roadtomastery
patreon
Chapter 175: Meet The Kraken
🕑 Added 2023-04-26 17:36:01 +0000 UTCJack lounged on a rock when Gan Salin woke up. He coughed, then shakily raised his upper body. “What happened?” he asked.
“Space monsters,” Jack replied, “but we pulled through. Are you okay?”
Salin’s eyes were piercing. “Did you save me?”
“It was nothing.”
“He fought off an Elite monster while carrying you and Brock,” Nauja said, stepping into the courtyard. “Hardly nothing.”
“I appreciate that,” Gan Salin said. He seemed confused. Perplexed even, like he expected Jack to let him die. But also earnest.
“No problem.”
“Where are we?”
“The palace,” Nauja gestured up and around at the mossy stone walls, then out into the darkness. “Brock went into the Trial already. With any luck, he’ll succeed before the bubble approaches a light beam again.”
“Are Trials that long?” Jack asked, looking for light beams spearing the darkness. He saw them far away.
“Some are.” She shrugged. “We can’t know. Just have to wait.”
“I hope he’s okay.”
Jack was worried about Brock. Of course he was. He’d seen the brutality of these Trials himself, and now his little bro was in one. All alone.
He didn’t even care if Brock succeeded. He just wanted him to return safe. In the three minutes since the brorilla touched the statue and disappeared, Jack’s heart had been filled with doubts. Was it a bad idea? Should he protect his little bro instead of send him at a death battle? Power could come even without Trials, it would just take longer.
No, Jack quickly chided himself. Brock has chosen this path himself. He does not want to be left behind, even if there is danger. The way of the bro is to respect that.
But this didn’t abate his worries. To escape them, he turned his mind to other matters.
“How is the darkness, Nauja?” he asked the barbarian girl. She’d just made a round around the palace to check for monsters. “Did you spot anything?”
She pursed her lips. “See for yourself.”
The palace was illuminated by a bright torch, courtesy of whoever made this bubble. They had lit it up and placed it in a central spot. Now, Nauja walked over and picked it up, holding it against the edge of the bubble, illuminating the darkness.
Tentacles slithered outside the light. Colorful, squirmy bodies.
“Still there, huh?” Jack asked.
“Still there. They’re sticking to us like fleas to a velociraptor.”
“So we’re trapped in a bubble in the darkness, surrounded by hungry space monsters?” Gan Salin asked. “What a nice morning.”
“Maybe they’ll go eventually.” Jack shrugged. “Besides, I doubt they’re hungry. More like curious.”
“About us?”
“Yeah.”
They had decided not to tell Salin about Jack’s Life Drop. He was a tentative ally, not to mention an insane one, and this was a subject that demanded absolute secrecy.
“Makes sense,” he replied. “We’re all they’ve seen in who knows how long. If I were a space monster, I’d stick my nose to the glass, too.”
“Thank God they don’t have noses.”
“And, for your information, they do get hungry. Not in the same way we do, but they have this urge to consume our Dao and grow stronger—but only if we’re around the same level. According to legend, the progression principles of space monsters is where the Immortals based off the leveling of the System.”
“Interesting.”
“I just wish they’d leave us alone,” Nauja said with a sigh. “If they decide to stick around permanently, we’re going to be in trouble.”
Gan Salin stood up. “Just watch. I got this.”
He reached down to grab a mossy rock—fallen crumb off the walls—and flung it into the darkness. It popped through the bubble and hit a tentacle before ricocheting off into space. The monster didn’t seem to register the impact.
“That’s right!” Salin shouted, waving his fist. “Get the hell out of my yard!”
Jack smiled. Then, to his absolute surprise, the monster shook before bolting away at top speed.
“...What?”
“Uh… Told you I got this.”
Nauja moved the torch around, illuminating a small horde of space monsters that were hurriedly running away. “What is going on?” she asked.
“I’m scary.”
“I really don’t think that was you, Salin,” Jack said, standing up. “Space monsters have sharper Dao perception than we do. It could be that—”
His words trailed off. His eyes widened. Something was coming from below, far under their feet, deeper into the darkness. Something whose Dao shone like a sun. And it was fast.
“Fuck,” he said.
Large, white tentacles rose around their bubble. These were nothing like the previous ones. Each tentacle was the size of a space monster, and they were also solid and lifelike, like actual flesh instead of strung-together Dao. Moreover, they gave off a sense of finality. Of death. Whatever this was, its Dao was well-defined and stable, unlike every other space monster Jack had ever met, with one exception: the green crocodile that Captain Dordok had fought.
“It’s a D-Grade!” he said with rising panic. No wonder the other monsters had run off. This was the boss of the area!
“Okay, this is bad,” Salin said, “but maybe it doesn’t eat canines?”
“Stay calm,” Nauja ordered, stretching her hands. “It’s probably curious to see what drew all those monsters together. It can’t reach us here. We’re safe. We just have to wait for it to go away.”
They still couldn’t see its body, but it must have been enormous. The tentacles rose all around the bubble, twitching through the void like searching for something.
