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Chapter 97

Luke backed away from the tree slowly while Zea scrambled to stay low on all fours as she fled its reach. Twice more, branches that had just been normal, bark-covered limbs suddenly sprouted razor thorns and became as flexible as willow switches. They slashed through the air at him, but weren’t fast enough to tag Luke.

If the situation had been less bizarre, or if he’d had a better grasp of their capabilities, he might have swatted the attacks away. Visions of the branches grabbing ...

Chapter 236

Author's Note: Tomorrow's chapter will be the final update for this story.

* * *

He felt… hollow, empty, without purpose. For so long, for sixty years, if Rizin was to be believed, Nym had been struggling to escape from under two titans before he was crushed in their struggle. Now it was finally done, and he couldn’t believe it.

He cast god killer on the corpse one last time to pluck Niramyn completely from reality. Then he reshaped the ...

Chapter 96

They rushed straight north as fast as they could, using System as a pseudo-compass to make sure they didn’t get too close to the absolutely massive cluster of hundreds-foot tall trees jutting up out of the forest like some great wooden mountain. Luke had taken the time to climb up to the top of one of the nearby normal trees to get a good look at them, and what he’d seen was not encouraging.

Not only were they tool users, the squirrels had built rudimentary homes in the boughs of th...

Chapter 95

The mountains loomed in their vision, blocking much of the eastern and northern sky and forcing them to push farther and farther west in an attempt to circle around them. Since that was an expected complication to their journey, Luke hadn’t thought much about it initially.

That was before the squirrels started showing up. At first, it had just been some random level 12 squirrel, nothing impressive, that had leaped off of a tree branch in some sort of suicidal attempt to attack his fac...

Chapter 94

Luke ranged back and forth in a zig-zag pattern while Zea marched straight ahead. Every few minutes, he’d loop back and check in before starting another lap. They kept this up for days, and without the XP split or the slow pace, he quickly jumped up from level 26 to 29. Of his 84 new AP, 30 went into rank 4 of [Unarmed Martialist] and 15 were spent on [Tactical Insight].

He also got a lucky break and ranked up [Power Strike]naturally ...

Chapter 93

“First things first,” Luke said, “System, how do I make it so that Zea can see you too?”

“You will first need a skill that lets you modify other people’s systems called [Remote Access],” System told him. “It will cost you 15 AP, and is necessary for any other bloodline skills that affect anyone besides yourself.”

Considering he only had 33 AP to begin with, that was going to sharply limit his options for taking anything else if he chose that. “...

Chapter 92

The ritual itself was kind of boring, at least from Luke’s perspective. Zea did all the work, which included walking around the circle repeatedly, chanting something that sounded ominous at first but which quickly became kind of boring and then a bit annoying as she droned on over and over, and messing around with the ingredients at specific times.

Luke’s part was to sit in the square and not touch anything, for an hour. He was extremely bored by the time the ritual was over, but he...

Chapter 91

By early afternoon, they’d walked ten miles and picked a few fights with various monsters. Luke had just finished extracting his mace from the skull of a badger-looking thing the size of a grizzly bear when Zea said, “That did it. I’m level 17 now.”

“Nice! Do you want to take a break from walking now?”

“Let me just push the rank up on [Mana Manipulation]and see if… yeah, this ritual is looking a lot easier to pull off now. If we want to be safe, I ...

Chapter 90

Luke’s back slammed into the tree hard enough that he felt the wood crack. The whole trunk groaned and shifted, with a few roots popping up out of the ground when it tilted backwards. Stars flashed across his eyes, blinding him, and he did the only thing he could think of. He reached down and grabbed the monster firmly with both hands, prayed he didn’t get a finger bitten off, and threw himself forward to slam it into the ground.

His mace landed next to him with a thump, and as his ...

Chapter 89

Luke sat next to Zea by a small campfire and tried to pick the tufts of hair out of the flanges of his mace. Normally it wasn’t a problem to clean it out, but his latest kill had hacked up some sort of glue-like snot ball at him, which he’d batted aside with his mace. And now everything was sticking to it.

