Loopshard - Chapter One-Hundred-and-Eighteen

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The thick plottens!

Also, Loopshard is going to hit 400k words with chapter 119! My personal best for word count on a story is Isekai Exorcist, which at three books has 427k words.

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Chapter One-Hundred-and-Eighteen

While the others continued to fight the Bone Creeper that remained, Adam shaped his arm into a spike and drove it through Jun’s head, easily creating a hole through his cranium. The internal blood explosion Adam had used to kill him had compromised the bone quite significantly.

With the hole made, Adam retrieved one of the bolts that the creeper had fired at them and placed it through Jun’s open head, shifting his muscles and flesh around to empower his arms enough to drive the large bolt firmly into the forest ground.

Once Adam had returned his body’s shape to how he remembered it looking before, he finally went about looting Jun, though he was only looking for one thing.

< < Loot ­— Jun Jie Lim > >

< Captain’s Cape (Rare) >

< Duellist’s Glove (Rare) >

< First Strike Earring (Rare) x2 >

< Slothling Fur Coat (Rare) >

< Slothling Spring Boots (Rare) >

< Shard of Blood >

And there it is, the thing the Flayed Lady wanted me to collect.

< < Quest Object > >

< Shard of Blood — The crystallised lifeblood of Jun Jie Lim >

Adam held the shard in his hand for a moment before absorbing it into his own body, folding his flesh around it to hide the evidence away. After all, it would’ve been foolish to just put it in his backpack.

Then he swapped his Hobgoblin Pendant out for the Blood Mage Choker, since he no longer needed its affect to trick the wannabe Player-killer.

As the numbness faded and his sense of feeling and touch returned, Adam paused to take in the pain that wracked his body from the transformations. He had managed to avoid breaking his body while manipulating his own flesh without the sense of touch and feeling, but the pain was a potent force that rolled over him in pulsating waves.

With a deep breath, he pushed the pain to the back of his mind.

I should probably be concerned that I don’t feel any shred of remorse for what I just did.

But maybe it’s just because I can’t forgive anyone who would destroy the world for their own short-term gain.

I want Beck to succeed, but he can’t do that if Nwetrou cheats and intentionally sends Players after him.

Once I get back to the island, I need to do a deep scan for all the adherents of Nwetrou.

I may have to unlock the Challenge Stone to get rid of them.

Adam collected as much blood as he could from Jun’s corpse without making it look suspicious, and then he ran towards where the others were still fighting, leaving behind the rest of the loot.

Mikhail was injured, his left arm hanging by his side, but it didn’t stop him from bashing the Bone Creeper repeatedly where it was rooted into the ground. Next to them were three toppled trees that the enemy had clearly fallen from, landing in a way that two of its back legs were stuck firmly into the understory of the forest.

Kate and Sarah struggled to pierce the bone armour of the Elite, but the three of them were working together quite well. Kate used her parries to protect the others from the creeper’s legs that swung at them, and she created weak points on its body that the other two hit repeatedly, thanks to her Vigilant Fighter’s Vambrace.

As Adam closed in on the fight, Mikhail managed to crack the outer shell of the creeper, but they were still far from being able to kill it.

It seems that the weak points created by Kate’s vambrace aren’t actually highlighting the true weaknesses of the enemy and they’re making them less effective because they redirect all their attacks at its dense body, rather than the actual parts they should be hitting.

“You need to target the legs!” Adam yelled at them.

Neither Mikhail nor Sarah listened, but then Kate repeated Adam’s words and they obeyed.

That’s weird…

Adam pulled out his Spidersilk Needle and performed one of the tricks he’d been practising the night before. With the needle in his right hand and the golden thread coated with his energised blood, Adam drew out a spiral with the string, placing it on the front of the needle as tightly as he could.

It was something him and Beck had discovered quite quickly with the Golden Tailor evolution. It allowed Adam to make stable constructs with the silk and ‘wear’ them, but he could also apply them directly to his needle, which produced a powerful result.

