N. Francis
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Chapter 140: B5
🕑 Added 2025-08-15 14:00:00 +0000 UTC“Whose idea was it to put a god forsaken asteroid field inside a volcano?” Zoey groaned for the billionth time.
“Aelia, or Eon, or maybe the universe just hates us,” Rory responded as he kicked off from the floating space rock.
The fabled fifth floor of the Deep Chambers, they had finally entered after spending only a month out of B4, several years prior, and for all the things they had expected, it wasn’t to appear in space.
Or sort of space.
The fifth floor was essentially a collection of minor ‘planets’ separated by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of space, the only thing bridging the distance vast belts of asteroids they had to maneuver and kick off between. It was like a strange mirror of the volcanic region with its floating mountain chains, except even larger.
Larger, and inside one of the aforementioned mountains.
Figure out how that works.
They had already traveled between three of the ‘planets’, each more like a biosphere, each at least a hundred miles across. Based on their progress and time spent so far, they estimated around ten planets total, with the end likely being a monster they’d heard referenced by little Jinn of all things, a high-tier-seven floor guardian.
With an endless assault by space monsters that looked like a squid and a sea slug had gotten freaky, they’d been making good progress, toward A8, with Rory having cracked level seventy-six just the other day.
It wasn’t necessarily easy, but it was helped that in an environment of boundless miles of space debris and rocks, Rory was able to utterly spam Dragon’s Fall.
Now, technically speaking, it wasn’t a true Dragon’s Fall as he wasn’t actually using projection magic, instead using the near vacuum and lack of gravity to manipulate the asteroids into his signature attack. That itself wouldn’t have been much easier, if not for a particular skill that he had absorbed shortly after their foray into the fifth floor of the Deep Chamber.
Earth Soul
Rarity: Custom. Skill Level: Low.
Formerly known as the skill Earth Touch, after years of deliberation and tireless work, it was modified into the custom skill Earth Soul. While channeled, it allows the user to grasp the innate soul of earth-aligned materials, allowing for nigh-unmatched levels of manipulation.
Years of modification had resulted in what was essentially a matching skill, enabling the manipulation of earth ‘stuff’ as if it were water.
At least, that was how Zoey had phrased it when Rory had announced his success, much to his chagrin.
While the result had a somewhat similar usage case as the base version of the unmodified skill, where it really shone was that, on a per ‘unit’ case, Earth Soul was approximately a thousand times cheaper to channel than Earth Touch. Meaning, while Earth Touch was fine for moving around small to medium volumes of dirt or stone, Earth Soul could move entire comets larger than a group of buses lumped together.
Sure, the low gravity helped in that department as well. Yet even with normal gravity, Rory was confident he could directly manipulate things up to the size of a semi without burning himself out or without much effort in general.
That had convinced Zoey to absorb the skill from the skill slate as well, though her usage of the skill was far more limited than Rory’s due to her far inferior magical skills.
It was Zoey who absorbed the skill afterward, which taught Rory that skill slates were very limited. By the time she was done, Rory felt as if the slate had two, maybe three, uses left before it would degrade past the point of usability. Important, but given they had another seven planetoids to visit, not entirely relevant.
Either way, with the use of Earth Soul, fighting within the asteroid belts felt to Rory what he expected a fish to feel in water.
Natural.
It was perhaps one of his best environments to date; the pneuma wasn’t so dense as to be incapable of projection, and the low gravity made moving the asteroids an effective weapon.
Aided by that reality, even with the seemingly endless onslaught of squid, sea slug monsters, they made progress. Having been a few years since the third planetoid, between Rory and Zoey, they were finding themselves looking forward to finally having solid ground beneath their feet once more as they neared the next pseudo-planet.
When they did finally arrive, it was Zoey who groaned.
“So, desert planet?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Rory muttered, squinting.
“Well, not a fan of that.”
“Not going to disagree,” Rory said as they shot through the fake-space, each kick off from an asteroid pushing them hundreds of yards in a single movement. Zipping through the weird approximation of space, the planetoid grew larger and larger as they closed in on it, this one around three or four hundred miles across.
“Split up or stick together?” Zoey asked as they floated above the miniature desert planet.
