The Fusionist Book 5 -- Chapter 18

Chapter 18

It didn’t take long before they encountered the edge of their first Aperture territory, which was obvious enough because the environment changed from rolling hills of grass to rivers and deep ponds. Normally, that wouldn’t have been too out of place, but they abruptly appeared upon the landscape with a clear delineation, cut off precisely where the territory began. Looking at it closer, there was essentially a straight line where a rushing river appeared out of nowhere to flow toward the center of the Aperture’s territory, making it quite obvious what was going on.

“Go around?” Nedira asked, but Larek shook his head. While it wasn’t currently what his companions had called Surging, the Fusionist didn’t want to pass up an opportunity to gain some more Aetheric Force – especially since he had hit his maximum Skill Level in four of his Mage Skills, and the others weren’t far behind. With all the advancements he’d made lately, he wanted to take advantage of his abilities when he got the chance to sit down and make more Fusions.

Granted, he was still in a hurry to get home, but he also didn’t want to neglect his own development – and he would be able to help out the local area as well by thinning the monsters in the nearby Apertures. Besides, with how slow he had to keep his Pattern-based box to ensure he didn’t strain himself too much, it was still going to take a few weeks of travel to get back up to Rushwood. It was still slightly faster than his Air Skimmer, at least, otherwise he might have rethought his transportation plans.

Still, it wouldn’t be the smartest idea to simply rush into the Aperture’s territory without knowing what they were up against. Fortunately, he felt fairly confident that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the last disastrous outcome from their last venture into an Aperture; they were both much better equipped to defend themselves, and his Pattern box wasn’t going to explode – or even get knocked out of the sky once he had it locked down with his mind.

Edging up to the nearest river in the territory, he looked down into the deep rushing waters—

—only to pull himself back as something shot out of the water at his face. As it passed by the box in an arcing dive back into the water, he was able to better see what it was – though he had no name for it.

Thankfully, Nedira had also seen it and was much more knowledgeable. Despite missing some of her memories, she remembered more of her Monster Knowledge classes than he did.

“Bladeshark. It can leap up to 40 feet above the surface of the water at great speeds, as you saw, and uses its blade-shaped head and upper body to cut through its victims. Their biggest vulnerability is that they are practically helpless when on land, which is why when they were seen from Scissions, they were typically accompanied by a miniature flood that poured out of the opening,” she recited from memory.

That matched what he saw of the monster, as it was approximately 6 feet long and relatively narrow throughout its whole body, looking more like a fat sword than a shark. It reminded him of Penelope’s swords, in fact, which made him wonder where the blue-haired Martial ended up.

There was a thump from below as the Bladeshark attempted to cut into the Pattern box and completely failed; Larek quickly looked over the side to see the monster crashing back down into the water with the tip of its head bent awkwardly. He chuckled at the proof that his Pattern Cohesion was strong stuff, as he couldn’t even sense a dent in his construct.

Distracted by looking at where the injured Bladeshark had fallen in, Larek was nearly skewered by a second one that shot out of the water away from where he was looking, and it was only the Automatic Ice Repulsion Field that he had on his clothing activating that save him from being hit. Instead, the Bladeshark slammed into the sudden plate of ice that appeared in front of it, skittering off at an angle while leaving cracks in the ice behind.

Needless to say, he took leaned away from the edge of his Pattern box to ensure that something like that didn’t happen again.

“Normal tactics in the past had Martials physically blocking their emergence and keeping them out of the water while Mages blasted them with spells. Not sure if that will work here with our positioning, but we can always try,” Nedira offered.

Larek thought about it for a moment before shaking his head. “I don’t think that will be necessary. They’re coming for me already, and all I have to do is be ready for them. My Agility is high enough that I should be able to see and react to their appearance in enough time.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

The Fusionist unfastened his axe from his belt and held it out in front of him. While it wasn’t identical in shape and appearance as his old best friend, it was close enough to count as a Logging tool for his Axe Handling Skill to function properly. “It’s time to see if their blade is as sharp as mine.”

