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EC Book 4, Chapter 25 - Bait and Switch
🕑 Added 2024-03-20 01:35:15 +0000 UTCThe first step to their plan was finding the errant soulbloom in question. Despite Tinsel's words, it didn't seem eager to erupt out of the ground and attack them—in fact, if Misa hadn't known any better, she would've guessed it was avoiding them. The soulbloom flowers in the field shifted around from time to time, some of them moving away from the pair, others moving toward them.
They'd left Tinsel back in Soulbloom Station. There wasn't really a need for it to come with them—Tinsel wasn't a fighter. Really, none of the items brought to life by the soulblooms seemed to be; they were all low-level constructs at best, dangerous perhaps to new adventurers, but not to experienced ones like Misa and Sev.
The real danger, it seemed, lay in the soulblooms themselves. Now that they were close enough, Misa could see each of them tagged with the system's labels and levels.
<Level 87 Soulbloom Flower>
<Level 92 Soulbloom Flower>
<Level 1,157 Soulblossom>
The last one gave Misa pause, and she narrowed her eyes, stopping in place and holding a hand out to stop Sev from moving forward. He followed her gaze, and she caught a sharp intake of breath.
"What in the hells is that level?" he hissed, suddenly on guard. Misa just shook her head slowly. She was cautious, of course, but... [Intuitionist] wasn't screaming danger at her.
Not yet, anyway.
"Guessing it's something to do with all the souls it's got mashed together in there," Misa said quietly, keeping her voice low. There was no evidence that the Soulblossom would be able to hear her, but she didn't feel like taking any chances. "A hundred level 10s added together would add up to about a thousand."
"That's definitely not how the system is supposed to calculate levels," Sev said with a frown, although he'd calmed a little; that explanation made more sense to him than a sudden encounter with a monster that was over ten times the known level cap, beyond even the Overseer-type monsters they'd had to fight before.
"We should still be careful," Misa muttered. "Not sure what's going to provoke it."
"We're going to need to get closer for me to try to heal it anyway," Sev said. "Let's just take it slow. One step at a time."
"Right," Misa said. She didn't protest, although she did make sure to lead the way. There was no reaction from the Soulblossom. One step closer, two steps, three...
The ground trembled beneath her feet.
Shit.
Her block was instinctive, at this point. She felt herself twist through all the layers of reality she needed to to manifest the right weapon to block the Soulblossom's strike; her mace became a shield, and then something beyond, a manifestation of fire and rot atttached to her hand. The Soulblossom struck at her, earth wrapped in roots lurching to crush them both, bot it screeched in pain the moment it made contact with her makeshift shield.
Misa grinned. Good to know that skill still worked. "Sev?" she called.
"I'm okay!" Sev called back. "Working on it!"
"Better hurry!"
The worm-thing was fast, and it didn't seem particularly inclined on following any of the laws of physics when it came to how it moved. Misa watched it pulse through the air, swallowing swathes of space like it was dirt, the entire length of its body contracting and expanding as if it was pushing that air through its body to move.
Or it was swimming in the air. One or the other.
She was already running a multitude of other selves, testing the waters with fighting this thing. One version of her charged directly for the head, wielding only her mace; that version was immediately swallowed up when the Soulblossom's trajectory abruptly changed. Another version fired arrows from a distance, loading those arrows with concepts of Order and Untangling—but she could sense how ineffective that was. Something about the sheer weight of the hundred souls within the Soulblossom acted as a kind of shield against her concepts, breaking them down before they could penetrate very deep into the dirt.
Fine. She had other methods at her disposal. Her Strength stat was high enough now that she could let loose physically and do enough damage for it to be worthwhile; the only real concern here was the level of the Soulblossom and how much health it had—
The Soulblossom roared and struck at her, veering almost ninety degrees in the air to charge directly toward her with inhuman speed. Misa gritted her teeth, glancing behind her. Soulbloom Station was there. She couldn't just dodge this or it'd smash straight into the station, along with the train they needed to get to the next part of the dungeon.
Once again, she blocked.
A visceral pain tore through her as she did so, though the shield manifested on her arm and once again repelled the worm; Misa let out a growl of pain, collapsing briefly onto her hands and legs before forcing herself back onto her feet.
"Shit, that hurt," she said. "Sev, it's doing something—part of it can get through my block!"
