The Fusionist Book 4 -- Chapter 43

Chapter 43

The seemingly endless desert that he passed over in his Air Skimmer was starting to get to Larek. It wasn’t the monotonous sand dunes and lack of landmarks, or even the pervasive loneliness that was affecting him more than he thought it would considering that he had grown used to traveling by himself. Instead, it was the feeling that he wasn’t making any progress with his journey, despite the fact that with his current speed he’d calculated that he’d gone at least 500 miles since he entered the desert. With his stops at night and the moving desert physically shifting his Skimmer, it was difficult to say how far he had actually traveled; but he figured that it wasn’t any less than that, especially with how it had seemed to bring him further toward his destination.

Yet, there was nothing from what he could see to show that he had made any progress whatsoever. While traveling through the Empire, the landscape at least changed somewhat, from forests to plains to mountainous areas, with some sort of different environment visible on the horizon. Here, though, there was none of that, as it occasionally felt to Larek like the entire world had been enveloped by a desert and that it would never end, no matter how far he traveled through it.

Logically, he knew that it was only a matter of time before he passed through the entirety of it, but it was hard to keep that in mind when there wasn’t anything visible in which to evaluate his progress.

Nevertheless, he pushed on, wary of another attack by Barbed Gators or anything else that might be under the sand of the desert. The night after the attack by the reptilian monsters, Larek nearly didn’t stop to rest, wanting to put as much distance between him and the attack site as possible. However, only an hour after the sun dipped below the horizon, the strain of standing up all day after fighting in the morning, along with his need to sleep after the injuries he’d sustained, all caught up with him and he was forced to land. Paranoia about another attack tried to keep him awake, but he ended up fighting through it to finally get the rest that his body needed.

Unexpectedly, Larek wasn’t attacked during the night nor in the morning as he got ready to leave. The next day was simply more of the same boring desert, the sand dunes all looking similar as he passed over them in his effort to speed his way east as quickly as possible. That night he stopped yet again, hoping that any threat to him had been left behind. By that point, the Combat Fusionist estimated that he’d passed the 700- to 800-mile mark, and he only had a day or two left before he was out of the desert. Again, there was no sign of him being attacked during the night or the morning, and he left in slightly better spirits knowing that his journey over the endless sand was coming to an end.

He didn’t make it there on what was his sixth day in the desert, but he figured he was fairly close and would make it the next day. By the end of the seventh day, he was entirely confused because he should’ve reached the end of the desert at some point earlier that day, but the horizon still showed endless dunes and more of the same, without any sign of ending.

After coming to a rest and setting down on the sand after the eighth day with absolutely no progress visible in the landscape, he began to worry that his information on the size of the desert had been unreliable if it was indeed about 1,000 miles from east to west. Even if that were the case, he doubted that it was that much bigger, and he should be seeing some results soon. At least, he hoped that was the case, because he only had about a week’s worth of food left in his supplies inside the vessel. With what was lost overboard a few days before, along with how much he’d had to eat after being injured, Larek had depleted his food stores much faster than he expected. He was just thankful that he still had plenty of water thanks to his Fusions, because otherwise he would be in trouble if that were running out.

The only positive note in everything was that Larek was able to replace one of each of his offensive Fusions, using some wood from his pack that he’d been lugging around for what felt like forever. The wood he carved out of them into small flat squares weren’t as useful as the stones he had used before, but there weren’t any stones in the desert to replace them with – only sand. Miles and miles and miles of sand.

By the end of day 9 with no end in sight, his frustration was so pronounced that when he set down for the night, he couldn’t get to sleep; instead, he mumbled to himself about sand and deserts and how much he absolutely hated both of them with a passion that could be classified as murderous. A few hours after sundown and a couple of hours until midnight, Larek was startled in his plans to someday make a Fusion that turned the entire desert into some sort of humanoid figure that he could then strangle to death.

The desert began to move, taking him and the Air Skimmer along with it. This wasn’t totally unexpected, of course, because he already knew that it did this, but it happening earlier than what he thought of as “normal”, it caught his attention. He was glad that it did, because he quickly found that instead of it pushing him further east, it was pushing him back to the west – the opposite of where he wanted to go. When he attempted to use the lifting gusts of air from below the Skimmer to extricate the vessel from the sand, he found that the entire Skimmer had been clutched tightly within the sand’s embrace just as fully as what had happened against the Barbed Gators.

In other words, it wouldn’t budge. When he attempted to push the vessel to its limit at Magnitude 6, he heard – and felt – portions of the wooden frame inside the Air Skimmer beginning to splinter and crack, so he stopped that immediately before he ripped the entire thing apart.

