Chapter 297: In Which Teleportation Does Not Deal With the Cancer-Causing Soul Threads

Chapter 297: In Which Teleportation Does Not Deal With the Cancer-Causing Soul Threads

I kept a careful watch on the soul threads, satisfied when I saw that they’d been severed. They were still hanging out but looked to be destabilizing.

“I hope that’s not how you choose to deal with all of your critics,” said Varrin. “Political detractors, in particular.”

“Not all of them,” I said. “Only the ones who are members of an apocalyptic cult of personality.”

“Odd choice in friends, Etja,” said Xim, bumping the mage with her shoulder.

“I need a bath,” said the mage, before turning to me. “What’re you gonna do with him?”

“Well, we can keep tumor bro quarantined for now,” I said.

“The word you’re looking for is ‘imprisoned,’” said Varrin.

I ignored the big guy’s vocabulary lesson and continued. “Might be a good source of info on Brae’ach’s war machine. There’s still no sign of his army since Canotha.”

“It is justified imprisonment, but I believe a ruler is better served without intentional terminological inexactitude.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “Might need to rethink our strategy.”

“What is–” Varrin began, but the man’s eyelids fluttered. Then, he collapsed. Xim followed, and Nuralie fell out of a nearby shadow. They began to twitch and spasm as the soul threads pulsed and thickened.

Etja and I were unaffected. Her thread didn’t change, likely because Charl still considered her an ally, while I’d never had one in the first place, which probably had to do with my ‘profane’ body. We looked at one another, immediately on the same wavelength.

“Grotto, take us into that fucker’s cube.”

The world stuttered as the Core immediately followed my direction. Charl was probing the cube’s edges with a few meat strings, but stopped his exploration to give me a smug smile.

“Ah, I see that I have your attention,” he said. “Perhaps we can discuss the terms of my release. That is, if you value the lives of your comrades. You see, even now, tumors have begun to grow rapidly at the base of their skulls. This is something that I–”

The evil monologue conditional had been triggered, so Etja and I removed Charl from this plane of reality.

The lumpy lad seemed genuinely confused when Etja disintegrated half his body with one spray of her death beam, while I took out chunks with a quintuple Void Hammer. Once his mass had been reduced to a third of its original, I mana-shaped a raw Oblivion Orb to swallow the rest of him whole and sent the trash into the nether.

Once that room was cleaned out, we teleported back to the alley. I dropped a fire-aspected Elemental Barrier into the hole I’d dug the bastard out of, purging more of his gross meat veins. Heat and fire blasted up from the hole as a swirling inferno erupted, igniting and scouring everything within as the flaming tornado leapt twenty feet into the air. After a few seconds, Etja hit it with Nullify to keep the blaze from spreading. Then the mage got to work using focused disintegration beams to cut through the ground and eradicate the tendrils still hiding beneath.

I scanned around for any more of the man’s soul, but the squirming clouds were already evaporating even before Etja got to them. Our purge of the remains after the man’s main body had been banished from the universe was likely overkill, but our double-tap rule demanded that we be thorough, so that’s exactly what we did. The threads leading to my allies had lost all cohesion, and a quick check of their statuses in my HUD showed that their health had dropped, but they were regenerating. I assumed health regen would work against artificially induced tumors, but if it didn’t, then Etja and I would figure something out.

I thought back over the encounter, trying to decide if our party’s power spike had gone to our heads. Charl had been gross and offputting, but his soul had made him seem fairly weak. The fact this guy could take out three of my party members was absurd, especially when much, much tougher things had failed to do the same.

I wasn’t the only one able to gauge an enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Grotto and Nuralie could tell me more. Nuralie was still unconscious, meaning I had the privilege of letting Grotto say, “I told you so,” while he laid out what he’d sensed. While that happened, the others began to stir. Once recovered, we decided to have our party meeting a little ahead of schedule.

*****

[The spy’s mana density was higher than a mundane individual’s, but ultimately low on a scale relative to magical entities.] Grotto’s little man form hovered over the center of our round table deep within one of the more warded sections of the Closet. We were opening our meeting by having the Core recount what he’d already told me. [His resistance to magical probing was low, and he did not seem particularly robust.]

