Magic Breaker Ch 100-102

Chapter 100: The Undergrowth

[Flametouched cackles as you light its beacon.]

Oops.

The forest may, perhaps, be on fire.

This is not at all my fault. Jess looks at me, slowly extinguishing the fireball in her hand. Okay, maybe I’d been feeding them with extra mana, effectively supercharging them. Maybe I’d been weakening the environment’s resistance to fire. 

Maybe. Probably. Allegedly.

The forest smells of smoke and charred leaves, and we start to retreat. The plants here are hostile, and even the fallen leaves are sharp and hard, digging into the soles of my shoes like little pebbles. But they still crunch down into dried dust, fertilizing the angry undergrowth.

Vines reach for my feet, only to wilt away at the touch of my [Suppression]. Kuro eats bits of any of the stronger ones. Our guide, a tall minotaur named Bile, looks at the flames and slowly moves further away. “Now, usually,” he says, pushing a set of glasses further up his snout, “we don’t need to worry about fires since the forest works to extinguish them.”

He then glances at Jess. “Some pyromancers have ways to reduce that impact. In which case, the fires often attract more force to put them out, quickly. This will be resolved soon, but we should leave before we get caught in it,” he said.

With quick nods, everyone begins to shuffle away from the forest, even as bits of it light ablaze. I also withdraw my suppression, letting the plants resist the fire much better. Instantly, sap moves to smother the flames, and the variety of plants deposits different mechanisms to deal with the fire.

Some open up and froth with milky foam, others snuff out the fire by moving water through their roots and spraying it. It looks a little like multiple kinds of sprinkler systems going off at once. Already, though, we hear a distant howling. The smell of smoke must have attracted forest predators.

Even as we’re moving away, animals appear from the brushwork. There’s many of them, strong and weak, trickling into my sphere of observation. I brush my senses against them, and the moment they spot our group, they turn and howl.

The animals on this floor are strange, too. Most are, to some degree, nature aligned. The brutal, vicious kind of nature, emphasizing the circle of life. They did not hesitate to murder each other at all, and yet, they were able to cooperate. Strange, lupine figures, wreathed with intertwining vine and flesh. Monkeys that wore faces carved from living wood, and bears with their skin plated in barken armor.

There were more, of course. The jungle’s most insidious defenders were almost invisible. Venomous ants and centipedes, their colonies scurrying about beneath the thin coverings of leaves, always just a step away from being bitten and swarmed. 

It’s an omnipresent network of life. Interconnected, and, to some degree, cooperative. A bird with a wooden beak shot at me with a barrage of rocks. I [Suppress] its wings, making it tumble, slamming into the floor. I breathe, smelling the mix of smoke and forest air, full of decay and composting.

“Move,” Bile hissed, drawing his green cloak tighter, camouflaging into the forest. “We need to get out of here before a drya finds us.”

[You have caught the Eye of the Earthmother.]

There is a rumbling in the ground as it shakes. Roots writhe like snakes, suddenly animated with life. I can feel the way that life floods the environment. A violent roil of vitality that smothers me, like the feeling of hot air and sticky sweat against my skin. It’s disgusting.

We run. We run as quickly as we can, moving far away. There’s howling and gnashing in the distant forest for a few more minutes, and by the time the smell of smoke fades away, the forest has gone back to silence. Through the distance, I catch a glimpse of writhing vines, and there is some noise of breaking bodies.

We pay it no mind, though. Instead, we find the first opportunity to hide it out.

Bile’s a hybrid. His job is being a survivalist, his class is an earth mage, and his innate skills were rogueish. That’s how he’s hidden from the guild, and that’s how he hides us from the forest.

One of his bunkers marks our escape. He lifts up the ground, an earthen staircase down into its dark depths, and once everyone is inside, he heads down the steps himself, his horns just barely fitting underneath the low ceilings.

With a soft thud, the earth closes up above us. 

It’s quiet down here. That’s the strange part of it all. The forest is so chaotic, and yet so quiet. Deadly plants everywhere, murderous mushrooms, parasitic insects, venomous flora and fauna, and yet it’s quiet.

Down here, though? It’s even more silent than that. The only sound within the hovel is the soft thuds of movement up above, and our shallow breathing. Opal is covered in ichor and plantmatter, grinning brightly. Inu’s armor has rusted a little, hit by some sort of corrosive ability, so Bay is already working on restoring it.