“Huh? What do you mean—?”

Instead of answering, Larek leaned back over the edge of the box, and within a few seconds he saw what he was looking for. It was almost impossible to spot them under the surface of the river, as their coloring seemed to blend in with the riverbed, but when they launched themselves from the water with a small splash, it was easy enough to spot them. As it shot toward him aiming for his face – or more accurately, his neck – he quickly adjusted the angle of his axe blade so that it was pointing directly towards the airborne shark.

Unfortunately for the monster, once it had launched itself out of the water, it had no way to adjust its trajectory. As a result, the tip of the Bladeshark went headfirst into his axe and his tool went through its hardened, sharpened, exoskeletal blade with only the slightest of resistance. The monster was split in half as Larek held the axe steady with his prodigious Strength stat, allowing the murderous shark to essentially kill itself in the process.

It all happened in less than a second as a disturbing *riiiiip* sound accompanied the splitting of the Bladeshark. Its speed was so great that the two halves continued past him along the same rough trajectory, with all the spilt blood following behind them. He watched as the now-dead monster fell back into the river, and was just barely in time to adjust his axe blade again for the dented-head shark that attempted to catch him unawares. It, too, hit the axe, but because of its misshapen head, all his tool managed to do was cut entirely through the upper third of its head and body before coming out the other side.

That was apparently enough to kill it, however, as when it fell back into the water, a cloud of recognizable Corrupted Aetheric Force appeared and joined the first Bladeshark’s cloud as they shot into him. He found out a short time later that each of the Bladesharks that he killed was worth 25 Aetheric Force; not the best, but also not the worst – especially since he barely had to work to get it.

“I guess my axe is sharper,” he remarked with a grin at Nedira, only for his smile to slip from his face as he looked at her.

“How about we find a different method?” she suggested, wiping off the blood that somehow splashed on her face from the last Bladeshark.  She spit out some additional blood from her mouth a second later as her face scrunched up in disgust.

“Sorry about that,” he apologized, before helping to wipe off the rest of the blood with the bottom of his shirt. “Yeah, we can try something else.”

Now that they knew what they were up against, it was fairly simple to come up with a solution. As Larek slowly crossed the Bladeshark’s territory, the both of them leaned over the side of the box and stared down at the water below, each of them holding a Stone Shredder Dome Fusion in their left hand pointed downward and a staff with a VREP Fusion in their right. While the monsters were quick, they weren’t fast enough to avoid a simple movement of the Stone Shredder Dome, and when they impacted the rapidly moving sharp stone they were battered and ripped apart.  If they somehow survived impacting the deadly dome, they were finished off with some powerful flying stones that came from the tip of the staff. The bony blade of the monster was strong and robust, but the rest of its body turned out to be relatively weak; as a result, it only took a few hits from a flying stone along its body to kill it outright.

It wasn’t as easy as simply letting the Bladesharks slice themselves apart on his axe, nor was it necessarily as clean since the Stone Shredder Domes tended to make a mess, but it was better in a different way.

In short, it allowed Nedira to join in and fight alongside him.

That alone was worth the change in his killing methods, as he found himself greatly enjoying the experience. After a while, they even started a competition where they would attempt to kill the emerging Bladesharks before they could even reach the Domes, blasting them with quick reactions of the VREP Fusion on their staves. Larek, with his high Agility stat, naturally had an advantage there, but he did his best to try and react at the same speed that Nedira showed. While she wasn’t able to move her body and target the monsters anywhere near what Larek could accomplish, her quick mind and perception seemed to locate the emergence of the Bladesharks faster than he did. As a result, while this didn’t exactly make the competition even, it was much closer than he had expected it to be.

After all the fun he was having with her, time seemed to pass in an instant, and before he knew it, they were at the Aperture.

“Ready for some extreme target practice?” Larek asked with a grin.

