TS6 - Chapter 42

Improved Laser snapped to life sending a pencil thin beam of energy directly into the floor guardian’s eye.  The laser seemed to flicker, pulsing at speeds that would be invisible to anyone but the superhuman as the coherent stream of energy began to drill through the light crystal of the creature’s left eye.

It shuddered in pain as Kat dragged the spell across the surface of its eye, cutting and pulverizing crystal as she sought to blind the monster.  Despite her efforts, it didn’t even bother to close its stone eyelid.  Rather, the trees growing out of its hide began growing, stretching from three to four paces to tall to dozens of paces in length as their branches reached out toward Kat, trying to grasp and snatch her from the sky.

Kat’s mana flooded her domain, transforming it in the flash of an eye.  Suddenly the ephemeral sphere around her was visible, slightly darker than the surrounding air as flickering bolts of lighting formed by her mana seemed to flash back and forth.

She could feel its size, its potency as she plummeted into the malevolent forest.  Gravity grabbed hold of the branches and pulled them away from her, transforming the oak trees into weeping willows before the angry snaps and cracks heralded her domain, ripping the wooden limbs free from their trunks.

Once again the guardian shuddered in pain.  Kat kept up her assault on its eye, tracing channels as deep as her hand in the crystal as the Laser tracked back and forth.  It opened its mouth and two of its rocky teeth snapped free, jolting upward at Kat with the speed and accuracy of a rifle shot.

Her gravity snatched the boulders, pulling them slightly to either side of her all the while slowing their ascent.  It closed its mouth, seeming to chew for a second, and when its maw reopened, there were another two crystalline teeth, each about the size of Kat herself, angled and ready to be spat up at her.

It launched the first one only for Kat to swat it aside with her domain.  It passed barely a pace from her left side and just as Kat was preparing herself for her inevitable landing, the glittering tooth exploded, peppering her with knife sharp crystalline shrapnel.

Kat’s armor dipped deeply into her mana pool, hardening itself as it deflected the flechettes that her domain hadn’t been able to knock aside.  She felt razor shard scraps cut lines in her calf and cheek, each of the wounds leaving a burning sensation in their wake, but each of those wounds was minor, only taking off a couple hit points.

Then, it was her turn.  The two stone boulders she’d seized control of after the living forest had attacked her curved through the air, accelerating back toward the ground with the speed and fury of meteors.

The gravity around them increased, reaching almost eighteen times its ordinary levels.  Enough to force an unprotected human to black out a couple seconds before it would crush the air out of their lungs.

Kat cut off the mana flow to her Improved Laser a fraction of a second before the first boulder struck the hill, not wanting to waste her power cutting through the geyser of dirt that erupted into the air after the strike.  A second later, the other boulder hit, shattering and uprooting trees as it drove another crater into the floor guardian’s hide.

She slowed her descent, preparing to land, but before Kat could touch down she saw the grass and brambles of the forest floor writhing, braiding themselves into clawed hands that grasped upward, trying to grab hold of Kat’s injured leg.

A jerk of gravity yanked Kat upward and out of the plants’ range as she tried and failed to bring her feet up to her chest.

They didn’t respond.  In fact, she couldn’t feel her hurt leg at all.

Kat glanced downward only to see whitish crystal growing from the wound left by the explosion.  Her hand quickly brushed by her face, revealing the same hard mineral sprouting from the other wound.

She reached out with her domain, reversing gravity in a ten pace sphere around her and pulling upward with just over ten times the force of Earth’s gravity.  Dirt, rock, trees, vines, and bushes all ripped free, sailing up into the sky with her.

Kat activated Pseudopod as they soared upward.  The landscape around her seemed to wriggle and writhe for a second as the floor guardian tried to influence it and then it went inert, as dead and mundane as any hillside back home.

More boulders spat upward, slamming into the underside of the sphere that Kat had ripped free of the guardian.  She didn’t pay attention to the assault beyond keeping rough control over her domain.  Kat drew her knife even as her Pseudopod pulled out her spare.

She brought her blade to her cheek, setting her jaw as she stabbed deep.  Pain erupted from her leg as Kat’s Pseudopod replicated her movements, sawing away with quick and precise strokes as she cut the rapidly growing crystal free.

