Interlude 4 - from Book 2

Here is Interlude 4 from book 2 - Nexus Runner - Rampage!

“Are you still sure this was a great idea?” Tomas asked as he used Flash Step to appear 20 feet away from Jane.

Behind him, the Demolition Rhino smashed through the heavy construct he’d left in its path. The huge monster looked a lot like an Earth rhino, but with heavier plating, and its magical horn generated a powerful battering ram force. Coupled with its trample effects, it had nearly gotten him when it first charged into the mountain valley where they’d been training.

It snorted with rage as it smashed through his defenses, but didn’t even see the trap module he’d left buried behind the decoy construct. The rhino charged over it and the ground exploded with fire and force and thousands of steel spikes that shredded up through the monster’s underbelly.

The beast collapsed, roaring in pain. Tomas Flash Stepped to 10 feet above its neck and dropped, leading with the point of his sword. With all his weight and strength, he drove the blade down through the beasts’s spine and got the kill notification.

He raised a hand in triumph and whooped, trying to embrace the thrill of battle like Jane or his brother. Lucas wasn’t the only Altan on this planet, and he was getting better at killing insane beasts, despite his initial revulsion. As a surgeon, his entire purpose had been to save lives and to heal. On Arasha, that didn’t work. Here, there were monsters and they had to die in order to keep the people he loved alive. Tomas was still working through that strange dichotomy.

The idea of venturing into the lower reaches of the western mountains to train and fine-tune their new class skills and abilities had seemed brilliant. Lucas spent most of his time out of town and he was growing insanely strong, despite how low his levels remained. The reality of dealing with the monster-infested wilderness was proving a lot more difficult, especially since the monsters didn’t just attack one at a time.

“Well done, my love,” Jane shouted as she made a fantastic parkour jump between a couple of trees, her laughter echoing from the mountains rising high on either side of the little valley.

As she tumbled through the air, she lashed out with a pair of simple clubs, smashing several silvery giant moths out of the air. She orchestrated the movements perfectly and the moths detonated in clouds of powdery smoke. Psychic walls ringing her body kept the smoke at bay until she dropped out of range.

The swarm of Grave Moths had erupted out of holes in several of the trees just as the rhino had charged them. That innocuous looking powder they emitted triggered horrible living nightmares, and they seemed totally immune to psychic attacks or even telekinesis. They were perhaps the most perfect monster to counter the core of Jane’s build.

She loved the challenge and had insisted on taking them on alone. Jane’s thrill-loving exuberance for life was one of her qualities that most attracted him, but sometimes she took risks that seemed over-the-top extreme.

Of course, Jane didn’t see it that way. She’d explained to him once that she calculated every possible variable before leaping into a seemingly insane stunt. Even back on Earth, she’d liked to say, “I don’t chase danger, I choreograph it.”

Now, with her Willpower stat, mind powers, telekinesis, and high Intelligence, she could calculate many times more variables. She still pushed the limits, but to her it was more just following the optimal path she’d already mapped out in her mind.

Still seemed insane to Tomas, but he knew better than to argue with her. He still couldn’t help shouting, “Watch those toads!”

Jane laughed again, the sound like sunshine through his heart. “The day a pack of sticky toads does me in is the day I’m too useless to keep living.”

As she raced around nearby trees, dodging diving moths, she leaped and rolled to avoid globs of sticky black pitch the size of baseballs, spit from the giant Tar Toads hopping around the trees nearby.

They posed far less risk to Jane than the moths. They were slow, their sticky spit bombs predictable, but they also launched long tongues that they used like grappling hooks to snag prey and yank it back into their teeth-lined maws.

Not that they’d touched Jane. As much as he wanted to help her, Tomas had to focus on his own problem. Right after the toads had hopped out of a nearby cave, a dozen Blight Badgers had erupted from the ground.

They were weird beasts, oversized berserking monsters with spiky hides. They could dig super fast, leaving trails of poisonous mist behind. They could spit poison, and their bites looked like they’d transmit plague.

The badgers were fast, but not very smart, and Tomas could easily keep them confused with Flash Step. The rhino had scattered them, but now they regrouped, focusing on Tomas. With a few jumps, he scores several hits on the backs of some of the monsters with his sword, driving their anger to whole new levels and luring the entire pack into charging after him, right between a pair of large boulders.

Perfect place for a trap.

