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Chapter 161: More Arms, More Fun
🕑 Added 2023-04-10 17:36:01 +0000 UTCHappy new week, everyone!
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Jack cracked his knuckles. He was suddenly eager to fight, eager to unleash his pent-up energy on this clueless monster.
Nauja and Brock stepped away, leaving him alone against the monstrous chameleon, which still hid in the sand, unaware they’d noticed it. Unfortunately, Jack wanted a fight.
“Come out!” he ordered, shooting a Meteor Punch from afar. The purple blow landed on the chameleon’s back with an explosion that leveled the nearby sand dune, sending showers of sand flying tens of feet into the sky.
The chameleon instantly sprang into motion. Yellow eyes snapped open, each with two green irises in their midst, and each moving independently of the other. Its skin was green now, there was a ridge of spikes running down its back, and webbing was between its fingers, probably to help it glide through the sand.
It was the size of two horses put together, and it crawled over at a speed that would put any camel to shame. It reached Jack near-instantly.
Jack braced himself. He was going to test the Life Drop’s power—his four-armed form—but first, he wanted to try out his bare self. The Ancient trial had given him eleven levels and a fused Dao Root. He wanted to see how he stacked up against this chameleon, a peak E-Grade monster.
The chameleon attacked. When it reached a hundred feet away from Jack, its mouth cracked open, a pink tongue shooting out like a missile. It was the width of Jack’s torso and long enough to reach him at this distance.
Thankfully, the monster’s description had warned him of the tongue attack. It still came too fast, too early. He crossed his arms before his chest and felt like he was struck by a cannonball. He was sent flying back, piercing through a sand dune to stop at the second, flat against the sand.
The chameleon hadn’t stopped. It was on him again, crawling over the tumbling sand dune with its tongue hovering in the air, waiting to strike like a scorpion’s stinger.
Jack rolled aside, letting the tongue bury itself in the sand. It retracted like a spring before he could hit it. This tongue is trouble, he realized with a grimace.
He jumped up and faced the chameleon. He charged forth. He had no advantage at range.
The monster didn’t acknowledge his power. As he charged, so did it, its tongue whipping all the while. It came at him from all directions, moving at blinding speed and with great force. Jack dodged valiantly. He ducked, side-stepped, or, for the more accurate attacks, ghost-stepped away. Having tasted the power of this tongue, he didn’t dare block.
The sand caved under his feet, but he simply pushed harder, letting the grains scratch his shins.
He was upon the chameleon in a blink, fists blurring as they shot out a flurry of blows. They landed on slick scales, denting them or sliding off. The chameleon tried to headbutt him. Jack leaped over the strike, shooting two Meteor Punches into the chameleon’s neck and one behind himself—so that the explosions wouldn’t push him into the air.
He landed in a crawl, jumped aside, then rolled under a tongue blow. He ducked low and sprang up with force, burying his fist into the chameleon’s guts, raising the beast an inch off the ground. Jack felt his elbow creak.
For the first time, the chameleon felt pain. The moment it landed, it regarded Jack as an opponent rather than prey, adjusting its tactics. It stepped back and let its tongue take over, wielding it like a long mace.
The control it had over its tongue was frustrating. It could twist and bend in mid-air, form into angles, and keep chasing Jack as he escaped.
At a distance, Jack was losing. He couldn’t let the chameleon get away.
He ghost-stepped twice in rapid succession, closing the distance. His fist smashed into its nose, breaking it with a sickening crunch and burying its head into the ground. Just as he pulled back to strike again, the body of the tongue shot sideways and hit him in the ribs, sending him flying.
Jack suppressed a groan. Something was cracked again, as it often was. That tongue was no joke.
But he kept his cool. Meteor Punching the air to shoot back at the ground at a sharp angle, he turned and landed on his feet, then dashed for the chameleon again. The tongue shot out, a maelstrom of pink violence, but he had a sense of its patterns now. Like the tyrannosaurus, the chameleon was stupid.
He ducked under an attack and jumped over another aimed at his feet. He kept going, ignoring a feint, then took a grazing blow to the arm when that wasn’t a feint after all. Cursing, he charged again, ghost-stepping to the chameleon’s face and ghost-stepping again to arrive at its back.