Norman stays near the entrance, using his Skill to cloak it further, and I pump mana into a solid sphere that glows faintly, just bright enough that we can actually see. Amusing how we wanted to leave the first floor so much, and now we are back underground, hiding like tunnel rats. Perhaps, that is my true fate. It could be worse.

The movement above-ground comes closer. Thudding and slithering. Closer still. Then, right above us, it stops.

There’s a dull hiss, like a gigantic snake, kept apart from me by a few feet of earth. Then, Bile huffs, and grits his teeth with exertion. “Grrrr,” he snarls.

Above us, the earth bulges downward. Then it crashes inward. Serves me right for thinking it could be worse, I guess.

As a prize, I get the lovely experience of being buried alive. 

Chapter 101: Carving Through

About twelve tons of earth crash into my chest all at once, followed by the massive body of an ivory snake. Its white skin was wreathed in yellow veins underneath the graceful scales, plants growing out of those blood vessels as though they were roots. Mainly flytraps, I note, as my bones creak from the weight. 

Then, all at once, the earth turns liquid, and I feel myself pushing to the surface, rocketing out of it as if thrown by some giant. I fly high, the mouth of an enormous flytrap closing just beneath my feet. Dispassionately, I [Observe], the snake’s eyes meeting mine for a moment.

It flicks its tongue, tasting my mood on the air. And then, there is a blink of fear. 

Instantly, I know it has some emotional resonance skill. It’s seen my nature. It knows what I truly am. The same way that Dar did. The same way that Inu does.

My hand flicks forward, and mana gathers. My entire vessel, suddenly emptied in a torrent of power. All my usual care disappears as I gather my power. 

The snake spits something at me from its mouth, a row of poison darts, but the coalescing mass of mana twists and writhes into a short sword. It’s imbued, too, with [Suppression] and [Deconstruction].

[Job up! Imbuer 4 > 6]

My total vessel hits 150. More power pours into my weapon. A dull, grey sword, wreathed from stable, solidified mana. It’s the largest construct I’ve ever made, and I make it as solid as I can. Streaks of runes glide along its ethereal surface, and harden it.

Poison darts crash against the blade and shatter.

[Solidification 9 > 10]

My blade lasts. No, more than that. The combination of an imbuement of [Deconstruction] fuels my Abiding Apathy. As I carve apart the venomous mana of the snake, I can feel even more power flood the weapon. It grows longer, just a tiny bit, eating at the world.

I stare at the snake. I see the fear in its eyes. I fall, and I swing my sword. 

My epitaph sings a hymn. 

The snake dies.

[You have killed a lv. 38 Snyder]

[Level up! 33 > 34]

More points go into vessel. My sword is already starting to dissipate, even as the fight goes on. There is no dryad, specifically, but the nearby plants writhe in fury at the snyder’s death. 

Roots roil and wrap around my feet, until Syvles whispers to them. Then, all at once, they unravel and retreat. Opal carves some apart with their blade, and Thatch simply looks at them and they wilt.

The plants around us are angry, but they keep at bay. Coiled and waiting to strike, but knowledgeable of what might happen if they do. I jab my sword into a tree, letting it drink the plant’s mana while we take the time to think.

“We have to move,” Bile says. He’s raised us all out of the earth, but his dark fur is now mottled with dirt. He trains his dim, yellow eyes on me. “That was a quick kill, but we will need even more distance now.”

“That’s fine. We can go back up,” I say.

Bile shakes his head. “You cannot. Not now.”

[The Earthmother witnesses your crime. For a day, you may not leave her forest. Repent, or prove yourself worthy.]

I see. So that’s how it is. “A day,” I say out loud. “A day until we can ascend again.”

How would she stop us, I wonder? Maybe any tree we attempt to climb would simply have all its branches wither and die, making us fall back down to the floor? Or, maybe, it’s something sanctioned by the Tower. I sigh, softly.

Fine then.

Pulling my degrading sword from the tree, I nod. The others have already gotten the picture. All at once, we move.

- - - 

With willpower, and a steady trickle of regenerating mana, I shape my sword into something of a machete, hacking at vines. Every time I cut through one, a bit of power is lost, and a bit of power is stolen right back from whatever I cut.

Imbuement seems to be a powerful synergy with my epitaph. Moving with an empty vessel for once is also rather nice. Unlike most of the time, I don’t feel the pressure, or the stinging pain, that comes from my vessel. That sensation of heartburn is entirely gone, and in its place, I simply feel relief.

