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The Gamer Chapter 1610 – Raid and Adventures 5 – Trials, Tests, and Suspicion
🕑 Added 2024-01-27 16:25:27 +0000 UTCThe corridor led them right up to the next tent. Canvas fluttered in strong drafts. Sea salt filled the air. Corpses lay scattered across the floor and between wooden booths. Eyes of lifeless merchants that still drew breath took lethargic note of the party.
John remained in the entrance area, eyes drifting over the torment of the locals with all the disassociation appropriate for the situation. He would play his expected role of the helpful man where expected, but he wouldn’t go out of his way to put a sandwich in the mouth of every NPC around. That was a waste of time, resources, and care he could put to better use with real people.
Instead, he appreciated how skilfully crafted the misery of this place was. From the loose clothing, over the notches on the corner posts of the tents, all the way to the wounds that marked the corpses. They were all burned or stabbed by some kind of weapon, neither of which were the kinds of wounds the Skinwalkers would inflict.
‘Guess there was a purge or something? The environmental storytelling works quite nicely here,’ the Gamer thought.
Of the rest of his party, Undine and Nightingale stuck close to him. Gnome stood just a few more steps removed. Aclysia was at the centre of Lydia, Nia, and Ehtra. The maid watched carefully, while those three inspected the corpses for any signs of monsters hiding under the skin.
“I think this one’s bone structure is different,” the pariah spoke up eventually.
“I’ve got a similar feeling for this one,” Ehtra reported and, in a callous move, attempted to rip the flesh off the corpse’s cheeks. “Your Innate Ability creates inconsistent oddities,” she complained when the meat turned out to be oddly resilient.
“It’s called gameplay before consistency,” the Gamer told her. “Wouldn’t be much of a challenge if we could do whatever we wanted.”
“Feels like the brain rot of a mind that has become too incapable of taking simple solutions to obvious problems,” Ehtra stated and stood up. “A repeated problem in this age. Everyone seems to be so taken up with the ways things should be done that they don’t bother actually doing it.”
“I think that’s a fair critique of the modern world,” John relented. “For games, however, we typically limit ourselves because solving problems with a select set of tools is engaging. Can’t play catch if one of us wins by dropping the ball, can we?”
While they had their little exchange, Nia walked to one of the stalls. “Is there a way to force a Skinwalker to become active?”
The question seemed to trigger a response, the NPC she addressed turning to the blonde. “No, but we have some of the inhibition salve.” He gestured at a pot in the corner. “You might as well take it… not like it makes a difference now…. Apply it to whoever you believe to be a Skinwalker. If you are correct, they’ll be prevented from reaching full strength.”
Nia did not waste any further words on the NPC, instead walking straight to the pot. She retrieved two vials of some kind of brackish green oil from the piece of cracked pottery. “Isn’t that convenient?” Ehtra drawled. “Two vials for two targets.”
“It’s the second tent. It’ll probably get progressively harder, then eventually we won’t have enough vials for everyone, among other mechanics introduced,” John told her. “Might even be that, eventually, the Skinwalkers are among the alive people, not just the corpses.”
Nia handed one of the vials off to Ehtra and the two poured it over the chests of their respective targets. There was no visual sign of whether or not they had been right. They would find out in a moment anyhow.
Outside the tent was another connective segment, rimmed by black stone walls. This one was a little more open than the previous corridor. Before they could advance, they heard the twin gargling of two Skinwalkers behind them.
The theory played out as expected. Neither of the two humanoid monsters that followed them was in its empowered state. The carapace covered creatures slowly stepped forwards, claws primed to strike.
“Everyone, fall back. Nia, your time to test,” John ordered.
The pariah gave them enough time to build some distance. To avoid any nasty surprises by illusions, John dropped a few Unstable Arcanas in the area. The orbs pulsed once, arcane fire breaking in bright silver on the surface of the carapace, dealing seemingly nothing in terms of damage.
Nia lifted her eyelid and the world screeched.
The Unstable Arcanas were extinguished in an instant. A fractal asymmetry of patterns shot like the waves of an explosive impact through the air. Shapes and impossible faces surfaced in the gaps between distortions. Even with her back turned towards them, the blonde’s out-worldly presence imprinted itself on John’s field of view as a headache and the iron taste of blood in his mouth.
Aclysia, Undine and Gnome took a unified inhale of sharp pain through clenched teeth. Nightingale lifted a wing to cover herself from the sight. Ehtra collapsed to one knee, holding her head with her left hand. She struggled back to her feet, while Lydia remained battle ready. The most human out of all of them, from a physical perspective, the half-elemental was the least affected by the concentrated anti-magic.
John could actively feel his eyes become bloodshot. Every heartbeat pumped the venom of intense stress through his system. His MP regeneration halted, then slowly ticked backwards. The raw might of the Great Empty One’s gift was enough to ignore the Friendly Fire clause.
For all the suffering they endured, the effect on the enemies was remarkable. The monsters gradually fell apart, the carapace and then the flesh behind it dissolving as if eaten away by acid. It only ended when the two creatures disappeared fully, their entirely magical being completely eaten away by the Blue Maiden’s gaze.
The world only stopped screaming when the cover was back in place.
“That appears… useful,” Nightingale hissed, her tone betraying the same conflict that went through everyone’s mind at that moment. Useful tools were best used, but useful tools that also induced killer headaches were hopefully attached to some excuse not to use them.
“Not as useful as you might think,” John said, after checking something. “I didn’t get EXP from those two.”
“That would happen when you outright delete an enemy,” Aclysia groaned.
“I am glad.” Nia faced them all again. Bits of alien intensity still hung around her like an aura of pure terror. “I can still be useful to you the normal way.”