He smashed a Meteor Punch down, making the monster croak and arc its back downward. He punched again and again, charging up each strike to make it a purple meteor. The explosions shook the sand, cracked the denser ground underneath, sank the chameleon in.
Its tail came from behind to swat Jack in the same ribs the tongue had cracked before. He flew away, already grimacing in anticipation of the pain soon to come… But it didn’t. There was no feeling of cracked ribs straining to remaining whole or digging into his innards. It was like his ribs hadn’t been attacked before.
What?
He remembered the skill upgrade he got when the Life Drop fused with his soul. The Dao of Life had increased his Indomitable Body’s regenerative properties to “extreme.”
He skidded into a landing and grinned. His cracked ribs had healed in a matter of seconds. Granted, the injury had been small, but such a speed of recovery…
It could make him unstoppable.
The chameleon slithered opposite him, pulling itself free of the sand where Jack had buried it. It seemed angry now, its eyes and tongue darting around rapidly. Despite taking three Meteor Punches head-on, it wasn’t too injured.
Neither was Jack, but he was getting tired. Keeping up with the tongue required multiple uses of Ghost Step, which tired him out quickly. He had to admit that, if he fought the chameleon like this, he would probably lose.
However, this was still a large step-up from when he’d been completely overwhelmed by the tyrannosaurus. Now, he could keep up. He could protect himself. Fight it as an equal.
And he had more to give.
“Nauja!” Jack shouted. “Is it clear?”
“There’s nobody around!” A voice carried over from a nearby sand dune, the tallest one around, and Jack grinned. Reaching into his soul, he lifted the barrier around the Life Drop’s core, letting its energy flood him until it reached an equilibrium.
His form shifted, growing taller and wider. He saw the chameleon shrink as he was enlarged. The bare skin under his armpits itched, then ruptured to reveal two tubes of flesh and writhing muscle that quickly entwined around each other to form two extra, fully functioning arms.
The chameleon had frozen, inspecting him with confusion. It was considering fighting or fleeing. Jack felt the power course through his body, felt his strength rise rapidly. He could barely control his anticipation as he charged, each stomp shaking the desert.
It chose to fight.
The tongue blurred through the air again, coming from his right. Jack raised two hands to block. The strike met his forearms next to his ears. It was heavy. He felt the impact shake his body, pushing him to the side and forcing him to take a side-step to maintain his balance. He felt his two right forearms protest under the pressure.
But that was all. One step. Before transforming, a head-on collision had sent him flying.
He grinned.
The tongue circled around and came at him again, this time from the left. Jack saw it. It was no longer blurring through the air. It was simply fast.
He leaned back, letting the tip of the tongue sail past his face, then reached out to hook its body under his elbow. It pulled at him, but he held. The two bottom arms grabbed the tongue, large fingers closing around them, as Jack’s upper arms grabbed it farther back and pulled.
The chameleon did not expect that. It stumbled, yanked forward by its own tongue, then hurriedly planted its feet deep into the sand and pulled back. It was frantic now, trying to escape.
But would Jack let it?
His two arms held on tight, their veins sticking out. His muscles were iron cords filled with power, his fingers were iron pliers, his body a boiling furnace. He pulled against the chameleon, dragging it into a tug of war around its own tongue. The tip flapped in the air and tried to strike him, but he used an extra hand—he had so many!—to trap it under his armpit, where it could do no harm.
He pulled, and the chameleon pulled back. There was no Dao involved here, no skills. It was pure strength versus strength.
Obviously, Jack was losing. His greatest advantage against this beast was his Dao. His feet dragged through the sand, his fingers laxing and threatening to lose purchase.
However, no matter how strong the chameleon was, there was only so much force its tongue could handle. It cried out in pain. Jack felt the tissue under his hands begin to rip as the tongue was stretched beyond its natural limits.
The chameleon had to give way. It dug its feet out of the sand and rushed at Jack, hoping to surprise him. It failed, of course.