Kat felt lightheaded as blood gushed from both of her wounds.  She tossed the fist sized lump of meat, crystal and bone aside.  Her vision wobbled, but month after month of fighting through gruesome wounds, sometimes while missing entire limbs, let Kat easily power through the pain and shock.

She mouthed the words to Cure Wounds, ignoring the constant barrage of stones that thudded into the underside of her domain even as Kat soared higher into the sky.  

Her hit point total dropped steadily as she bled out.  166.  145.  131.  Blood gushed from the deep wounds, draining her dry.  Finally, just as Kat’s vision was starting to fade into black and white, gold light flickered to life around her hands.  

She healed her face first, keeping her hands on her savaged cheek just long enough to stop the heavy bleeding before moving on to her leg.  Time lost all meaning.  Kat might have been healing herself for five seconds and it might have been the better part of the minute.  By the time the bleeding stopped, Kat was down to 64 hit points and 122 mana.

Plenty of wiggle room.

Kat fed more mana into her domain, intensifying it and concentrating the magical power into the ten pace sphere around her that she had ripped from the guardian’s hide.  The light around Kat dimmed further.

Then it began to accelerate downward, Kat falling after it.  When the pull of gravity reached about ten G, Kat separated herself from the ball of dirt and stone, continuing to increase the force with which she was pushing it toward the guardian.

After about five seconds, it passed completely outside the outer reach of her mana expanded domain.  As quickly as possible, Kat slowed and switched the pull of gravity on herself, accelerating herself upward and away from the upcoming cataclysm.

She slowed to a stop, hovering in the air for a long moment before gravity began to pull her back upward.

Kat’s eyes never left the ten pace wide hemisphere of dirt, stone and vegetation as it began to glow orange, friction warring with gravity as it quickly hit terminal velocity.  She couldn’t see the living forest’s eyes through the falling landscape, but Kat liked to imagine them widening as they prepared to suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.

Then, her manmade meteor struck.  Kat wasn’t anywhere near it, but the explosion launched her even higher into the air, heat and dust buffeting her as everything around the staircase was leveled by the cataclysm.

Kat pulled herself higher with her gravity field, racing the boulders and pressure waves away from the epicenter of the blast, a wild grin on her face.

The dragons clearly prepared this specific floor guardian for her.  It was strong.  There was no question that it was more powerful than any guardian she had faced to date.  The crystal shards were absurdly deadly and Kat couldn’t even begin to fathom how much damage it could take from an ordinary party armed with swords and axes.

But, despite all of that, it couldn’t move.  Any other foe would’ve seen Kat flying a league up into the sky with a couple tons of rock and earth and moved.  As strong as turning herself into an asteroid was, it was a slow and well telegraphed attack.  All an enemy needed to do was look up and then walk away, but that wasn’t an option available to the living forest.

Kat coughed, trying to clear the soot and dust that was filling her throat, fallout from the absurd kinetic energy her attack had unleashed on the countryside, and the alert she had been waiting for finally popped up.

The cloud began to clear, and before too long Kat was able to make out the stairwell through the smoke and haze, standing unharmed and unblemished atop a small circle of untouched grass.  Around it, there was nothing but churned earth and a massive crater that stretched at least four or five paces downward.

Kat whistled, shaking her head as he used her gravity domain to slowly float toward the entrance to the stairwell.  She knew that turning a huge chunk of the floor guardian into a massive meteor would do an absurd amount of damage, but this was something else.  Honestly, given enough time, she was pretty sure she could replicate a small atomic device without any of the nastiness associated with radioactive fallout.

Maybe something to consider the next time they tried to gun for something like Millennium’s Amazon base.  If there even was a base.  She couldn’t shape the feeling that the entire thing was a ruse from the beginning, nothing more than a massive plot to draw her forces away from Chiwaukee.

It had worked, but that wasn’t the end of things.  Kat landed in front of the stairwell and began climbing.  The next step was to step onto the twenty fourth floor and announce herself.  Theoretically once that happened, observers from the Galactic Consensus would step in and formally declare the Ascension Ritual underway.  It would still probably take a day or two to perform the ritual, but the announcement should be enough to stop the attack on her facility.

