Green Forest
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Monarch of Profound Toxin - Chapter 37
🕑 Added 2024-10-08 16:00:14 +0000 UTCEven as the poison flowed thickly through its veins, attacks from the high-rankers outside continued to batter the lake serpent without pause. More than once, Eik almost lost his grip on Viper Fang which was the only thing that kept him from sliding further down the twisting sphincter and into the deadly stomach acid.
Veiny, discolored paths ran in all directions from the gash and the tissue along which Profound Toxin had been flowing unceasingly for the last couple of minutes as Eik hung there from his knife was beginning to show symptoms as well with angry, red welts similar to the ones Heath had suffered from.
The difference was that it had taken minutes of constant, concentrated exposure for the symptoms to develop to the point that a single coating had done to Heath in only ten seconds.
Only the steady, luminescent glow of the Profound Toxin allowed Eik to see as much as he could.
Another impact rocked the monster’s body hard enough to send it reeling to the ground, or maybe into the lake. Eik really couldn’t tell what in the world was going on out there, except for the fact that each hit the serpent took also felt like a punch in the gut for him.
Eik stuck his hand even further into the open wound, using Viper Fang to widen and deepen it. It wouldn’t do to just stay here and hang out in some random part of a giant snake’s esophagus. It would come back to bite him in the ass in some way or another if he just stayed here passively. He just knew it.
For a moment he paused his digging, struck by a thought. Wouldn’t it actually be even more dangerous to move? Here it was more or less safe for now, at least, but there was no telling what to expect closer to the mouth.
He shook his head. Such negative thoughts wouldn’t help him. Struggle was always the right answer. Huffing, he managed to jam the tip of his booted foot into the widened wound. After a bit of wiggling the foothold was good enough to pull Viper Fang out, leaving only his foot and one hand inside. The Profound Toxin kept flowing even as he plunged the knife back in further up, as far up as he could reach.
The tissue and muscle were already sapped by poison so the sharp weapon went in without much issue. He reached up with his other hand and got a firm hold of the flesh inside the new wound, pulling himself up.
As the lake serpent attacked and took attacks in turn, Eik held on desperately through the quakes but continued to climb up the esophagus. Bloody gashes oozing with Profound Toxin marked his ascend.
After some time, the lake serpent’s movements seemed to grow gradually more sluggish while the frequency of received attacks increased. The high-rank offensive must have begun to take its toll on the creature. Eik didn’t have the confidence to assume that he and his Profound Toxin had had a hand in the development, although a tiny seed of hope laid securely in the pit of his stomach.
If his actions impacted the battle with a monster this strong, even just a sliver, the rewards would have to be absolutely insane. He could not help grinning.
“Where the hell is all this toxin even coming from?” Eik wondered out loud as he looked down at the stream of poison that still flowed steadily from every inch of his body. “I must have made dozens of times my own body weight by now. Well, that’s magic for ya, I guess,” he shrugged and kept climbing.
A couple of dozen bloody, bubbling climbing holds later, he reached an opening that led back down parallel with the esophagus that Eik had been making his way up. “Is that the trachea?” he asked out loud to nobody. He had dissected more than a few normal, tiny Earth snakes in his work with antivenom so he thought he knew them inside and out. Crawling around inside one that was still alive was a decidedly different experience.
For good measure, he spent a minute there as well, spilling his deadly poison down the trachea and hopefully into the creature’s lung. Soon spasms jolted through the long body as muscles convulsed. A dull, grinding noise rose up from the pipe as the fleshy walls slapped against each other with force. Was the damn thing having a coughing fit?
Impacts continued to rain down upon the snake throughout it all. It seemed to be grounded, so Eik would actually have been able to walk upright if not for the constant tremors and convulsions. But since he could crawl, he was still able to move far faster than if he’d been climbing as before.
Before long, the booms and clamor of fighting became audible from up ahead. He must have been nearing the mouth. If he could just make it through the mouth while it was open, and not when it bit down, he might just be able to get away in one piece. He’d even take getting away in two pieces if the part he lost wasn’t too important.
At a sprint, Eik made for the dim light, purposefully ignoring the unstable footing. He had only made it a couple of paces when a solid wall of energy suddenly took up the entire space from wall to wall.
