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Chapter 176: Surfing a Tsunami of Space Monsters
🕑 Added 2023-04-27 17:36:00 +0000 UTCMy Dao of Catchy Titles is going strong.
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Space monsters were unique creatures. They were formed by Dao that stuck together, the fundamental properties of the universe given shape and form. When that happened, sentience was developed, but most monsters only remained at the E-Grade, their infancy.
As a result, they were driven by two primary instincts: progress, and survival. Progress came from devouring other creatures that cultivated the Dao—usually cultivators, or sometimes compatible space monsters. Survival was more complex, and being barely sentient, what space monsters did was blindly follow what other space monsters were doing. If they saw one moving with purpose, they followed it. That is how monster hordes were formed.
At the same time, this sort of instinct could have unintended consequences.
In the densely crowded environment of Space Ring, once enough monsters got to running, there was no stopping them. More monsters took note and automatically started running as well, spreading the panic like a wildfire in dry grass. A massive horde could form swiftly, with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of space monsters all rushing over each other to escape…something. They didn’t know what they were running from, nor did it matter. Everybody else was doing it, so they followed.
The super horde that formed on this day was the result of an event chain accidentally started by Jack. When he activated his Life Drop to fight the electric eel, the eruption of Dao was so strong that it caught the attention of a D-Grade space monster slumbering in the bottom of Space Ring. That monster rose to investigate. However, as the Life Dao had disappeared, it focused on the closest special occurrence it could sense—the gathering of space monsters around a specific bubble.
The D-Grade monster didn’t know what was happening there, but it had the intelligence—albeit barely—to connect the dots. It concluded that a high-quality, life-related treasure had matured inside that bubble. Such a treasure could be invaluable to this monster, since it cultivated the Dao of Death. Therefore, it grabbed the bubble and pulled it to its lair in the inner wall of Space Ring, where it could investigate at its leisure.
However, the monster’s arrival and subsequent frustration had terrorized the nearby space monsters, sending them into a frenzied escape. In its retreat, it also squashed some of them to quell its rage, further fueling their panic. Such a monster could create large waves. It wasn’t long before every E-Grade monster in the region, from peak to King, was in motion, heading out of the darkness and into the light, where the poor cultivators had no idea what was about to happen.
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Jack, Nauja, Gan Salin, and Brock emerged from their fast descending bubble into a void that brimmed with activity. Behind them, the mossy palace floated in a bubble wrapped by large, white tentacles. They barely caught a glimpse of the massive creature below, dragging the bubble ever deeper.
It was a white squid the length of a skyscraper. A space kraken. The entire palace was like a toy to it.
Thankfully, the kraken didn’t pay them any attention. It descended at great speed, quickly disappearing in the darkness as the palace’s torches went off one by one.
Unfortunately, the kraken wasn’t the only monster here. More and more of them surged out of the depths, frightened out of their minds by the kraken’s appearance and anger. Jack glimpsed dozens of them in the bubble’s dying light. The weakest were peak E-Grades, and the strongest was a King monster that resembled a dark blue rhinoceros.
All those monsters were surging towards Jack, Brock, Nauja, and Gan Salin. They barely caught a glimpse of all the monsters before the final torch in the palace went out, and they were sunk in absolute darkness.
For a moment, there was stillness. Jack hovered in the darkness quietly, like the approaching horde was only a dream.
Then, something crashed into them, and the group was flung forward. They didn’t try to fight back. They let the flood take them, doing their best to align with it and stay alive. Their only saving grace was that the monsters, in their haste to escape, did not try to eat them.
Jack’s world was filled with bursts of all kinds of Dao. He was almost overwhelmed. His mind focused on his friends. Wind, Insanity. Brock, he was carrying.
There were dozens of Daos erupting out of everywhere around him. Shapes bumped into him in the darkness. The monsters fell an urge to come together, leading to a tightly clustered pack in complete absence of light.
Jack finally felt a mind-turning burst from the side. He rushed over, hoping to not get tackled by a monster, and found Gan Salin.
