The Fusionist Book 5 -- Chapter 54

Chapter 54

“No!  Why did you do that?!  Are you insane?!  You’re going to get us all killed!”

Verne heard the Faction leader, Jack, yelling at the unfortunate Mage who started casting prematurely, and he couldn’t help but agree.  They had been sneaking through the entire Calamity for the last week, using the nearly exhaustless energy of the Martials to carry the Mages as quickly as possible, because speed was one of the things they had revealed was necessary to navigating their way through the massive territory.  It had been the various Scouts and Rangers that they had employed to map the vast Calamity that had discovered the secret to traveling through it without being attacked, and it was as simple as speed, speed, and more speed. 

If you didn’t stop for more than a minute at a time, avoided directly interacting with any of the subservient Apertures’ territories, and if you were noticed by a Steel Slime—or a Rainbow Slime, which was worse—you absolutely did not kill one of them, but instead needed to run away, then nothing would attack you as you made your way through.  In essence, none of the surrounding Apertures would send out their monsters as reinforcements, allowing you to slip through without notice.  Not stopping also prevented the Calamity Aperture from locking onto them, which made them essentially invisible unless one negatively interacted with a monster at some point.  It had taken moving in shifts, carrying those who needed rest or sleep on mobile cots, but they had managed—through extensive perseverance—to get within a mile of the central Aperture despite all of the obstacles in their way.

And it was all going to be ruined by a Mage who started casting before they were prepared, and had ended up violating the other rule to crossing through the Calamity without drawing attention to yourself.

Don’t cast any spells, use any battle arts, or carry any Fusions with you. 

There was apparently something about the Calamity that could sense even minute shifts in ambient Mana or Stama, and that even simply absorbing Mana from the environment to refill your Mana pool was detectable.  And when the Mage began forming his simple Fireball spell before they were all ready, pumping every spare bit of Mana into it, that act had triggered the chaos that was happening around them. 

They had been so close, too.  If he had just waited another minute next to the giant Aperture, when all of the Martials were in position to attack as well, then their plan might have actually worked.  Granted, it was still a longshot and might not have worked, but the theory of overloading the Aperture with massive amounts of damage before it could trigger its defensive reinforcements was the best idea they had come up with since the Strike Faction was formed.

It also probably would’ve killed most of them that had joined in the expedition to the center of the Calamity, but that was a price that all of them were more than willing to pay to finally close it.  But now that all of the defenses had been triggered prematurely, there was no chance of that happening.

“Everyone, attack!  Let’s see if we can still salvage this!” Jack shouted, and every Mage and Martial sprung into action.  It was likely already too late, what with the slight rumble underneath their feet and the sub-vocalized screaming that seemed to come from the giant Steel Slime Aperture, but they might just get lucky.  As Verne started casting threw out an acorn from his pocket onto the ground, he began casting a spell that he’d adapted from his homeland, as the spells in his Specialization were “natural” to him.  As a Naturalist, following in the footsteps of Nedira—whom he seriously worried about because he hadn’t heard from her in years—such spells that dealt with nature and plants were extremely easy, while he struggled with many other types of spells.  It had nearly gotten him kicked out of Silverledge Academy because he struggled to cast even the simplest of any other spells, such as a Fireball, but he managed to demonstrate that his inadequacies were actually an advantage.

To say that he had an affinity for growing things was an understatement.  Once the Professors discovered what he could do, they called him a prodigy, though he didn’t let that go to his head; he studied just as hard as everyone else, even if shaping and manipulating the patterns of the spells he cast to change them to suit his needs was almost trivial in execution. 

For instance, the spell called Grove Defender was a Naturalist spell that animated an existing tree to fight for them, though it had restrictions on size and a limit on how well it could fight – a limitation based on the caster themselves.  That was because the tree in the Grove Defender spell was directly controlled by the caster, so their own skills in fighting directly reflected upon how effective the spell became.  If they were a poor melee fighter, which most Mages were, then so too would be the animated tree.

Verne’s twist on the spell took something he remembered from the Dyran Hearthwood, namely the elders who planted themselves once they reached a certain age, growing large and tall and acting as sentinels to protect their homeland, and applied it to Grove Defender.  His reworked spell was now called Ancient Protector, and he could grow an enormous oak tree out of a single acorn.  It took almost all of his Mana, and most of his Pattern Cohesion, to cast it, but it was more than worth it.

As he formed the spell pattern and fed his Mana and Pattern Cohesion into it, causing him to immediately feel drained and exhausted afterward, he watched the acorn suddenly burst with roots shooting out in all directions.  Dozens of these roots grew and writhed like a mass of snakes from a central point, and when they spread in a roughly circular formation reaching 30 feet in diameter, a green shoot rapidly expanded from the middle.  At first, the green shoot was no more than the width of his pinky, but it rapidly grew in both width and height, browning along its outer edges as it began covering itself in a bark that was as hard as iron.

