The Fusionist Book 4 -- Chapter 8

Chapter 8

It was mid-morning by the time he left Enderflow, and it was only just past noon when he encountered his first monster that attacked him as he was resting for a few minutes. He’d been running at a pace where his Long-Distance Running Skill kicked in to help reduce the energy needed to maintain that speed, while his Martial stats provided the extra oomph to allow him to keep that pace for hours before needing to rest. After a few hours, he found that while his endurance was high enough to not become tired from all the running he was doing, his body needed food to supply it with energy in order to do that. As such, he stopped around noon when the sun was high in the sky to move off the road and into a small copse of trees nearby that provided some shade.

His journey thus far had been uneventful even as his strides ate up the miles in between him and the town of Enderflow. The landscape had generally been similar to what was around the town, with half-flooded fields and distant rivers and bunching of trees near what he assumed were lakes, though he couldn’t see him from his perspective. In the far distance, what appeared to be some shorter mountains poked up into the skyline, while relatively closer than that was a veritable forest of trees similar to the copses seen around the local area. They were too far away to tell for sure, but they appeared to be a bit larger than the ones he was taking shade under while he consumed some of the freshest food he had purchased a short time ago.

He was in the middle of chewing a strip of some sort of dried meat that had a fishy – but not unpleasant – taste to it when a rustle above him alerted him to the danger a second too late. Larek was taking a step backward in response to the sound as he looked up, but something suddenly scraped something sharp across his face before impacting his chest. The weight behind the blow was insignificant and only made him stagger back slightly, but the attack against his face was bad enough that it made up for it.

As his survival instincts kicked in, he looked to see on the ground near him what appeared to be a 4-foot-long beast of some kind, shaped like a lithe ferret but at least three times as large. A brief glance at the bloody claws – on what he recognized as a Tree Weasel – proved that it had been the one that had attacked him; more than that, the fact that he could only see out of one eye meant that the sharp claws had likely sliced through the other with startling effectiveness. Even as he snatched his axe from his holder – which he had transferred outside of his robe for easier access – he felt a brief flash of pain from the wounds to his face, though it was quickly suppressed due to his Pain Immunity Skill. What was more worrying to him was the fact that he was down an eye, and a memory of Barrowford where he had his face ripped apart by a flying skeleton bird was enough to send a surge of panicked energy through his limbs.

As such, when the Weasel gathered itself on the ground to jump at his face again, his body reacted jerkily to interpose the axe in front of his body with the blade facing forward, directly in line with its upward jump. He nearly lost control of his tool when he felt the impact of the monster’s head against the unnatural sharpness of the blade, but he managed to keep it steady as the beast essentially killed itself as it was cut in half, splashing its bloody pieces all over his robe. The blood wouldn’t stain, fortunately, as the Multi-Resistance Fusion on it helped to repel the substance, but that wasn’t really his concern at the moment.

As soon as he saw the Tree Weasel was dead, Larek took a better grip on his axe as he looked up to see if there were any other surprises there for him, just in time to have a second Tree Weasel descend on him from his peripheral vision. Better prepared, he steadily held his axe again and shoved the blade in front of the Weasel’s downward arc, and the monster obligingly cut itself in half as it impacted his Logging tool.

A quick glance around with his good eye, of which his vision was turning red as blood leaked into it from his other wounds, showed that he was safe for the moment, or at least he couldn’t see any other Tree Weasels preparing to attack him. He activated his Healing Surge Fusion and stiffened as it kicked up his natural Body Regeneration to heal the wounds on his face; no more than 10 seconds later, he nearly threw up his recent meal when he felt and heard his eye reform in his socket, as it sounded like a wet plop that was more than a little disturbing. Fortunately, he managed to keep it all inside as his healing finished, leaving him hungry and covered in drying blood where it had spilled out of the rips in his face.

With one hand on his axe and the other reaching into his pack to get more food, he kept his eyes roaming over the nearby trees and his ears open to the sound of any rustling that might give away another ambush. After a few minutes of chewing through more of the meat he had previously been consuming, as well as a few hard biscuits that were buttery flavored if dry, he felt quite a bit better. A few sips of water from a waxed leather canteen he had purchased at the general store along with his bedroll and tent washed it all down, and he felt ready to go again.

Except he didn’t move back to the road. Instead, he went to go find more of the annoying Weasels, which he could only assume were nearby. There was a faint feeling of an Aperture somewhere close by, though he had missed it while he was running and later trying to replenish his energy. He resolved to keep his senses active while he ran in the future, as he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss any others so that he could kill its monsters and accumulate Aetheric Force. While that was a motivation for Larek to move through the forest, which now that he took a better look at he realized was subtly different in shape than he would normally expect, it wasn’t the only motivation.

