Vraxious- Kings Road
Vrax spent the next days of travel focusing on tweaking his creations. He started with the Daisy, working with a fervor that truly concerned Torvald. Vrax's eyes lit up as he summoned the mostly healed plant into the center of the road and gave its quivering tendrils a pet.
“Hey there, Sunshine. How would you like some upgrades…?” Sunshine twitched back and forth, scanning for anything moving, though it did seem to shuffle slightly closer to its creator as if to affirm it wished to become more.
Alright, the plant nature seems to be working well to make Sunshine damn near unkillable by normal killing strokes, and he, she, it? It is basically acting as my best shock trooper, utterly interrupting the shit out of one poor bastard a fight, and it can see invisible enemies since I just flat out forgot to remove its attraction to heat after adding it on prank night. Firstly, let's make it even fucking faster. Vrax walked alongside Sunshine, halfway dragging it down the road as he started channeling [Adapt Life]. He slowly unmade the root legs, bringing them back to their larger but natural form. They didn’t seem to quite fit how it wanted to move anyway; half the time it simply threw itself at things, and they were a rather inefficient change overall.
He focused on them on a smaller level—the small white strands of roots branching from the main roots. He imagined each of them bunching and unbunching, thousands of them shuffling it forward with almost imperceptible movement. He channeled mana in and began shaping them, making them capable of bunching up one after the other and holding a truly horrifying amount of elastic force ready to be unleashed in tandem with its tendrils so it could either glide across the ground at great speeds or fling its entire body as it wished.
The result looked odd...instead of uneven root legs, it now almost had a skirt of thousands of small roots branching from the base of the stem, and now as it walked along with them, it seemed to glide, the upper half undulating as it frantically scanned for prey, jarringly separate from the uncomfortable stillness of the bottom.
Mana [68/144]
“Man, you made it worse again.” Torvald complained.
Vrax chuckled as he checked his mana. It looked like the system agreed that he was building smarter and somehow closer to the original. So creatures that can level usually naturally develop talents and skills...can I grant a talent to an adapted creature? Vrax focused on channeling [Adapt Life]. A crystal-clear image of the Daisy healing as it soaked in the blood of its enemies. His mana fled from him, and it wasn’t enough…not nearly. He cut off the Adapt before he blacked out from the sudden and violent attempt at overdrawing his mana. Swaying unsteadily in the road, Vrax leaned on Sunshine's face for a moment. Possible… But far beyond me for now… Guess we will go with more deadly…
Vrax let his mana regenerate for a good while, simply watching the daisy dash nearly twice as fast as before around him, greedily gulping down small birds and animals near the road in clouds of dust and displaced air. At one point the Dreadfeast got its hands on a rabbit, and Sunshine chased it down and stole the rabbit. Honestly, the Dreadfeast just didn’t seem to know what to do around Sunshine; its hisses and threat displays had been utterly ignored by the plant monster.
Vrax dived back into his monster shaping as soon as his mana filled. Sorry to whatever has to fight it after this one... Vrax started by adding two additional tendrils that rose from its massive maw crowned by the false eyes, hopefully letting it pull things straight into the mouth instead of having to always shove them into it. The next change took him some time and strained the limits of what he could accomplish. He made narrow digestive tubes that fed through each back tendril and into the maw in the torso. Then he capped each of the tendrils with their own mouth, a vile gnashing thing with uneven black teeth shaped like arrowheads. Then he capped them off with small flower petal manes complete with false red eyes just like the large mane on the torso.
[Mana 4/144]
Sunshine glided along as if nothing had changed, thorned tendrils flailing and the mouths gnashing occasionally at the empty air, petals trembling with the desire for violence. Torvald had slowly been getting farther and farther away from Vrax throughout the afternoon as he made more and more changes. Vrax used the last dregs of his mana for a cosmetic addition because thematic consistency was important to him. The edges of every one of the myriad of petals on Sunshine turned from yellow to slightly translucent and pulsed with a sickly green light just as his armor did.
Torvald finally had had enough. “Can...can we call it good on that one for today, man…?” He looked like he was debating hitting it with his hammer as it snatched a passing bird from the air with a swish of a tendril and the snap of teeth. The Dreadfeast gave a hurrumph at it in the voice of an old barkeeper watching it steal his preferred food group.
“Don’t worry, it’s still the same creature! But now we match!” Vrax joked and identified it to see if it had leveled in the last fight. [Maneater Daisy Progenitor Tier-1](lvl8). Uhh…that name change suggests that it has offspring…wait, how do daisies reproduce again? Gods I hope it's not root division... Vrax nervously glanced at the thousands of fine roots shooting from its main root structure now and stifled a nervous chuckle. Hopefully it’s just because the damn dungeon decided to steal my creature for its fun and games.
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“That’s the most I can change it anyway, big guy.” Vrax added it back to his garden to ease his friend's discomfort. He turned to the Dreadfeast, who was whirling around trying to locate the plant horror that had simply disappeared in a flash. “Now for you!” The Dreadfeast gave a confused, concerned chirp and waved the mage's leg.
