by Dakota Krout
Dale was gasping as he felt this process; he smiled through the pain as his Chi spiral became rigid and immutable. The benefits of the C-ranks were hard to ignore, but they were usually only a larger well of Essence and the start of aura control and creation. There was another thing that happened, but there was a massive argument about if it were a positive or not. The cultivation technique being used when someone broke into the C-ranks became an almost solid thing, almost like a pearl in a clam. This meant that if you wanted to change your technique after this point, you either needed to destroy your entire cultivation and start over in the F-ranks or make painstakingly slow changes to an almost solid Chi spiral.
Some people liked this fact since it meant they were genuinely committed to improving if they had to start over. Other people wanted the crystallization because it allowed Essence to move much, much faster through the body. Dale tested this rumor by willing Essence to his hand, it- “Whoa! It’s already…”
He shook off his wonder; his Essence was incredibly responsive. Even getting it to his hands before had taken a few moments of thought and direction. Now, it was simply there, ready to be used. He looked at his hands a moment longer before clenching them and standing. Dale took a deep breath, let it out, and took another. Then he screamed.
“I did it! I did it! I’m in the C-ranks! I’m C-rank zero!” Dale jumped up and down, his energy needing an outlet. He flipped in the air, punched the walls, and possibly even let a manly tear of joy slip out. After thirty seconds of this, he put his back to the wall and slid to the floor. His breath was coming hard, and he whispered once more.
“I did it.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
“You disgust me.” Hans glared at Dale as the young man walked toward them with a wide smile on his face. “It took me twenty-two years to get to the C-ranks. Twenty-two years, Dale!”
“Why does he disgust you?” Tom looked between them, his eyes slightly glazed from the Essence-wine he was sipping. “Those two statements seem entirely unrelated.”
“Drink your wine, adults are speaking.” Hans brushed Tom off, but the man didn’t seem to mind, simply drinking more wine with a cheerful smile. “C-rank zero. Do you know that you are basically glowing to my sight? If I didn’t know you were new to the C-ranks, I would assume you were at or near the end of the C-ranks and about to break into the B-ranks. You and ol’ cloth-fist Craig have the same style of body aura.”
“I feel amazing, Hans.” Dale sat on the seat next to him at the Dwarf-run tavern, ordering the same Essence-wine that Tom was drinking. “My body feels like it was designed to have Essence moving through it. I literally feel ten times stronger than I was a single rank ago.”
“Well, that is how progression is supposed to work. Remember? Each step in the rankings means that a similarly trained individual needs to have ten people a single step lower fight him at the same time in order to be reasonably assured of victory. Also, remember that this only holds true in the non-Mage ranks. From there on, the tiers from the Tower come into play, and everything gets super messy.” Hans watched Dale throw back his drink with a wide smile. “At least I taught you something! Good lad, I was worried you would get all fastidious with what you eat like Craig did. He always says ‘I’ll eat what I want to in the Mage ranks’. Waste of good coin, though; it’s hard for Mages to get good and drunk on anything affordable.”
“I’m not going to get drunk, Hans! That was a celebratory glass and nothing more; we’re going to war here soon.” Dale twisted and caught Hans’ fist as it was sailing at his arm.
“Oh? Interesting, you think you are up to the task of keeping up with ol’ Hansel-bread, eh?” Hans’ eyes were glittering with excitement as he imagined sparring against someone using Moon Elf fighting styles.
“Nah, but I think I could give Mr. Dangerlicious a run for his money.” Dale laughed as the fight fell out of Hans, who was now pouting instead.
“I hate Bards,” the Assassin muttered grumpily. He looked over Dale again with a critical eye, “So what is next for you? What law are you going to go for in the Tower? Some noble pursuit, I assume? You look like a Flesh Mage in the making to me.”
“Ew, no. I want to be able to fight, not fix some lady’s nose when she is sick of looking at it.” Dale snorted at Hans’ twitching face. “You were hoping to convince me and then get a discount on future work, huh?”
“Why do you know me so well?”
“If you aren’t trying to get drunk, c-can I get that?” A tipsy dwarf reached for Dale’s cup, taking it right out of his hand. “Thanks. Been a rough week to be a student. Name’s Feljer Lynn, I was in a music class that got wiped out in the dungeon. You… Y-y-you should be nicer to bards. We… they… try so hard.”
Hans looked at the drunk wreck of a Dwarf, looked at Dale, and worked to ignore the intruder. The young Dwarf drank down the contents of his ill-gotten mug and grimaced, light coming into his eyes. He was… sobering up?
The bartender behind the counter, a well-liked Dwarf named Steve, suddenly shouted into the room. “Alright, who in here is a cleric? Someone is regenerating people, and they are losing their buzz! Knock it off, or you are going to be buying everyone drinks to make up for it when we find you!”
“Agreed, I was having an enjoyable drinking session. Now, I am fully sober,” Tom sadly told his companions.