With the spring-like spiral placed on the front of the needle, Adam shot it forward with a spike to the back. Thanks to his many upgrades, it flew much faster and with more power than during the Forbidden Altar.

As the tip of his needle touched the back of the creeper, away from where the others were targeting their attacks, the spiral of silk on the front of the weapon triggered.

A crack like the sound of thunder came, and then the needle, which had reached the end of its initial burst of momentum, suddenly shot forward, shearing through three of the legs and stretching the elastic silk another ten metres before yanking back.

A few moments later, the others destroyed the remaining legs and the Bone Creeper cracked like a dropped egg.

[Elite enemy defeated.]

“We did it!” Kate celebrated.

Mikhail and Sarah smiled, sharing her excitement.

Huh. The Russian guy didn’t strike me as the smiling type. More the quiet brooding type.

“Where’s mister incredible?” Kate joked when she saw that Adam was alone. She had clearly not been a fan of Jun’s smug attitude.

“He’s dead,” Adam replied.

“Dead?” she asked and cast him a suspicious look that the other two mirrored.

It’s been only a few minutes and they’ve already formed a tight-knit group…

This is giving me flashbacks to what happened with Maalia, Leon, and Ruimin.

Adam tried to put his apprehension aside and look at it objectively from their perspective, but he couldn’t stop it from nagging at him.

I would probably be suspicious too if I was in their shoes.

“The other Bone Creeper got him,” Adam said.

“Bone Creeper? Is that what these things are?” Kate asked.

“That’s what my cube called it at least.”

“Did you loot his body?” Kate asked.

“No, I came to help you guys as soon as our creeper was dead.”

Kate nodded.

Then the other two nodded.

Okay… What the fuck is going on.

The four of them went over to where Jun’s body lay and Kate grimaced at the sight of him, before realising that the creeper had been killed by a single strike.

“He managed to deal a lot of damage to it, but then it shot him as they both fell towards the ground,” Adam lied.

“Damn, that’s unlucky,” Kate replied, not questioning the shoddy logic Adam had come up.

For some reason, neither Mikhail nor Sarah wanted any of the loot from Jun’s body, so Kate and Adam just divvied it up, with her getting the cape and both earrings. The rest went into Adam’s backpack to be sold later.

I’m gonna need something else to carry with soon, since the Nightwing Heart is taking up so much space.

He noticed that Mikhail’s left arm was still hanging limply by his side.

“Doesn’t he have a healing potion?” Adam asked Kate.

She repeated the question to him, and he just nodded.

“You should use it,” Kate told him.

Mikhail pulled out a healing potion that he quickly drank, restoring his arm to normal function.

There’s something really fucking wrong with him and Sarah.

It has to be because of Kate.

They’re only listening to her.

As they continued through the forest in the direction of the tower, Kate suddenly told the other two to go on ahead and do some scouting.

Once they were out of sight, she stopped walking and Adam came to a halt as well.

Before he could ask what the hell she’d done to the other two Players, Kate said, “Adam, you’ve gotta help me fix this!”

He frowned. “Is it because of your Patron?”

Now that they were up close to each other, he noticed that her irises were glowing faintly orange-red.

“You lied about worshipping the Masked Courtesan, right?” she replied.

“Yeah…”

“Thank God,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the cause of it, but when I met her, she told me to be careful with the boon I was gifted.”

“What kind of Absolute is she?” he asked.

“She controls the power of attraction or something,” Kate said, speaking quickly. “I’m pretty sure it also extends to love. Her boon is a power that allows me to charm humanoids to make them friendly, like those goblins from the village for example. She said I could make them friendly if I’d had her boon back then. One of her titles is also ‘The Siren’. Anyway! The issue is that the charming power is active without me doing anything!”

Adam was reminded of James’ theory about the Masked Courtesan being a deity of love. He had been incredibly accurate with his guesses, which was astonishing in hindsight, considering how little they all knew at the time.