“Split up, Earth Soul should get a lot of mileage on a planet like this, even at your level.”
Zoey made no effort at refuting his commentary; it was just a simple fact that wasn’t nearly as practiced as Rory was.
Having come to a consensus, the duo split apart, traveling to opposite poles of the planetoid. Once in position, it was as simple as willing themselves to fall, crashing down below.
Never a fan of this part.
Zoey, with as much durability as she had, had to make zero efforts regarding her landing; she could crash straight down and dust herself off as if it were nothing more than a stumble.
Rory wasn’t quite so fortunate.
Calculating the best approach to safely landing on this specific planet, Rory eventually flicked his wrists upwards, relying on his newest skill as far below what appeared like a sand twister was spooled up. Inside the twisting pillar, ‘clouds’ of sand formed, barely a wispy, almost non-existent cloud at the highest point, and growing thicker with each consecutive cloud.
While the first cloud barely slowed his fall, each following cloud slowed him more and more. Aside from being battered upon collision with each sand cloud, it was a largely painless process, and it wasn’t long until Rory touched down upon the planet.
“Better than the last planet at least,” Rory muttered. It had been an ocean planet, and he had turned himself into a literal cannonball as he clad himself in a total shield dome, crashing hard into the waves below. Rory had thought it was a good idea, but even with the shield dome, the shock of crashing into an ocean at hundreds of miles per hour had all but knocked him out, as a shark monster proceeded to attempt to grab a bite out of him shortly after.
That wasn’t one of my better ideas, I’ll admit.
Feet on ‘solid’ ground for the first time in nearly a year, Rory took a moment to appreciate not being zipping around space.
Alright, gratitude time over, back to work.
The first few planetoids had all had different objectives, and as Rory let his senses stretch out as far as they could, he attempted to be quick about determining the point of this planet.
Surprisingly, his efforts were rewarded almost immediately, as he noticed something almost directly beneath his feet.
Odd.
Shifting the sand, Rory slowly descended into a pit of his own making until his feet landed upon something truly solid. Frowning, he continued to push aside the sand, revealing whatever it was entirely.
“A black box. Very creative,” Rory said, arms folded over one another. The black box was, well, a black box, as far as his senses could tell, unable to determine anything about it.
“When in doubt, touch the mystery box.”
With a shrug, he bent over, brushing his hand against the surprisingly rough black material.
…. Only to blink and find himself transported.
“Aw, fudge,” Rory groaned. He’d appeared in a room, its walls and floors made of the same black material. More importantly, there were three separate doorways before him, and a simple probe forward told him that they all diverged into further separating pathways.
“A god damn labyrinth.”
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“Seriously? A labyrinth?” Zoey groaned. She’d spent only ten or so minutes scouring the oddly desolate desert planet when she had stumbled upon something poking out of the sand. Trusting her durability perhaps a bit too much, she had opted to touch the item and see what would happen.
Only to appear in a labyrinth.
It was both a good and a bad thing. Monster killing tasks weren’t Zoey’s strong suit; she could manage, but she was by no means quick about it, something that Rory had helped shore up.
Furthermore, while she had taken the role of a ‘tank’ for quite some time, her primary calling was that of an explorer, so a labyrinth was right up her alley.
Except, no one ever actually liked labyrinths, not unless you had a way to cheat your way through.
And unfortunately for Zoey, aside from a solid instinct for directions that wasn’t even magical, she had no such cheat skills.
“I wonder if there's only this one labyrinth or if it’s a labyrinth world,” Zoey considered as she paced the first room. “If there are more, I’ll bet Rory will figure out some way to bullshit through. ‘Oh yeah Zoey, all I had to do was pick my nose and count to ten and it solved itself!’ or some shit like that.”
Of course, she understood it wasn’t actually that simple, but bitching about Rory was one of her favorite pastimes, especially when it annoyed him.
After all, that’s what you did with friends.
Finally getting bored of standing around, she looked at her options for pathways, picked one, and went on her way. Following it for over three hours, it rewound on itself countless times, and endless meandering that took her through rooms filled with even more pathways. Refusing to budge, she stayed upon her single path until at last she encountered something interesting.
A turtle.