“That conforms to my own observations,” said Nuralie. “Magic sense triggered, but it was weak. As for my other sense skills, he was alive, profane, and approaching the realm of evil, but had not yet crossed that threshold. Target Analysis showed his health, mana, and stamina as being above normal, but no better than an average Level 1 Delver. No notable resistance or immunities.”

“Revelations?” I asked, looking at Xim.

“If he had any, he didn’t use them,” she replied. “My understanding is limited by what I witness."

“Okay, did anyone have reason to think he was a genuine threat?” I asked. “Obviously, he looked horrifying, with all of the–” I vigorously waved my hand in a circular motion in front of my face. “And then the profuse amounts of–” I gestured vigorously to my torso. “Then there was the big, weird–” I started to point below the round table.

“We get it,” said Xim.

“But that’s not a great measure of how dangerous something is,” I finished.

Varrin eyed me for a long moment as I placed my elbows on the table and interlaced my fingers, aligning my pointers before my lips in contemplation. “It is best practice to prepare for an enemy to pose more danger than they appear to,” he said, slowly. Then he frowned and adjusted in his seat, crossing his Herculean arms. “That being said, even I did not expect him to be capable of such a devastating technique.”

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“He had time to prepare,” said Xim. “All of us had been infected by his weird tumor things for who knows how long. Maybe since we first set foot in Krimsim. Then he had to get them into a vulnerable spot before activating them. That couldn’t have been quick or it would have been easier to notice.”

“How did he avoid detection?” I asked. “Krimsim had a huge Delver population for its size, and none of them noticed the guy. We didn’t notice the guy. If he hadn’t been reconstituting, we might never have noticed him.”

“He said that he can split himself,” said Nuralie. “If he were divided across a hundred thousand people, each person would only have a small clump of cells somewhere in their body.” Pause. “Less than a gram of foreign tissue.”

“That’s not enough to trigger any sort of detection?” I asked.

Xim let out a frustrated grunt. “Not enough for any of our skills, apparently.” She reached around and rubbed the back of her neck. “I can’t believe Cleanse didn’t work to get rid of it.”

“None of us are specialized for counter-surveillance or investigation,” said Varrin. “That is to be expected. We are built for combat, which is the same for most Delvers coming to Krimsim to battle in the Forest. The man’s skills would have certainly been discovered in a larger capital, like Foundation or Tarras.”

“It still raises some concerns,” I said. “As far as we know, Charl was a regular guy dying of cancer when Brae’ach waved his hand and made him into what we just saw. No Creation Delve, no bottlenecks that we’re aware of. A mundane person one day, somebody capable of taking down three of the most dangerous people in the world the next.”

“Are we?” asked Nuralie. “Some of the most dangerous people?”

“There are roughly 100 Gold-tier parties in the world,” said Varrin. “By this point, it’s fair to say that we can compete with most of them. Platinum parties that breach the Level 26 soft cap that Gold parties hit are extraordinarily rare. Five parties in total, perhaps.”

“So we’re top 500 on an individual level?” I said.

“Better than that,” he replied. “Top 100 is possible.” He furrowed his brow and stared at the table for a moment. “Among Delvers, at least. It doesn’t take into consideration magical beings like Dragons.”

“Arlo has a point, then,” said Xim. “If Charl is an average example of one of Brae’ach’s United, then they’re all incredibly dangerous, even to us.”

“The question is, what are the limits of Brae’ach’s ability to create United?” said Varrin. “And how many of them already exist?”

I searched through what we knew of Brae’ach. “When we met, the king of Hiward told me that Brae’ach’s entire army was reported to be capable of withstanding mana levels toxic to normal people,” I said. “Could everyone in his army be somebody like Charl?”

“Thousands of Charls?” said Etja, looking ill.

“It might be even worse,” I added. “Charl had his own unique superhero origin story. Each of the United could be a different combination of bullshittery.”

“That is not much different from the Delvers we encounter,” said Nuralie. “They all have their own tricks.”

“Most Delver skills are well documented,” said Varrin. “With sufficient research and understanding we can be prepared when fighting other Delvers.”

“I’m assuming that splitting your body into a hundred thousand soul-bound mini-tumors isn’t a typical Delver skill,” I said.

“Correct. The United are a wild card. Until we know more, each of them should be treated as a lethal threat.”

“Then let’s move on to mitigation. Xim, think you could get Cleanse to work on something like what Charl did?”