In no more than 20 seconds, the trunk of the Ancient Protector extended 50 feet into the air and grew to 8 feet in diameter; at that point, a mass of branches sprouted above the trunk, creating a leafy crown of foliage, and larger lower branches began to emerge.  These lower branches acted as the tree’s arms, and each of them were as thick as a two people side by side, and reached dozens of feet in front of the enormous arboreal behemoth.  

The best part of Ancient Protector was that Verne didn’t need to control it directly, as it was self-acting based on the parameters of the spell.  It used the same sort of techniques that he’d seen his elders perform in the Hearthwood, and while he’d never seen them fighting monsters before, they frequently utilized their battle prowess in demonstrations against each other. 

In other words, they weren’t simply trees that could swing their branches at an enemy and hope to defeat them.  Rather, they were able to use the entirety of their bodies to inflict as much damage as possible, using their roots, their crown of leaves, and their multitude of branches to attack.

Which was exactly what it did.  As he practically collapsed to the hard obsidian ground, the extremely powerful spell taking a lot out of him, he watched as it used its enormous roots to quickly propel itself forward to the edge of the floating Aperture, where it began to beat on the spherical object with its arm-like branches, headbutt it with its crown of foliage, and extended at least a dozen roots upwards to stab and pound at the underside of the floating portal. 

Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that its efforts were in vain, as were all the powerful spells that were raining down on its exterior, as well as the impacts of dozens of Martial weapons enhanced by Battle Arts.  Other than a brief shrinkage at the beginning of the attack, the Aperture’s 350-foot diameter size seemed not to condense at all, hinting that it had already entered the phase where it was invulnerable to attack until all of the monsters controlled by its subservient Apertures were killed.  If they had coordinated better and if the other Mage hadn’t preemptively used Mana, then Verne was confident they might have had a good chance of actually closing the Aperture before it could get to this point.

But not anymore.

We’re so dead.

They had planned and planned for this, going so far as to leave false clues back at their Faction compound in Warshdin, just so that they wouldn’t be sabotaged on their way toward the center of the Calamity.  They had attempted to contact other Strike Factions around the Calamity in hopes that they could coordinate their activities, but none of them believed that this could work and refused; they thought that their own plans were better and that Verne’s particular Strike Faction was foolish for pursuing this method – and that they would only get themselves killed.

Until just a few minutes ago, he would’ve laughed at them, showing the nonbelievers that their plan had gotten them this far exactly as expected.  Of course, now it seemed as if they were correct: They were all going to be killed.

“Stop!  It’s not working!” Jack called out, and the attacked gradually dropped off as everyone tried just one more time to break through the invulnerable outer shell of the Aperture.  “Prepare for incoming!”

Ah, here it is… the beginning of the end.

Normally, anyone trying to approach the massive central Aperture had to, at least, fight their way through the thousands of Slimes that guarded the area around it; that was if they managed to slip by the subservient Apertures without a fight, which was harder said than done.  A single person or a small group might be able to do it, but it was unlikely that they would be able to step foot within 10 miles of the Calamity’s heart without being detected by the final line of defense in the form of the Slimes that protected it.  Unless they did something like what the Strike Faction did, but that had taken careful planning, constant movement, and the lack of use of any Mana or Stama for an entire week.  But even that hadn’t been enough in the end.

But now that the Aperture was alerted to their presence, the Slimes that wandered around the area were converging on their location.  It wouldn’t be long afterwards that the monsters from nearby subservient Apertures would start arriving, but they had to deal with the Slimes first.  Verne didn’t know if they could do even that much, considering that they wouldn’t be facing just Steel Slimes.

They wouldn’t be facing only Rainbow Slimes, either.  While they were a lot more difficult to kill, they weren’t impossible to fight – especially with the numbers they had on their side.

It also wasn’t what the Rainbow Slimes had eventually evolved into, which were large slimes a dozen feet in width, were completely impervious to physical damage instead of being simply highly resistant, and reflected most single-target magical spells back to the caster. 

Crystal Slimes.

They were difficult to kill, but it could be done, especially with wide-effect spells that couldn’t be reflected.  Only a few of them had been taken down in the past because they rarely ventured more than a few dozen miles away from the Calamity’s Aperture, acting more as guards than venturing around the rest of its territory, but from what Verne knew, the battles had been long and difficult.  Chipping away at its crystalline exterior bit by bit was the only way to find and destroy its core, which took a while, but it was also dangerous because it could attack from range, launching small portions of itself as deadly sharp projectiles up to 150 feet away.  The Crystal Slime wasn’t something that they would choose to fight if they didn’t have to, but it theoretically could be done.

No, what was going to be the most trouble was the third evolved Slime, a singular monster that had been spotted almost a year ago.  There was only one of its kind, though that even one was bad enough.  From the reports they’d received, the aptly named Emperor Slime was 100 feet tall and twice as wide and formed from some sort of dark material that the Scouts couldn’t identify.  Whatever it was, it was likely even more resistant to any damage they could dish out to it than the Crystal Slime, and even if they could hurt it, the monster was so large that it could take days to wear it down enough to reach its core. 