"I'm almost ready!" Sev called back, sounding a little panicked; Misa wondered briefly if Sev was also struggling with his skills, and then she didn't have time to wonder at all anymore.
The worm was charging at her again. She maneuvered herself this time, putting herself on the opposite side of the Soulblossom so it wouldn't crash into the station if she dodged it; this time, she leapt over the damn thing, using a few of her alternate-timeline Endless Echoes selves to judge how high she would need to jump to avoid getting eaten.
Then she split into several copies of herself with [Me, Myself and I]. There was jarring sensation she'd never felt before as she did it, though she didn't have time to think about it; she directed two of her copies to charge directly for the midsection of the worm, ripping into it with heavy strikes of her mace.
It did enough damage to tear away chunks of dirt, exposing tangles of glowing roots that dangled awkwardly in the air. Extra copies of her tore away at those glowing roots, grabbing them by the fistful and ripping them away from the main body of the worm, eliciting an angry roar as they did so—Misa noticed how difficult it was, even with her Strength stat. It was like she was ripping at cords of steel instead of plant fiber.
The Soulblossom was clearly hurt, though. It writhed about angrily in the air with no apparent target, thrashing and crushing large swathes of the ground as it did so; Misa winced when she saw several smaller soulblooms get torn up by its desperate struggles. A few copies of her tried to pluck them out of the way to save them, but they didn't quite get there in time. Those that did were quickly knocked away, sent sprawling in the dirt.
Misa charged in herself. The best thing she could do was to make the entire thing smaller — and to that effect, she and all her copies targeted the same segment of the worm, bashing into it to dislodge the dirt and then physically ripping away clumps of root. The worm thrashed, but Misa reacted; a half-dozen arrows of Immobility kept it relatively pinned in place.
The smaller the target, the less damage it could do.
The roots burned at her as she tore them apart. [Intuitionist] called to her, warning her about her current course of action—the roots were damaging her in some fundamental way, even if the system wasn't reflecting it. But her strategy was working. The worm was trying to turn back around and snap at her, but she was too far up its body for it to be able to turn enough.
She ignored the warning, though her hands burned and her vision started to blur. If she faltered here, there was every chance she would no longer have the mental faculties to properly defend Sev. She was in too deep, as he'd say; the strategy worked. It cost her too much to switch to another one.
And she couldn't risk what happened with Irvis happening again. Not a second time. They didn't have Vex and Derivan here to pull off a last-minute rescue, and Sev was their healer. If he was the one that got hurt—
There was a dull thud that Misa distantly recognized as one half of the Soulblossom splitting off and crashing into the ground; the upper half continued to writhe in the air, even with no support. She glanced down at her hands, and was momentarily surprised to see not her flesh, but the bones beneath. Acid-blue dripped from her bones.
She didn't react. Part of her brain had trouble processing what she was seeing; the system normally replaced damage like this in a matter of a second, but it was almost like the system was operating on a delay. Like it was struggling.
A moment later, her hands were back to normal, and the sight of her own bones felt like a fever dream. Misa shook her head, trying to clear the sight from her memories. "Sev—" she started again.
"Done!" Sev called back, and she was nearly sent sprawling as a massive flood of divine energy suddenly flooded the Soulblossom. It was so strong she could feel the magic seeping into her, too, healing her from whatever malady she'd inflicted herself with by manually tearing those roots apart.
Maybe. A small part of her whispered that perhaps the damage she'd inflicted hadn't been temporary. That perhaps she'd damaged something permanently.
That part of her was silenced as the soothing warmth of Sev's magic suffused her. The Soulblossom stopped writhing, and a moment later, she felt the clumps of earth she was sitting on fall apart; the roots no longer held on quite so dearly to everything around them. Dozens of shadows split away from the roots, racing toward Soulbloom Station.
Misa stared at the sight. It was kinda pretty, in a way.
"Misa," Sev said, concerned. "What was that? I felt something weird coming from you."
"What?" Misa blinked, shaking it off. "Oh, uh... Nothin'. It was nothing."
A long pause. The two of them stared at one another. The only sound in the field was the sound of crumbling dirt, wind, and one no-longer-sick level 60 Soulblossom slowly rooting itself back into the dirt.
Sev raised an eyebrow.
"Okay," Misa admitted. "I might've pushed myself more than I was supposed to."
