“Any monsters inside the building?” asked Valeksi. He raised an eyebrow at me as I stared at it with my soul sight. I frowned.
“There’s a huge enemy inside. I think it has a Fortitude of around grade 20. I have no idea what other abilities or stats it might have, but we should be ready for a difficult fight.” I couldn’t help but grimace. I still remembered that back when we had fought inside of our first inner district of the Market, the enemies we had seen inside had less than grade 15 agility. Even that had seemed mind-numbingly fast at the time. Now, the first guard for a real shop we had found had a life force of above grade 20. It was obvious that things were much stronger in this district - and I didn’t like that idea. Still, at the very least this fight should be manageable.
“I don’t know if I’m capable of holding off a monster that strong, at least not for long,” said Sallia. “My perception stat is still too low to keep up with my physical abilities, so I can’t make full use of my stats.”
I sighed, before I nodded at her. Even though she was already terrifying as-is, with her [Perception] attribute so low, she could only employ some of her own [Strength] without hurting herself, and her [Agility] was shackled by the fact that her eyes and her ability to process information couldn’t keep up. Being able to dodge faster than a bullet could move didn’t matter much if she couldn’t detect the bullet until it hit her - and unfortunately, that was the situation Sallia was now in.
“Any other signs of life?” asked Felix.
“I don’t see any other monsters in the front room, at least. There seems to be some kind of material further into the shop that blocks my perception, so I have no idea what’s in that area. We should be prepared for the monster to have reinforcements after we initiate combat.”
“What does it look like?” asked Valeksi. “Is it safe for me to send in some wooden birds to do some more thorough scouting?”
I shook my head. “I think the one monster I can see is some kind of ambush monster. It’s hiding in the wall right beside the entrance, and I can only see it with my soul sight - my physical sight isn’t picking up anything. Be prepared for it to attack us the moment we open the door.”
“In that case, how about we just kick open the door and then I try to stab the wall and see if I hit it?” asked Sallia. “Anise can follow up with a fireball, and then we run back and prepare for any counterattacks it launches at us.”
I mulled over Sallia’s suggestion, before I nodded. It was a simple battle plan, but it seemed like a reasonable one.
“I think that could work,” I said. “Does anyone else object?”
Nobody raised any objections, so we got into position and gave Sallia the green light to start.
Sallia kicked open the door and rammed her blade into the wall, right where I had warned her that the enemy was lurking.
White-gray blood poured out of the bright red, festively decorated wall. I realized, with a shock, that the monster wasn’t hiding in the wall. The monster was the wall. The wall sprouted meaty, fleshy tendrils, before propelling itself towards Sallia at a ridiculous speed - but Sallia somehow rolled out of its way before it struck. The wall smacked directly into the other side of the entry hallway with a bone-rattling crash, and more white-gray blood was thrown away from the collision site. Before I could react, the wall seemed to melt into a puddle of liquid, almost like a slime - and then it screeched.
The screech seemed to rattle our surroundings, the walls of the research lab, and even my bones. Then, something slammed into my mind a moment later. It was like someone had taken a white-hot stake and driven it through my skull. I felt blinding, impossible pain. A moment later, the sound penetrated deeper than just my mind - it started to dig into my very soul, tearing and pulling at everything that made me myself. In a fraction of a second, I lost my battle against the horrible sound.
I blacked out.
Then, my eldritch half snapped into place. While my human mind and my human soul reeled in agony, the eldritch half of my reached towards my human half.
This was our last hope. I wouldn’t allow our hope to perish here. So I reached out of the layers of concepts buried within reality, and dragged my human half back to consciousness.
A moment later, the eldritch half of me was exhausted - after all, I had barely recovered since my multiple deaths at the end of our last life. But it was enough for my human half to jolt itself back into consciousness, and slam myself with the strongest healing magic I could.
With healing mana pouring into my brain, the feeling of someone pouring molten metal into my skull while running my brain through a blender vanished. I could think again.
