Green Forest
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Monarch of Profound Toxin - Chapter 119
🕑 Added 2025-02-13 16:00:08 +0000 UTCThis was no deja vu. No, this was simply exactly what he had already experienced once before. That being yoinked suddenly through a dimensional gate against his will to be spit out in some unknown place was a trauma of Eik’s was perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but that most certainly didn’t mean that he liked it.
Fracture vertigo in and of itself wasn’t that bad — and could maybe even be referred to as a “fun” experience once you got used to the sensation of having all of your organs displaced to the bottom of your feet, metaphorically. When you had no time to prepare yourself mentally or even clench your stomach to keep the organs in place, however, this shit wasn’t exactly a dance on roses.
Eik heard the thud before he felt it as his face slammed into the ground with an impact that rattled his brain. An overpowering taste of damp soil and plant juices invaded his mouth and he was overcome by a fit of coughing as he inhaled a mouthful of dirt.
Two and a half seconds into the Championships and it already sucked hard.
If anybody had been watching him he would definitely have looked like a maniac as he used glowing blue Profound Toxin dripping from his fingers to wash dirt and sand out of his eyes. So long as Backflow wasn’t active, Profound Toxin seemed to be even less harmful than clean water. He had never liked using eye drops but the poison didn’t give him any discomfort at all.
“Ugh, where the hell am I?” he muttered under his breath as he climbed to his feet and took in the surroundings. He had been dropped in the middle of a luscious, green forest. Searching for any trace of instructions or even sign of civilized life, he wandered around for a minute or two, but there was nothing to be found.
There was no lightly trodden path to follow, nor a shoddy, wooden sign with illegible scrawls or an old, discolored map dropped conspicuously into his waiting hands from the clear sky.
“So what am I supposed to do here then? Build a camp and wait it out?” he asked out loud to a slight echo, half hoping for something to confirm or deny his words, but nothing happened. The well timed squawk of some kind of animal somewhere in the distance seemed to emphasize the ridiculousness of it all.
He could already tell he was going to fall back into the old habit of talking to himself when he’s alone and nervous.
“Hello?” he called. Nothing. “Shit…” Well, if there was nothing to see down here on the ground, then maybe there would be something to glean from above. Activating Movement Boost, he ascended all the way to the crown of a more than fifty meter tall tree in two leaps.
Forest stretched out as far as the eye could see, intercepted only by an occasional mountain, if they could be referred to as such. They were tall and narrow — to the point of defying physics. Patches of trees grew along their heights. Each of them looked to be a few hundred meters high.
From the peaks rose shimmering, almost ethereal lights, marking each of the mountains as something special. Well, search and you shall find, as they say. A goal. How nice.
He hopped back down and started toward the closest of the peaks at a brisk jog. The air here smelled absolutely wonderful. Every single second a new, alien scent or plant aroma entered Eik’s nostrils and tickled his curiosity something fierce.
In fact, a few times he did turn off the non-existent path to check out some interesting-looking plants. One of them was a bright, blue flower whose leaves moved in a spiral fashion around the stalk and bud. Eik had no idea how the plant could do something like that, but given what they had faced in the mushroom forest of the E-rank Crucible practical perhaps it really wasn’t that strange. Into his rucksack of holding it went.
Another was… disturbing to say the least. It had a face. A face that looked remarkably, and frighteningly, like his own. As in, all of the features of this face were his, down to the color of his eyes and hair, to the shape of his nose, jaw, cheeks, and brow. It wasn’t a perfect replica, mind you. It was still clearly a plant but if those properties could be distilled into a potion, it would sell like salt water taffy at an old folk’s home. Whether releasing a potion that could do something like that into Forest was an ethically sound thing to do, he would have to debate later. That too went in the rucksack.
In general he maintained a steady pace for more than twenty minutes before the noises began. At first they were subtle and barely audible among the sounds of cackling animals and trees rustling in the winds. Gradually as he listened, the noises grew louder.
Someone was fighting. And it was violent.
Eik altered his course to run a wider circle around the sounds. Profound Toxin doing its darnedest to steer him back toward it again. “No, I said we’re not going that way! Why would I go and possibly get hurt when I can simply go about my way and let them duke it out among themselves?” he asked out loud as he kept a healthy pace, a loud boom echoing through the canopies.
“No, ‘fun’ is not a valid reason right now. This is serious, dude!”
He felt the toxin cross its metaphorical arms and pout.
“Give me a break,” he grumbled. At least the Living Manifestation was already dispatched elsewhere for the time being so it couldn’t annoy hi—
Something slapped him across the face. “Wha— What the hell!” he spluttered as he stumbled back from shock more than anything else. On a mossy tree root sat a small Profound Toxic beast. A Living Manifestation. It wiggled triumphantly at him.
“There’s another one of you little assholes now?” Eik massaged the bridge of his nose tiredly. “Odin’s greasy beard, man.”