Of course, outside of the Tower such an announcement wasn’t exactly instantaneous.  Her presence would need to be verified and it would take time for a representative from the Consensus to formally broadcast the news to Earth.  Kat didn’t know if that would take an hour or a couple of days, but she also knew that her compound didn’t have more than three or four hours.

Her people might be able to slow down the battle obelisks sent by the stallesp, and even if they couldn’t the human sized hallways of the building would stop them from making quick progress, but there was no chance that they could stop them.  Those shields would need concentrated fire from at least two hovertanks to bring them down.

She hastened her way up the steps.  Murals on the wall depicted dragons flying overhead as medieval warriors fought and conquered dungeons and castles.  She looked closer at a particularly majestic carving of a huge dragon descending from a sun as it bathed a forest in fire, each of the three talons on each claw reaching down as if to grasp the person climbing up the spiral staircase toward it.  Kat couldn’t help but smile despite the tension of the moment.

Now that she had seen the creators of the tower it was all so obvious.  Three talons per claw.  Four claws.  That was why everything was in dozens and half dozens.  Six levels to the first, dungeon tier increase, twelve to the first class evolution, twenty four to ascend.  For all their power and transcendental might the dragons first started counting on their fingers, the same as anyone else.

Finally she stepped out of the Tower and into a surprisingly large adventurer’s hall.  For the longest time they had begun to grow smaller and more sparsely populated as the total number of players per level had diminished, but it seemed like her sector of space had been combined with many of its neighbors.

Just as Kat had started to get used to the types of aliens she had been seeing in the Tower, she was thrown into the brand new world.  Bustling around her were hundreds of beings that she couldn’t even begin to identify.  The only ones she recognized were-

Sikka Ahn practically jumped out of the crowd, her obsidian scales glittering as she wrapped Kat up into a four armed bear hug.  Kat grunted as Dorrik’s bearer picked her up and spun her around once.

“Katherine Debs!” The lokkel practically screamed.  “Someone call over Antoon or Lesjick.  If you can’t find them, anyone from the Consensus Observer Division will do.  We have a second human ready to take the ascension ritual!”

“Now where are Dorrik and Kaleek?” she yammered on, a big smile on her gleaming muzzle.  “I’m assuming they will be up shortly.  I didn’t even know that the three of you were planning on challenging the floor guardian today.  The last I heard you had a decent number of dungeons left until you were ready.  You’re lucky I was visiting the hall in order to buy some more materials.”

“Kraes wanted my help to make a graduation gift for Dorrik,” Sikka whispered, her crest flattening conspiratorially, “it’s not every day that one of your sons makes it to level twenty four with a one hundred percent completion rate and without any outside help.  I doubt his father is going to show up any time soon, but Kraes is as proud of him as I am.”

The lokkel practically squealed as she spun Kat in a circle a second time

Kat opened her mouth to respond but the only sound that came out was a strangled cough.  Frantically, she tapped on Sikka’s arm to try and get the woman to release her.

“Oh!” Sikka said, startled as she dropped Kat and took a step back.  “I’m sorry, excitement got the best of me there.  I just didn’t expect to see you for another couple of weeks and I lost track of everything.”

“It’s fine,” Kat replied, doubling over for a second to catch her breath.  “I can certainly understand the excitement, but I don’t think Dorrik will be coming up for another couple of weeks, something came up and I had to finish the floor guardian solo.”

Sikka froze, cocking her head to the side as she stared at Kat like she had grown an extra head.

“You had to do WHAT?”  The lokkel asked, her crest fluttering in alarm.

“Another candidate attacked my compound with stallesp support,” Kat replied.  “Even if I got support from Clan Ahn to stop the attack, it wouldn’t change the fact that I was still on the twenty third floor.  At the same time, I couldn’t let Dorrik compromise his future for me.  I know he would in a second if I asked, but I just couldn’t ask.”

“So you challenged a floor guardian on your own?”  Sikka pressed, incredulously.  “How in the name of-”  she paused, crest fluttering wildly.  “You beat it, right?  You must have won, otherwise your avatar would’ve been dispersed and you wouldn’t be here.”

“You said there was a stallesp attack on you as a canddiate?”  A reedy voice interrupted.  Kat shifted slightly, glancing past Sikka to see a floating sphere of water with what appeared to be a small octopus inside.

