arrows had ornate carvings of the monsters they were carved from, which, according to Jorn, allowed the arrow to tap into some of the monster’s miasmatic abilities.
Will studied the way the carvings tapped into the miasmatic structures remaining in the bone, collecting energy and channeling them into the structures, much like the shells of Loth’s Steak bugs.
Fascinating.
“Have you considered-“
“Will, no.” Loth said.
“What?” Will asked innocently.
Have you considered what kind of effects you might get if you took out some of your own bones and carved them? Will had been about to ask.
“I saw what you were looking at,” Loth replied.
“I’ve got a whole kit to make it completely painless,” Will said before he thought about it a moment longer.
As much as Will liked to act like an older brother, a casual suggestion from Will was tantamount to an order to Jorn.
They were not equals.
The kid wasn’t old enough to handle that kind of pressure.
“…Fine,” Will said, waving it off.
“What were you talking about?” Jorn asked.
“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Will said.
“Was it a sex thing?” Jorn guessed.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“That’s usually what people are talking about when they tell me they’ll tell me when I’m older.” Jorn mused.
“Usually, but not in this case. Seriously, don’t worry about it. I was gonna go on a dumb tangent and Loth caught it just in time.” Will said.
“Okay.” Jorn nodded.
They arrived at the gate to Carrie’s Stronghold a short while later and presented themselves before heading to the Key Site.
The massive wooden door composed of native hardwoods rumbled open, revealing Brianna and Carrie.
Behind them, the tiny Stronghold bustled with activity as leather-faced men cut and shaped some of the most valuable wood this side of the 8th Floor.
There were piles of sawdust everywhere and the air smelled incredibly fragrant from the blessed tree sap permeating the air.
Not a bad place to make a Stronghold, Will thought enviously. It was only the distance, danger, and difficulty importing workers that made the Stronghold less than ideal.
The scenery was excellent.
“Presenting myself to the Lord of the 14th Floor.” Will said, arms out and doing a little spin for Carrie’s benefit. Lords had to greet other Lords when they travelled, as a sign they weren’t trying to kill them.
“Plans?” she grunted.
“Going to seventeen and back.”
“mm…Good luck, Will.” Carrie said. “If you’re not staying in my Stronghold, don’t worry about a passage tax. Not like I could know how much you’re stuffing in that Dimensional Storage of yours anyway.”
“You are most gracious,” Will said with a nod before his gaze flickered to Bree, who had a raven on her shoulder.
“What’s up with that?” Will asked, wondering if Bree had learned some form of witchcraft.
“It’s one of my copies.” Brianna said with a gentle smile. “I experimented a bit and managed to make a simple me that you can use to pass messages to the Burned Stronghold. She won’t burden my mind, but in return she’s quite limited.”
Will studied the raven’s vacant gaze.
“If you need to know what’s going on at the Burned Stronghold, just boop the snoot.”
To demonstrate, Bree tapped the raven on the beak.
“The Burned Stronghold is currently not on fire.” The raven said in Bree’s voice.
“That means everything is okay.” Bree said. “Here you go. Stay with Will for now, Okay?”
The raven hopped over to Will’s head and began picking at his ear.
Will booped it’s snoot to get it to let go.
“The Burned Stronghold is currently not on fire.” Brianna spoke into his ear.
…What do you mean by ‘burden your mind’? Will thought as Bree left.
Will didn’t want to draw attention to it around Carrie or anyone else for that matter, so he didn’t press it, but to Will’s knowledge, there wasn’t a ‘burden’ from having more copies running around.
At least, not an immediate effect that the System could quantify.
They each had their own brain and could selectively share information, so it was less cluttered than one might think.
If there was a burden it went beyond the Ability and was more personal than that.
Hmm.
“Let’s not bother Carrie anymore and get a ride up to the 15th Floor.”
Part of their reason for Loth coming along was to get a survey of the 15th Floor and to separate fact from myth.
There is a Key Site in need of clearing to your South.
Jorn took out a totem and summoned his Desert Eagle. The Desert Eagle was a brown eagle about half the size of a roc, large enough for a man to ride on its back.
It had sharp eyes and a ranged attack composed of gusts of wind.