Revenge upon those that hurt him and took his sight away again, even if only temporarily, took precedence. No one gets away with making me bleed my own blood.

It didn’t take long before he found his first victim, especially as it came right for him. Until it jumped off the trunk of the tree it was hiding on, the Tree Weasel’s fur coloring made it difficult to see, but now that he was aware of the danger and alert, the monster didn’t stand a chance as he swung his axe at the target, bisecting it with a single slice through its body. Half of it impacted against his robe, but it wasn’t with enough force to hurt him in the slightest. Just as the other Weasels he killed initially, Larek saw that he received a single AF as a result of its death, which wasn’t a lot when all was said and done – but that didn’t matter as much to him as taking out his frustration of nearly being blinded again on his weasely victims.

Larek continued slaughtering his way through the small copse of trees, looking up the entire time to find the Tree Weasels as they descended upon him in ambush, until he realized he could feel the Aperture nearby. Looking around his immediate area, he found it easily enough behind another tree, and it was just as small as he expected given his recent experience with it.

His previous knowledge of Apertures had been limited by his exposure to only a single one back in the Kingdom, along with the notification that explained their origins. What he hadn’t realized until he had participated in the temporary closing of the ones near Enderflow was that they varied in size substantially based on the monsters that emerged from them. For the Tree Weasels, that meant that the sphere of the Aperture was only 2 feet in width, which was just wide enough for the lengthy monsters to slip out.

Their smaller size also meant that they required less force to temporarily close them. The Apertures were physical in a sense, as they could be attacked and damaged, but they couldn’t be permanently “killed”; instead, what he and the other Protectors from Enderflow had done was strike the sphere with their weapons until it shrunk in size to the point where it appeared, for lack of a better word, dormant. No new monsters would emerge until it was active again, but as for any that were left in the Aperture’s territory that hadn’t been killed before the sphere was temporarily closed?

They would immediately attack whoever was trying to close the Aperture, racing in from wherever they roamed around the territory. They had learned that the hard way when they accidentally left a few dozen monsters alive when they attacked the Aperture, only to have to scramble to defend themselves when they were abruptly assaulted by a swarm of monsters. After that, they made sure to clear out the roaming monsters throughout the territory first, which was much easier because they tended to only move solitarily or in small groups, rather than a full horde of them like during a Scission.

Now, though, he was counting on his attacking of the Aperture to bring all of the darn Weasels to him. He didn’t really want to spend another half-hour wandering around and clearing the rest of them out, as he still wanted to make some distance on his journey that day.

Striking out with his axe at the relatively small floating sphere located in the middle of the copse of trees, he immediately saw it begin to reduce in size and determined that a few more blows would likely close it. At the same time, he was also aware of sounds coming from all around him as the trees seemed to come alive. A quick glance around his location revealed that the normally hard-to-spot Weasels were streaming in from all over the Aperture’s territory, bouncing from tree to tree in an effort to defend their connection to the world of Corruption. Larek readied himself for the inevitable attack as he raised his axe…

…only to spin around and slice through two different trees in quick succession behind him, causing them to quickly start to topple over. He moved to another one a few steps away and did the same thing, slicing easily through the trunk of the tree with a single blow since their trunk diameter was relatively small – not anywhere near the thickness of the Rushwood trees he was used to back in the Kingdom.

The falling trees were easy enough to avoid, but the point in taking them down wasn’t just for fun, but to provide fewer options for the approach of the incoming Tree Weasels and to give him some room to maneuver. The trees crashed down just as the first of the monsters arrived near the location of the Aperture, and Larek leapt backwards as it attempted to jump nearly 20 feet to land on him, only to find that it had missed him and landed short on the ground below. The Fusionist was quick to take advantage of this as he swept his axe in a downward trajectory and lopped off its head; using the momentum of his swing, he brought it up just in time to catch another Weasel that flung itself at him only to miss him by a few feet, and it was cut in half before it even had a chance to land on the ground.

Now that he had some room to move, Larek maneuvered himself into the middle of the clearing he had created as he watched the enraged-looking monsters have to jump down off their trees and make their way over the ground toward him rather than try and land on him from above. It quickly became clear that the Weasels were quite a bit less agile while on the ground as compared to hanging off the side of a tree, and while a few of them managed to jump and impact his body, none of them got anywhere close to his face. Their claws attempted to shred through his robe, but the Multi-Resistance Fusion on it stopped even their naturally sharp implements from cutting through it.

Larek lost count after the first few dozen were killed, and it was only when no more attempted to attack him that he relaxed and looked around him, seeing that more than 60 of them had streamed toward his location. Other than a scratch on the back of his hand that bled profusely until he stopped it with a pulse of his Healing Surge Fusion, he was unharmed.

