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BII: Chapter Thirty-four
🕑 Added 2023-05-01 20:32:43 +0000 UTCPlush bedding cradled him while he stared up into the vaulted ceiling. Eli rested in the comfort of his sanctum, but he couldn’t sleep. Thoughts flurried through his mind, one after the other. His delve into the dungeon had been thrilling, but beyond horrifying.
Eli had thrown himself into his sanctm immediately after messaging Rick and Roman so they knew he was alive and fine after his delve. He definitely felt shaken up though.
Vigilant Revelation had piloted his body.
Eli knew it wouldn’t be able to do that again even if he wanted it to, but that scared him more than the almost brush with death. It wasn’t that fighting spawn was intoxicating, but how he felt while he demolished them.
Every intention, thought, and purpose he had always unified in battle. Actions came so easily while the rest of the time he almost felt paralyzed.
Especially right now, when so many people counted on him to figure out dimensional travel.
Lies he told himself rolled around in his mind about how he hadn’t been wasting his time. Sure, he had taken every opportunity he had this past week to enjoy himself. To learn more about powers, this world, and the System. He had gone too far, though, and overindulged.
People want to help you. Vigilant Revelation pushed the thought forward in his own voice.
Eli bolted out of bed while he unequipped Vigilant Revelation. He pushed with Astral Starspace as he expanded his sanctum out into a full apartment with a balcony. It was as much space as he could dedicate to this version of sanctum, but he knew he could create multiple instances.
It was time to create his next power and go over his build plans now that he understood Stellar Body and how its base Celestial Embodiment worked, same with Aurora Stardust. Then he needed to make a serious attempt to figure out dimensional travel. Inspiration buzzed at him that he almost had it figured out.
[Unequipped Perks:
Blight
Double
Control Light
Control Water
Control Air
Cloud
Farsense
Mirage
Warp
Glow
Reflect
Perception
]
<You have two or more perks. Would you like to merge them to create a new power at evolution tier zero? Y/N>
Yes.
<Merging perks:
Double
Control Light
Control Water
Control Air
Cloud
Farsense
Mirage
Warp
Glow
Reflect
Perception>
<Processing…>
<Congratulations, Elias Newton! You have created Nimbus Sentinel Ev. 0/Lv. 0 (Epic)
Would you like to equip it?>
Eli smiled at the familiar fragments of light inside the power. All his other powers fit great, but this felt like it was the most his out of every other power he had ever customized or built.
He stepped out onto his balcony overlooking the vast void of swirling starspace. Silhouettes wreathed in stars and starlightning crackled in fractals from countless vectors.
Nimbus Sentinel flared around him in a radiant halo. An aura of resplendent clouds that stretched off of him like taffy as it reformed into a copy of himself.
Eli shivered as he felt his senses and experiences almost double as his nimbus relayed information back to him. The touch of cold concrete beneath its ‘feet’, how the faint breeze that Eli hadn’t noticed he had created whispered past them, and so much more.
He reached out to it and had it look behind him with a smile. Eli’s vision almost doubled as he had a near perfect 360 degree vision before accounting for his spatial field.
With a flex of will, Eli commanded it to use Astral Starspace to create a star. Nothing happened, but he still sensed a canal ready for him to push his other powers through it.
At this close of a range, it was negligible, yet a star flared in the center of its chest as the nimbus dispersed.
Plans shifted in that single moment.
Eli knew right away that he was going to merge Vigilant Revelation with Nimbus Sentinel. He was afraid of the potential for it to become truly intelligent, but it wasn’t a strange entity. It was Eli in a detached sort of way.
It was tempting to merge Aurora Stardust and Astral Starspace together, but he didn’t think it would work quite right. He felt like a lot would be cut from both powers to make them mesh.
Nimbus Sentinel reformed with a flicker.
Aurora Stardust gathered with a roil of ionized light as he repeated his attempt to have his nimbus use it. But he was able to push it through with an aurora flare that shimmered through the wisps of burst nimbus.
