Breaker of Horizons: A LitRPG Adventure, page 58
Nic was surprised for a moment, but it was true. He’d fallen into cultivation, the way he’d once fallen into the way of the sword—or his fruitless attempts to study runecraft. Nic was someone who only had eyes for one goal, who would pursue one thing relentlessly.
The System probably loved fools like him.
“I guess I need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Feeling stronger when I go back to sleep, that’s a pretty good one.” He grinned.
“Except you hardly ever sleep,” she pointed out. Setting the box on the edge of the Saturnalia—Nic couldn’t help but snort with laughter to see an entire world used as a table—she drew out a long, thin needle of bone and a small bowl of red dust.
A skin inscription kit.
“There are three inscriptions given to our honor guards, each with its own meaning. The first is the Flower of Loyalty.” She gestured for him to kneel as she mixed water into the dried ink and stirred it with the tip of the inscribing needle. “It offers a small boost to cultivation rate. Sadly, it’s the only one of the three I have the materials to offer you. The other two require things that could only be found on my world… and frankly, someone with more talent than I...”
“Sofia?” Nic whispered under his breath. “Uh, make sure this inscription only does what she says it does.” It wasn’t lost on him the kind of damage an inscription could do. He thought of the way he’d ambushed the monkey tribe by rigging their weapons against them and shuddered.
“Noted, Nicolas. And I’m glad you’re showing caution around her. She may not be a cultivator, but she has been part of their world in a way you have not. In some ways, surviving in such an environment without her own power… it breeds a certain kind of ruthlessness…”
Nic could imagine. He knelt, and Nylea pressed the needle into his back, one prickling point of ink after the next. “Where will you go next?” she asked.
“Back to the Dungeon.” The answer was instant. Nic had etched his goal to begin a Settlement and save Tarquin into his heart. But more than that, he had unfinished business there. Sula’s quest for the nuclear fire. Azmin Hale’s vendetta. His grudge against Baby Boots.
Oh, and more than a few quests to tie up.
“I have a friend I need to save, and every moment I’m not fighting, I’m slipping behind everyone who’s out there risking their lives.” He was resisting the urge to check his rankings. He assumed he’d been raised a few places by his evolution, but if he allowed himself to start worrying about that, he’d never stop.
“So when will you stop?” The question cut through him like a cold knife, although Nylea had only meant it casually.
“I guess I don’t really plan to. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll reach the top of the mountain someday and go ‘that’s enough for me’. But”—that didn’t sound like him at all—“knowing me? I’ll just want to see what the next mountain looks like. I dunno. It’s like breathing now. Like enjoying good food. A big enough part of me that stopping would be like dying a little death.”
“Then you really were born under a strange star.” She sighed, needle stinging into his back for the thousandth time. “Almost done…”
“She’s been honest. It really is just an enhancement, with a way to message you built-in,” Sofia noted. She seemed almost disappointed.
He could feel Nylea’s energy and will within the tattoo, suspended inside the ink. He was carefully restraining his cultivation to avoid overwhelming the design until it was ready.
“And”—she bit her tongue—“there!”
The final drop of ink was pressed into place by the needle’s point, anchored beneath his skin. The resonating will that infused each droplet formed a complete circuit and started to circulate, drawing in his own Essence, assimilating it.
Skin inscriptions were almost like artificial Shards or techniques, in a sense. They bound together different nodes to form an inner network of Essence that was refined towards a single purpose. This one was simple—it was meant to absorb Essence from the outer world, in the same way his breath did. It formed a tiny whirlwind within the ambient Essence of the world, cycling sparks into his body.
He flexed his hand and snapped open his cultivation map. It was a small increase. Half a mote per minute.
Only once all his modifiers stacked up, it became a huge leap.
“Now…” Nylea grinned down at him and lifted the needle, tapping it across each shoulder like a monarch knighting their vassal. “Do you swear to my defense, and the name of Lady Nylea, in times of great need?”
“Mhm. I swear I’ll defend you and anyone else who’s willing to stand with me as part of my Settlement,” Nic agreed, while subtly shifting the terms.
