orthoros
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118 - Target Practice
🕑 Added 2023-11-18 06:08:46 +0000 UTCNew Quest!
A massive threat has been spotted near the village of Oomah. The giant gelatinous cube (T8) is devouring everything in its path to satiate its unending hunger. Stop it before it destroys the village and devours their fields.
Goals:
Kill the giant gelatinous cube before it reaches the village.
Rewards:
2 level-ups.
1 ton of gelatinous acid.
Accept?
Y/N
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“Can anybody tell me what the fuck a gelatinous cube is?”
“It’s exactly what the name implies,” Nimma was the one to answer first. “A big cube made of some sort of gelatinous… stuff. They’re extremely slow but considered almost unkillable. They also are known for being able to dissolve almost anything they manage to put inside of themselves.”
“I don’t especially like that “almost unkillable” part of your explanation,” I said, worry tinting my voice. “How do you kill them?”
“Well there’s lots of reasons for why they’re hard to kill, chief among them that they really have no weak spots,” Nimma continued. “If you cut them apart, the separated parts will move on their own and eventually fuse back together. The only real way is to… just hit them until they stop moving.”
“That’s it? Just whack it until it keels over?”
“Essentially,” Nimma confirmed. “Oh, and physical attacks are usually a bad idea since whatever you attack them with tends to get dissolved.”
“So what you’re telling me is that this battle is going to be vastly in my favor?” I almost couldn’t believe my luck. A big, slow monster that needed to be hit a lot and hard to kill, that was close to immune to physical attacks? This would barely be different from hitting a training dummy to me, and probably just about as dangerous to fight.
“It would appear so,” Nimma shrugged.
“You really lucked out on that one,” Andrius commented. “Gelatinous cubes are pretty rare, but not too hard to deal with if you get a bunch of mages together to fight it.”
“I suppose the main difficulty would come from the fact that the traveler is meant to kill it mostly by themselves,” Orbos agreed. “A lot of damage is needed to kill a regular one, not to mention a giant one.”
“As far as I am aware the quests that are generated are completely random,” Lando supplied. “It shouldn’t take into account the capabilities of the one taking on the quest. You got lucky this time, but it could have swung the complete other way as well…”
“Are there monsters that are immune to magic?” I asked, dread setting in as I thought about having to fight something like that with my completely magic-focused build.
“In extremely rare cases, yes,” Nimma confirmed my newest fear. “Complete magic immunity only appears in monsters above the fifteenth tier, though. Below that they’re usually only immune to a certain type of magic, or two, or three. Same for physical damage, by the way.”
“I should probably look into branching out a bit before I get to that point, then…”
“That, or join a team,” Orbos gestured around the table. “Let somebody else cover your weak points.”
“I have to agree with Orbos here,” Nimma nodded. “It’s usually better to have a group of specialists instead of having a few people that can’t do anything particularly well.”
“I’ve spotted the cube,” we all jumped a bit when Redax’s voice could suddenly be heard. “It’s out west and at the speed it’s going it’s probably gonna reach the village in about two hours.”
“That’s plenty of time, thanks, Redax,” I couldn’t help but wonder how he had left the room to scout without any of us noticing. He would have had to open a door or a window to get out, right? Or did he? I hated how good he was at being stealthy, and I really wanted to learn his tricks.
“So… you’re sure you can take it down?” Lando asked, clearly relieved that his village wasn’t going to be destroyed today.
“Probably,” I replied. “If it’s really how they said, I shouldn’t have too much trouble with it. If there’s one thing I’ve got in spades, it’s firepower.”
“I can confirm that,” Redax said, his voice emanating from the empty space directly behind me. I barely managed to conceal how startled I was, silently cursing him because he was clearly showing off at this point. My feelers, once again, couldn’t even pick him up. I should look into upgrading them so shit like this wouldn’t happen when it mattered. It was all fun and games now, but if something managed to sneak up on me like Redax was capable of, my life would be cut short.
“Well, best not waste too much time,” I said, lightly slapping the table with my “hands”. “I should probably go throw some spells at that thing, see what sticks.”
“I wish you the best of luck,” Lando said, standing up from his chair, which the rest of us took as the signal to get up as well. “And thank you again for choosing our village to generate the quest for you.”
We exchanged a few more quick pleasantries and shortly after we were back outside again. It didn’t take too long for me to figure out how Redax had managed to track the gelatinous cube as quickly as he had. The thing really did its name justice, after all. A quick glance west revealed the monster in question, easily towering over the buildings of the village. It was in the middle of dissolving an entire skyscraper, the building's only offense being that it dared to exist between the cube and the village.
A quick strategy meeting later, we were on our way to meet the giant cube of gelatinous mass. A mere two minutes later we were standing on the roof of a skyscraper, looking at the glacially moving gelatinous cube. The thing truly was huge, taking the shape of a square at least a hundred meters wide on each side. It wasn’t terribly far away from the village, but at the rate it was moving it would indeed take it about two hours to get there. It was largely transparent, and we could watch it dissolve everything it moved through.