Helpless to stop it, Larek watched as his vessel was carried along back to the west, with the wind whipping at him as it moved; it wasn’t a wind that naturally blew through the desert, but was instead a wind caused by moving at an incredibly fast speed.  It was at least twice or three times as much horizontal wind that was generated by his own movement through the desert when he traveled during the day, meaning that he was likely losing all – or possibly all – of the progress he had made the day before.

In other words, he was fairly sure he now knew why he hadn’t hit the eastern edge of the desert yet – because it wasn’t letting him leave.

Without any ability to stop what was happening, Larek went to sleep shortly thereafter, intending to get as much as possible for the next day. In order to get out of the endless sand dunes, he was going to have to keep moving through the night and possibly the next one in order to reach the edge of the desert.

With that plan in mind, Larek spent the next day traveling east, and instead of stopping for sleep, he simply took breaks every few hours to eat a little bit and stay hydrated while he flew through the dark. There was enough star and moonlight to at least see where he was going, and by keeping his course headed east without any use of his left or right gust adjustments used all night, he ensured that he stayed on the correct heading.

Except when the sun came up the next morning, it appeared on the horizon in the wrong direction.

“What? How is that possible?” He knew for a fact that he hadn’t turned at all during the night, and while he might have been slightly off of heading due east, there was no way that he would’ve ended up heading due west at any point. However, unless the sun somehow teleported during the night and decided to rise in the west rather than the east, then he was going the wrong way.

“How long was I going west?” Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing since it wasn’t like he could consult any landmarks, and without any way to know where he was in relation to the entire desert, he was at a loss of how much he had backtracked.

Tired from the sleepless night and frustrated that he had inadvertently got himself turned around, Larek fixed his direction and begun heading east once again. Before it was completely dark that night, he set the Skimmer down and got to sleep earlier than usual; as a result, he woke up in the a few hours before dawn to find that the Skimmer was again moving to the west as the sands shifted – and was moving faster than before.

“What is going on?” he mumbled to himself, completely at a loss of what to do now. Looking at his food stores, he thought he could hold out for another week if he was careful, but he had to figure out how to get out of the desert by that time or he’d starve to death. As it was now, it felt like he wasn’t getting anywhere; the setbacks just kept adding up, and it felt like the very environment was working against him.

Another day of traveling followed by a second night where he continued through the night ended in disaster once again. He had deliberately made sure not to alter his course, like he had thought he had done previously, and had even started trying to navigate by the stars above; while he didn’t precisely know how to do it, there were a few constellations he recognized up in the night sky and he attempted to keep them in the same direction. Unfortunately, none of these worked, as he found himself traveling west when dawn broke over the horizon.

Setting down on the sand and shutting almost everything off, Larek sat down on a crate and deliberated what to do for the next hour as the world brightened up by the rising sun. I can’t tell if I’m actually getting anywhere near the border with the Kingdom, and it feels like something is messing with me when I attempt to travel at night. I should realistically be going east, but somehow I end up heading west – how does that happen? Actually, the better question might be why is this happening?

From everything he could determine from when the sands used to carry his vessel east but now brought him west at night, he could only conclude that something was either deliberately keeping him in the desert… or was trying to bring him somewhere. What, or even who, was doing this wasn’t something that he could determine at the time, but that it was happening was no longer in doubt in his mind.

With anger at being once again manipulated without his consent by outside forces, Larek made a decision.

He was going to find whatever was keeping him in the desert, figure out why it was doing it, and then make it stop – one way or another. He didn’t have time to play games at this point, both because he was running out of food and because he needed to get back to the Kingdom, so he was going to put an end to this… whatever it was.

Just as he was about to get up off the crate and lift off from the sands, there was another rumbling underneath the Air Skimmer. At first, he was going to attempt to outrun the Barbed Gators that were inevitably about to appear by lifting off before they arrived, but his anger was still burning hot after he made his initial decision to stop whatever was keeping him in the desert. As a result, he waited for them to appear…

…which turned out to be a massive mistake.

Struck from below, the Air Skimmer tumbled through the air, arcing at least 30 feet high before coming back down on its roof with a slight crunch of wood as the frame took the brunt of the impact. Even with the strength added to them because of his Strengthen Area Fusion, it couldn’t handle all of the abuse it underwent with being tossed into the air and landing on the mostly unyielding sand of the desert. None of the wooden frame supports completely broke, but a few of them were fractured to the point where they would indubitably shatter if they took another blow like that.