It was just that huge.

If it was only the Emperor Slime or the Crystal Slimes that they had to deal with, then that was one thing, but with they were put all together, they stood very little chance of surviving – and that was before the other Apertures’ monsters arrived.  If they had three or four times their numbers of Faction members, they might be able to hold off their inevitable demise a little longer, but there was a reason why closing the Calamity was thought to be a fool’s hope.  It would take tens of thousands of people, all working together, to withstand the onslaught of so many monsters, and there just weren’t that many people willing to venture into the Calamity to do such a thing.  He’d heard that there was a plan to do something of that scale at a different Calamity sometime in the future, but theirs wasn’t on the agenda – and that was a problem.

Why?  Because all signs pointed toward the Aperture expanding again within the next few months.  The Defend Faction, for all that they preached keeping things safe, wasn’t doing what needed to be done to prevent such an occurrence, as they sent fewer and fewer groups into the Calamity to keep the numbers of monsters down.  It wasn’t obvious to most people, as there wasn’t a clear indication that this was the case, but for those that closely monitored the situation – such as the Strike Faction – the trend was clear enough.

It was either strike now or let it expand again; if that happened, cities and towns around its perimeter would be swallowed up, and tens or hundreds of thousands of people would lose their lives.  If not from the monsters invading their homes, then from the lost farmlands and inevitable mass starvation that would bring about.

So, the Strike Faction had to act before it was too late, for good or worse.  It just sucked that all their efforts would be for nothing.

“Do you think we’ll be able to escape, V?”

Even as Verne directed his Ancient Protector away from the invulnerable Aperture and toward the approaching Slimes he could see in the distance, he turned to Marteena, or Teena as she liked to be called by her friends – which he supposed he qualified as.  He could immediately see how pale she looked, as the realization of their predicament settled upon her.  She, like everyone else, knew that they wouldn’t likely make it out of there alive; at the same time, giving their lives for a noble cause like closing the Aperture before it could expand was worth it.  But now?  Now, nothing would show for all their efforts.

“No, Teena.  There’s no way we can outrun the monsters here, as they’ll chase us all the way to the border.  Perhaps if we had Martial stats, we might be able to stay ahead of them, but even then, I doubt we would be able to run for an entire week straight without rest.  Even the Martials that brought us here had to sleep once a day to maintain our pace, which was already quite brutal.”

“So… this is it?”

He didn’t answer, as nothing he could say would make her or himself feel better.  Ever since something life-changing had happened to him nearly five years ago, he hadn’t looked at his life the same; he’d thrown himself into his studies and then thrown himself into dangerous assignments, searching for whatever it was that seemed as if it was just out of reach.  When he first became aware of the Strike Faction, he thought it was the perfect change to stretch his abilities and live up to his potential, even if he didn’t know why such a thing was something he thought was necessary.  It was just that there was something missing from his life, and that was his motivation for participating in the riskier fights and plans the Faction enacted.

Sadly, it didn’t look like he was going to find that elusive missing piece to his life, as said life was soon going to be coming to an end.

Of course, he wasn’t going to simply give up.  He was going to take as many monsters down as he could before the end, starting with the dozen Steel Slimes that rolled their way toward the small force of Strike Faction members.  Verne ordered his Ancient Protector ahead of even the assembled martials awaiting the inevitable confrontation, and it immediately attacked the closest of the metallic slimes.

With a slam of its powerful arm-branch, the Slime was practically flattened to the ground, the impact of the blow so powerful that its core was ruptured as it became a pile of goo.  The Steel Slimes were highly resistant to physical attacks, but when a physical attack was so powerful that they essentially collapsed into a puddle, there wasn’t much that could be done about it.  Of course, its follow-up attacks with its roots weren’t quite as effective, as its sturdy bottom appendages attempted to pierce or smack around the Slimes, but it was enough to delay them long enough for another barrage of powerful branch blows to finish them off.

The Martials that were watching were perfectly fine with the impressive tree doing all the work, as they knew that such a thing was limited in its time with them.  Verne did a mental check at how much longer he could expect it to stick around, and he figured that it still had about 16 out of its 20 minutes before the Mana invested into it faded away, leaving a single acorn behind. 

Unfortunately, the Dyran Naturalist couldn’t just create another one instantly, as it was so exhausting and had used nearly all of his Mana; in about an hour he would be in good enough shape to cast the spell again, but he was uncertain if they would even still be alive by that point.  Until then, he would throw his Ancient Protector into as many fights as possible, allowing the other members of the Strike Faction to rest and prepare for the inundation of monsters that would be coming soon. 

Not that he thought it would ultimately matter in the long-run, because they were absolutely screwed at this point.