The thing actually kind of looked like a massive cube of ballistic gel.
Standing here on the roof, looking down at the gelatinous cube, I couldn’t help but not feel threatened at all. It barely moved, didn’t have any proper attacks according to Andrius, and generally didn’t look very dangerous. Of course, if I were dumb enough to throw myself in there, I would probably take a decent amount of damage while struggling to get back out. Now, I could see the danger the monster posed, as it was essentially an unstoppable force of nature. When you were in the way of one of those things, you either moved out of the way or met a gruesome fate. For physical fighters, it would prove a nightmare to get rid of it, but for me? Easy.
Its resemblance to a block of ballistic gel made me want to use it for target practice.
“I think I’m going to take it easy and test out a few spells that I didn’t really get to experiment with before if that’s alright with you guys.” I said to the rest of my “team”.
“Sure, go for it,” Nimma said. “We’re just here to observe, mostly. We’ll be watching from over there, so go nuts.”
With those words Nimma and Orbos took a massive leap and landed a few roofs away, leaving Andrius behind. “I’d like to stay close by and watch if you don’t mind.”
“By all means,” I replied, happy to have the educated mage nearby in case I had any questions. “If you got any bright ideas on some funky magic usage, be sure to let me know.”
“Definitely,” Andrius nodded and took a few steps away. “What are you going to start with?”
“I was always curious what would happen if I pumped a ton of mana into the elemental bolt spells,” I said, beginning to charge a wind elemental bolt. “Like, A LOT of mana, you know?”
“I get that,” Andrius chuckled. “Most mages that know the spell usually try something like this at least once, although I doubt they usually got a stupid amount of mana like you do. I sure didn’t when I tried.”
“Oh, you did this before?” My curiosity was piqued. “How much did you charge it with?”
“About ten thousand?” Andrius replied while scratching his chin. “It seemed like a waste to go further than that, and at the time that was most of my MP.”
“Let’s go for a fun one hundred thousand then, shall we?” I asked, a little bit of mania entering my voice.
“That… okay?” Andrius seemed to be taken aback. “Just how much MP do you have?”
“Secret,” I decided to tease him a bit. “Now, let me focus on charging this bad boy up.”
I did say that, but with how much practice I had with infusing MP into spells(or void seeds), I could charge something like this in my sleep. Instead, I directed my attention toward the giant gelatinous cube and queried the archive of asphon to find out some more details about my slow-moving adversary.
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Giant Gelatinous Cube (T8)
This monster is one of the select few below the tenth tier, categorized as a calamity. Although they move incredibly slow and have no attack skills, if you find yourself in the path of one of these behemoths, usually the only option is to pack up shop and move. They are considered almost unkillable and, unless there just happens to be a team of high-tiered warriors around, there is little chance this one will die.
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The text blurb told me more of what I already knew, although it was interesting seeing it being categorized as a “calamity”.
“Hey, Andrius, what does it mean when a monster is classified as a calamity?”
“Pretty much what the name implies, calamity-class monsters are almost impossible to fight, and where they appear only death and destruction follow,” Andrius shrugged, looking down at the cube. “They’re usually a bit more menacing than this one, though. And more aggressive.”
“Do you think I’m a calamity-class monster?” I asked as a joke, but Andrius seemed to consider his next words heavily.
“Probably not… yet,” he answered after a while. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re extremely deadly and I wouldn’t want to be at the wrong end of a 100k MP elemental bolt, but to be a calamity you need to be hard to kill too, not just being able to hit hard.”
“He’s right, I could take you out so easily if I wanted to.”
I almost lost control of my spell when I suddenly heard Redax’s voice behind me, once again being reminded that he could sneak up on me with no issue.
“COULD YOU NOT?” I shouted angrily. “I’m charging up a literal extinction ball here and I don’t want to accidentally destroy the village myself!”
“Sorry…” Redax’s voice faded away and I angrily grumbled to myself at how squishy I was.
To distract myself I decided to dive a bit deeper into the archive. After all, I’d learned how to use it properly and it would be a waste not to do so. Over the next few minutes, while charging the spell, I found out quite a few interesting things about the gelatinous cube before me. For example, they had resistance to pretty much every type of damage in existence, excluding something called “shifting magic”, which they had a weakness against. They possessed a high, passive HP recovery, had a massive MaxHP, and could fuse back together if parts of it got cut off.
They were a highly evolved type of slime, that started out at tier zero. I felt a bit of kinship toward the big cube until I remembered this thing spawned into existence a few minutes ago and didn’t know the struggle of starting out at the bottom of the food chain. All of this was terribly interesting, but I had to take this information with a grain of salt. After all, this was data from the archive which was a generalized data bank. Every monster was unique and there were bound to be some deviations on a case-by-case basis.