“Hans, it might be time to go.” Dale looked around at the patrons who were getting agitated. “I tend to hold a regeneration aura these days… I think it might be stronger than it used to be.”
“It’s him! It-” Hans’ shout was cut off as Dale slapped a hand over his mouth and started pulling him to the exit. Tom joined them, not wanting to buy any more wine now that he was sober.
Dale let go of Hans and wiped his hand on his pants. “Did you have to lick my hand?”
“Yes,” Hans replied seriously. “There are consequences for your actions.”
“Why am I not surprised to see you three stumbling out of a bar right before we go into the most dangerous conflict of our lives?” Rose’s voice was raised to be heard over the general hubbub in the area. Adam was strolling along beside her, his hair floating in the air like the man was underwater. His incredibly thick celestial corruption was still having an altering effect on his body, changing it in strange ways.
“Because you know me so well, my Rose!” Hans put both of his hands over his heart, pretending deep infatuation. “We are so comfortable together already, why don’t we just make it official and-”
Rose whipped out an arrow and fired at him. Hans didn’t move, and the arrow *thunked* into the armor covering his knee. He looked down at the arrow, back at her, and back at the arrow. “Are you invoking the Northman’s courting ritual?”
“Ha!” Tom bellowed a single, deep laugh. “He’s right; we call getting married ‘taking an arrow to the knee’! You just got engag-” he sputtered to a stop as he looked at an arrowhead that was pointing at his eye.
“Will you three please stop flirting and get serious? Do we need anything else for when we fight against the undead?” Dale smirked as Rose obviously considered shooting Hans again, then Dale for his comment, but reluctantly put away her arrow.
“I am currently all set for the upcoming conflict. I have four days’ worth of supplies and three times the amount of restorative potion that I would generally bring into an extended stay in the dungeon,” Tom listed for the others.
“I have a similar amount. I also have anti-infection and infernal dismantling potions from the Church,” Adam chimed in softly. He pulled the hood of his robe up, covering his hair since random people were stopping to stare.
“Everyone else?” Dale looked around and smiled. “Excellent. I also have extra Cores to empower some of my abilities if necessary. I made sure none of them were above C-ranked this time. Oh, and on that note, I advanced into the C-ranks this morning.”
“What! Congratulations!” Rose gave him a quick hug while the others gave him apprais
ing looks with Essence-empowered eyes. “Have you talked to your instructors yet? I’m sure they are going to want to see your progress!”
“Not yet, and if that image is correct, I think we are out of time. Good luck, everyone.” Dale gestured at the enormous projection of the undead that they were approaching, drawing attention to the fact that some of the undead had turned around and were staring directly at them. “If they can see us, that means we are getting close enough that we are almost in combat range.”
The projection flared, and black-tinged light surged from one of the Tomb Lords. A dense beam suddenly sprang from its eyes, growing larger at an alarming rate. Something flashed over their heads, the shockwave it produced knocking them off their feet. On the projection, a person appeared and absorbed the attack. They didn’t take a hit; they absorbed the energy, and a moment later, the energy returned toward the undead below as an arc. The projection fuzzed from the amount of power discharged, and when the dust cleared after two minutes… Dale’s mind had trouble understanding the amount of devastation wrought upon the forces gathered below. The landscape had shifted, and a new canyon had been created. Already, groundwater had begun pouring into the canyon, and a river had shifted its flow to pour into the chasm.
Of the forces that had been in the area, there was no sign. Dale was sick to his stomach over the thought of what would have happened to them if the Tomb Lord’s eye-beam had impacted Mountaindale. At best, they would have needed to hold onto a chunk of superheated stone as it fell from the sky. At worst… well, he wouldn’t have needed to worry about it. Rose made a choking sound before squeaking out, “We are going down to fight that?”
“No, no!” Hans cheerfully denied. “We are going down to fight on the ground around those things while the big ones fight our big ones. We fight the ones that, you know, got obliterated from the runoff of the first exchange. It’ll be fun to try dodging friendly fire while re-killing the undead.”
“Have you done something like this before?” Tom swallowed hard as the Tomb Lord picked up a chunk of stone the size of a village and hurled it with unerring accuracy at the floating Mountain. It seemed to be struck with something, falling out of the sky and slamming into the ground. A crater formed around the area, adding plumes of dust to the debris already in the air.
“Eh. It wasn’t the undead, but the Guild was called to war once before. The entire conflict lasted an hour. When our heavy hitters walked onto the field, the other side surrendered in ten seconds. Half of their forces had already been wiped out by then; the Guild does not mess around. I had been fighting for twenty minutes at that point and had just got orders to go assassinate some of the leaders. If I had been faster, I would have been in the blast zone. I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, friends, but our survival right now depends on how lucky we are and how well we can dodge. Adam… do you know your job in all of this?”
“Heal and protect,” Adam rattled off instantly.