Not a monster turtle, or some weird mutant turtle.
An ordinary turtle.
“Well, what exactly is a little guy like you doing here?” Zoey pondered as she stared at the turtle that was slowly traveling the same path that she was upon. Growing more curious by the second, she examined the turtle, confusion upon her face as she did.
Turtle of True Immortality
Level: 1
A completely mundane turtle blessed with immortality of the highest level. It is entirely impossible to kill in any fashion or method, but it otherwise has no special skills or qualities.
“That’s… not something you see every day?” Zoey questioned as she continued to stare at the truly immortal turtle as it meandered forward at a painstakingly slow pace. Beginning to feel bad for the poor thing, she scooped it up, as the turtle looked back at her with a look of very animal confusion.
“Don’t mind me, little guy,” Zoey said, patting its head. “Just lending a helping hand.”
The turtle seemed to disagree, and it slowly opened its mouth, attempting to clamp down on her hand holding it. It was an attack that proved entirely ineffective as the completely mundane turtle was unable to even hope of scratching her tier seven skin, even assuming she wasn’t a ball of durability.
Realizing in its turtle brain that biting her was useless, the turtle seemed to resign itself to its fate as its head retracted, only poking out a quarter of an inch.
“So, why don’t we team up, little guy?”
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“I am not a fan of tarantulas,” Rory grumbled as he waved his staff, launching crackles of lightning down the hallway, eviscerating bodies as they attempted to push past one another.
“And I’m really not a fan of tarantulas the size of a dinner plate.”
The swarm of tarantulas was endless. They were low enough tier that his weakest lightning strikes exploded them as they passed through, but there were so many—tens of thousands at the very least.
And that wasn’t even mentioning the presence of a tier seven further away, which Rory assumed was the leader of the tarantulas.
Rory was thankful for his staff, as within the maze, there were absolutely no earth elements to manipulate with Earth Soul. His skill as a melee fighter wasn’t the worst, but trying to cut down tens of thousands of tarantulas directly was asking to be buried alive in a mountain of writhing, hairy limbs.
So instead, he had gotten to blasting, a magical circle beneath him constantly drawing in small amounts of pneuma and helping to keep him topped off, able to hold the monster spiders back for hours at his current rate.
Able to hold back the tide on autopilot, Rory withdrew a mental thread into his Mind Palace, focusing on building a model of a new projection within his mind. Spontaneous projections were something he’d long ago gotten the hang of, but that didn’t take away from the fact that it was still far more efficient to project things that he’d ‘stored’ into his Mind Palace.
Once Rory was satisfied with the newest model, he withdrew from his Mind Palace. In the real world, a secondary mental thread had focused on blasting the endless tarantulas, while a third kept track of any sudden changes or shifts in the tide.
Thankfully, nothing had changed to the point where Rory had a feeling that the tarantulas streaming toward him weren’t even ‘real’ monsters, drones that were closer to a living swarm spell from the tier seven that was content with playing the same game he was.
Well, joke's on you.
Instantly, several golden portals appeared around him, and several projections were formed from them. They were not threads, bullets, knives, or spears, but something entirely new.
Boomerangs.
Calling them boomerangs was perhaps a little too cute a description, as these were far away from the toy boomerangs a child might play with, three limbs each with serrated blades, and a central opening where a spinning gyroscope was located. It was the gyroscope that had been the most challenging part of the modeling, something that would have been hard to replicate or sustain with spontaneous projections.
With nearly ten of the boomerangs, Rory stopped blasting lightning down the hall, instead flicking two fingers forward like a general commanding his troops to charge. In the same motion, the boomerangs shot forward, before enacting an absolute massacre. Flying through the air in parabolic patterns, the boomerangs only accelerated as they mowed down the endless tarantulas. They were, compared to almost the entirety of the rest of his projections, far more advanced, a clear showcase of the difference between the limits of his projections in his early days versus what he could do now.
Now, for that same reason, they were also more costly to maintain, but he’d already set up a magic circle beneath himself to aid in sustaining his lightning strikes; it took only a single instant to ‘rewire’ the purpose of the circle to affix it to sustaining his boomerranges.