The moment it stopped pulling, Jack got to work. He had so much tongue to play with. His four hands blurred through the air, tying it into tighter and tighter knots until he formed a large pink mass that only stretched thirty feet out of the chameleon’s mouth instead of a hundred.
The chameleon reached him then, but Jack only let go of the tongue and charged forth. Two meteors blazed on his right, and two on his left. All four struck the chameleon’s face, sending it flying backward. The explosions were larger than usual. So large, in fact, that Jack was almost blinded and deafened.
He reached the fallen chameleon in a blink and pummeled it. His every fist carried tremendous power. Even without using Meteor Punch, their force was enough to rupture scales, rip skin, and bruise tendons. The poor chameleon tried to resist, but its tongue was so tied up that it couldn’t control it, and its limbs were far from strong enough to face Jack in his current form.
All it could do was lay there and take a beating.
Which made Jack feel bad. He stopped his next punch an inch away from the chameleon’s face, then jumped back to observe the damage. The monster was sprawled on the ground, limbs still lashing out blindly. It was bleeding from a wound on its forehead, and its belly was bruised, but it wasn’t too injured overall. In the final pummeling, Jack had only been using brute force, not Meteor Punch.
Its greatest injury was the tied-up tongue, which now resembled a large mace.
Jack couldn’t help but admire his power. Before using the Life Drop, he was slightly weaker than the chameleon. Afterward… He almost toyed with it. He was stronger by an entire tier.
Just how strong am I? he couldn’t help but wonder.
“Hey,” Nauja said, arriving next to him. “I’m glad you stopped.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. There was no point maintaining this form further; he let it dissipate, returning to his normal size with the extra arms shrinking and disappearing.
“Wow,” Nauja said, eyes glued so hard to his body that he felt almost uncomfortable. “That was…”
“Impressive?”
“I would say brutal, but yes. I’ve seen people augment their bodies during battle, but nothing like that.”
“Right?” he replied, smiling. He flexed his hands. “And that power… Oh, boy. That was something else.”
“How long do you think you can keep it up? Indefinitely?”
“A few minutes, I think. The Life Drop’s resistance was growing stronger as time passed.”
“Wow… By the way, the chameleon is still here.”
Jack looked up to find the monster. It had just managed to regain a semblance of control over its tongue, pulling it back into its mouth. The upper part of its snout bulged out slightly now.
Nauja gave him a look.
“I think we shouldn’t eat it after all,” Jack finally said, rubbing the back of his head. He looked back towards Brock, who was still approaching from a distant sand due. “Sorry, bro, but we’ll have to find you something else. I already bullied this poor chameleon enough. It didn’t even attack us first.”
“It would, if given the chance,” Nauja intervened.
“But it didn’t.”
“That doesn’t change anything. Anyway, I agree we should it let it go. Besides, look at it. It’s kind of cute.”
The chameleon—the large beast with a hundred-foot weaponized tongue, natural camouflage, and two irises in each eye—was looking at them, its bulging eyes playing to either side of its head. It was half turned away as if ready to flee.
“Hear that, big guy? We’re letting you go. Now, let me untie that—”
The chameleon rushed away before he could even finish his sentence. It crossed the sand dunes at profound speed and disappeared in a matter of seconds, leaving Jack with his hands outstretched.
Only his belly’s growling dragged him back to the present. Belatedly, he realized that using the Life Drop—and fighting in general—was exhausting.
“Well, maybe it will untie by itself,” he said, shrugging. “Now, let’s go find something else to eat, shall we? I’m starving.”
“We should,” Nauja agreed. “We are already approaching the village. We don’t know what awaits us there, so we should probably be at our peaks when we arrive.”
“Right.” Jack nodded. “Do you think that minotaur will be there as well?” His mind was still on his new powers—specifically, how he’d like to bury all four of his fists into the face of the minotaur who dared slap Brock.
“Probably.” She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Comments
Dang, poor Chameleon. Should of ended it and earned the xp at the very least, seems Jack forgets the difficulty of his task of becoming C grade in less than a year. Of course, he's stubborn as a mule with his will-power so he sure has hell wouldn't listen to me. xD