Okay. So he could cast his other powers through it fairly easily, but what about Stellar Body? Body of Light generally worked through his other powers.
Eli closed his eyes as he plumbed out his connection between him and the newly formed nimbus. With the influx of Stellar Body, vague smudges of detail turned crisp and vibrant. Instead of vaporous suggestions of hands, it turned into an exact replica of his own hands with his own fingers.
Light filtered through it as he commanded the nimbus to high five him with a sharp clap of impact. Eli winced with a smile since he felt the contact twice.
Space warped around him as his sanctum expanded his cozy niche balcony into a sprawling concrete patio. Enchantments layered through the material in a reinforced boundary.
Eli let his physical enhancements from Stellar Body and Aurora Stardust diminish as he lowered himself in a crouch across from his nimbus. Impressions in its cloudy eye sockets gazed back at him blankly.
Fight me.
Light flashed as the nimbus howled in a gust. Its fist sailed toward Eli’s cheek in a wild haymaker that he easily sidestepped. Hints of space warped as the nimbus blasted its missed punch toward him anyway.
He let it happen.
Misty warmth slapped against his cheek ineffectually. Nimbus Sentinel was far too weak to affect him, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be a tremendous tool.
Especially if he merged it with Vigilant Revelation and Aurora Stardust. The synergy would be insane, it’d be like he was in two places at once.
Eli’s eyes widened.
Realizations crystallized in a cascade as he teleported himself into the grounds of Newton estate. Hollow disbelief still rang through him at how much land and space Herbert’s parents had. He had been thinking about this all wrong.
It wasn’t that he needed to pierce through a sort of dimensional veil or master dimensional space.
He already had everything he needed.
Starspace burst from him in a sweeping pulse as he did his best to sense where everyone was. Adelaide and Rick sat together outside on a small patio with a grill going despite the fact they just had pizza… six hours ago.
Eli winced at how easily he had let time slip away from him after the delve and his attempt to relax, but that didn’t matter now. Herbert’s phone appeared in his hand at the same time he teleported next to Rick who was setting up an outdoor table while Adelaide tended to the sizzling steaks and kebabs on the grill.
“I think I figured it out. Do you know where Roman and Maeve are?” Eli blurted out startling Rick, who dropped some silverware with a clatter on the brick tiles. A part of him wondered how he was even startled, but he supposed that he didn’t push his capabilities to his max all the time either.
“What did you figure out?” Adelaide asked gently after she shut the grill lid.
“How to travel through dimensions. I’m not sure yet, but I want them here too when I… no when we try.” Eli rambled as he paced manic. He felt almost manic with excitement and the need to try. He had already typed three text messages to both of them. Introspection shone that maybe he should try to calm down and plan this properly.
Eli tried to equip Vigilant Revelation but was met with a cooldown message. He hadn’t missed seeing those.
<Vigilant Revelation is currently unequipped and on cooldown. No cooldown will occur if the power is capped>
<This power cannot be equipped again for 01:14:34>
Planar space surged in a black-and-white tide as Maeve appeared with Roman in tow. Both of them carried bags full of tools and various electronics.
“What’s the big emergency?” Maeve raised her eyebrow as she took in Eli’s wide eyes and the blank serious expressions on her parents' faces.
“Eli says he thinks he figured out dimensional travel.” Rick combed his fingers through his hair. Adelaide studied Eli carefully, as if she were afraid to let herself hope it was possible.
“You had a breakthrough already?” Roman set his own share of the bags down. “It was only last night that we built our prototype and saw our home dimension.”
“I think so. I’m not sure, but it makes sense. At least to me.” Eli nodded as he bored into subspace creating a portal that led to nowhere yet. Space fractured with a muted flash of starlight. Whenever he entered a dungeon, he felt far more dimensional space than he did normally.
Same with his sanctum. Even Sandra used a sort of hub in-between for her dimensional swap.
Astral Starspace strained against him as he unmoored his new subspace and shoved it out and away. Hairline fractures boomed into existence as spatial wind jetted into Eli’s face. Stellar Body crackled as it flooded him with new strength.