As for Larek, he only saw all of this because he was still inside the Skimmer as it tumbled through the air and landed upside down, with his food supplies landing all around him and spilling out into the nearby sand. The Combat Fusionist was able to twist himself enough that he didn’t land on his head, but the impact of his left shoulder against the roof temporarily popped his arm out of his shoulder socket. Getting to his feet was a challenge as he was slightly disoriented from the sudden attack, but it cleared up quickly as he stood up, yanked on his left arm with his right, and then pulled his shoulder socket back into place with a hollow-sounding *pop*. Relief at the uncomfortable feeling in his shoulder disappearing spread through him as he scrambled out of the flipped-over Air Skimmer, grabbing his staff that miraculously didn’t tumble out of the vessel on the way out.

Expecting to see more Barbed Gators, he instead was presented with what had actually hit the Skimmer from below – and it was certainly not a Gator.

Stretching up to 50 feet tall at the apex of its tail, a giant scorpion with deep-black-colored chitin comprising its exoskeleton, was staring right at him with its creepily beady eyes from where it had erupted out of the ground. Each of its sharp claws were larger than Larek, and its legs were long enough that the width of the monster was at least 60 feet as it spread out over the sand. Unfortunately, a lot of that was something he ignored, as his main focus was on the stinger on the end of its curled tail, which glistened with what was likely a deadly poison on its tip, poised and ready to strike out at its intended victim. In this case, the intended victim was Larek, but he had no intention dying that day.

Thankfully, the scorpion seemed to have the same sort of ability to manipulate the sand to make it firmer beneath his feet as did the Barbed Gators, so Larek was able to get traction as he ran away from his Air Skimmer, knowing that if he was going to get out of the desert without dying after he killed the giant scorpion, he needed the vessel as intact as possible.

The monster – which he had no doubt at this point that it was a monster, and not a natural beast of the desert – turned to face him as he ran to the side, displaying how nimble it was on its feet. Before he was even to the point where he want to turn and attack, the scorpion apparently judged where he was going to run and charged forward, moving extremely quickly for such a large creature, and a claw came flying out at him with significant force behind it.

Diving forward to avoid being caught within its claw, his leg was clipped, and he was sent spinning away, landing hard on the sand and rolling a few time with a multitude of bruises all over his body. Nothing was broken or greatly injured, fortunately, and he found that the only reason his leg wasn’t snapped from the impact with the scorpion’s claw was the fact that it was deflected slightly away because of his Repelling Barrier. He instantly knew that if he was ever hit straight-on, he could be severely injured by it.

Jumping to his feet as the massive monster turned toward where he had rolled, and before it could charge at him again, Larek decided that there was enough room to start using his Fusions offensively. He first took out a Weaken Fusion that was designed to explode and flung it at the face of the turning Scorpion. It was an almost perfect throw, with it aimed to land near one of its eyes, but its left claw whipped around and batted at the fragile stone, causing it to explode.

Larek had already hit the ground as he was expecting it to blow up as the Fusion was shattered, releasing all the Mana, but he was still close enough to feel the blast as it washed over him and nearly lifted him off the hard sand and tossed him backwards. He was able to hold on just enough that he didn’t move more than a foot as the force of the blast 60 feet away pushed at him, and the heat from the explosion singed his exposed skin slightly.

That was actually better than he expected, which was a bit worrying. Being in such proximity should’ve done a bit more damage to him, though not nearly as much as being at the center of the explosion, and he looked up to see what had happened.

The scorpion stood where it had been, seemingly stunned as it had its claw frozen in place in front of it like a shield, and a small chunk of chitin had been blown off from where the Weaken Stone had impacted it before exploding. That was it; a small, perhaps 1-foot-square piece of the durable chitin protecting its claw had been destroyed, from an explosion that was dangerous to Larek within 100 feet of the detonation. He immediately saw that the destruction caused by the exploding Fusion had been largely deflected upward because of the angle of the giant claw, thereby reducing the amount that Larek had been affected by it.

Getting to his feet quickly and pulling out yet another Weaken Fusion stone, he tossed it at the stunned Scorpion, hoping to take advantage of its incapacity, but he was disabused of that notion as it moved as soon as he released the stone, bringing its other claw up to block it similarly to the first. Even as Larek picked himself back up from where he had thrown himself to withstand the blast, he realized that the Weaken Fusions alone wouldn’t do it, as instead of being stunned after the explosion, the only slightly damaged Scorpion was already moving toward him by the time he got to his feet.

I guess this is going to be a lot harder than I thought.