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Edge of apocalypse 84
🕑 Added 2023-07-12 15:13:53 +0000 UTCThe quest basically wanted Albert to go all out against the voidlings that inhabited the floating island (which he still thought was just a cave system). And so he did. The skills he would have to use were, in order of how he wanted to go at it:
- Teleportation: the hardest one to weaponize and therefore the first one he wanted to get over with. The idea was to leave the easy stuff at the end so he could have some fun with it after the hard work was done.
- Earth Shard: possibly the weakest of the truly offensive ranged skills. Considering that Bullet Time was out of the question, he would have to aim and shoot before the voidlings began to jump around like crazy. He still had his shield ring, but having to kill ten of them meant that he could only mess up once before he had to stop and recharge, or risk being injured. The latter was acceptable in theory, but without total pain nullification it would hurt a lot. Fortunately, healing touch was at level 7, and was capable of even regrowing lost limbs provided he had the mana for it.
- Strengthening: easy. He could just use it together with the sword to make quick work of the voidlings.
- Fireball: provided that the monsters were flammable, or at least weak to flames (which they were, given what happened last time Albert used a fireball on one of them), using this skill should be the easiest of them all. A good occasion to unwind and relax.
It was crazy to think how Albert had become so used to system-related shenanigans that he now considered burning voidlings to a crisp akin to relaxing. But he did, and for a while he was acutely aware of how much things had changed since the first time he had been forced to fight something by the system. Perhaps he was becoming a battle-hardened war machine, bit by bit.
Certainly, he was doing so much more willingly than if the system had just thrown him into an apocalyptic battlefield. The system he had was much friendlier than most systems he had read about in the novels, which might not seem like much but was actually a very, very good thing.
“Okay, time to roll.” Albert said under his breath, somewhat respectful of the silence of the caves. He activated [Perception], tuned it to Entropy and went out hunting.
Voidlings were, as the name suggested, creatures of the void. Which, incidentally, was also the nature of the second kind of energy the place was filled with other than psionic. Using Entropy vision, Albert was able to see where the void was densest, simply because it appeared like a black hole that sucked in Entropy, only for it to never be seen again.
This made spotting voidlings rather easy, since they were big enough that they influenced pockets of entropy large enough that they were visible from afar. Did this mean that, close to a voidling, something happened like the Practice Effect in David Brin’s novels? Did chaos revert back to order, there?
There would be time for all these questions, later. Albert had already decided to hunt first, and experiment later. He also had another experiment in mind, involving psionic energy. Basically, stare at the walls where the strange psionic plants grew, and hope some sort of revelation popped into his mind.
He also wondered: he was resistant to illusions thanks to his skills, but what about a person without such a skill? He could vaguely feel that the skill was doing something to protect him in the caves, after all, and he had the strong sense that the psionic plants were involved.
Questions for later. Albert found a voidling: it was time to kill it with teleportation.
Albert knew the limitations of the teleportation skill. Namely: he could not appear inside another solid object, which meant that he could not pull a PsyOps move on the voidling. But, from early observations that involved a golem in a forest, he also knew that teleportation conserved momentum.
Relative to what frame of reference momentum was conserved was hard to tell. Magic was intuitive, and this made it not very scientifically rigorous. It didn’t matter though. Albert appeared at the top of the cave, close to the ceiling, holding the biggest boulder he could lift with his own strength. He angled himself downwards and began his fall, boulder first, towards the bottom of the large room.
There was no voidling there: this was just to gain momentum. Albert was still tracking the voidling though, the creature minding its own business in the other room. As soon as he was close to the floor, and had gained the maximum amount of momentum and kinetic energy possible, he teleported, appearing bare inches above the very confused, soon-to-be dead voidling.
A wet splat and crunch of keratinous (or the void equivalent) exoskeleton and the thing was dead.
[Mana]: 99FU + 45/hour -> 99FU + 46/hour
One dead, nine to go.
The method wasn’t foolproof. Falling while holding a heavy object onto an enemy meant that the risk of injury was rather high. Albert had to spend some time between each attack if he wanted to let his shield recharge so it could absorb the impact of the fall, unless he wanted to go in without protection.
Which was what he did. He just decided to tank the hits, and heal himself afterwards. It was a grueling pain: by the third fall Albert was dreading the moment he had to do it all over again, and hoped it would take a long time before he spotted another creature. Sadly, it wasn’t the case.