“Bring it on. In fact, I’m confident that I’ll kill more than you.”

He chuckled at her confident tone. “Oh, really? That sure of yourself, huh?”

“Yes,” she stated simply. “You’re going down.”

“Alright, then. Let’s get this party started.” Without any reason to delay it longer, he aimed his staff at the Aperture and hit it with a single flying stone, making it shrink slightly in size as it was damaged. The attack on the Aperture had the result they were looking for, however, as dozens of Bladesharks suddenly converged toward the center of the territory from all over.

Instead of simply swimming their way toward them, most of the monsters instead shot out of the water they were in at an angle, traveling hundreds of feet in a matter of seconds. When they landed in the water, they dove down and launched themselves again, leap-frogging closer and closer in an attempt to stop those that were attacking the Aperture.

This gave Larek and Nedira the perfect opportunity to hit the Bladesharks out of the air as they came closer. With each of them taking opposite sides of the box, they began rapidly firing flying stones at the incoming monsters, and soon enough the hopping sharks were shredded as they were hit by barrages of stony projectiles. While he couldn’t see how well she was doing, Larek was convinced that he was much more accurate with his shots and was absolutely destroying her in their competition.

But he had forgotten that she wasn’t just some normal person wielding one of his Fusions like the volunteer hunters back in Tarvada. Nedira was a Mage, and she showed the same magical prowess she’d shown back when they were fighting the Sand Vultures – but with the added benefit of boosted stats and protective Fusions to ensure she didn’t get hurt.

With a 100% increase in her maximum Mana and regeneration, she went wild with her spells. Even while controlling her staff with her right hand, which continued to pummel the approaching Bladesharks out of the air, she used her left hand to rapidly create spell pattern after spell pattern. There were Pyroblasts that caused the leaping monsters to essentially explode; long Binding Roots emerged from the few bare patches of land in between the rivers and ponds, which latched onto the Bladesharks and held them steady while she destroyed them with her staff; and then there was a brand-new spell that he immediately wanted to learn, which he knew of as Shatter.

WhatShatter did was create a large stone approximately the size of his torso near a distant target. The stone wasn’t a projectile by itself, but it became one after it suddenly shattered into hundreds of sharp fragments that exploded outwards, tearing through anything nearby. Larek could immediately see a use for something like that in a Fusion and made a mental note to ask her to teach him the spell later.

He was so distracted by watching her work that his own efforts started to fall short, letting the Bladesharks get a little too close to him. Switching the staff to his left hand, he continued firing out flying stones as he grabbed his axe with his right, and he soon fell into a rhythm of hitting those further out with the staff and slicing through those who got too close with his axe. It was messy work, and before long he was practically covered in shark blood, but he kept at it over the next few minutes as the numbers of monsters thinned and eventually stopped completely.

“I forgot how powerful it feels to have these boosted stats—eww, what happened?” Nedira started to say with happiness in her voice, before looking at him in horror. Larek looked down and saw that he was absolutely covered in shark parts and blood, and that he’d collected a small pile of monster pieces at the bottom of the Pattern box.

“I, uh—”

“Lost, is what you did. Now, close this Aperture, go take a bath, and then let’s get moving,” she ordered, turning up her nose at his appearance. The hint of a smile on her lips portrayed that she was playing with him.

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on that, ma’am.”

“See to it, then,” she said, before turning away and crossing her arms over her chest. Larek just chuckled and bombarded the Aperture with more projectiles from his staff, before setting the box down on one of the few dry places in the environment. Reabsorbing the Pattern box, all of the disgusting shark pieces fell to the ground while Larek took a dip in the now-empty river nearby. It only took a few minutes to wash up and Nedira used her Repelling Gust spell, one of the first he’d ever learned from her, to dry him off as he stood up to the knockback effect. It wasn’t too much longer afterwards that they were able to get moving again once he remade the Pattern box, a smile on both of their faces at the successful closing of the Aperture – and at the fun they had in doing it.