Constantly slicing through the air, the tide shifted as the hallway of endless tarantulas began to empty, finally revealing what was beyond.
I am glad I don’t have arachnophobia. Or trypophobia.
Beyond the hallway was a spiderweb that spanned the entirety of the next room. Within it was a tarantula the size of a small car, its body filled with holes. Each second, an egg sac was expelled from the many holes covering its body. Those same egg sacs hatched within seconds, releasing hundreds of tiny spiders that rapidly expanded in size, reaching their maximum size in just two or three minutes, Rory estimated.
Rory could understand why the living spider incubator was content to remain where it was; as far as Rory could sense, it wasn’t even using pneuma to spawn the egg sacs constantly. While Rory could have lasted hours at his prior rate with his lightning, he would have exhausted himself far earlier than the spawning spider.
With direct line of sight to the spider, Rory also had a better feel of its aura. While it was undoubtedly a tier seven monster, there was something weird about its presence, almost as if it were hollow or fragile.
“Curious. Is it perhaps that while you’re a tier seven, you don’t have the attribute density comparable to other tier seven monsters? Or maybe you’ve got a unique attribute you’re invested in, something relating to the egg spawning?”
Either way, Rory did not doubt that now that he had overcome the tides of spider spawns, he’d essentially won. Proving his point only a moment later, his boomerangs swept into the room, sawing through the un-matured spawn before continuing their arcs through the air and slashing apart the webs, the spawning spider shrieking some unholy call.
“Oh, hush,” Rory grumbled as he pointed his staff, two rapid-fire blasts of lightning removing its legs from its body.
Yeah, that’s closer to a tier six or even tier five, based on how easy it was to hurt.
Walking into its former den, Rory brought the butt of his staff down upon the rough black material beneath his feet, as a golden circle flared to life beneath the spider. Bringing the staff down several more times, with each strike of his staff upon the ground, a new rune flared to life within the circle surrounding the monster.
Runes of slowing, of energy, air, and absorption amongst other runes, with one final strike, the circle finally erupted with power as the spider seemingly froze in place. If one looked really closely, they would notice it moving, just at a fraction of a fraction of its original speed; it would need an entire day to expel its eggsacs, as slowed as it was.
Worked better than I expected.
The circle was nothing more than a modern version of a ritual he had contracted decades ago, meant to absorb the life force and essence of monsters for his growth sites used to foster his bloodwood saplings.
This version lacked the direct absorption of lifeforce, but was otherwise more advanced in every single way, and it had only taken him thirty seconds to construct purely through projection. A stronger monster would have broken free of its effects. Still, the spawning spider was a perfect candidate to test it upon, given so much of its overall strength was allocated to being a highly efficient incubator.
Examining the spawning spider from outside the containment ring, Rory nodded to himself. Its aura was definitely that of a tier seven. Still, as he took time to examine it more closely, he’d begun to understand that the ‘hollow’ nature of its aura was that there was an aspect to its aura that he couldn’t lock onto, like trying to make sense of colors outside the visible spectrum.
A spawning attribute? Interesting, very interesting.
Having gotten everything he wanted from the encounter, he leveled his staff at the spider, a single bolt of electricity shooting through its head and out its back, a sudden trickle of ascension energy telling him that it was dead with the single hit.
With a wave of his hand, the webs, now without a master, were drawn toward a single spot gem he’d released from his inventory, making the clean-up process a breeze. While the webs were unlikely to be anything worthwhile, it was always worth at least a little investigation.
With the room no longer shrouded in spider webs, Rory frowned as he noticed eight different doorways.
Sighing, Rory looked between the eight before chanting in his head, an infallible ritual for determining which path to follow.
Nearing the end of the chant, Rory said those last few words out loud.
“Catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers, let him go. Eeny, meeny, miny… mo. Alright, that way.”
Nodding to himself, satisfied with his method of decision-making, Rory strode forward confidently.
Now, how the hell do I get out of here?
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So, fun little trivia, this is not the first time you've seen this turtle. 5 internet points to anyone who can remember where else it showed up.
Comments
Nathaniel France
Very very close. It’s actually in the very first chapter!
Khoa Tran
Is the turtle in the prologue when the universe collapses?