If one of the Courtesan’s other names is the Siren, then it might explain why it’s impossible for Kate to fully switch off the charm.

“It has to be the weakness tied to your worship of her,” Adam theorised.

“Weakness?”

“Yeah. You get a boon and a weakness. Your weakness might be whatever the fuck happened to Mikhail and Sarah.”

“I think it’s because I touched them,” Kate said. She was clearly quite upset about having brainwashed the others. “That’s just the kind of person I’ve always been. I’ve been told it’s a bit much in the past, especially when I get too excited about meeting new people. My sister used to say I’m a golden retriever.”

Adam thought back to their first meeting in the Tavern. She had immediately tried to high-five him.

What a dangerous power for someone like her.

I fortunately feel nothing, but maybe that’s just because she hasn’t touched me yet.

Adam took a step back.

“I don’t think it would work on you,” Kate quickly added.

“I’m not taking any chances,” Adam said.

“But what do I do??” she pleaded. “They’ll die if I don’t tell them exactly how to fight! Sarah tried to attack the creeper thing by swinging her staff at it until I told her to use her magic. I’m not meant to have this kind of power!”

“Take a deep breath,” Adam told her.

Kate drew in an exaggerated breath and then exhaled loudly.

Man, everything she does is extra.

She’s like a rabbit on caffeine.

“There may be a way to break the spell on them,” he started.

“Really!?” she replied excitedly.

Adam held up a hand for her to wait for him to finish his thought.

“If you say the Courtesan is associated with love, then perhaps rejecting them would work. It’s like the opposite of attraction, right?”

“I can’t!” Kate exclaimed. “The Courtesan explicitly warned me not to!”

“Why?”

“She said that rejecting someone’s attraction would make them act irrationally or become violent.”

Fucking hell…

What a goddamn mess of an Absolute to worship.

I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this before. Brainwashing other Players is so obviously prone to abuse.

“Maybe the effect will wear off if we just wait,” Adam suggested. “But no more touching people! Your power is fucking terrifying.”

Kate hung her head. “I just picked her because I thought charming someone else would’ve prevented the massacre I experienced in Stage Five.”

Adam sighed.

“It’s not your fault. But you’ve been handed tremendous power, and you need to be responsible with it.”

Kate nodded. “Thank you, Adam.”

“Do you know how you unlocked her at the Altar?” he asked.

“I think it has to do with unrequited love,” she replied.

That tracks, I guess.

But it’s weird, because Emelia said she got the Courtesan to show up too in the loop before she met me. I wonder why.

Perhaps there are more than one way to unlock that Absolute.

“Who are you worshipping?” Kate asked.

“It’s actually Messimer,” he lied. “I didn’t want you all to know that I have access to the Appraisal skill, since it can be quite invasive.”

Even if she has confided in me, I don’t trust her with the truth.

After all, if she can brainwash the others, then she could easily decide that I was a threat and do the same to me.

But so far at least, I don’t feel any attraction towards her.

Perhaps the charming touch only works against those who are already attracted to her, he guessed. That would at least balance the power a little, although it’s still quite insane to be able to turn people into slaves at will. I’m lucky that Kate doesn’t seem like a bad person.

“Is that boon why you were able to jump off the carriage before we were attacked?” she asked.

“That’s right. It’s also how I knew the legs were the weak points on the creepers,” he lied. But at least it was a convincing lie.

Adam had only known about the weakness of the creepers’ legs because of James possessing the Scope of Insight when he’d been here last time.

I should’ve just said I worshipped Messimer from the start, Adam thought. As a time-looper, faking the appraisal of an enemy is actually quite easy.

“Let’s go get the others before they reach the tower,” Adam said.

Kate nodded and off they went through the forest.

I hope my Stage Seven isn’t such a massive clusterfuck…

Just once I’d like to experience a group Stage where everyone is cooperative and not murderous psychos or whatever the hell you’d call Kate in this situation.

Adam sighed again.

He already just wanted this Stage to be over with, and it hadn’t even been 30 minutes since they’d started.

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