“God damn it,” he said, giving up and throwing the mace down into the dirt. “Whatever this shit is, it’s not coming off.”

Zea ignored him while she worked. What ex...

Chapter 88

Zea was quite satisfied with her shopping trip. Not only had she managed to find everything she needed both for the ritual and her own enchanting needs, she’d even negotiated free use of an enchanter’s workbench to make the masking enchantment for her slave runes. It was currently bound up inside a small stud-style earring that she’d put in sometime in the next few weeks when the old one lost its power.

She’d also managed to snag a few small ceramic jars with some spices and a p...

Chapter 87

Chapter 87

“Someone down there?” Luke called out.

“Gedin? Nenda?” Avlir added. “You two alive down there?”

Silence stretched on, broken only by the sound of debris shifting as it settled into its new position. Luke scanned the basement, even looked through a few of the other holes, but he didn’t see anyone down there.

“We never found their bodies when we were digging,” Avlir said quietly. “I figured they were crushed under the machine itself, but…...

Chapter 220

The modifications went well. They weren’t terribly dangerous, but mistakes could have unacceptable delays, so Nym was glad to have performed them all properly in the first attempt. More accurately, he was glad to have not made any irreversible mistakes. It took him more time than he wanted, but when he was done, everything worked right and he was one step closer to being able to handle each part of the god killer spell simultaneously.

There was less progress on the front of actually c...

Chapter 219

That little vacation had done wonders for Nym’s mental health, but now he was back in the box. Rizin had given him some valuable hints, and he was determined to milk them for all they were worth. First, he was planning to resume his attempts to crack the membrane to the seventh layer and withstand the arcana that blasted out of it.

Rizin said the problem was his own personal density was being spread too thin by splitting himself a dozen different ways, but hadn’t given him an answer...

Chapter 86

“A favor?” Luke couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yeah.”

“Why would I do a favor for you after you made me chase you to get back what you stole from me? Just because you stopped running?”

“Well it’s not like I was really planning on taking it! If I had been, you wouldn’t have found me.”

That might have been true, but there was no good way to prove it. Then again, the kid wasn’t breathing hard, so he could have kept running, and given how high his streng...

Chapter 218

“I don’t understand,” Nym said.

“You don’t need to understand to do it.”

“But-”

“Are you willing or not?”

“I mean, sure, it’s not a big deal. I just don’t get why.”

Rizin just stared at Nym, his lips pursed and reminding him disturbingly of Risa’s. Nym wanted to say something, but that would be an open invitation for the fox to double down on teasing him. It definitely wasn’t a coincidence that his appearance was so close to that o...

Chapter 217

The cage didn’t work. Despite everything he’d done to reinforce it, it seemed to lack the weight needed to withstand the arcana. As soon as the first fissure opened, it got blasted around every bit as easily as Nym himself. It wasn’t a physical weight either. It didn’t matter how dense the cage was, every iteration met with the same result. Some attempts had actually ruptured it completely, forcing Nym to build a new one from nothing.

He was about to try a different tactic. Inst...

Chapter 85

Now three coppers lighter, Luke stood on the inside of the gate and took a deep breath. The city smelled, well, if he was being honest, it smelled awful. Maybe the wall prevented fresh air from circulating through, or maybe too many people were dumping their chamber pots in the street at once, but either way, Kazos was nowhere near as clean as Valtira.

It didn’t take long to get directions to the business district, where Luke had his choice of half a dozen different stores selling tra...

Chapter 216

Nym didn’t trust any of the other ascendants at this point. Niramyn would no doubt send new hunters after him, and if Myzalik ever learned that someone had witnessed his god killer spell, Nym was sure he would immediately jump to the top of the priority list there. Even supposedly neutral ascendants like Hozim were willing to sell him out for the right price.

Maybe if he knew any of them better, he might have considered it. They might be fair in their dealings with him, but they also ...

Chapter 84

Luke didn’t understand why they needed a silver bowl inscribed with a circle, or an athame of obsidian and blood silver, or anything else that the ritual called for. Zea assured him that most of the expensive objects were tools that they’d only have to buy once, and that if the ritual failed, they would only be out some of the reagents used in it.

