After the battle, I took a quick moment to look over my System messages.
Slaughter: Kill a False Dryad for the first time, Assist in Killing a False Dryad for the first time, Assist in killing a False Dryad for the Fifth time
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.
Achievement +600, Achievement +40, Achievement +50, Achievement +0.05
This brought my total from 280,023 to 280,713.
More importantly, I also got a new Ability from the tree monster I had killed with extinguish. After looking at it, I was pleased to confirm that it was a useful ability, rather than one of the oddly specific and hard to use abilities I sometimes got from monsters.
Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured False Dryad for the first time. New Skill created.
Your [Fortitude] is enhanced by 1 grade when you are exposed to a sufficient amount of light, and while in light your body will slowly heal itself.
Light wasn’t that hard to manufacture artificially - Anise had a few spells that could generate light for me when needed. So when it came time for us to fight for more lives, I would at least have a little bit more leeway for mistakes during the battle before a blow would be lethal.
After I finished looking over my own messages, I spent another few minutes waiting for the rest of the group to finish reading their own messages. Soon, we were ready to move on.
Since we felt that something was still observing us, we moved very slowly and methodically - we constantly maintained alertness and a readiness to retreat from this inner district of the Market. I also kept scanning our surroundings with all of my unusual types of sight, and Valeksi sent out his own wooden bird scouts as well.
After all, this was a true threat to our survival. Whatever was watching us felt dangerous. I even had a sneaking suspicion that it might be whatever monster was guarding the lives further in this area - in which case, I wasn’t sure if we could win a battle at the moment, or even escape if it came out of its lair to hunt us. I also gave Felix the {Splinter of Annihilation}, so that he could use it if push came to shove and the enemy attacked us.
Fortunately, the enemy - whatever it was, didn’t seem to be willing to emerge and hunt us down. In fact, we couldn’t see any signs of its presence at all, save for the vague sensation of being watched by something dangerous.
“Why isn’t it coming out to kill us?” asked Sallia. “I was actually kind of relieved at the idea that we might start our final battle soon. All of this preparation and anxiety about whether we’ll survive the next encounter… well, as much as I intellectually know that more preparation time is good, I’ve been really anxious about this for years now. I was thinking we would figure out whether we lived or died soon - but the monster isn’t coming out to attack us. Anyone have any good guesses?”
“Maybe it’s the guardian, and it’s not willing to move too far away from wherever we acquire lives?” said Felix. “Miria, you still haven’t seen any signs of the enemy or any powerful sources of life force near us, right?”
“I can’t detect any powerful monsters near us, no. While the space in this place is a little bit messed up and so my range isn’t as good as usual, I’m still pretty sure there aren’t any powerful monsters within a five minute walk of us, at least. Just a few false Dryads that seem to be defending that concession stand,” I said, as I pointed to a former snack-selling stand filled with moldy bread and melted ice cream. None of us bothered taking another look at it - it was highly unlike we could get anything useful there, so there was no point in wasting our essence.
“What about with your conceptual sight? Anything odd on that front?” asked Anise.
“My conceptual sight does seem to indicate that the concept of ‘hunger’ gets stronger the deeper I look into this research facility, but I haven’t seen any signs to indicate the source of that concept is closing in on us,” I said.
“In that case, I think it’s because the Guardian is watching us, but it’s too conservative in how it defends the lives,” said Felix. “If I were designing some kind of guardian to prevent new transmigrators from appearing, I would certainly stop it from moving too far away. After all, there are so many different kinds of stealth, teleportation, and ways to block perception in the Multiverse. It seems unlikely that any living creature could ever be able to detect and defend against every single form of stealth or enhanced movement. Therefore, if it moves away, a transmigrator might slip through its defenses and buy lives before it catches them. The transmigrator might get killed right afterwards - but if a transmigrator buys twenty more lives or something, then gets killed afterwards, they’ll just respawn in the Market and lose a life. Then, they could go live 19 more lives, pick up a bunch of ability upgrades, and then come back and steamroll the guardian. It really can’t afford even a single mistake.”
“That might be true, but if someone manages to slip by the guardian, how would it stop them from buying more lives?” asked Kexley.
“I figure that the transmigrator might be able to sneak by it… but the enchantments that actually condense our Achievement into more lives probably doesn’t have any kind of stealth mechanism on it. Thus, the moment it activates, the guardian will know something is wrong and start spraying attacks at its surroundings. It might even be specialized in attacks that can hit large areas, or perhaps attacks that hit stealthy enemies,” said Felix. “Or perhaps it has some other mechanism entirely. I don’t know enough to do much besides speculate, after all.”
“If that’s the case, I think we should be wary of airborne poison, as well as dimensional and elemental attacks that hit a wide area,” said Sallia. “Those would be the most classic ways I can think of to hit hidden enemies, anyway. If we find any skills or items that defend against that kind of attack, it might be worth prioritizing them.”
I nodded thoughtfully. If Felix’s speculation was correct, and the enemy was built to fight off invisible enemies, that could be a good thing for us. After all, none of us were built to specialize in stealth abilities, and the amount of different skills and abilities this monster had were probably limited. The more of its limited development was devoted to countering abilities we didn’t have, the better our odds of actually winning this fight.
“Since it’s not going to move, that means we can seize what we need from the rest of the area,” Valeksi said. “At the very least, if your speculation is correct, we have free reign to develop right up until we get near the lives.”
I grinned at that. I was really happy that we had more time to develop before the final confrontation. Even though I sympathized with Sallia’s anxiety and vague desire to get it over with, every single minute we had to grow stronger improved our odds.”
Now that we knew we were probably safe, we picked up the pace again. We started lightly jogging through the corridors. After just two minutes of travel, we found another small group of the same tree monsters we had previously fought blocking our way. Just like last time ,we used it as an opportunity to build our teamwork - though we went a little bit closer to full power, since it was also important to know what each of us could do at full strength. After wiping out this group of tree monsters, we found our first important-looking shop. This one was stylized kind of like a large laboratory - which was all the more confusing because the aesthetics of the building we were in was already stylized to look like a large lab. I had no idea what kind of visual effect the planners of this place had been going for, but it was a huge mess.
Still, even though this strange region looked absurd, the shop itself was interesting. According to the sign above the shop, it sold tickets that we could use to initiate new transmigrators into the Market.
At any other time, I might have actually been tempted to buy some tickets. After all, I doubted I would go the rest of my time in the multiverse without making any new friends or family members that I wanted to keep alive on a more permanent basis. Sadly, we had more important things to do with our Achievement at the moment. Still, I mentally marked down the spot where we had seen this shop - I wanted to come back later, if we had enough spare Achievement and we won the battle for more lives.
After another five minutes of travel and a few more fights with tree monsters, we found what we were looking for.
A shop selling new bodies for members of the Market.
The first step towards preparing us for whatever lay in store for us further in.
Author’s Note:
On July 6th, I will be getting surgery (again). It’s the exact same surgery as last time, just for a different area of my gums (they can only do a certain amount of area at a time, basically, so this process is broken into three parts. This is part two.) We’ll see if that interrupts the chapter schedule or not. If I’m in pain post-surgery, or semi-conscious due to the painkillers they put me on during the surgery, I might need to take a raincheck on a few chapters that week. I’m sorry T_T.
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