“Then rise.”
Nic grinned as he popped up and waved a cheery hand.
“And with that, I think it’s time I be on my way.” He dug into his bag and took out the second of the lotus blossom seeds. Leaning over the Saturnalia, he pressed the seed into the ground beneath the tree of Esper fruit.
It was time to go. He lifted Redjaw onto his arm and pulled the sleeping Sunfire up from the hellish continent of lava and cracked earth. Inkspur leapt onto Nic’s shoulder, looking wistfully back at his magnificent statue.
Nic grabbed the Esper fruit off the tree, leaving behind the unripe blossoms but taking everything he could harvest. Ten in all, with many more growing since he implanted it as part of the Saturnalia.
As he did, Nic looked down. He’d planted a scattering of Shard dust within an unremarkable part of the world, hoping to harvest something wonderful, or at least see the people below leap up in cultivation. Instead, he saw nothing.
Mist had closed over that portion of the map.
He shook his head, turning away. The little world in a cauldron would enchant him for weeks if he let it, but he had a real world to tend to, real problems to look after.
And it was time to solve them with terrible, terrible violence.
When Nic arrived at the human camp outside the gates of the Dungeon, there was death. Total and complete. The tents were crumpled, trampled down into the mud. Ash and blood infected the air with their scents.
A glowing dome surrounded the statue of Pathos. It was small, only a few feet across, but a dozen or more people huddled inside in a miserable crush of bodies.
As he approached, something hissed in the dark. His danger sense could pick up more than a dozen moving points of threat in the tangle of forest beyond the camp.
Sitting at the core of the wreckage, chewing on a human corpse, was a sand devil. It had yellow chitin striped with black and serrated hooks on the back of its powerful legs, with a pair of brutal crushing claws like a scorpion. As it saw him, its vestigial wings flicked out, forming a blue-white halo behind its back.
“Why don’t your friends come out? I know you’re just bait…” Nic wasn’t worried. His Warform wasn’t fully recharged, but he had a few breaths to kill these pests in.
The sand devil screamed and flung itself at him.
Nic reached for the Sandrider Blade on his back. The curved, heavy blade of green malachite was far too big for him to use in his axolotl form. But as he swung it off his shoulders, his body expanded, rising into the air as the Sarradur snake-kin.
And one of his six arms shot out to catch the incoming sand devil around the throat. The curved blade flicked through the air, and he broke through the beast’s hard shell in a heartbeat, ripping the devil in half at the waist with a single sword blow. Dying, it continued to bite at his fingers, trying to sink its teeth in past his thick scales.
He flung it aside.
There was a mass howl and more came pouring out of the forest. Two flying devils shot towards Nic, stolen weapons clutched in their hands. A speartip broke against his chest and staggered him as the first rushed by, escaping his grasp, but he managed to backhand the second as it tried to swing a broken axe toward his head.
He snapped its limbs with the impact of the blow, catching the miserable creature as it dropped to the ground. Seizing its left leg, Nic whirled around and swung it like a club, smashing it into the first of the landbound sand devils as they came rushing out of the forest.
There were nearly twenty of them. They were hunched, crude, and carrying stolen weapons from the camp like they hardly understood how to use them. They hissed and screamed as they loped towards him, a swarm of half-human insects.
Before, they had so thoroughly outclassed Nic in raw strength that even fighting one had taken his wits, taken his most desperate tricks.
Now? Now he dominated on raw strength alone.
He flung the broken-winged devil into the first enemy he saw, sending three tumbling back under the weight of their wounded companion. The next to lunge for him was caught mid-air by one of his enormous arms, holding it back so its chipped sword couldn’t reach his face. He met the third with a hacking downward stroke from the curved khopesh-sword of the Sandrider Blade, the descending blur of green splitting its head in two and biting deep into its torso with a spurt of yellow blood.