“You got any idea what shifting magic is?” I once again broke the silence by asking a question to the walking magic encyclopedia.
“It’s a very rare type of magic that allows you to… well, shift things,” Andrius replied a bit sheepishly. “At very high levels it allows you to shift some wild shit. Like, in this one book I’ve read there was an example where they would shift the soul away from a body, leaving the target an empty husk. It’s scary stuff, to say the least.”
“Sounds like something I’d never want to be on the receiving end of,” I shuddered, suddenly understanding why the almost invincible gelatinous cube would be weak against that. Shifting magic was probably effective against almost everything.
By this time the once tiny ball of wind magic above me had become a raging maelstrom, barely contained by my willpower. The moment I crossed the threshold of 50k MP, infusing more mana into the spell became a lot harder and I suddenly found myself having to concentrate a lot harder to not lose control of the spell. The more MP I pumped into the spell, the harder it got to control. It was like I was trying to ride one of those rodeo machines turned up all the way to maximum. I did the best I could, but as I approached the 80k MP threshold, I knew that I needed to shoot this thing off or risk blowing it up on myself.
“I’m at my limit here,” I informed anybody within listening range. If the void language wasn’t spoken through mana vibrations, there would have been no way Andrius could have heard me over the raging storm above me, but thankfully he did, signaling the others that shit was about to go down. “Here we go!”
I let the spell fly and as soon as it left my control pandemonium descended on us. The wind picked up drastically and I had to employ all my strength to not get flung away. Andrius had conjured up a shield, reminding me that I could do so as well. The shield protected me from the buffeting winds and I could properly witness the moment of impact. The spell had grown to about a third of the cube’s size while I’d charged it and it expanded even more once it found its target.
I could tell that the spell wasn’t nearly as effective as it should have been, most likely due to the resistances of the cube, but everything around it was getting absolutely decimated. The sharp winds were cutting apart everything within its area of effect, the spell itself slowly transforming into a small tornado. The spectacle continued for a full minute before things started to die down, letting us get a clear picture of the aftermath.
Most everything in the affected area had been razed to the ground, but in the center of it all was the gelatinous cube. It was looking worse for wear, having big chunks of it cut out and having shrunk by about half, but it was still alive. What a hardy little bugger.
“How much MP was that?” Andrius asked, leaning over the edge of the roof to get a better look.
“About eighty-thousand,” I replied. “I couldn’t keep the spell stable beyond that. Opinions?”
“You’ll have to raise your intelligence attribute to go above that. Aside from that, it looked about the same as the S-tier wind spell, Tornado,” he replied after a while. “Considering that Tornado costs about eight thousand MP to cast, this is a massive waste of MP, but I guess it’s nice to be able to cast it without knowing the actual spell?”
“I suppose,” I agreed, although needing to infuse mana for just about ten minutes also deducted a lot of points. “Well, it’s not like I’m going to use this a lot. This was more of a test. You know, for fun.”
“Oh for sure,” Andrius nodded sagely. “This isn’t usable in a fight at all. Can’t even use it as a surprise attack, considering how loud it is while charging up.”
“True, true,” I looked down at the gelatinous cube, watching smaller pieces of it returning to the main body. “I think I’m going to let it heal up a bit, try out fire elemental bolt next.”
“I’d love to see that as well.”
“Alright, let’s take a break for now. It looks like it won’t be moving anytime soon, which gives me ample time to restore some of my MP.”
I spent the rest of the day using the gelatinous cube as my personal target dummy. Throwing overcharged spells at it to see their effects, letting it heal up between the spells. The fire spell was just as expected, a rather massive explosion. The earth one was almost pointless, as the giant boulder it conjured was casually dissolved by the gelatinous cube. I tried the water spell twice, once shooting it off as a highly pressurized stream, and the other time letting the whole thing go at once, causing a bit of a flood.
The village was apparently catching some stray effects of my spells, but they had a whole team of mages on standby to mitigate or redirect anything that could actually endanger their fields. After having had my fun, I went absolutely ham with void spells on the poor guy, Andrius being especially impressed by the void rend spell. I hadn’t shown it to him before, since it was almost pointlessly strong. It was fun to fire off several of them at once, though, even if I could only manage three concurrent castings.
Eventually, the punishment was too much for the poor gelatinous cube and I finally got my kill notification from the system. This had been a lot more fun than I’d thought it would be, but I had finally completed my first village-tier quest!
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Bit long, this one. Just above 3k words, which is unusually long. :)
Comments
Brandon Terry
I’m kinda scared for the people what a void attuned mana bolt charged that much with all his advantages with that element would do to the environment. Either complete evaporation or a hole torn through reality so violently not even the system could stop it
Orthoros
it's just a coincidence that this took 4 days, I swear...