Jorn didn’t need a saddle. As he climbed onto the creature’s back, red veins sprouted from his legs and attached to his summon, binding him securely to the creature’s back. The huge bird beat its wings and rose into the air, a wild ride that might’ve unseated an unbound rider.
Jorn let out a whoop as they rose above the trees, somewhere in that fleeting time where the fear of falling had diminished, but flying itself was still magical.
They matched Jorn’s pace and spotted the pillar of light shooting through the trees after about half an hour.
The typical black stone seemed to be replaced with a pyramid of wood with a faint blue light slipping through the top as the majority of the concentrated miasma was gulped down by tree roots the size of buildings.
Overgrowth
Roots of a blessed tree have tapped into the stream of Miasma above the Key Site, mutating into something much more dangerous. Cull the abberant tree and clear the land around the site.
“Well, at least it’s easy enough to tell which tree we have to kill,” Will mused as they flew lazy circles around the Key Site.
There was a single tree larger than all the others that the roots traced back to. It towered over the already-massive canopy, making the already massive trees look normal by comparison.
“I think we’re probably going to have some major property destruction,” Will mused. “I would probably hit it with Hammer of God until it was nothing but splinters, then pluck the roots. Could take a while, though,”
The tree was mountainous. Will could destroy a mountain under the right circumstances, but it was never the first choice.
Not to mention…
The last large-scale deployment of Hammer of God had been on the 10th Floor. Would the magic-resistant even wood be bothered?
“I would probably breed a parasite and have them consume the tree over a number of days. Safest and easiest play.” Loth said. “If I had to kill it immediately, I might whip something up with my new spiders?”
Will and Loth glanced over at Jorn.
The kid blinked and pointed at himself.
“Me?”
“Yeah, what can you do?” Will asked.
“I guess…I would make some firespout hummers, have them set the tree on fire, then fan the flames with desert eagles.”
“Let’s see it,” Will gestured at the tree.
“O-okay.” Jorn nodded, pulling out two bone totems, one made of chiton and depicting a beetle, while the other composed of hollow bones creating a bird.
A single large red beetle about the size of a dog appeared in midair and clumsily caught itself in midair with a noisy hum. The firespout hummer was a monsterous beetle that typically buried itself under the sand, made noises to attract prey and shot flaming goo at Climbers, but it could fly…albeit clumsily.
Nearly a hundred smaller beetles manifested around it, followed by a single massive desert eagle, and another hundred smaller ones.
With a wordless command Jorn’s summons swarmed down on the massive tree.
The Firespout hummers spat flaming goop all over the tree’s branches.
…Despite there being nearly a hundred of firespouts, they could still only cover a small portion of the gargantuan tree’s branches.
The response was instantaneous.
The tree shook its branches, twitching like a horse bit by a fly.
Hundreds, thousands of monsters fell off those branches, catching the wind and looking for the source of the disturbance.
They had the look of aphids the size of dogs, with fat green bodies. Their wings only functioned via magic, allowing the corpulent insects to fly with uncanny dexterity.
“I’m putting up a net!” Loth said, reaching her hand into her barrel.
“I’ll take them!” Jorn said at the same time, his arrows darting forward.
The four arrows streaked forward, popping aphids by the dozens.
Unfortunately there were thousands of them, and the barrier of aphid-popping arrows was pressed backwards as it struggled to keep up with the press of the insects.
“Pull the arrows back!” Loth said, tapping Jorn on the shoulder.
Jorn’s expression was one of total focus, such that he didn’t acknowledge Loth’s words, his arrows spearing through the aphids.
He is a rookie. Better he mess up here than later, Will thought.
Loth pinched Jorn’s ribs, eliciting a squeak from the young man.
“Pull the arrows back!” Loth shouted, thrusting her hand forward.
From her hand dozens of bullet wasps carrying fate-weavers launched themselves into the air.
The aphids began spitting a sap-colored glob of something that Will would rather not touch, judging by the caustic look of it’s miasmatic structures.
Will found the tiny gap between Loth’s bugs and Jorn’s arrows as they returned and created a shield of solidified air.
“Half your attention on the enemy, half on your Party members,” Will said. “Half the battle is not tripping them up. I know you’re used to going solo, but keep it in mind.”