A fourth flung itself forward, reaching for his eyes with taloned fingers. He surged forward, trifold jaws snapping open, and clamped down across its head with his powerful muscle and poison fangs. A flick of his neck swung the luckless devil about like a ragdoll in the grasp of his teeth, decapitating it and sending the body flying away.
There was a piercing scream, bringing the whole battle to a halt. The sand devils retreated, squirming along the ground with broken limbs from Nic’s savagery.
Out of the forest stepped a jet-black Ascended devil, standing fully tall, its body covered in red handprints of blood like warpaint. Six whip-thin tendrils extended from its open mouth, electric blue tongues that writhed at the air and gave Nic a queasy sense of hostile strength.
The leader had come out to play.
Chapter 87
Primordial Mist
Nic was weighed down by the assault of countless sand devils. They poured towards him, clawing at him, and Nic’s six arms swept down in a fury of blows. Carapace crunched, and the soft flesh beneath spurted out yellow blood. Before he’d barely been able to scratch them—now, they broke like dolls.
He smashed one aside with his tail as it leapt for his back, coiling it up and squeezing down. With a satisfying crunch, the neck snapped and the body went limp. Another slammed its blade into his side, managing to drive a shallow wound through his scales. He counterattacked with a hiss, seizing the back of its head and smashing it face-first into the ground with a force that pulverized the skull to yellow mush.
His body was low to the ground now, and he swept forward, using his long tail and the lowermost set of arms to propel his body in a lightning-quick circle that enveloped three unlucky devils. With a sudden squeeze, his coils tightened around them, lassoing them together for a brutal, bone-crushing death.
But the Ascended one was coming. It rushed towards him, a broken greatsword raised to its shoulder in an actual swordsman’s pose. It knew how to use the weapon—its brothers were clumsy despite their speed, but the Ascended devils could match raw force with equal skill.
It rushed him down with a blinding fast sweep of the blade, and Nic barely dodged back in time to avoid the blurred arc of silvered steel. His tail flicked out, dealing a brutal hit to the beast’s hip and making it stagger back. Lesser devils clung to him and slowed him down, but Nic’s hand shot up, making a fist, making the soft earth rise to his command.
Pushing energy through his damaged meridian channels was agony, and much of the aura he spent was wasted, blazes of pale fire appearing on his skin as the power escaped and bled into the air.
But he made the mud sweep upwards and knock the Ascended devil back, buying him time to deal with the swarm before it could tear itself free of the mire.
He grabbed two that were crawling up his back and slammed them together, tossing them aside. Another was caught with one hand on its arm, one on its leg, and ripped apart. The Sandrider Blade made a zigzag blur in the air, cleaving off two heads in a single breathe.
But Nic was approaching his limit.
With a sigh, he unleashed Redjaw from his left arm. The centipede curled around the limb and raised its toxic feelers, its bright red teeth, high. As the centipede leapt from his arm, its form filled with light and expanded outwards.
Redjaw landed in his Warform, transformed into a massive Lindwurm. His body was wide and flat with centipede-like legs running down the length and flat plates of armor across his spine, but he had the foreclaws of a dragon, thick and powerful with muscle. His head was eyeless, bright-red antenna extending from the empty sockets. Mandibles that could cut a man in half pushed out from either side of his toothed mouth. Part slug. Part centipede. Part dragon.
His roar deafened them and pushed them back, poison venting from his open maw. It filled the air with a deadly, stinking mist, pitch-black and turning the plants sticking out of the muddy earth into black rot. His massive lungs gave the Poison Mist more reach and spread than Nic could have ever achieved in his axolotl shape, but the effect was diffused, creating a toxic swamp rather than a focused killing beam.
But it was still a dense, black mist.
Nic released his Warform and shrank, dropping down into the cover of the fog. He struck the Sandrider Blade into the ground and drew out his centipede hatchet, sized for his small hands.
Redjaw was still bellowing, meeting the sand devils with sweeps of his tail and broad, crushing blows from his two-fingered claws. His strength was already greater than Nic’s had ever been at F-Class, although his speed was almost nothing by comparison—it was a matter of sheer size that let him bully the sand devils back, crushing and oppressing them as they labored in the rotting fog.