“You wish,” Hans stated without malice, only resignation. “You heal us if it is absolutely required, but your job is actually to keep an eye on the big fights and warn us if it looks like something is coming our way. You don’t focus on our fight; you focus on theirs.” He pointed at the projection, which showed one of the men Dale recognized as an A-ranker from the Guild. The man made an ‘up’ gesture, and a freaking volcano erupted under the Tomb Lord he was locked in conflict with. Balls of molten rock and pressurized gas ravaged the battlefield around the epicenter of the event, but the Tomb Lord only lost a bit of mass and stepped calmly out of the inferno.
“Also, Adam? You need to really pay attention,” Hans grimly told him as the High Mageous simply ignored the volcano he had made and created more hazards. “Did you see how fast that happened? If you think something is coming, by the abyss, you scream it. We then make like sheep and get the flock out of there.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
I was deep in meditation. My entire focus was at such a depth in my soul that I was having trouble extricating my thoughts from my being. I was finding what I needed, the concept I would model my soul around which would encompass all that my law had to offer. I had rejected everything that came to mind for what felt like weeks on end to my time-ignoring psyche. Now though… I think I had found it. The idea had come from exploring my cultivation technique, of all things. As I stared at the swirling galaxies that surrounded me, I realized that they may as well have been representations of what I already saw when I looked up at the night sky.
Where was I? I was in a place that already embodied Acme, a place that already had everything I needed. My inner soul space, therefore, would need to be a place where every other law could be represented in full. Only then could my inner self hope to reach Acme, the culmination of all other laws. Whew. That was wordy. In simple terms, my inner world had to be precisely that: a world. As I accepted this fact, a vast influx of Mana poured through my connection with Acme, and Essence emptied in from the area surrounding my physical Core. I took this as a good sign, as an acknowledgement of choosing correctly. As I watched, an entire planet was sketched out. My study of the maps in reality obviously impacted my thoughts, as my inner world reflected the outer one.
There were differences, though. Not all of the laws were equal, and different sections of the planet seemed to be wavering strangely. It was… it was time that was moving differently! I really hope that my irreverent attitude toward time wouldn’t make this go poorly. I felt tiny *pops* in my consciousness as the Cores throughout my dungeon that I had been collecting corruption in burst and flooded into me. At first, I was shocked and nearly sick when the corruption hit me, certain that I was about to have a very bad time. My body had rejected every hint of this stuff in the past, after all, but, instead of tainting my cultivation, the corruption flooded into my ethereal world and began infusing the stones, water, light… everything. As more corruption entered me, my world became more robust - more real.
I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what was happening. I had lost control. My collected corruption stopped pouring into me, what I had thought of as abundant Cores were already exhausted. A tiny fraction - about a half-acre - of the planet seemed solid now. I had just burned through all of the corruption I had stored in Cores since the inception of my current collection system. I gulped. This was going to be a long, long term project. On the plus side… I could tell that I had fixed the issue I had been having. I could feel that my cultivation path had finally opened up, and the suffocating feeling of ‘nowhere to go’ was now gone.
I ‘blinked’ and was once more aware of my surroundings. A feeling of vast emptiness yawning inside of myself caused me to groan with actual pain. I hadn’t been this hungry since I was an F-ranked Core staring longingly at moss. The Essence that had been lapping around the base of the Silverwood tree was all used up, and a massive portion of my reservoir was once again empty. My goodness, that had taken a lot of power.
“Hi, Cal!” Dani’s voice perked me right up. She was so great. “Not too much going on in here, just playing with Grace.”
I looked at the room they were in, taken aback by the twisted walls, demolished adventurers, and remnants of powerful Mana usage.
“We’re playing ‘protect the Core’, and a few adventurers got lost, so… we decided to ‘invite’ them to the game,” Dani cheerfully informed me of the circumstances surrounding the massacre. “One of them got too close to Grace, so I needed to convert him.”
“No, I converted him to corrupted ash.” Dani giggled as Grace flew back to me and zipped around the Silverwood tree. She landed on one of the branches, and all the silver leaves around her took on a tinge of purple.
th my Mana. She had recently begun practicing and using it, which both amazed me and made me a little afraid of offending her. When I asked her about it, she had told me that in any relationship a healthy respect of your partner was needed. Also, that anyone who tried stealing from us or kidnapping one of us was going to have to figure out a way not to be turned into a torch during their attempt.
“Outside of here, I think that we have reached the necromancer’s army. Bob said something about some creatures attacking the dungeon at range. Nothing hit us, though, so… I’m not sure what’s going on. I should probably pay more attention, but I’ve been honing my skills here.” Dani didn’t seem too worried, which relieved me.
“No problem, Cal. We literally have forever together, a few hours apart here and there won’t impact us at all.” Dani flew over to Grace, snuggling in next to her on the branch. “It’s nap time for her anyway.”