He was struggling. Already, he was in dire straits, his bursts of Dao erratic. Two monsters surrounded him, not trying to kill him but accidentally swatting him with their tentacles, while he was trying his hardest to survive.
Jack couldn’t see the battle, but he could perceive parts of it.
He sensed Salin erupt with speed as he dashed at Jack. Suddenly, he was flung aside—probably batted by a loose tentacle. The strike was hard, but Salin wouldn’t give up. He forced himself to remain conscious and doubled down on his original trajectory, once again rushing toward Jack.
He was struck away again, but he persisted. He would try the same thing again and again until it worked.
Jack arrived. He swept by Gan Salin’s side, falling in line next to him to protect one side. The canine stopped struggling so much.
Wind came from another direction. A gale blew through the monsters, finding its way next to Jack. The three of them formed a nucleus surrounded by strong space monsters, pushing against all sides to avoid getting crushed. There were bodies all around them, now. They weren’t cramped, but the monsters were so large, fast, and strong that, without sufficient space to dodge, Jack’s team would be squeezed into paste.
It felt like fighting blind-folded. Jack’s perception was overwhelmed by Dao eruptions everywhere around him. He swatted away a tentacle and dodged another. A monster rammed into them headfirst while both of Jack’s hands were busy, but Salin was there, using his signature move, Five Star Grasp, to slap the monster straight in the head and make it curve around them. Nauja was covering their other side, stopping a variety of monsters from assaulting them.
All the while, the three of them sped forward, in step with the horde. If they slowed down even in the slightest, they would be overrun and stomped to death.
On all sides, space monsters were sprinting towards the light. More and more of them surged up from the depths of the darkness like an unstoppable tide.
The monsters deeper in the darkness were generally stronger than those in shallower parts. Therefore, they were also faster. As all monsters began running in the same direction, with the faster ones behind the slower ones, they gradually squeezed together, forming a dense layer of monsters all running together in blind panic.
It was in the center of that layer that Jack’s team had accidentally wedged themselves.
Jack’s entire mind was focused on survival. He lost track of time. At some point, he looked back and realized the light was fast approaching.
To the horror of everyone in Space Ring, the super horde emerged from the darkness and continued unabated. Cultivators pointed in shock and ran away at top speed. Space monsters watched on with confusion before their instincts kicked in and they, too, joined the horde.
Bubbles and cultivators were swept by the horde, taking them along in their mad rush for the far wall.
Jack could finally see again. The monsters surrounding them were a snake—he had confused its tail for a tentacle before—and a gorilla with tentacles for arms. Both peak E-Grades.
Now, their group could fight better. They coordinated. Jack flew aside, exploiting a break in the unintended space monster offense to assist Gan Salin. The canine jumped back, taking on the flank he was more suited to covering, letting Jack smash a bunch of meteors into the monsters behind them.
An arachnoid Elite monster shot out a white substance at him. An arrow of wind pierced and drove it away, pinning it to another space monster. There, the substance hardened and bound to its victim, gluing itself to its appendages until the space monster slowed down so much it was swallowed up by the horde, torn to a dozen pieces as the rest of the monsters clawed their way through.
Jack looked to the side. He saw Gan Salin use all his strength to smack away an errant tentacle. Another was rising behind him, so Jack shot over a meteor. Salin spotted that, cursed in his helmet, and leaned back, letting the meteor sail over him and smash into the tentacle, saving him.
Right after, Salin pointed behind Jack, letting him twist around another projectile—a horn-like appendage? Nauja then arrowed a monster about to reach Salin, and the canine attacked at the same time, slapping it away twice.
Gan Salin was grinning. Though his life was on the line, he was clearly having fun.
Through a gap in the monsters, Jack took a quick glance around him. It was chaos. The entire ring, everything he could see, was in chaos.
By the time the first monster had emerged from the darkness, an entire army followed it, dozens of high-level ones. The spread of the super horde didn’t stop. More and more monsters joined the dance. Soon, they had created a horde so massive it swallowed bubbles, pulling them along simply by momentum, like forest animals running away from a wildfire.