Nic appeared like a shadow and ripped through the back of a devil’s leg. He hammered the axe’s blade down into its skull as it fell, and then vanished, retreating, summoning a wave of mud to splash against the legs of the devils as they tried to chase him. They stuck fast to the binding mire and toppled forward, bound together as their own struggles spread the sticky adhesive from one body to the next.
Reaching into his bag, Nic flipped a pyre-lob into the tangle of bodies and grinned maniacally as a burst of fire and shrapnel tore the fog away.
That smile faded as a piercing shriek of danger warned him a second before the Ascended devil’s black hand shot through the mist, reaching for his throat. The devil moved so fast it drew the smoke and smog of the battlefield around its body in a swirling torrent like a black cape. Its hand burst free of the mist and swept towards him, slashing down, and Nic raised his hatchet to block.
Chips of bone showered against his face as the hatchet nearly broke, flying out of his hand as he was knocked across the earth in a tumble of limbs. Blood spilled into his vision, and a trio of huge cuts ripped across his face.
He rolled onto his feet, and his heart nearly skipped a beat as he saw the same black hand already reaching for him again, already slashing down. The Ascended devil had barely taken a single heartbeat to close the distance and attack again.
Nic slammed energy through his Mire-Caller Shard and swept a wave of mud into the way, but even that barely knocked the beast off balance. It ripped free, shaking off the clinging mire before it could fully take hold, and lunged on all fours across the ground like an animal. Its dark eyes blazed with reflected light.
But even in his original form, Nic was E-Class now. He had energy to burn and more ways to fight than head-on.
He launched himself up atop a wave of mud—landing braced with one arm and leg against the trunk of a tree—and grasped a pyre-lob from his bag. As the devil crashed towards him, vaulting into the air, Nic kicked off and used Mire-Caller to seize the earth underneath the tree’s roots.
With a lifted fist, he brought the tree crashing down. It swept the Ascended sand devil from the air, slamming it down, and for a moment, his foe was pinned. The devil pushed its hands against the ground to lift the crushing weight from its back, but Nic turned that ground to soaking wet mud, giving it nothing to brace or push against. It sunk deeper and deeper.
Nic threw a pyre-lob against its side, sticking the grenade fast.
As the Ascended devil tore its way out of the earth, fire and poison blossomed around its armored hide. Shrapnel formed from teeth and glass sank into its flesh, tearing apart its carapace, leaving its lower leg shredded apart.
It staggered and shifted to moving on all fours to compensate for its wounded limb. It dove forward, chasing after him, and Nic was forced to retreat farther and farther from his axe. In the distance, Redjaw was struggling, swarmed by enemies and being steadily worn away as they managed to get their claws into him. They were fighting him like ants fought a spider, wearing him down by sinking their fangs in and holding fast.
Nic needed to rescue Redjaw—and fast.
Between the ring of Day-Into-Night and his cracked meridians, he was burning through Essence at a far, far accelerated rate. There was no winning this as a drawn-out confrontation, playing cat and mouse till the centipede venom in the pyre-lob wore away his enemy’s cultivation.
But Nic had one card left to play.
As the enemy rushed towards him, Nic braced his feet, drawing up the power of mud and muck to anchor himself firmly. He drew out his tiger-claw and braced with both hands wrapped around the grip, shoving his cultivation base hard to summon all his strength and activating the Inner-Sacrifice Cauldron Technique. His body erupted into white-hot pain, his skin glowing red like a burning skillet as the power of his blood was burned away within him to fuel his physical body. Power surged through his limbs, and he burnt Essence with the Concept of Sacrifice to give him the fuel to overcome the cracks in his meridians and burst out with full strength.
He rocketed forward and met the beast head-on. The push of his limbs against the bracing wall of hardened mud underfoot let him shoot forward, diving past the blow that swept overhead. His fist slammed into the side of the Ascended devil’s head, twisting its neck away as it was sent stumbling back. The tiger-claw shattered into pieces against its hard carapace.