Tomas activated Creative Frenzy, his new class ability that allowed him to drag one second of real time into eight long minutes for himself. It was still weird to see the world around him freeze as he stepped outside of time, but Tomas had only hesitated the first time he’d tried the ability. Now he focused, despite the distraction.

In his time bubble, he triggered his MacGyver permanent spell, along with his Haphazard Guardian class spell. The first inspired him with a flood of ideas for how best to defeat the badgers with materials on hand or in his storage. He could even use it to generate new materials, if needed, but that consumed his mana fast. Besides, he’d been gathering random junk ever since he got the spell and his inventory was half full of useful bits.

Haphazard Guardian, combined with Creative Frenzy turned Tomas into a super builder. He chuckled to imagine what he must look like to someone outside of his time bubble. Like a cartoon whirlwind of motion as he assembled constructs so fast, it was like they created themselves.

Tomas stepped out of the time bubble, marveling at the process he now controlled. He was used to working with deliberate precision in a surgery room. Now he was fast-crafting crude constructs of death and devastation. It was so foreign, and yet so incredible at the same time. It was definitely one sign of just how far his life had changed in the past week.

With a flourish, he dropped a couple multi-limbed constructs with swinging arms capped with heavy, iron-studded clubs, along with several spring-loaded spike traps. Then he retreated, leading the raging badgers into the death gauntlet.

As clubs smashed down and spikes erupted into the monsters, tearing them apart, he produced the last construct he’d made. It was a basic cannon trap that would have been perfect in a Mad Max movie. A blend between a crossbow mechanism and a pipe bomb, it was a single-shot explosive delivery system.

Most of the badgers were ripped apart by his traps and constructs, and he blasted the remaining monsters to smithereens with his cannon trap.

“Crude, but effective,” Tomas commented as he studied the carnage and considered how everything had worked. With each construct, new ideas blossomed in his mind like he’d swallowed Wikipedia. With some slightly better components, he could envision some truly epic constructs and traps.

Later. Tomas triggered Loot, then rushed back to the trees where Jane had been playing death tag with the toads and moths. He arrived in time to see Jane somersaulting through the air, kicking off trees like a martial arts movie heroine, whooping all the way.

Toads were chasing her, spitting sticky tar balls to knock her out of the air, while moths swooped down from above. For a second, it looked like they’d finally cornered her and cut her off.

It was unlike Jane to screw up her calculations, but anyone could make a mistake. Tomas prepared to Flash Step to help, but the sticky tar balls suddenly changed direction mid-air. Instead of splattering into Jane’s back, they smashed into the moths, driving the annoying but physically weak monsters right out of the air.

Telekinesis. Of course. The moths might be immune to Jane’s mental and psychic powers, but the tar balls weren’t, and the moths were not immune to getting hit by physical objects.

Jane kicked off a tree, somersaulting back the other way and landing too close to the toads.

“Look out!” Tomas cried, but it was too late. Four toad tongues lashed out at Jane before she could move. They struck her torso and yanked backward, clearly trying to rip her limb from limb.

Jane didn’t scream, didn’t move. She just threw him a pair of thumbs up and a wink.

When the toad tongues yanked back into their oversized maws, they didn’t pull Jane with them. It was like they slipped off her body, and as they retracted into those toothy maws, blood erupted from invisible wounds.

Tomas grinned with understanding. Jane had fashioned psychic walls around herself. That’s what the toads had yanked back to themselves. Only the walls had been crafted with lots of spikes, so the toads had self-inflicted gruesome wounds when they retracted the tongues.

Jane snapped her fingers, and the injured toads lurched to face the other monsters in their group, spitting sticky tar into the other toads’ faces. Probably mind-controlled with her mental powers boosted by her Phoenix Force aura.

Nice. Tomas Flash Stepped behind the toads and started lopping off the heads of the distracted animals even as Jane started throwing them one by one high into the air with telekinesis. When they struck the rocky ground, they exploded in gory geysers.

“That was fun!” Jane gushed, her face flushed with turbulent emotions riled up from overclocking her Phoenix Force aura.

Tomas started to reply when a screech tore out of the sky, so loud that Tomas clutched at his ears and collapsed to the ground. The world blurred around him and he nearly passed out.

Jane hauled him off his feet and then threw them both sideways with an invisible wall just before an enormous monster crashed into the spot where he’d fallen. It struck the ground so hard, earth exploded in every direction and several trees shattered.

