Jjhutto_Son of Flame
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B3. Ch. 50 Another Bad Tree
🕑 Added 2024-11-04 21:08:52 +0000 UTCCongratulations! You have completely eliminated a new evolution of creatures (Arachnid Parasites) from the face of Nephesh. You have earned the title: [Peerless Annihilation]
[Peerless Annihilation] - You are one of a select few who have completely destroyed an entire racial evolution. The greatness of your accomplishments hangs on your soul like a banner, impressing your might on those around you. Aural Abilities boosted by 300%.
Honestly, he was pretty happy with this one. He would have preferred something that offered utility in direct combat, but if the title had gone in that direction, he probably would have been stuck with something spider-specific. Or with another bonus to killing large groups of weak opponents. Two things he probably didn’t need. [Peerless Annihilation] on the other hand, would give him one more tool to use against the heavy hitters, whom he was being thrown against more and more often.
As interesting as the implications of the new title were, the second notification took the cake.
Commerce Guild, System Sanctioned Notification - You have successfully deposited the equivalent of one point five million Guild-standard Platinum. This has been credited to your account and can be withdrawn in numerous forms of currency.
No one had explained to Tilly the worth of a piece of platinum but going by the other conversions, he was pretty sure it would be another 100:1, gold to platinum. The spiders had been sitting on a truly immense fortune which they had chosen to squirrel away from the Commerce Guild. It had probably served some magical function of worship, but Tilly wouldn’t ever get the chance to know.
Besides, seeing such a large amount of wealth go undeposited in the banking monopoly of the plane made Tilly rethink the source of their information regarding the location and contents of this temple… had it been divine? Or had someone much more mundane tipped them off?
“We are ready, Great One,” Erash stated with a final wave of her staff over her own body, causing a series of enchantments to blaze into being all over her clothing, before fading into invisibility.
The dragon took a moment to stretch his fully recovered wings, but Tilly wasn’t fooled. He just knew Brokenridge would shoot off as fast as possible when he thought Tilly wasn't paying attention.
‘Not this time…’ Tilly thought, gritting his teeth as he tensed his body forward and breathed in short bursts.
He kept his eyes locked on the dragon, and his careful scrutiny revealed a tiny burning script crawling over the dragon’s scales, almost like the nonsensical falling green code from the matrix. He didn’t know the significance, but Brokenridge was now practically oozing smugness, as he casually moved up to the ruined statue and ripped its upper half from the arachnid base. Clearly the effects of such a large infusion of wealth were doing more for the dragon than was immediately obvious.
Tilly was tugged forward as the statue was ripped from its base. He almost didn’t notice as another twig hit him in the face and he bobbled it in his hands as the dragon made to take off. Judging by the strategy the dragon had employed during this raid, Tilly probably wouldn’t be working with ample decision-making time when they attacked the next Faction. He sighed in repeat as he narrowly missed dropping the enchanted piece of foliage.
Without a word of warning, Brokenridge took off into the air, surging a couple dozen feet with every beat of his wings. Each surge pulled the unenchanted parts of Tilly downward violently before being given a brief instant of relief from the force before starting the process all over again. It was maddeningly difficult to time his breathing and tensing along with the pull of the dragon's ascent.
Despite that, thanks to his Endurance, and slight preparations, he was no longer in danger of any damage from the whiplash. The whole situation was complicated by his still recovering body, which strained and groaned at the unusual pressures being put on it. The recent crash landing had caused damage to a few muscles and micro-fractures in many of his bones.
Then they were through the opening, with the dragon making a clever twisting turn so that Tilly and a now invisible Erash, moved through the opening without striking its edge. As soon as he emerged into the open, Tilly was assaulted by a thick smoky haze, through which he caught glimpses of multiple roaring forest fires and the charred husks of thousands of different combatants, not to mention a charcoal-like imitation of the Faction’s guardian curled in on itself halfway down the ziggurat. The enormous tarantula-like creature had been reduced to a charred husk, lying on its back with its legs folded inward in the classic dead spider pose.
‘Holy Shit’ Tilly thought as he attempted to wipe tears from his eyes due to the caustic nature of the smoke. Brokenridge had absolutely wrecked this Faction.
As if he could hear Tilly’s thoughts, the dragon broke off his ascent to wheel in a lazy circle high above the ruined Faction, roaring in triumph, before beginning to glow with a purple haze. As the magic built, Tilly registered a sound in the distance. Something that sounded like a distant shriek, layered with base undertones.
Before he could register the sound, the haze around Brokenridge firmed into a bright purple light and Tilly sent an urgent warning to Kindle, before pulling his body into the same pose he had used before. He tensed his muscles and curled into a makeshift fetal position just in time to resist the force that slammed into his body. Once again attempting to rip everything not linked to the statue.
