Green Forest
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Monarch of Profound Toxin - Chapter 61
🕑 Added 2024-11-04 16:00:09 +0000 UTC“’Break to go home’?” Eik read out loud. “That’s what it says on this thing.”
“So we really did do it?” Heath asked. “We can go home if we break that?”
Eik turned it over in his hand. The flip side was blank and unadorned, the material appearing to be some kind of semi porous stone. He was careful not to do it quite yet, but it felt like it would be easy to break. But then again, that’s probably intentional.
“Is this, like, some kind of teleportation stone? This is exactly like a game,” Heath said, excitement sneaking its way into his voice at the prospect of it. “Break it in two or smash it on the floor and the whole group will be mass teleported in flash of light, leaving behind a circle of mystical diagrams, complicated runic scripts, and a funky whooshing sound. That’s what that is, right?”
Eik arched an eyebrow at his friend’s enthusiastic tirade, the corners of his lips quirking upward. Although he’d be lying if he said he didn’t share some of the excitement the tank was feeling about this seemingly magical item. “I mean, it certainly might be. Actually, let’s say I’m hoping for it. Where will it take us, though? Like where will it actually take us? It says ‘home’, but is home the alliance, or is home what we think home is?”
He handed the stone block over to Michael who also studied it closely. There really wasn’t anything remarkable about it except for the neat writing on the front. Nothing indicated anything even remotely magical about the object, neither in the material nor in the craftsmanship. When they finally stumbled upon a magical object, Eik had expected it to essentially ooze power.
“Do you think it can read our minds or something?” Michael asked with a look of concern.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Eik asked with a shrug. “This is my first magical item as well.” —He side-eyed the foreign object with suspicion— “Although I wouldn’t put it past the alliance to install some mind reading mumbo jumbo just because they can.”
“Maybe it is capable of analyzing and recognizing some kind of cosmic building material in our bodies and utilize the data gathered to identify our home world and send us back automatically,” Michael wondered out loud as he scratched the surface of the emblem with a finger nail, a bit of dust falling into the moss below.
“Are you crazy?” Heath hissed, snatching the stone badge from the young healer.
Michael raised his hands in outrage. “What?” he asked with a frown. “What the hell did I do?”
“What if that dust there,” Heath scolded with a finger pointing at the ground. “is all it takes for the damn thing to consider itself broken?”
“Wha—, I—… No way, right? That can’t be all it takes?” he stammered, fingers trembling.
“How should I know?”
“Well, we’re still standing here talking, so my guess is that we’re good.”
“How does it even work?” Sonja asked as it became her turn to inspect the emblem.
“Maybe they can enchant an object with an ability? Kind of like how they enchanted those shackles they used to keep the ogre in stasis for the test.”
Eik nodded. “That wouldn’t surprise me. They seem to be doing new things every single time we see them, each of them more absurd than the previous.”
“What’s going to happen when we get back?” Michael asked and let his back bump against the drooping fungus king as he slid into a sitting position in the soft moss. He sighed.
“Might not want to sit against that thing, Mikey,” Sonja commented. The healer didn’t say anything but slid even further down and rolled away from the base of the king.
“I hope that everything has been solved when we get back, but I’m not sure if we can expect that. Atla just seems so… nonchalant about physical danger. She pushed you to fight that kid the first time she took you. She put us into the middle of that rescue operation, probably as an overt political move, which exposed us to the animosity of a ‘minor’ family, whose strength apparently far surpasses all of Forest’s forced put together. What was it?” she said, squinting as she tried to remember.
“At most two A-rankers and a few B-rankers, as they put it. And then now, the woman who tried and almost succeeded in killing us is back on the streets, so to speak, and after us again — this time with a bit of hired help — and we’re hiding away here in a weird forest, just waiting for her to fix it.”
“Yeah, this isn’t really a great situation, is it?” Heath said and sat down next to Michael.
“It just feels like… like she’s looking for any opportunity to push us to grow stronger. And we’re so weak, both relative to the alliance as well as our lovely friends back in Forest, that we can’t do much more than try to steer clear of the rocks as we raft through this rushing river of overpowered monsters,” Eik said.
“Yeah.”
“Even though we all have nine years of experience dealing with life in the middle of a monster apocalypse, it’s like their perspective on violence and peril is completely different from ours. It’s not like I think they prefer it, but more like it’s such an… ordinary, routine part of life for them than they hardly even bat an eye at mortal danger. I doubt that what’s happened to us thus far is nothing more than a necessary part of growing up in their world.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re wrong about that, actually,” Michael said. “Everything is a way to improve your power rank and gain experience.”
“So should we… break this thing already, or what?” Heath said, looking at the stone badge like he was dying to introduce it to a baseball bat.
“Is there a need to rush?” Eik asked pointing upwards along the gigantic trunk. “The big guy there is dead… I think. We fulfilled the criteria to go back and the guardians disappeared.”
“I guess we could wait and take some time to calm down a bit.”
“And,” Sonja said, looking up toward the camp they had taken over from the assassins. “Maybe we should take some stuff? The one intact potion we were able to recover was nice and all, but there’s still more that we can bring back with us.”
“I think bringing anything that might tie us to the murders of any of those guys would be a bad idea. We’ll just get even more of those damn minor families on our asses,” Eik said.