“You’re useful to me even if I dislike your powers,” John assured her. Not the smoothest way he could have formulated that, but his head was still pounding and Nia knew him well enough to take the best way he meant those words. “Was that taxing to you in any way? You don’t look notably faded.”
Nia inspected her own hand for three seconds before answering. “I suspect that these being false entities makes it easier to undo them,” the pariah answered. “They are soulless, just magic shaped into a hostile form. There is no history nor will to them, besides what they were programmed to pursue.” She lifted her gaze to John. “It came at little cost. Real enemies would be harder. I think. I will not test this.”
John just nodded. The idea of Nia strolling up to one of the Elemental Islands and snuffing out the existence of whatever elementals were in her field of view for a test was horrifying on every level. ‘I hate it when I understand why the average person doesn’t want to be anywhere near her,’ the Gamer thought.
The other experiments were considerably less intrusive.
Nightingale had already confirmed that her illusions worked on the enemies. Stretching her influence further, the lady of the night could take one person out of the fight by completely blinding and deafening them, two for some time if she really pushed herself. The result was a flailing and by no means harmless enemy, but it was still a very useful tool when it came to group combat. Her chains were an additional crowd control tool. Whether the power of her magic would persist after the break of dawn was a subject for later.
Lydia grew more comfortable with her extended arsenal as she used it. She now had access to three kinds of metal reliably. Strimata’s Fusional wires and otherwise separated pieces made for good precision tools, while the Hydra Steel allowed her powerful area coverage of the brutish kind. The armour’s ability to turn light into a short-lived metal was comparatively useless, although it did come handy once or twice by turning the ever-flowing sunlight of her cape into an armament. It was a supportive ability at best.
Ehtra did her best to insert herself into the group dynamic and she did it mostly well. It was strictly impossible for her to truly partake in the combat with the same degree of fluidity as the others. Even Nightingale, who had not gathered the same extensive combat experience as the others, still understood the rest of the harem by heart. Ehtra, by contrast, had millennia of personal combat experience and still knew fairly little about most of the harem.
It was to the Metracana’s credit that she did not let her fighting preferences take over. She did as John ordered, for better and for worse. Following commands to the letter was useful when the one giving them did not make mistakes. The one or two times his orders were suboptimal and Ehtra did not fill the gap intuitively, she let it pass without critique. She appeared to understand that he was learning to integrate her into his plans as well.
For the time being, it was better to have an overly dependent soldier than a chaotic one.
Their progress slowed as they advanced. As John had guessed, the riddle of finding who the Skinwalkers were got increasingly more complex. By the seventh tent, they had the first instance of one of the live people being their target. By the tenth, they first dealt with the issue of there being less of the salve than suspected targets. By the fifteenth, things had reached a degree of complexity that they weren’t sure if they got all the right targets.
The combat arenas were always some kind of corridor walled off by the black stone of the shoreline. What the cause of the projectiles was, they still hadn’t found out, but the fliers just remained close to the ground anyhow. The Skinwalkers, even if not empowered, were sturdy and their illusions made it difficult to follow them, but by and large handling them was a straightforward Stat check that they passed. Unless they overplayed their hand massively, they would be fine.
“How many more of these will we have to deal with?” Ehtra groaned, while they approached the twentieth tent. At that point, they had been at it for six hours straight.
“This is probably the last one,” John told both her and the weaponized maid that was clearly itching to get to the kitchen. “I think we’ve exhausted all of the mechanics, so there’s going to be one final ‘test’ and then we move on to a boss fight.”
Whether he was right or not was not immediately apparent upon entering. The tent contained a singular stall, located right in the middle of it. Planks of wood had been placed in a roughly circular shape. Within it sat another merchant. This one, however, was far removed from the lethargic merchants they had come across so far.
“Not thick enough… not nearly thick enough,” the man mumbled in a hazy voice, his blood-soaked hands gliding over the splintered surface of the planks taken from ship carcasses. The man grinned ear to ear, wore only a loincloth, and was covered by a sheen of sweat and the crimson extracted from the carcasses that lay scattered around him. “The blood… I need the impure blood!”
“For what?” John asked, because he felt that was the expected question.
The man answered without ever stopping his bloody finger painting. “The boar… the great boar demands a sacrifice… nothing but the thickest blood of the great invader will do… Spill it… Spill it over his stone! PRAISE BE!”
The man suddenly contorted towards the Gamer and his party and lunged. Aclysia was between them the moment he leapt from the planks of his stall and cut the man open from shoulder to waist. He turned to dust before any of the gore could rain on them.
“Hint to unlock an extra boss, I suppose?” John answered the unasked question. “Any salves?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Gnome reported, already foraging for any of the cracked pots they usually found the vials in.
“Hmm, then I guess we’re done with this phase?” The Gamer headed for the exit of the tent and poked his head out. Out there was a kill zone, littered with arrow covered bodies and bonfires. Soldiers patrolled all around. The embers rising from the fires lingered around their armour.
Most notable among all of them was a giant of a man, easily three metres tall and of broad build. Like the other soldiers, all of his human features were covered by the thick plate. It was custom-made for him, but of the same general style. Lazily, he dragged a greatsword after him as he walked in circles around a central bonfire.
John pulled his head back. “Alright, the first boss is out there,” he told everyone. “Let’s call it here for now and take our lunch break. We can run our face into it afterwards.”
“It would also be wise to readjust your group,” Nightingale suggested.
John just nodded, the thought had crossed his mind, but he kept it until after he had appeased his stomach.
They were back to the manor about five minutes later.
Comments
Funatic
Dangit
Fenbags
Looks like this and the previous chapter are both labelled as 'raid and adventures 5' Everything else this chapter is banging though, the boss looks sick
Phraxius
Whatever the Sole Survivor is could be useful for Fusion's so-so intelligence services, if it's conceptually related to the Skinwalkers.
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