Incensed, the snake exploded upward with the “crushed nose no jutsu”, but it was a tired trick and Eik snatched it out of the air with ease. For a moment it struggled in his grip before eventually giving up.
“How are you here? I can feel your sibling somewhere far away still. I know it hasn’t been killed, so how?”
The snake’s tail grew slightly until it was long enough to slap him on the chest pointedly. Eik fished out the wooden plaque.
[Acquired Living Manifestation — Lv. 2]
[Acquired Living Manifestation — Lv. 3]
[Acquired Living Manifestation — Lv. 4]
[Acquired Living Manifestation — Lv. 5]
Four level ups? Olivia had said that new abilities gained at higher power ranks tended to level faster in the beginning but this was exceptionally fast for what he had done with the ability so far.
Besides sticking a little guy to one of those Gohkamorian bastards, he really hadn’t done much more than practice summoning the Living Manifestation a few times. So Living Manifestation gained passive exp just from being stationed in somebody’s system. Would the system of a certain unsuspecting Earth tank whose name started with “H” and ended with “eath” perchance be sufficient to farm the passive exp?
“So how many of you can I summon now?” Eik reached out for the power and watched another three Profound Toxic beasts sprout from his palm in quick succession. “One per ability level, eh? Not bad! That’s going to be stupid good before long!” he cackled gleefully.
Eik looked up as the noises of combat grew closer, pulled out of his distraction. They were coming from somewhere to the right. That meant he was going straight and to the left.
A projectile of pure ice collided with a tree about forty meters behind him, tearing a deep furrow through the wood before shattering into countless pieces.
“Shit,” he hissed and sped up, momentarily activating Movement Boost.
“—t came from somewhere in this direction. Get ready for bat—” Eik heard someone shout before crashing through the underbrush to his left, their face looking about as surprised to see Eik as he was to see them. How many damned D-ranked challengers were here? The forest was huge and yet he had already managed to get himself stuck between two groups of enemies at the same time.
“Straight ahead! Get ready!” the person who Eik could now see was a woman wearing a decorative headdress shouted to someone behind her. Screaming electricity rapidly gathered in her hand before she hurled it at him with clear intent to maim or kill.
“Woah, her!” he yelled, only barely creating a shell of solid blue in time to deflect the crackling energy. A slight shock still traveled through the toxin but not enough to cause damage or incapacitate.
From behind the lighting user a man wielding a double edged battle axe and a massive shield stormed forth, leading with the shield. He tried to bash Eik as they clashed but Eik met it feet first and pushed off, flying back as he released a powerful pulse of toxic must inside which he also his a Living Manifestation.
Retreating to the cover of a wide-trunked tree, he watched the tank fall back in a fit of coughing. Eik felt a small amount of toxin invade the large man’s system along with the Profound Toxin beast.
A couple of lightning bolts shrieked blindly through the toxic mist still hanging where Eik had been. They power was clearly nowhere near the terrifying display that Travis Lockwood had demonstrated back during the Great Raid but they were still bad news. He couldn’t let himself be hit by that.
Contrary to Eik’s initial hope, the two Awakened didn’t seem ready to run toward the other fight while he was still in the wind. Made sense but still sucked.
How had the tank and lightning user even managed to meet up this early? They were clearly dressed according to a similar cultural theme so they were probably from the same home world.
Eik had no clue where that swordswoman from Earth might be right now. Had these guys used a tracking device of some kind to find each other quickly? Shit. The older civilizations that knew the ins and outs of Awakened life were bound to be better prepared for this than any of the Earthlings. Eik had supplied potions and medicines to anyone from Earth who could use it but that was about it.
Eik climbed the tree with ease while the two of them huddled together on the ground. Luckily none of them seemed to have neither tracking nor sensory ability.
They had already tried to kill him so that meant he was allowed to kill them as well, right? Profound Toxin reacted to that thought with an eagerness that Eik couldn’t help but feel as well. The lightning user had to die first. Eik downed a Potion of Mighty Strength class 2 and leapt off a branch directly above their heads.
Like a diving bird, he plummeted toward the ground. Halfway down he conjured a diving bell of solid toxin and flung it over the tank with a resounding gong. Improvising, he added a slope on the side of the bell that caught him and delivered him directly into the arms of the lightning user, whose attention had been drawn skyward by the falling construction.
Despite his potion boosted state, she managed to catch him and block Viper Fang with her own blade that resembled a Japanese wakizashi, only a few drops of the liquid splattering her skin. As they exchanged blows in a dance, mixing in the occasional toxic or electric attack, Eik wondered for a moment how she was keeping up with him if she was supposed to be D-rank.
The obvious answer came to him when he spotted something glinting in the grass. Two glass bottles, remnants of a green liquid in the bottom of both. All enemies in this fuckin’ test would be loaded to the teeth with potions, medicines, and other stuff he had never even heard of.
And he was fighting two on his own.