“Stop!” Maeve reached to jostle his shoulder, but the instant she touched him the fractures grew into fissures as his concentration eroded. She let go. He felt her use planar space to help him stabilize the portal.
Eli created a star that he looped and anchored into the new subspace. Chaotic thrashing across the portal eased into smooth ripples before its surface was entirely flat.
He stepped inside.
Tranquil pressure stamped against Eli’s body, mind, and will. Raw potential held him upright on the oscillating surface starspace. Sanctum twisted as he used it to anchor this subspace further.
Tons of soil dumped out of Astral Starspace into the ground as a new atmosphere swept across the nascent sky. Eli drew boulders of stone out of starspace and cut them into blocks. Tethers of starspace hoisted the blocks through air and space until he assembled a grand arch.
Dimensional space seeped and settled into the outermost confines of his new subspace. It felt soft and porous, unlike the rigid walls of space he normally felt.
Ripples sloshed through his new sub-dimension as everyone stepped through the portal.
Eli gathered himself as he walked in front of the arch.
He willed a corridor of space to appear between here and home. Just like how he used to teleport when he first created Spatial Control. Sheets of space grated and ground against him as the corridor stretched out infinitely.
Bands of starspace clamped around him. His veins blazed with stellar radiation. Clouds wept from his skin in a series of bursting doubles as Aurora Stardust and Nimbus Sentinel formed around him.
Blood squirted out of his nose as he wobbled on his feet.
Voices shouted, but he couldn’t hear them.
Flashes of other worlds streaked past him as his corridor stretched toward home.
Spatial bubble anchors tugged at him in New Faram and Farbrook. He pulled on both as he felt all three ends of the corridor align.
He felt Farbrook stretch out beneath him. It almost felt like he stood above a model version of his home. Offices, restaurants, and buildings sprawled out in a familiar aerial sight that he hadn’t seen since he learned to chain his teleports together.
Or when this all began and he flew with Lumencloud after fighting Daniels.
He saw the high school campus and the winding path that he and his sisters used to take to walk to school before he got his car. Eli smiled at the sight of streets that he remembered learning how to drive on with Dad.
Eli pulled his landing point closer and winced at the signs of devastation. Blackened scars from fire and signs of plant overgrowth left multiple streets and buildings in disarray. Mounds of the same greant spawn they saw last night littered the street.
People hunkered behind barricades with whatever weapon they could get their hands on. A few people wielded street signs. Others held rifles, pistols, or bows. Several lobbed parts of their powers to little effect.
Eli frowned at how underwhelming everyone’s powers felt.
Where was his family?
Space blurred until the other side clarified.
Lana bent and twisted gravity in dextrous loops and waves that sheared through a near endless tide of greants, metal insects, and the walking undead Theo created. Bullets of smoldering silverlight shot from her with an echoing crunch as it barreled through ranks of spawn.
Every spawn she killed stiffened as they petrified into silverlight that exploded into new waves of shrapnel.
Lyra fought beside her.
Reality fuzzed as the air turned poisonous before spikes of burning ice mulched through spawn. Incendiary explosions ignited with a thunderclap. Jets of arctic blue flame washed over them turning metallic insects, ghouls, and greants into ice sculptures that gradually burned.
Fingernails dug into his palm while he watched. Eli searched for his parents with clenched fists. He felt Roman stand beside him. Maeve and her parents lingered while they watched.
It didn’t take long for him to find Dad in the thick of it. He fought in a massive crevasse torn into the earth where the spawn rushed out of. Bolts of lightning lanced through spawn with sizzling pops. Blasts of kinetic force almost as strong as what Dorian had thrown around pulped into anything that got close to him.
Mom floated in the sky where she fired beams of decay that turned the ground into rotting mush. Any spawn that walked into it found themselves trapped as they squirmed. Rot clung to them, festering their outsides. A howling winter blizzard followed as they were cooked alive.