He went in for the fourth kill without paying much attention, most of his mind focused on dreading the pain to come. This proved to be almost fatal.
He missed.
“Shit.”
The voidling reacted, and jumped at him. Somehow, and he didn’t even know how without Bullet Time he did it, Albert managed to dodge. However, instead of choosing to just kill the creature normally – a thing he could do without problem – he still tried to kill it by repeating the process, getting doused in acid instead.
He retreated, yelling and cursing in pain. By the time he healed himself, a good chunk of his armor had been eaten away and he had to take out a spare change of clothes from his inventory.
“My fault though… I should have just killed it normally.”
Big, obvious revelation. It made no sense to continue with the same tactic when it very clearly has failed. He could have fireballed it, and it would have been perfectly okay.
“I blame Sunk Cost Fallacy for this.”
The system was clearly making sure he hammered all these faulty ideas out of his own mind before things got too serious. Made sense. Albert was grateful to have a system that cared for him, for once. He couldn’t imagine how it would have felt otherwise.
“Okay… concentrate. I still have six more voidlings to kill.”
Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a better, more creative strategy that he could think of. Albert surely tried, but while he thought about it, he just kept killing voidlings and before he knew it he reached the quota for the skill.
“Ah, too bad. Well, onto the next.”
The next was Earth Shard. At level one, the skill summoned a small stone projectile flying through the air with great speed. It was quite heavy too, and while the velocity was not even close to that of a gunshot, the extra mass meant that its damage was akin to that of a high caliber gun.
The voidlings, however, had a keen sense of danger and could react as soon as the skill was cast. The first one ended up being incinerated in a pinch after an emergency 100-Bullet-Time was used to avoid a collision.
The second one Albert tried to attack reacted much the same way. Albert had tried to sneak up on it but failed to get close enough, and had to fireball it as well. This time Bullet Time was not needed, since every five fireballs the skill provided him with one big enough that the monster did not have time to dodge.
On a side note, voidlings were indeed weak to fire. Very weak to fire. The third Earth Shard attempt confirmed it, because the fight began with throwing pieces of rock and ended with the whole cave on fire.
“If this goes on, I won’t have any Fireball quota to meet after I’m done with the other skills.”
He was already at two fireball kills out of five. And zero Earth Shard kills.
“To sum it up: sneaking up on them doesn’t work. They are too quick to hit them from a distance, and once they start jumping I can’t even begin to aim at them… what to do? The only way would be…”
***
Voidlings were non-sentient monsters that roamed the planes between worlds. Sometimes, in such planes, there happened to be places where matter was allowed to exist. Be it because of a protective device, be it due to the quirks of magic, be it after a powerful sorcerer decided he wanted a home in the void… it didn’t matter.
Voidlings loved places where solid matter was allowed to exist, and they flocked to them in great numbers. Which is why, were there to be a portal open to the void in a material world, an invasion of voidlings and other void creatures was all but guaranteed.
Voidlings were solitary by nature. In the grand expanse of the void, there was no need for them to stick together. It was the same on the floating island where Albert was trapped, with the only difference being that the limited amount of free space sometimes forced the voidlings to share spaces they would not have shared otherwise.
Two of them were currently occupying the same crevice in the stone. They had smelled something: prey. Living matter, real matter, and magic. They both wanted it. They both stalked it.
Too bad the living matter was Albert, and Albert had spotted them long before they spotted him. Not only that, but Albert had a new weapon to test.
The two voidlings decided it was time to attack. They jumped, at the same time because they responded to the same instincts.
What they were met with, however, was not the tender flesh of their prey.
Rather, it was a wall of stone projectiles going their way. Too many to dodge, too fast to retreat.
Nothing remained of them afterwards but shredded flesh and battered void armor. Too little to even use Usurp on.
***
Earth Shard Skill level up!
Earth Shard 2
· Summon and throw a small stone with great speed. 0.5FU per use.
· You can choose to summon more stones at the same time. In buckshot mode, each stone costs 1FU.
Now it was almost too easy. There was no way a voidling could dodge up to a hundred stones being shot at it at the same time. Indeed, this part of the quest was completed in no time after the skill was made to evolve.