This entire side of Space Ring was swept up. Any cultivator unlucky enough to be traveling between bubbles was drawn into the horde, struggling to save their lives. Anyone lucky enough to be in a bubble stayed there, holding on for dear life as the world tumbled and turned around them.
And at the very head of the super horde was a small team riding the wave. By staying there, instead of buried inside the body of the horde, they could survive. It was like surfing a tsunami.
They were gradually getting away from the darkness and heading back towards Village Ring. At the same time, the squeezing around them got more and more intense.
Trying to escape through the horde would be very difficult; the monsters changed positions all the time, and one mistake would be enough to get them crushed.
All they could do was ride the tide and try to survive in the ever increasing pressure. Moreover, all these attacks slowed them down, and they had to constantly expel Dao from their Dao Seeds to stay up to speed. Their endurance wasn’t infinite. Eventually, they would run out, and they would fall into the horde.
This can’t go on! Jack thought. We must find a way to use less energy.
It wasn’t just the sides and flank. There were monsters above and below them, everywhere the eye could see, pressuring them so hard that they had to give it their all just to stay afloat. Naturally, they wouldn’t last long like this.
Jack looked back, trying to find a solution, and crossed eyes with Gan Salin. The canine smiled brightly like he’d been waiting for this moment. He reached to his belt and recovered the old, steady rope he’d taken from the mossy palace, giving it a couple test tugs.
At the time, Jack had thought Salin was joking. As it turns out, he might have had a point.
I can’t believe this, Jack thought, reaching out. Salin gave him the rope. Jack let the canine hold off the monsters for a moment as he looked for a suitable target.
There. Right below them was a rhinoceros-like space monster. A King. However, being a King also meant that the other monsters gave it a wide berth. It was perfect.
Jack dived down, using a series of Meteor Punches to approach the rhino. He quickly passed the rope around one of its horns.
It was surreal.
The rhino ignored him, not even bothering with his small existence. Every other monster was running away, filling the rhino with urgency.
Jack’s rope was now tied around the rhino’s horn. He gave it a tug to make sure there was no problem. The rhino, bursting with strength as it was, didn’t even slow down. He gestured at his friends, who rushed to join him, letting two monsters clash where they used to float.
Jack was holding onto the rope for dear life. There was barely enough space for the three of them—at least, Brock was holding onto Jack’s back.
Finally, however, they were somewhat safe. No monsters would attack the rhino, even by accident, and there were no other Kings around. Moreover, it didn’t seem to mind giving them a ride. For now, they could take a breather.
Which let Jack gaze ahead, where the horde was headed. He saw poor cultivators rushing to reach a bubble before the wall of space monsters reached them first. He saw a bubble swept to the side, pushed along by all the monsters behind it. Two cultivators were inside, pale-faced and shaking like leaves—one was the lizard-riding man from Village Ring.
Looking into the distance—and shielding his eyes from the sun mushrooms—Jack saw another bubble in their immediate path. It was a sandy coast.
Suddenly, three cultivators jumped up from the coast, voluntarily exiting their bubble. It was like they hadn’t noticed the approaching super horde. Jack prayed for their poor, stupid souls.
Then, those cultivators started running in parallel with the horde, but slightly slower. They let the horde approach them and slowly merged into it, matching the speed of the frontrunners. Coincidentally, they happened to arrive very close to Jack’s team. He, Brock, and Gan Salin were staring like they’d seen a ghost.
One of the new cultivators erupted with lightning, charring a monster in front of him and making room for his team to dash. Another swung a mallet larger than her torso, smashing it into the void, expelling Dao from its business end, and propelling the entire team forward. The third member just watched, content to be carried around by the other two.
In the blink of an eye, this new team of cultivators reached Jack’s rhino and flew beside it.
Long time no see, Jack, said the Sage telepathically, with a full smile that showed off his yellow teeth. Care to share the ride?
Comments
Jumping Flounder
coincidence? i think not