In the wake of winter’s wrath fought a towering man that could’ve been Eli’s twin. His eyes glowed white as he hacked and slashed his way through the hordes of spawn. Icicles loosed from him with the force of ballistic fire.
Limbs and other body parts bobbed in the air in its wake.
Plasma that felt like the cousin of Eli’s starlight strobed from Herbert as he threw himself deeper into the spawn brawl.
But he didn’t spot the lurking greant that rose with buds of regrowth flowering over its wounds. It reared a buzzing hammer back before it lunged—
Rick and Adelaide gasped as their powers surged, destabilizing the fragility of their pocket dimension. Maeve pulled them back.
A hail of bullets pulped into the greant turning it into woodchips.
Someone that could only be Romulus descended in a blur as they landed with an abrupt bounce. Mounted artillery set on Romulus’s shoulders spat out bursts of gunfire that mowed through countless spawn.
Roman shuddered next to him as he watched his own counterpart fly and fight in a suit that he could’ve made. It was less sci-fi and more fantasylike a futuristic knight’s plate.
But all of the spawn they fought felt weak.
Easy to kill, but innumerable. Meant to grind them down and soften them up so the true threats could attack.
Eli tugged on both ends of the corridor as he created another portal. Agony needled every cell of his skin, burrowed into his bones, and drenched his nerves in acid.
Spots wheeled across his vision. His consciousness wavered, but a portal cracked open in the arch of stones. He glared at the horde of spawn. They reminded him of hopeless scenes from countless fantasy movies besieging the defenders.
But it wasn’t a set piece that was under attack but his home.
Something slipped around him even as the portal formed. He felt his home dimension start to slip away as the portal snapped. Cracks as big as his wrist spiraled throughout the disk as starlightning lashed everywhere. Visions of other dimensions became clearer. What he saw and felt of home became murky as the other dimensions crowded in. Fear kindled in Eli’s gut, hot and viscous. Every time one of his portals broke, it created a volatile explosion that only got worse the more powerful his spatial power became.
Images crunched into his mind one after the other.
A series of mountain peaks with a gray ocean all around and at the top of the largest peak a silver dragon roared.
Urban buildings similar to what there were in home, but people in strange militaristic outfits fought with a startling display of power.
Monolithic buildings taller than any he had ever seen with enough advanced technology that he bet if Roman saw it too he might have hopped through.
White walls surrounding a country with nothing but a barren wasteland outside.
Blood dribbled over his fingers from the gouges in his palm. Eli let it happen as he wrung Aurora Stardust and Stellar Body dry and infused them both straight into Astral Starspace. He was going home and nothing would stop him.
Space stabilized and stilled with a heave of effort that pinched and tore at him. He wobbled as a wave of feebleness washed over him.
Home beckoned.
“I got you.” Maeve slung him over her shoulders. He swayed with the movement. It seemed like the momentum carried on in an endless cascade. Nausea spiked at him.
Cracks snapped through his shoddily built pocket dimension as the earth shook. Vibrations rattled its way up his bones as the portals connected for a moment. A riptide of space and gravity squelched around them.
Maeve sprinted into the archway and through the portal without any hesitation. Eli watched from a distance as Roman followed them through.
Fractures cracked through space with a roar as the sub-dimension buckled in two. Rick and Adelaide shouted as they struggled to follow them, but the portal in their backyard dragged them back into their own dimension.
Power burst out from the portal in a nova of force and heat that roasted a wave of greants, metallic insects, and ghouls. Concrete melted.
Screams hung in the air.
Eli flopped uselessly to help. To do anything.
Restoration slowly marched through his body as Stellar Body rebuilt the devastation of stars in his void and Aurora Stardust pulsed inside of him. Convulsions rattled him as Maeve created and snapped out dozens of lightning spears that exploded spawn.
Roman didn’t even stumble as he transformed into his armor and fired on the enemy. Bullets and electromagnetic rays bolted into the enemy ranks.
Desperation gnawed at him as he willed the claim power screen to open.
<You have selected Volcanic Devastation Ev. 1/Lv. 0 (Legendary). Would you like to equip it?>
No.