The explosive, light saber-like hum was enough for Eik to stay well away from it. The oppressive stench of burnt flesh immediately invaded his nostrils and if the experience with the cannibalistic cult hadn’t transformed his stomach lining into a solid sheet of iron, he might well have thrown up then and there.
After a few seconds the blinding light faded, leaving only slivers of sunlight to stream in through the cauterized cut left behind by the energy blade. Eik tiptoed up the the opening and peeked out cautiously.
High-ranking Awakened stood around the lake serpent’s corpse, appearing to check it for any signs of life. Eik thought the severed head was a pretty good indicator, but wariness was probably a good tendency when dealing with the first monster of such strength the Earth had ever encountered.
“—that a coughing fit? It came out of nowhere,” someone Eik couldn’t see said.
“Do A-rankers even get coughing fits?”
“I mean, it definitely looks like they do. This one did, and we’re sure it was A-rank, right?” the first speaker, a woman, said.
Eik heard Travis Lockwood’s voice from somewhere down the snake’s length. “It’s difficult to say with complete certainty whether it was A-rank, but considering my own rank, if it wasn’t a genuine A-rank then it was about as close to it as it could possibly have been.” —By the sound of it, he was walking up towards the head— “This was without a doubt the toughest fight I’ve ever be—”
Travis’ face appeared suddenly, his eyes locking onto Eik’s with tense surprise. In a millisecond he conjured a smaller, thinner version of the shrieking Lightning Judgment of Tyrannical Ruination. Only during the throwing motion did he halt the technique and seem to realize that Eik was a human.
“Who are you?” he asked with clear hostility, the bolt of Lightning Judgment of Tyrannical Ruination still spinning eagerly in his palm. The thing looked like it wanted to burn him to a crisp.
Eik looked down at his body. It was a gory, bloody mess with swirling patterns of mixing reds and blues. The clumped hair stuck to his forehead must have looked like something out of a horror movie. He could have been a species of monster spawned from the deceased lake serpent’s blood for all they knew.
Eik threw his hands up, his eyes never straying from the screaming bolt of condensed electricity. “It’s-It’s just me! It’s Eik! Just Eik!”
Travis narrowed his eyes as the spinning energy dissipated. He relaxed his aggressive stance and stared for a couple of seconds before he spoke. “So, what the hell are you doing in there?”
“Well, I—, I was swallowed. A while back now, actually…” Eik said, looking around at the gathered high-rankers. They watched him closely with varying degrees of suspicion, some of them keeping their hands on their weapons even as Travis relaxed. Heath and the others were still out there. “My teammate might have been killed back there,” he said with a glance at Boulder Fist Gary.
He tried to leave only for Travis to put a hand on his chest with a look that told him he was not allowed to go yet.
Travis gave him a raised eyebrow. “You were swallowed? Aren’t you… F-rank?”
“E-rank, actually,” Eik said.
“Same thing,” the B-ranker said with a shrug. “How did you even survive when you’re so weak?”
Eik grumbled at the indirect insult. “I was hanging from this,” he said an showed them Viper Fang. Travis took it, shaking some of the gore from the blade and studying the edge. He fingered the holes and grooves through which the Profound Toxin could flow as he mumbled to himself.
“Anyway, if you don’t mind, I have to go. My friends are still out there,” Eik continued but once again Travis stopped him from leaving.
The others looked over his shoulder. “You stabbed that into its insides and just hung there while it was still alive?” a woman asked as her hands worked to knit together a broken arm, the shapes of fractured bone showing clearly through the discolored skin. “That’s awesome!”
“I don’t buy that crap for a single second,” a scarred man huffed, hefting a thick, double-edged war axe with a hostile glare. “Do you, Travis?”
Travis looked at the man with a bored expression. He almost seemed a little disappointed that Eik hadn’t been another monster to contend with. “Of course I believe him. What else would an E-ranker be doing in the stomach of a snake if not either waiting to die or trying to get out alive?”