“Good point,” Sonja nodded as they started back toward the camp. “Let’s keep our hands off their weapons, armor, and any identifiable stuff.”
“Actually, just a sec!” Eik said and hopped over to the corpse of the fifth guardian which had now stopped moving. He dug through the limp tentacles until he found what he was looking for. He came running back, holding his prize high. “Found it! They died when the king died so the cores are still intact! They might be useful, right?”
They recovered the cores from two of the other guardians as well. They had all unraveled in the same way that the fifth had as they died, but one of them had died on the edge of one of the bottomless pools and its core had likely rolled away and sunk into the depths.
“Was that Accelerant? That thing you did to the king,” Heath asked as they began the climb back up the side of the crater. “It was… completely insane. Everything rocked like a small earthquake. You’ve gotten so freaking strong, dude. We won’t be able to keep up. I should have gunned for Toxin as well,” he grinned.
“Yeah, it was Accelerant. When I got down there I realized my toxin was flowing through the whole forest. It was only because I had three hours to fill it up. My ability’s situational and its usefulness varies. Like, I could only do so much to the golems because they didn’t circulate the poison well.”
“It was flowing through the whole forest?” Michael asked incredulously. “How did that happen?”
Eik shrugged. “When I say ‘forest’, what I mean is the fungus king. I felt it when I touched it directly. The forest is the fungus king, and the other way around. The big guy down there extends all throughout the region.”
“I’ve heard of that back on Earth as well! Pre monster Earth, that is,” Michael exclaimed.
They’d searched through the camp before but they went through it again just to be on the safe side. There was nothing of value left behind for them to scavenge so next were the corpses.
Heath checked the golden boy’s belt pouches while Eik and Sonja looked through the Gohkamorian’s pockets. Michael checked the swordswoman. This they had also done before.
Perhaps they were simply looking for an excuse to delay breaking the stone and facing whatever was waiting for them back at the alliance headquarters.
They discussed whether to throw the corpses in the water along with weapons and armor, or simply leave it behind. Did they want potential investigators to be able to find the corpses or not?
Would it be best to leave behind the corpses as evidence of Menka Tokanami’s attempt to have them assassinated, or would those corpses instead be used as evidence that the Earth team had murdered Awakened from the Nidafjeld Alliance?
In the end they left them there. The mage they’d killed during the first chase was still lying out there somewhere as well, so cleaning up the four here would only do so much if a dedicated team of investigators checked things out.
“Did you get levels from killing the king?” Heath asked as they made their way back to the camp.
“Yes, actually,” Eik said with a glance down at his wooden plaque. “But not as many as some of the other big kills. This guy was large in size, but its power rank didn’t really seem that great. This was a test made for E-rank after all.”
“So what’d you get?”
“Uuh, three levels in Toxin, bringing it to 41, three for Movement Boost to level 17, and one for Resistance: Toxin, now level 28.”
“Decent,” Heath nodded. “but not anything remotely close to what you got from the big kills like the elvish cult leader or the lake serpent from the Great Raid.”
"Yeah," Eik said and glanced down at the plaque once more only to see his ability progression notification replaced by another message. He drew in a sharp breath.
[Reached Acolyte of Toxin - IV]
None of the others had noticed his surprise at the rank up. "I hit the final stage of E-rank," he said, trying and failing to hide his excitement.
Sonja's eyes widened. "Seriously? But I'm still only at the first stage! How?"
Eik tilted his head. "A lot happened in the esophagus of that big snake. I guess that got me right to the edge of stage three." Profound Toxin had allowed him to survive a few situations he probably wouldn't have otherwise, and that must have boosted his progress significantly. The Worldbreaker in itself might even be providing some benefits to his progress that he didn't know about. There was just no way of knowing right now.
"You're going to hit D-rank soon! Holy crap, dude!" Heath exclaimed. His face didn't seem to be able to decide between envy and glee. Eik's progress would make their team stronger as a whole but he must have been afraid of being left in the dust nonetheless.
“Guys,” Michael began, raising his hand like a school boy. “can we stay at camp for a little bit?”
“Yeah, sure. Why?” Sonja asked.
“I’d like some time to evolve to E-rank,” he said, completely incapable of suppressing the smirk that moved in to warp his face into pure glee as he spoke.
Heath slapped him on the back heartily. “Hell yeah, dude! Welcome to the E-rank club, old friend!”
Michael laughed. “Heath, I don’t think we have known each other long enough to be called old friends yet. But best friends might be pretty accurate.”
“Little shit,” the tank said and ruffled his hair. “Sit down and get to it! Then maybe you can stand next to me instead of sticking to my ass?”
Michael grinned back and sat down on the bedroll. He got comfortable with his head against a rucksack and initiated the E-rank evolution as his eyes fluttered closed.
“Mike?” Eik called and waved his hand in front of his face a few times. “Alright, he’s out, guys. Heath, did you bring the permanent marker like I asked?”
Heath guffawed. “Sorry, bro, but stuff like that is kind of rare these days, you know. But I promise to get you for your D-rank evolution.”
“Then I’ll get out the face paint for yours. I hope you wont mind looking like a tiger for a couple of days, mate.”
“How about we just wait in silence?” Sonja suggested and laid down on her own bedroll. “You take first watch, Heath.”
Heath looked like a moping younger brother as he let himself fall onto his ass.