“We’re safe,” Jack repeated, more to convince himself than reassure the others. The monster below them blared in his Dao perception like a sun to the face.
“How is it here, though?” Salin asked, perfectly calm. “The immortal monsters almost never leave the inner wall of Space Ring.”
“No idea,” Jack replied, but he was lying. He knew why this monster was here. Because he’d used the Life Drop, erupting with Life Dao. It was looking for him.
He and Nauja exchanged a glance, not saying anything.
The tentacles looked around a bit more but didn’t find anything. Of course they didn’t. The power of the Life Drop was now safely withdrawn inside Jack’s soul, and even the space monster’s D-Grade perception had no way of infiltrating that.
They could only watch as the tentacles grew increasingly frustrated. Its fury emanated in waves, suffusing the void and stretching outward. Being so close to an upset D-Grade monster was unnerving. It was only the bubble’s protection that helped them maintain composure.
At some point, the monster would realize it had lost its target and move on. It had to. Right?
A moment later, Jack felt its frustration surge to a peak. He seized up, wondering what was going to happen.
The tentacles touched the bubble. For a moment, Jack froze, but the bubble held, not budging in the slightest. However, it didn’t repel the monster. One tentacle after another wrapped around the bubble, dark suckers sticking on its surface, as the space monster got a good hold over it.
Then, it started to move. Jack saw the light in the distance—the bright area of the ring—recede. He couldn’t believe it. The monster had grabbed their bubble and was pulling it deeper. At the same time, more space monsters were flying away around them. Dark shapes crossed the void, heading in the opposite direction. When the D-Grade monster passed close to them, Jack could see them contort and twitch in fear. Some were even expelling part of their Dao to get away faster, blindly and desperately escaping towards the light. More than once, Jack felt an explosion of random Dao near them, an unlucky monster getting too close to this enraged giant.
“We have to get out of here!” Nauja shouted, snapping out of her fear. The darkness around them was deepening by the second. Thankfully, space monsters used their Dao perception to hunt, not their eyes, or the flaming torches would have drawn in everything.
“But how!? We—”
“There is no time! We have to try and leave now, while it’s distracted by the bubble. It doesn’t know we’re what it’s searching for. We must run and hope to escape in the other monsters’ panic. If it drags us even deeper, we’ll never have a chance to escape again! We’ll never make it back up!”
“They aren’t just panicking,” Salin said, still calm. “Remember how I mentioned super hordes before? This is how they start. A D-Grade monster rises from the depths, terrorizing the E-Grade space monsters in a large radius, which begin to flee in panic. Other monsters see the fleeing ones and instinctively follow. The panic spreads as a chain reaction until there are thousands of monsters running away towards the outer side of the ring, a large wave that doesn’t stop until it hits the far wall.”
“What does it matter?” Nauja said. “We have to go now!”
Jack gritted his teeth. “Brock is still in the Trial.”
Nauja didn’t reply. She warred on the inside until her mind was made. Then, she crossed her arms, not saying a word more.
“I guess we’re waiting,” Gan Salin said. “In the meantime, wanna hear more trivia about space monsters? Did you know some of them can procreate, if they have the right Daos? My faction actually has a Level farm with procreating space monsters. Funky place. Never been there, but I hear their sex is, uh, disturbing.”
“What are the chances Brock will come out quickly?” Jack asked.
“No idea,” Nauja replied. “And Jack, I know you don’t want to hear this, but we’ll know if he fails. Either he’ll come out, or the statue will echo like a gong.”
Jack gritted his teeth. “He won’t fail.”
“Then, we’ll just have to wait. I’m a barbarian. I would rather die than abandon a friend.”
“Space monsters are mostly purple at the E-Grade, but they have all sorts of colors and forms later on! It’s usually animals, but I’ve heard of one shaped as a ship. There is a famous B-Grade space monster that wanders the galaxy as a continent-sized whale. People say it has an entire civilization in its stomach.”
Jack tried, but he struggled to enjoy Gan Salin’s fun facts.
The void was still flying past them, several times faster than they could achieve by themselves. It had only been half a minute.
“Do you think—”
Congratulations! Title “Fourth Ring Conqueror” upgraded to “Fifth Ring Conqueror!”
Efficacy of all stats: +20% → +25%
Jack moved instantly. He bolted inside, finding Brock standing by the crumbling statue, perfectly safe and sound. He held his Staff of Stone in one hand and gaped as he looked around, at the many tentacles hugging their bubble. He said something in monkey.
Jack rushed in, said, “Good job! I’m proud of you,” as fast as he possibly could, then grabbed Brock under an arm, put helmets on both their heads, and ran back outside. It took him exactly three seconds.
Nauja and Gan Salin didn’t waste any time, either. By the time he returned, they were both ready to go.
“You know what we could use?” Salin asked, picking up a piece of old but steady rope that held a torch to a wall. “Space monster reins. Since we’re riding the space horde, we might as well do it in style.”
“Just go!” Nauja shouted.
The darkness was still receding around them. Panicked space monsters were flying everywhere.
They jumped out.