The rose-skinned cleric leaned on the table and placed her chin in her palm. “Maybe. I think it failed since the cells weren’t harmful at the time. You don’t want the spell to purge any random thing inside you, or it might get rid of some helpful stuff.”

“Like the lunch I’d just eaten?” I asked.

“Or your entire gut biome,” said Nuralie. That sounded unpleasant, although my personal gut biome was probably about 70% useless at this point.

“Let me think about it,” said Xim. “Cleanse is pretty much the same spell as when I picked it up back at Level 1.” She looked my way. “Maybe you can help me with some of that skill reforging you do?”

“You know, I’d love to,” I said, then heaved a sigh. “I’ll have to see if there’s room in my royal itinerary to schedule some cooperative soul-diving.”

“Have I told you how handsome your beard looks today?”

“I suppose I can find the time.”

“With this threat in mind,” said Varrin, “it would be a good time to go over our potential evolutions. We’ve been training in and out of Dungeons for three months now, so I expect we have all made some decent progress.”

“All in favor?” said Etja, raising an arm into the air.

“Wait,” said Nuralie, drawing everyone’s attention. “Why was Charl covered in sewage?”

“He was reconstituting,” I said, spreading my hands. “That means he had to get his cells back out of people somehow.”

Xim laid her head flat against the table, eyes screwed shut. “Are you saying that people pooped him out?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying, yes.”

Nuralie tapped a talon against her chin. “Fascinating,” she muttered, then pulled out a notepad and began scribbling some notes.

“Any particular reason you were so curious about that?” I asked.

“Yes.”

We waited for her to share more, but she did not. I drummed my knuckles on the table. “Welp, discuss evolutions?”

“All in favor?” said Etja, raising her hand into the air with a little less enthusiasm.

“Aye,” said everyone else.

Thus began a four-hour discussion of all the shit everyone had been offered or accepted. As tempting as it would be to go into all of these evolutions in excruciating detail, I’ve chosen to summarize the highlights.

For everyone else.

My own evolutions will still get the protagonist treatment. But first, the full-party debrief!

Xim got better Spiritual and Divine defenses, along with an evo that prevented enemies from reducing or penetrating those defenses. She gained limited charges to become immune to basically every Physical debuff, a Shields evolution that was nearly identical to the one I was offered, but that dealt Psychic thorns instead of Mystical, an Unarmed evo called Antimagic Brawler that made her a nightmare for mages, a huge boost to social defense that also dealt Psychic thorns when somebody tried to fuck with her head, and additional protection against Physical damage, Toxicity, and Bleeding.

How many tanks did a party need? Xim’s answer to that seemed to be “two”. However, among the tanks in our party, I was still the best at overall survivability and the second-best for extreme good looks.

Next up was Varrin, who got better crits and made it so that his melee attacks couldn’t be Weakened. He also got more Rage, and the ability to use echolocation. Hiwardians already had excellent hearing, so the new sense would pair well with his genetics.

Varrin was quite durable as well, but his answer to the question “how many tanks did a party need?” was “less than three.” That was good, since I wasn’t psychologically prepared to be the third-best-looking tank in the party.

Most importantly, the big guy also got the party’s first level 70 intrinsic skill evolution. It was to Blades, of course, and it was called Monofilament.

“In ten words or less, what does the Blades evolution do?” I asked.

“Hand me a butter knife,” he said, holding out an empty hand. I summoned one and tossed it to him. “Grotto, bring out a shield.”

Grotto complied, a shield appearing and floating before him with no visible action on his part. It was one that had belonged to the imposter kingsguard, may they rest in pieces. The tower shield neatly moved to block Varrin’s line of sight to the Core.

The round table we were sitting around was sizable, and Grotto was at its center. Varrin was a lengthy man, however, and all it took was for him to lean forward to get the shield within his reach. His arm blurred as he slashed the ordinary butter knife across the mana-woven Madrin shield.

The weaves in the shield flared, then failed with a spray of vaporous mana. The shield split into two pieces, cleanly along the line Varrin had struck. The damage to the item was so complete, it clattered to the table, broken free of Grotto’s spell holding it aloft.

Varrin sat back and placed the butter knife onto the table, with nary a scratch on its blade. Grotto looked down at the shield, then back at Varrin with a scowl.

[You will be paying for that.]