Tomas recovered quickly, his vision clearing. He still blinked a couple times to make sure he was really seeing what he was seeing. Identify triggered, confirming his eyes hadn’t gotten permanently damaged and the monster really was as big as it looked.

Colossus Vulture. Level 45 Elite Rare. These flying life vacuums love freshly killed meat above all things, but are happy to finish off anything still living when they arrive. Their Harpy Screech sonic attack usually softens up prey for easy dispatching, or just swallowing whole, while their Carrion Blink ability lets them teleport to any recently-killed monsters and absorb lingering rot mana from where the corpse dissolved.

That was an unusually complete description, and unusually terrifying. The beast looked like a giant black vulture with a pure white head and a hooked beak big enough to rip a horse in half with a single swipe. It stood nearly 20 feet tall when it reared up on two massive legs, capped with claws as long as broadswords.

As it spun toward them, Jane whispered, “Stay still.”

Was she insane? Tomas wanted to run, and prepared to Flash Step the two of them away when the beast pounced.

Just then, he and Jane appeared 50 feet to their right, running hard before diving behind a pile of boulders. The illusion was so realistic, for a second Tomas wondered if Jane had actually created physical dopplegangers.

The Colossus Vulture might be immense and terrifying and powerful, but it wasn’t super smart. It pounced after the illusions, soaring across to the boulders with a single flap of mighty wings, its beak slamming down so hard stones shattered.

“Time for the boss round, lover,” Jane laughed softly. “Do your thing.”

This was so much more than they’d planned, but Tomas embraced the rush of battle lust that was rolling off of Jane in waves and triggered his spells again.

With Flash Step, Tomas stepped through space to the back of the monster and cast Creative Frenzy even before his weight landed on the beast. Time slowed and he got to work. To the rest of the world, it was barely a second later when he slammed down a blocky construct he’d just custom-built as a special gift for the vulture.

Five piston-driven arms plunged through the monster’s feathers and deep into its body, locking it into position. Then a huge drill whirred to life and started grinding down through the vulture’s back.

Tomas blinked back to the cover of nearby trees as the vulture howled and writhed, spinning and jumping, tearing up the ground and sending boulders tumbling away. Its sonic attack shook trees and echoed painfully from the mountains, but it was not focused so did little more than make his ears ring. Despite its wild gyrating, it could not unseat the construct that kept drilling deeper into its core.

Jane planted a fierce kiss on his lips, then stepped around the tree. Her aura flared with power and she flung out her hands. Tomas recognized the sound and feel of her powerful Scouring Storm spell.

The psychic storm swirled around the vulture’s big head, invisible razors of mental power ripping and tearing like the beast had donned a thorn cyclone hat. It screeched again, vainly trying to shake off the attack as blood fountained around it. Eyes exploded under the barrage, and it shrieked again, this time so loud, Tomas had to clutch the nearby tree to keep from pitching over.

Then the drill methodically driving into the beast’s back reached its heart, and the vulture convulsed a final time, then collapsed to the ground.

Congratulations, Tomas! Your party has defeated Colossus Vulture. Bonus experience gained for defeating a more powerful elite rare enemy. You have reached level 39. Stat points allocated.

Tomas pumped a fist into the air. “Got a level!”

“Me too. Now that’s the way to end a training montage!” Jane laughed, pulling Tomas into a fierce embrace. She’d pushed her Phoenix Force Aura hard, and her emotions were written large across her features as her eyes glowed brightly with her still-active power.

“Jane, turn it off,” Tomas urged, voice soothing. Her aura was mighty, but it set her emotions to boiling.

Instead, she made a gesture and her Base Camp tent materialized next to them. She gave him a fierce look and growled, “Not yet, Tomas. We’ve got celebrating to do.”

He barely had time to activate Loot before she literally hauled him off his feet and carried him into the tent. He got some enticing options from Adjustable Loot, but selected one at random. He was too busy with Jane, whose passion had been driven up to near-berserker levels by her aura.

At least this time it was love-fueled passion that was riled up. Dealing with overclocked rage had been so much worse. For passion, the best way to help her regain control was to lose control together for a little while first. Tomas regained his feet in time for Jane to leap into his arms. Even as she tore at his clothes, he staggered into the bedroom.