That was much easier than hunting them all down myself. A bit more dangerous, granted, but easier and faster for sure.

In fact, the only thing in danger had been his packs as they weren’t protected by any Fusions, but fortunately none of the Weasels managed to strike out at them on his back, either because they couldn’t reach or didn’t consider it a priority. He resolved in the future to ensure his belongings were stowed away before he did something like this again.

That thought made him pause for a moment before he started moving toward the Aperture. I’m doing this again? I thought I might just be killing whatever monsters I ran across, but this is something completely different. Should I be closing these Apertures wherever I go, even if it isn’t my responsibility?

The short and long answer to that was complicated. The short answer was no, because he knew that the Sealance Empire would have to figure it all out and closing these Apertures wasn’t something he needed to do. The longer answer was that it wasn’t about any type of responsibility that closing these Apertures was a good idea, as it was simply a means to an end. Sure, he could kill whatever monsters he came across on his travels and even occasionally take some time to hunt down a few more here and there; doing so would inevitably get him enough AF by the time he arrived in the Kingdom to achieve his goals of making Advanced Fusions, but it wouldn’t necessarily be quick. From his experience thus far, the monsters that emerged from the permanent Apertures were relatively weak and not very numerous when compared to Scissions – as long as their territories were small, as the larger the territory, the more monsters there would be inside of it.

Therefore, he could only count on receiving 1 or possibly 2 AF per monster when he killed them, and accumulating enough to raise his maximum Skill Levels would take months if he only confronted those that were nearby on his journey. But if he deliberately sought out the Apertures and brought all of the monsters to him…

He considered this approach for a few minutes as he killed a Tree Weasel that emerged from the Aperture after a few minutes or so as it regained its previous size. It was something that he hadn’t seen before because the Protectors had closed the Apertures they encountered almost immediately once the monsters were cleared, so it was slightly fascinating how the entire process worked. Apparently, if the sphere was damaged without being closed right away, it would eventually recover its previous size as it “healed” the damage done to it; he'd seen this happen back at the Trizard Aperture when they were working to try and destroy it before they knew what it was, of course, but that was a completely different situation because it “healed” itself rapidly due to its initial activation. What he saw now was what he could only assume was the normal method of its activity, along with it sending out more Weasels to replenish those that had been killed by Larek.

He had an idea to sit there and kill every Weasel as soon as it emerged, therefore gaining another point of Aetheric Force every few minutes or so for very little effort. Putting this plan into effect to see if it would work, he stood there waiting for another one to appear, but it wasn’t until nearly 30 minutes later that the next one came out and immediately attacked him – and almost instantly died as it was cut in half by Larek’s axe.

Hmm… if they come out every 30 minutes or so, then that means approximately 48 Tree Weasels every day. Based on how many there were when I got here, which turns out to be a total of 82 according to how many AF I’ve received thus far, then it would take a little under two days for it to fill up again. From what the original notification said about Apertures, it was only once they reached that point that they would begin to spread their territory and send even more monsters out to inhabit their newly expanded territory. How fast that occurred is something I don’t know, but I’m sure those back in the Kingdom would have a better idea.

Regardless, I can’t just wait around for a day and accumulate less than 50 AF for the trouble. I think my original idea to venture out and close all of the Apertures I encounter is probably the quickest – if not the safest – route to earning enough AF while still maintaining a steady pace.

With that conclusion having been reached, Larek approached the Aperture again and slashed at it a few more times, watching as it shrunk down to something the size of his fist. I was completely inert with only a very tiny sense to his Magical Detection Skill that indicated that it was even there, and any other attempts to attack it with his axe ended with his tool simply rebounding off with absolutely no effect.

With the Aperture now temporarily closed, Larek slid the axe back into its holder on his waist, before leaving the clearing he had made in the copse of trees, the bisected corpses of the Weasels he had slaughtered scattered all over the ground. He briefly considered if there was anything on them that might be useful, such as meat that he could cook for extra sustenance, but he dismissed it out of hand. He still had plenty of foodstuffs in his pack and enough money to last him for years of buying even more on his journey, though he didn’t expect it to take nearly that long. As for the rest of the Weasel bodies, he didn’t really think there was anything valuable in them, other than perhaps their claws. However, knowing that he had a long journey to go and not a lot of room in his packs to carry much, he left them alone for now; besides, he wasn’t exactly knowledgeable about harvesting such items for use in something else.

That was definitely something he thought he needed to work on in the future, however, especially if he was going to continue killing monsters at the incredible rate he had planned.

Stopping by where he first entered the copse of trees, Larek picked up his walking stick from where he had let it drop after being ambushed and wounded, and using it to guide his way back to the road, he broke into a run as he continued his journey back to the Kingdom.