It’s nice. 

Not nice enough to consider putting less points in vessel, but nice nonetheless. My epitaph sings as I cut through another vine, earning a notification.

[You have killed a lv. 14 Thornspring Ivy]

That’s how most of the plants go. I wonder how the tower handles notifications, because it clearly deems some creatures so far below me that it doesn’t even announce their deaths, like bacteria. I wonder about its filter criteria for a moment, then move on with my life.

More plants fall and we move faster than ever. My mana regenerates, even as I take damage. Sometimes, a few of the plants will land sneaky attacks on me. But my torn skin quickly mends itself again. Tiny thorns dig into my shins, only to be expelled as my flesh knits itself back together.

I look at my machete, grasped tightly in my left arm. The only arm I have left, really. I smirk at the thought, then hack aside another vine. The temporary inscriptions flare, and I feel a trickle of blood underneath my nose as I try to analyse them.

It’s funny. With the essence I have, I can imbue things by instinct, a bit, but understanding the way those runes work as inscriptions is difficult. Imbuement is, after all, turning skills into inscriptions. I have done that before, on Norman’s cloak, but it took me multiple weeks to emulate partial effects.

Now? The machete works like [Deconstruction] with every swing. The runes on it shift, as if to accommodate different scenarios. It’s beautiful, and I can intuitively feel its effects, but trying to analyse them leaves them just a sliver out of reach.

That’s okay. I try me best to remember them, carving tiny crystal formations into the budding skill I’m building. It only takes a tiny trickle of mana, since they’re so small, and it records a chunk of runes, alongsides the effects that an item exhibits. My personal, miniature library.

It’s not finished yet, but it’s getting close. That, and another skill…

Pins and needles on my skin warm me, just a moment before it happens. I duck, throwing myself at the ground.

The enormous snake, the snyder I’d killed, blasts through the trees above me, its corpse, already being dissolved into mana and reclaimed by the tower, crashing through multiple trees, snapping their branches and chipping their trunks.

Behind me, there is a roar, and I turn to see a hulking amalgamate.

A wulven, joints covered with mushrooms, orange veins of spores wreathing along its body. It stands twice as tall as me, and far stronger, with a feral grimace. Flowers jut from its eyes, wreathing its weeping face in a snarling grimace. They feel entrancing, and for a moment, they draw me in.

Then I raise my sword, and the compulsion shatters. Instead, I step back as the massive pseudo-biological scythe that the fungus grafted onto its left arm sweeps through where I’d just stood. 

The avatar of the jungle snarls at me, barking its challenge. I breathe in, calmly, the spores shattering in the air before reaching my nose. I nod, accepting. “Fine then. Let me prove myself, Earthmother,” I say, leveraging my blade at the thing.

Chapter 102: Clashing Blades

/The Earthmother, patron Eye of the third floor. The first has the Keeper of the Tunnels, and the second is shared between the Calamities. These three are known by almost all climbers, due to the fact that most climbers interact with them, to some degree.

The Keeper maintains law and order in the tunnels with their avatars. The Calamities are the true test of the second floor - whether it be the storm, the drought, the pest, or any of the others. You would need to travel far across those bland hills to see more than one.

But the Earthmother is the most vocal of those. She protects her forest, she challenges, she uplifts, and she respects one thing more than anything else: Fairness. If you catch her ire, there is a game. Run and escape, or beat a champion and survive. Those are how you live if you mess with the rules of the undergrowth.

Live as a creature of the forest would - or prove you’re strong or graceful enough to survive anyway. 

Well, most of you’d die in a ditch while fighting, of course. So really, run. Run fast, run far. The hunt may be fair, but you are hunted. Prey, not hunter. You’d do well to remember that./

-Jill Êras - Bloom, level 143 Grovekeeper, Avatar of the Green Tide.

- - -

The scythe of the [Fungal Stalker] hisses through the air in front of my face again. The hive-plant puppeteers the flesh of the wulven it ensnared rather well. It moves almost gracefully, even in ways that its muscles wouldn’t allow, and I suspect its insides must have been rearranged in some ways.

It’s a creepy thing to look at, and full of bothersome effects. The spores from the mushrooms try to make me sluggish and lethargic, a slow acting toxin that settles in my joints and sprouts from there. A parasite.