Once committed, he couldn’t look up from his knees to try and keep a watch on their location or relative speed. But that didn't stop him from squinting through the wind vortex assaulting his eyes to check as his Mana and Health slowly ticked up. Tilly’s body became one giant cramp as he continued to hold the position and the only positive to the dragon’s True Flight empowered speed was that once the maximum acceleration was achieved, there was no change in direction or velocity, allowing Tilly a space of time where he knew what the next moments would bring.
Despite the discomfort, Tilly managed to ease into something resembling rest, and after an unknown amount of time blasting through the air, both his status bars had returned to full. Eventually, Kindle awoke from her nap, having finished digesting the gains from their most recent fight. The wind provided no barrier to their mental communication and Tilly was happy to hear her now able to converse in full sentences. This regained ability did not stop her from sending complex sensory packets to flavor her language, but it was nice to have someone to process recent events with.
While he had not been able to gain any experience from the battle, Kindle had reaped significant benefits. She had been able to absorb large amounts of excess heat from the conflict allowing her to rapidly evolve into an evolutionary stage similar to what she had achieved before she sacrificed herself against the Prime Dirge.
Now that she was more cognizant, she explained that she could remember her past lives up to whatever point in her growth she currently held. This was often not very useful in its early stages but would become much more helpful as she continued to grow. She also shared that she had never gained the Starlight addendum to her race at this stage in her past lives and did not know its significance. Although she suspected its implications were more spiritual than physical.
As they talked, Tilly found himself getting hungry and even with the wind tearing at his every motion, he managed to slowly reach around to his back pocket and grab something within. He didn’t know how it was supposed to work, but as soon as his hand entered the stitched fold of fabric, he found something to pull out.
Tilly had no clue what it was, its texture feeling rough and dry, but it didn't come completely free from the pocket until his hand had pulled almost a foot away, and when it did, the wind caught it and pulled it right out of his grip. Growling in frustration, he reached over again, his legs slowly uncurling from lack of support, and fished back into the pocket. This time he squeezed what he had tightly as he pulled it free, and quickly brought it around to the front of this body, finding that he held a slightly squashed plum. He took a greedy bite and was happy to find that it tasted extraordinary, despite being bruised from his grip.
As he struggled through his snack break while holding his awkward posture, Kindle continued to outline her abilities and her best guesses at what would develop as she evolved further. She could currently store one-tenth of the heat she absorbed and could release it in all manner of forms, but would need to refill it once used. She also had the ability to almost completely disperse her form in a fiery final attack achieving a huge bonus to output damage, but as Tilly had experienced, this attack risked ending her cycle of rebirth.
Registering what she could do, he asked her to stay out of the direct conflict and save her intervention for attacks of opportunity and spotting unseen attackers. She seemed pretty confident that despite the fey’s glamor ability, her heat vision could see through most illusions. He then took time to fully explain what he had gained at the auction and what he hoped to get out of each item, as well as his need to defeat enough enemies to gain a level before arriving to the Contested Lands.
The screeching of the wind stopped, bringing a pause to their mental conversation, and the force pulling at Tilly’s extremity lessened for the first time in what might have been an hour or two. He had no real way to tell now that his Health and Mana were back to full, but as he painfully craned his neck, he was faced with a completely different landscape than the one they had left behind in the Arachnid Supremacy Faction.
Here the land was cracked and disjointed with plateaus rising and falling in unnatural patterns. Clockwork buildings covered the horizon as far as the eye could see, interconnected but huge moving gears and levers, constantly in griding motion. Some of the plateaus were rising and falling, releasing huge jets of steam and smoke along with the movement. Even from their vantage thousands of feet up, the only change in the landscape was the single spire piercing the sky in the distance.
The whole thing would have been very steampunk if not for the sickeningly familiar fleshy roots plunging in and out of all of the many factory-like buildings. They fanned out in a network centered on the distant spire, which sported an enormous tumorous growth at its base. Tilly’s mind raced through the intel they had on the Perfected Golem Faction.
They had once been active in plane-wide economics but had fallen out of contact with others in the last few months. Church sources stated that the Faction’s stated goal had always been to create the perfect clockwork form, but its methods of pursuit had radically changed recently, and they had cannibalized much of their resources to shift focus. Investigations had revealed high-level experiments using Corruption as a catalyst for mechanical evolution. This spawned power breakthroughs that caused an internal coup resulting in very few dissidents escaping the new regime.
That information had done little to prepare Tilly for what he saw playing out before him. He struggled to wrap his brain around what a fully grown Corruption Seed was capable of as its insane size dwarfed Tilly’s imagination.
Brokenridge slowed his approach, gaining altitude as he spent some of his velocity to climb. The endless city of interconnected metallic buildings continued its whirling mechanical movements, seemingly unconcerned with their flight over the Faction’s air space.
“Do they know we are here?” Tilly called over the wind.
Comments
Zachary Koffink
No, but there are three words that are banned in my kitchens. Quiet slow and busy
Joshua Hutto
... you a fire fighter bro? that is a strangely accurate observation
Zachary Koffink
Why do you tempt fate Tilly? Asking if they know you're here, is like asking why the shift has been so quiet.