“Yessir!” Jorn said, nodding, sweat beading on his forehead.
Didn’t we just get started?
Jorn’s summoned beetles were surrounded and killed shortly after they lit the tree on fire. His eagles created a gust of wind to fan the flames before pulling away and engaging with the spitting aphids from a distance.
These weren’t even mentioned in the Clear Request.
Will supposed it was because they weren’t directly benefitting from the Key Site’s miasma, and the System wasn’t fully sentient. To the System, it was a coincidence.
The tree’s sure making use of them, Will thought, watching Jorn’s eagles picking off the bugs as they tried to fully encircle them.
Miasma flowed from the back of Loth’s spiders, creating an enormous web that spanned hundreds of feet in ever direction.
At the very center, Devourer of Knowledge plucked the strings, giggling in a slightly raspy voice.
“Yes, this is a good web!” Devourer exclaimed as she plucked a string which created a vibration in spacetime that propogated through the web, creating a forward-cast ripple that cleaved through hundreds of the bright green monsters, sending chunks tumbling to the ground.
“Who said that?” Jorn asked with a frown, glancing at Will and Loth.
“An invisible raid boss we befriended a couple weeks ago.” Will said.
“Seriously?” Jorn asked.
Loth met Jorn’s gaze and shrugged.
“By the way, did you steal my dimensional blades?” Will asked, pumping the shield of compressed air outwards before dismissing it, flinging the caustic sap away from them.
“You show me your magic missile that many times…” Loth said with a shrug, her expression going vacant as she focused.
“That was to teach The Devourer to make movement flagella!” Will said.
Loth raised a hand, claws upwards towards the sky.
Thousands of strands of miasma rose from the earth as Loth’s Draconic Domain recreated The Devourer’s Anti-air defenses.
The aphids began dropping out of the air by the thousands, clearing the sight-lines to the massive tree in a matter of seconds.
“Jorn, do any of your arrows have an effect that could kill that thing?”
Jorn paled and shook his head. “I might be able – I might be able to cut through them with my arrows but I don’t think I could kill it with just one arrow.”
True. Comparing one arrow to the size of the entire tree below them was roughly the size of an eyelash to a human.
And without a heart or vital organs, the damn thing’s gonna be hard to take down at that size.
“Any bones from creatures with instant-death effects or nasty poison?” Will asked. “You need a giant slayer sometimes.”
“OH!” Jorn snapped his fingers and rummaged through his saddlebags, pulling back a blackened bone that radiated an ominous energy.
Jorn concentrated for a moment, and the bone thinned down and stretched out, into a black arrow that leapt from his palm and began lazily orbiting his head along with the others.
“Now I just need to carve a heartstopper into the arrow and it should have the effect.” Jorn said, pulling out a scrimshaw knife as the arrow settled back down into his hand.
“…How long is that gonna take?” Will asked.
“Like an hour?” Jorn said, glancing up at Will.
“…Screw it, I’m using Hammer of God.”
Hammer of God
Will changed his equipped Relic and began firing manifested cannonballs down at the tree.
The instant they hit, they converted to lightning, blasting large chunks of the tree’s upper branches away, scattering the flames and causing more and more of it’s wood to catch fire.
As Will cut the branches back to the base of the tree, the heartwood was revealed, and the tree began rapidly growing new armor and throwing rocks and other trees at them, which filled the air with dirt.
It was a mess until Loth managed to restrain the tree’s roots.
After that was the long process of slowly tearing the monster apart.
When Jorn finished his arrow, the ‘heartstopper’ effect didn’t work on the physiology of a tree. In the process, they discovered that the miasmatic structures that made the tree tougher got neatly cut by Jorn’s Resistance-piercing arrows, something that Will’s phantom hand armor couldn’t do.
Imagine someone being tied down before having their heart cut out by indestructible eyelashes connected end-to-end.
Once the monster was dead, Will took the heartwood and preserved it, stashing it in his Dimensional Storage. It appeared to act like a bundle of tiny straws, allowing miasma to flow seamlessly through the wood with the grain, but against the grain it resisted it.
It was an interesting physical property, since matter rarely interacted with Miasma directly.
Thank you for clearing the Key Site. You may advance to the 15th Floor at your discretion.
+ 20000XP