Since she was the one with the skill for it, he didn’t question the instructions. The important part to him was that they needed to get...

Chapter 215

There were only a handful of ascendants at the twelfth layer, powerful enough to be called Exarchs. Of those, there were only two who would be actively hostile towards Ferro and Valicin. One of them had a blanket hatred towards everyone and would attack anyone who got too close to him on sight. But his attitude and the locations he frequented were well known, well documented, and thoroughly avoided by anybody with a lick of sense. Even Nym, who’d been an ascendant for a bare handful of year...

Chapter 214

Nym promptly abandoned the sanctuary he’d constructed for himself. He also abandoned the front he’d built, a sort of decoy sanctuary that he gave out as the place to go in order to see him. The copy that manned that returned to him, as well as all of his other copies. Nym washed his hands of everything he’d begun to build in ascendant society and disappeared deep into the empty void that was the sixth layer.

Empty wasn’t really the right word for it. There was plenty of arcana t...

Chapter 83

Luke had gotten a look at a map before he’d left Valtira when he was preparing to walk, and he hadn’t much cared for what he’d seen. There was a giant blob of mountains blocking off a chunk of the coast, which limited access to the sea so much that Valtira was the northernmost port on the southern side of those mountains.

According to Zea, it also meant that every ship going north was going to stop there for the last resupply before they continued up the coast almost a thousand mi...

Chapter 213

From what Nym understood, advancing to the next layer after ascending wasn’t a simple matter of finding a fun new way to manipulate a conduit so that it was stronger or more flexible. What exactly he did need to do was still up for debate. That was the kind of information no one seemed to want to trade for. Perhaps they didn’t want company on whatever layer they’d gotten stuck on, or didn’t want to see anyone surpass them.

He knew he couldn’t dodge Niramyn forever, but he’d ...

Chapter 212

Nym sat at the table with Kazie while Analia fended off the Earth Shapers’ combined affection. “So, do you like this kind of work?” he asked.

“It’s alright. I don’t have the passion for it that Nomick does, but I’m capable, and it lets me contribute. How about you?”

“I did it for a little while, but earth magic was never my specialty. Sort of the opposite, actually. I started as an air mage.”

“Oh yeah? My first element was water.”

“That’s a ...

Chapter 82

“I- Thought- You- Were- Dead,” Zea said, punctuating each word by throwing handfuls of the gold and silver coins at Luke.

“Hey, stop that. Stop! You’re making a mess.”

Luke caught as many as he could, but he couldn’t snatch dozens of coins out of the air in only a few seconds. Coins bounced off of him and rolled into the dirt, hopefully to be reclaimed and not lost under loose leaves or in the tall grass.

“I don’t give a fuck about the money! You ran off and ...

Chapter 211

Analia stayed in Nym’s sanctuary for a week. When he’d finished his work and allowed her to wake up, she was as physically healthy as she’d ever been, more so than when he’d started even. Analia had run her body into the ground repeatedly for years and done very little to protect it. Nym’s magic had repaired a lot of damage.

Her mind was another story. She spent a lot of her time staring at a wall, so much so that Nym created little scrying portals that opened up over breathta...

Chapter 81

The guy in charge of the bandits wasn’t physically imposing. He was a few inches shorter than Luke with a slim build and a thin, dark mustache over his lip that matched equally thin, dark hair. If Luke had to describe the feeling of the XP coming off him, he would have said it reminded him of some of the children he’d seen in towns and villages on Aros. Sometimes it was so low that even looking for it, he couldn’t find anything. In this case though, Luke was betting the guy was a lot mo...

Chapter 80

The bandits were already scrambling to their feet before Luke showed up, but he buried them before they could organize any sort of defense. The first bandit took a mace to his ribs and was smashed backwards into the wall. The second one got kicked in the knee hard enough to cave the joint in and make his knee bend the wrong way. He fell away, howling in pain, and Luke blasted through the pitiful defense his friend put up to put a fist into the man’s face.

[Twitch Reflexes] 2023-04-03 15:27:40 +0000 UTC View Post