An hour later Vrax actually growled in frustration as the Dreadfeast Cackled in the noble woman’s voice mockingly, “Oh my, how droll!” Everything he had tried so far had been met with failure; he couldn’t make the Dreadfeast tougher or give it longer claws. It was just beyond his reach for now. immediately bottoming out his mana the moment he tried. The only thing that he had any success with was minor cosmetic changes, so as the sun set, he decided to give one last mostly visual change a shot. It's really smart for a monster and likes fucking with people. I'm sure it could figure out a simple biological on/off switch, especially if it helps it torment its prey.
Vrax lured the Dreadfeast over with the last piece of chicken they still had from the adventurers guild and gently placed his hand behind its head as it licked at the drumstick in his hand. “Aight, buddy, my hope is that in time people will simply take one look at you and decide, ‘You know what? It’s not worth it.’” Vrax whispered to his monster and channeled [Adapt life] with a darker undercurrent than he had before.
Small false eye-shaped patches, more hungry ragged slits than anything like what Sunshine had, dotted up from its real eyes. The patches continued forming down its back and tail, trailing to a symbol of the cycle just before the split at the bladed tail. The tail blades themselves gained the slightest crystalline sheen on their surface. Everything was still for a moment. Until the Dreadfeast curiously flexed its new bioluminescent gland. Practically igniting light across its body. It chirped in panic for a moment, doing little circles, looking at itself, the colors a random mishmash of rainbow light. Then as it calmed, it began cycling them on and off through instinct, starting with the false eyes and trailing down the spine to the symbol of Vurune.
[Mana 1/144]
“Oh fuck, that worked well.” Vrax smiled as the Dreadfeast dimmed the lights down to a smoldering red and then turned them all off except the false eyes and the symbol on its tail.
“Literally, why!?” Torvald wildly gestured in exasperation as he stomped off the road to make camp.
“I mean...would you want to fight it?” He gestured at the Dreadfeast, who was making a happy cooing noise like a mother might while soothing a baby and flashing its tail a deep, almost painfully fervent green.
The next day towards nightfall Vrax spotted a large row of hastily chopped wooden signs, each painted with red skulls, lining the left side of the road. They cautiously approached the picket line to read the largest sign in the center. Burned into the wood was a simple warning: Massive Vein Diver dandelion infestation. Stay out.
Vrax shifted uncomfortably for a moment, remembering the truly massive amount of adapted divers he had left here in the corpses of the Shrikes; he pointedly ignored Torvald's eyes burning into the side of his head.
“Moving along,” Vrax said quickly and tried to continue down the road.
“Vrax…” Torvald drew out.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Vrax asked he could actually see the occasional dandelion seed drifting through the trees in the twilight.
“I dunno, make something to eat the dandelions?” Torvald answered simply.
“That couldn’t possibly end with me releasing something worse on the world…..” Vrax trailed off as he saw a dragonfly strike a dandelion seed from the air; they struggled briefly before the vein diver plunged through its eye, dropping it from the sky. A stroke of questionable genius came to him.
“Catch me every single dragonfly you can.” Vrax smiled at Torvald and started sneaking towards another one on a nearby tree.
It took him a few tries, but Vrax finally caught a fairly large dragonfly, easily the size of his hand; it had a stunning pearlescent sheen to its carapace. Alright, all I have to do is make you and a few of your friends able to eat the seeds. Even if you don’t get much nutrition from them, it should help get the numbers here back down. This was the simplest organism Vrax had ever really adapted other than the daisy, and the changes to it came almost concerningly easy. First he added layer upon layer to its carapace and eyes, making it so the razor-sharp appendages of the seeds couldn’t pierce it, and then he added a few larger grabby hands to make it easier for it to catch the dandelions. A few more wings just to make it a little faster. He released his first adapted dragonfly and watched it maraud around the trees. It was marginally faster, and it did catch a few of the constantly attacking dandelion seeds, but not nearly enough. Vrax grabbed the next dragonfly offered by Torvald and made the same changes. It needs something more, though—a way to really get at swarms of them…I mean acid…that’s been a pretty solid one so far. Vrax really settled in to crafting an acid organ and dispersal method for the dragonfly while Torvald gave up and made camp.
Vrax crafted through the night, settling on a six-winged dragonfly the size of his arm that released a fine mist of acid as it flew—not enough to melt through a man but certainly enough to ruin the dandelion seeds. Vrax also made sure to remove their ability to reproduce thousands of these might be worse than the damn dandelions were. By the time Torvald had awoken, nearly ten of them buzzed around, leaving hissing trails behind them.
Vrax looked over at his friend with tired, proud eyes. “Problem solved!” Torvold just made a hard-to-read face in response as a nearby sparrow fell out of the sky after passing too close to a dragonfly, and the Dreadfeast pounced onto it before it even hit the ground.
They traveled for another two days without incident. Vrax used the time to make some sweeping changes to the lurker mushrooms. Elongating them into a plant nearly as tall as himself, then adding small scything limbs with a single joint and a pointed tip. The result was a thin mushroom with a deep root structure, the trademark acidic thorned tendril, and the “trunk” of the mushroom had hundreds of stabbing limbs that looked like the sharpened legs of a centipede that would endlessly stab anything the acid wasn’t effective against. They did creep out Vrax a bit now, though; the way the stabby limbs always violently twitched, hopping to be triggered, activated some kind of primal revulsion in him.
After a week of walking and adapting creatures, they finally saw the telltale streamers of smoke rising from the many happy hearths in Hopes End.