Meanwhile, the flowers that grow a wreath across the wulven’s empty eyesockets smell wonderfully enticing. They are beguiling things, drawing eye and awareness away from the pseudo-avatar’s lethatlity.

And it is lethal. Not a true dryad, not a true forestkeeper. It is meant as a challenge suitable to me. A victory the mother could respect. And she would be right to - beating this thing with an empty vessel seems like one hecc of a task. And yet, I’m up for it.

Gently, my machete glides through the air, beating the scythe aside, and stealing from it. Parts of that weapon crumble upon the clash, and a tiny bit of mana reinforces my disintegrating sword. The wulven roars, and the forest answers.

In a moment, the grass and leaves beneath my feet rise up, stopping me in the middle of a step. I’m off balance, and my ankle twists a bit. Despite that, I bring up the machete again, and the scythe slams into me. It’s strong.

The wulven’s body is strong, and the parasites have strengthened it even more. The blow is powerful enough that I feel it resonate up my entire arm. My feet lift off the floor, the plantmatter around them shredding, and I’m thrown against a tree.

My bones creak from the impact, but hold, supported by my heart stat. The wood splinters slightly behind me. I blink to clear my vision, and the avatar is upon me again already.

It’s faster than me. It’s stronger than me. The environment is supporting it. A thin smile spreads on my lips.

I’ll break it all the same.

With a quick motion, I bring up the machete to block the scythe, bracing it against my shoulder. Bio-metal crashes into my mana construct, the scythe only inches away from my neck, and both fracture and break. 

Except, my sword is better. It’s made from my entire pool of vessel, made to kill. It carves into the scythe, and the wulven’s weapon crumbles around it. Pieces of mana are devoured by my apathy, and though the sword wants to absorb them, I command them myself. 

When the wulven moves again, I [Suppress] it. 

[Suppression 15 > 16]

Suddenly, some of that monstrous strength fades away. Some of its speed breaks into flakes of ash and it staggers. I smell blood in the air, and step forward. A quick stab, and the avatar parries. Mycelium moves to block my strike, but it costs it. More damage. More bits of its body break away into motes of mana, feeding me.

I double down on my skill, making it even heavier. The monster roars, and I feel my muscles contract, stunned. Crap.

It sends me flying with its other arm, claws digging into my chest as my ribcage creaks from the impact. I slam into another tree, my sword still clenches in my hand. I cut the tree, breaking bits of it to feed my weapon. The cracks on its surface mend again, and when the monster slams into me, [Biological Restoration] has taken care of the worst of my wounds.

This time, it tackles me to the ground. Fangs snap shut right in front of my eyes as I pull back as far as I can, then place my sword in front of my face. The thing’s teeth close around the flat of the blade - and then they break. The runes on my machete glow as more mana feeds into them. The sides may not be sharp, but they still carry that same imbuement.

As the thing howls for a moment, I kick its stomach, sending it back a step, and hack down with the machete. It brings its scythe up to block, and yet more of the metal is worn away. It looks ragged by now.

Then again, I must not look amazing myself. Blood leaking from my ears, and mouth, with a few holes on my chest. I smile, nonetheless, and walk forward at the staggering monster. It’s fraying at the edges, I can see it.

For a moment, I am entranced by the flowers, but a single sweep of the machete through the air clears that up. Its spores and pollen shatter. Snarling with a toothless maw, the thing goes on all fours, an awkward position with the massive weapon grafted to its arm. I watch, and observe, calmly.

My heart beats with adrenaline, and I feel alive. There’s a song in my ears. A musical hum that speaks of power and domination. An epitaph? That’s what it sounds like, to me. I tune it out, and focus.

The world narrows. It’s me and it. The avatar, wreathed from a corpse. A test to see whether I’m hunter or hunted. 

It dashes at me. My machete cuts through the air.

[You have killed a lv. 43 Avatar Amalgam]

I breathe. A line of blood trails across my cheek. The broken pieces of the scythe embed themselves in a tree behind me. One of them trailed near my face, leaving a shallow cut.

[The Earthmother smiles at your offering.]

[Level up! 34 > 36]

On the ground, there lays the corpse of the wulven. Its scythe shattered, broken by my sword. I look upon it, the flowers wilted, the mycelium dead and dry. Already, parts of it turn to motes of mana, and other parts get devoured by the living forest. The tower is claiming its share.

And, of course, there’s the final bit. 

[You have been granted a possible epitaph. Accept?]

[Epitaph: Hunter’s Heart]