Eli pushed at the space around him. Astral Starspace whimpered with a blinding lance of pain that sent tears rolling down his cheeks. He sensed his parents and his sisters and executed a few trades, one after the other.
<You have initiated trades with:
Adelaide Newton for: Phytomancer’s Regency Ev. 3 (Rare)
Rick Newton for: Cybermancer’s Tech Ev. 3 (Uncommon)
Lana Newton for: Feral Steel Ghost (Ferrosteel Forge, Unrelenting Hunt)
Lyra Newton for: Volcanic Devastation Ev. 1 (Legendary) and Hunter’s Bounty Ev. 0 (Common)>
<Waiting for other party to respond.>
Eli bit his lip until the tang of iron coated his tongue.
Maeve continued to raze the enemy into smoldering piles of ash as she threw an endless array of lightning them. Roman grappled with an oversized iron hornet with a stinger like a hydraulic drill.
<Lyra Newton has accepted your trade.>
<Lana Newton has accepted your trade.>
<Rick Newton has accepted your trade.>
<Adelaide Newton has accepted your trade.>
An instant earthquake toppled the earth as an avalanche of obsidian appeared before shattering into a howl of volcanic glass. All the shriveled up greants already slain bloomed into lashing vines that pulverized their nearby brethren desperate to save them.
Lana ascended in a flash of silverlight and a twist of gravity before a meteor of silverlight burst out of her hands and crashed through the ranks.
Storm clouds rumbled as a tornado spun out of the crevasse where Dad held back the spawn he could.
Eli smiled.
Comments
Tyler Hooker
Of course the last available chapter is a cliff hanger
Corbin
Yeah, it's a lot better. I had it planned in my outline forever ago but completely didn't take in account how long it's been and that we're way past the middle half of the book now. D3 will still happen, I'm really excited for it when it does, but it'll be quite a bit later. This way too there'll be enough time to properly explore it so that'll be nice! Thank you for reading!
Paper_Link189
I think this is definitely a better fit for a) expectations, b) to reconnect the other POV's in the story. Not that I minded the Odyssey-esque detour to D3.
weas97
I really like where this is going with his new power and better perspective and use of space, as for the new dimension it's a bit confusing and interesting waiting to see how it all unfolds.
Corbin
That's fair! It was a bit of an abrupt introduction, but my intention is to keep this short to a couple of chapters to explore more of the system, powers, and dimensional stuff before diving back into D1/D2 and the issues going on there. It's like delving with dimensional travel, but I don't plan on officially establishing many more official dimensions throughout the rest of the book at least.
John Robert Westman
I don't know, if I like where this is going. There's still so much unknown and so much potential in both the original and the second dimension. Going to a third dimension feels like leaving too many unfinished things behind for me. I'd have liked halfway decent closure on things before spinning out into new issues.
QKelpFace
I…wow this was a great chapter. I quite honestly could feel the raw emotion when they were watching D1 battle, it was great. D3 I guess is your traditional fantasy type litrpg world. It also seems that different dimensions have different iterations of the system, perhaps depending on the culture or development of the dimension in question, like how because D1 and D2 are semi-parallels/developed sort of similarly they have near identical systems. Or maybe there’s an origin dimension and the farther your get from that dimension the more variety there is in the system, thus D1 and D2 are just close to each other in the multiverse. I do think that Roman gaining this new system would be better for him and his personality, the D1/D2 system didn’t feel like it fit him too well like it does for Eli. It seems this system is similar to Cyrus’s power sort of, maybe like the system in Rise of the Devourer with classes and such. Overall banger chapter, and don’t worry about the breaks we understand so take all the time you need!
Corbin
This was both a rough and easy chapter to write. Originally, I thought this would happen a bit later after the Stormshrine delve and some other stuff, but it felt more correct that this happened now. Those things will still happen, but differnetly. Let me know what you thought and I'll post the next chapter either this weekend or next Monday. Taking a bit more of a break with reduced chapter has been really helpful. See you next time and I hope you enjoyed reading!