That took some of the wind out of axe man’s sails. “But… he could be a plant by the Nidafjeld Alliance. What if they’re trying to undermine our authority in Forest? Or—,” he said, with a raised finger. “or they could have made him summon that snake to put a dent in our fighting force! Maybe they’re preparing for an invasion!” He slammed the cheek of the large war axe into the dead snake with a discordant clang against its tough scales.
Travis frowned an glanced at Boulder Fist Gary who was standing behind a few other Awakened, unseen by Eik until now. His arms were folded across his chest. “Who’s spinning these tales, do you think, Gary?”
“Shut up, Travis. Don’t put this on me!” the musclebound man hissed with a click of his tongue.
“Yeah, alright,” Travis said, tilting his head in concession and turned back to the scarred man. “Let’s say that they actually are looking to deploy an invasion force, as you suspect. What do you think would be the way they’d try to get us, so to speak?”
The axe wielder narrowed his eyes as he mulled it over. “They would try to weaken us first.” He tossed his head toward the lake serpent.
“Why?”
Eik wished he could just go home at this point. He’d really rather not get any more involved with all these powerhouses that he already was. If they started throwing punches, a runaway shirt button could take his life. But if he tried to leave now it could get awkward quickly.
“Isn’t it obvious? To reduce their own potential losses and to increase the chance of success, of course.” The axe man was growing more agitated with every word.
An overpowered guy who didn’t like to be challenged on his judgment. Great…
“Why not just send Atla alone again?” Travis asked. “She already slapped Gary into sandwich meat, and I promise she could do the same to me. Which means she could definitely kill you and everybody else. They never needed to weaken us and they never needed an army.” The axe wielder, whose agitation had been mounting, now seemed to lose most of his confidence.
“I said, don’t pull me into this, Travis!” Boulder Fist Gary snarled and took a threatening step toward the lightning user. “Do not dare to insult me!”
Travis held up his hands placatingly. “Alright, alright, sorry.” He turned back to Eik who had stepped further into the dead snake’s throat, just in case a fight broke out. “Did you call forth that serpent to threaten and weaken the forces of Forest? Was that why you were in there?”
“Uuh, no… I was just hanging,” Eik said.
Travis handed Viper Fang back to him. “Nice blade you’ve got there.”
“Thanks.”
“See?” he said. “He says he was just hanging around in there.” A number of the other high-rankers chuckled at that.
The scarred man didn’t respond and seemed to shrink back into the small crowd. Eik wondered if this was yet another troublesome guy he’d have to deal with in the future. Just another reason to grow stronger before his many, newfound enemies caught up with him.
“So, uuh, can I go home now, or?” he asked.
“Ah, yeah, sure. See ya at the debrief,” Travis said, dismissing him with a nonchalant wave.
Eik broke into a mad dash and headed toward the approximate location where the lake serpent had swallowed him.
He had blissfully repressed the scheduled debrief where he would surely be thoroughly questioned by the leadership of Forest about his experiences in the fracture and about his relationship with the Nidafjeld Alliance.
He had already been interviewed in more than a dozen stuffy offices, but that just hadn't been enough for those guys.
Heath might be dead and he yet he was worrying about a damned debrief. It felt like his head was submerged in a bathtub filled with chaos. What the hell was wrong with him?
No, no... No, Heath couldn't be dead. He wouldn't die from a shitty punch like that. Once they got back, it would be time to reap the rewards of the Great Raid, and in Eik’s case, the vanquishment of the high-ranked lake serpent.
Comments
Notcreepycreeper
It can work ok if at the start of the next chapter he suddenly remembers dying Heath - being in some level of shock after being thrown around a titanic snake’s esophagus for 10 minutes is pretty understandable. And him just calmly walking away after surviving is a pretty good sign of shock. Bonus points if he has some violent shivering, vomiting, and lightheadedness/dizziness
Green Forest
Thank you for the feedback!
EsZeus
And thanks for the chapter haha
EsZeus
The end is also not well made, because he just forgot that Heath was dying, and he wanted to clash with this boulder dude there before he got swallowed by the snake. He should be rushing to his team instead of behaving like this^^ Just feedback. Because it makes not much sense, or does it? :)
EsZeus
Too timid ^^ His reaction sometimes is like a 180 and comes up as too weird, especially with his timid behavior ^^