I immediately started pouring healing magic into all of my companions. This was no time to save essence - if we wanted to live through this thing’s attack, we had to end the fight now, before the soul damage it inflicted became too much. I could withstand it because half of my soul was now eldritch in nature, and so whatever damage this thing inflicted on souls didn’t seem to impact my eldritch half in quite the same way as my human half. My friends and our new allies had no such benefit.
My healing manage managed to jolt Sallia out of her stupor for a moment, right in time for her to leap out of the way as the liquid pool of howling teeth nearly tore her to pieces. Felix followed up with a spray of metal, and Anise whimpered in pain before she followed up with some kind of spell.
Immediately, the horrible sound disappeared. It was as if Anise’s spell had simply restricted sound waves from existed at all - suddenly, everything was dead silent.
The piercing pain in my mind and soul disappeared in an instant. The others straightened up, as if they had each taken a giant shot of caffeinated tea. The monster didn’t seem to notice that its sound-based attack had been cut off. Instead, its flesh shifted and warped into a giant fist, which it tried to slam onto Sallia’s head.
Sallia danced backwards, before she drove her sword back into the malformed humanoid fist. Kexley and Valeksi moved to the side, and began harassing the monster with bites and claws. I hit the creature with a few weak extinguishes, just to annoy it, but I kept most of my remaining essence reserves ready for another unusual attack. The sound-based attack had nearly wiped us out, after all - I didn’t want another nasty surprise to actually kill someone.
Fortunately, the creature didn’t have any other tricks up its sleeve. It kept shapeshifting and trying to gnaw at people, but with my third rune ability thrown in, Kexley and Valeksi had enough speed to keep out of its way, and Sallia had more than enough situational awareness to keep track of the creature. Evidently, the creature had a disproportionately high focus on life force and its soundwave-based magic attack - its actual physical abilities were rather mediocre, once we adapted to its constantly shapeshifting form. After a few minutes of hacking, stabbing, and blasting at it, the creature was nearly dead. I unleashed a much more powerful extinguish to finish it off, and see if I could get a skill out of it.
Slaughter: Kill a Wall Hugger for the first time
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.
Achievement +1,500
My Achievement increased from 280,713 to 282,213.
Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Wall Hugger for the first time. New Skill created.
Your body gains the ability to spend any form of essence to significantly alter your shape, and make it harder for other creatures to spot you. The ‘stealth’ component of this skill is a form of mental attack, which works by trying to make creatures below a certain threshold of [Willpower] ignore your presence and any problems with your disguised form.
I shrugged, and equipped the new skill. I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do with it yet, but maybe it would come in handy later.
“I got a shapeshifting skill and a mental attack from killing this thing,” I said.
“Got a new skill?” asked Kexley.
I paused, before I nodded. “I don’t believe we’ve gone over the specific details of all of our abilities, have we? To put it simply, when I strike the finishing blow on a monster, I get the option to ‘steal’ one skill from it. Most of them are useless, but sometimes I get something nice. More importantly, though, the skill descriptions can often provide useful information that helps us alter our tactical arrangements. Oftentimes, whatever skill I steal is a watered down version of the strongest skill a monster has - so it also tells us exactly how to counter that ability.”
“You really are good at scouting,” said Valeksi.
I laughed. “I mostly focus on support and healing, but I am quite decent at scouting too, yes. As long as nothing messes with my special types of vision, I can gather a lot of information with very little risk.”
“Are there any other monsters inside?” asked Kexley. I checked the area with all of my vision types, and then I grinned. Now that we were inside, whatever was obscuring my vision below was a lot less effective than before - it was still hard to see perfectly, but it was like trying to see through a sheet of paper paper versus looking through a foggy window. I was quite curious about whatever material was doing this, so I made a mental note to have Felix inspect it later. For now, I focused on confirming the presence or lack thereof of monsters in the back of the building, though.
“I don’t see anything else here. I think we should be safe. Let's head to the back - it looks like that’s where the actual body production facilities are located.”
We moved past the reception hall, and into the production area of the facility. It was time to finally get some new bodies.
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 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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