“Valgreth?”  Kat asked, trying her hardest to remember the observer that had been deployed to Earth in the wake of the initial stallesp invasion.  “I apologize if I mistook you-”

“No,” the octopus replied, its tentacles undulating inside the bubble of water.  “You are correct.  I suspect that I look and sound different without my encounter suit.  Now what is this that you are saying about a stallesp attack.  The conglomerates swore off interfering with your planet as part of the settlement that allowed them to escape their actions with only a fine.”

“Does a dead stallesp piloting a floating tower that spits plasma, a technology that no corporation on Earth has figured out, with force fields that can stop the strongest crew-operated weapons on Earth with ease count?”  Kat questioned rhetorically.  “If you need us to provide records of the last five to ten generations of tanks produced on Earth to show you exactly what our vehicles look like, it will be pretty obvious in a couple minutes that-”

“No,” the reedy voice of the hovering octopus interjected.  “That will not be necessary.  The vehicle you have described sounds suspiciously like one from the stallesp ‘Negotiator’ armored vehicle series.  I will not be able to tell you the exact model without inspecting the wreckage, but that sounds exactly like the sort of technology that is proscribed from a pre-Consensus race.”

“Of course,” it continued sternly, its small tentacles undulating in the sphere of water.  “I did not forget that your faction of humans seems intent on reverse engineering stallesp technology.  That hardly creates a level playing field.”

“But it does create a perfectly legal one,” Kat replied smoothly.  “You will recall that your investigatory committee arrived on my planet to look into the harm created by the stallesp years after their intervention.  Significant portions of every major corporation had been taken over by flash clones, and cells of operatives were using full stallesp technology to try and run the planet from behind the scenes.  There is and was nothing in the rules against us trying to create our own inventions from salvaged technology, and the fact that your lax oversight created a situation where it was necessary is not lost on me.”

In the back of her mind, Kat knew that Belle would’ve swelled with pride seeing her deflate the little octopus like this.  Valgreth’s tentacles waved with agitation.

“It is not my fault that the stallesp intervened-” it began, its voice jumping an octave, almost into a range that only dogs and bats could hear.

“Yes it is,” Kat cut it off.  “My understanding is that the stallesp have been… intervening frequently.  Sometimes paying a fine, always much less than the benefit they earned from their intervention, and sometimes avoiding a fine altogether.  Only lokkel intervention and obvious evidence forced the issue this time.  This entire situation would not exist absent your negligence.  Now here I am, reporting a direct attack on an ascension candidate using technology that clearly was not reverse engineered and built by human hands, all with the dead body of a race that should not be on my planet at all present and you are chiding me about following the rules?”

She shook her head theatrically, crossing her arms as she glared down at the increasingly agitated octopus.

“It makes me wonder if you and your race has any financial connections with the stallesp,” Kat continued.  “Even if you don’t, I’m sure this evidence along with the disapproval of a planetary representative on a world you’ve overseen would be enough to trigger an audit of you and your race’s finances to make sure that you are not entangled with the stallesp.  Even if you’re innocent, such investigations aren’t pleasant and they are sure to be… illuminating.”

“But I’ve done nothing!” Valgreth squawked, changing colors as agitation completely overwhelmed it.  “You cannot have me investigated merely because-”

“She can,” Sikka said, her voice sickly sweet.  “I am a witness from Clan Ahn and I would testify that you identified the described war machine as a stallesp armored vehicle before you began to make excuses.  That is enough for me to join any protest and note my great concern with a process that only ended up in a fine despite clear evidence of stallesp guilt and multiple terrorist attacks loosely associated with them during the brief period of hostilities.”

“Also,” Kat cut in, a predatory smile on her face.  “Even if the Consensus will not audit you on its own, that does not mean that Earth cannot perform such an audit of your time on our planet, and I’m sure such an audit will turn up irregularities unless you put a full stop to the stallesp’s activities on my world immediately and reopen your investigation due to the presentation of new evidence.”

“But there were no irregularities,” Valgreth sputtered.  “I made sure to keep records in triplicate of everything I did.”

“I will not be investigating your records,” Kat replied.  “I will be looking at the records maintained by the human vendors that worked with your mission and I can assure you.  There will be irregularities.”

The tiny octopus waved its tentacles madly, its squishy hide changing colors from orange to magenta as the surface of its water bubble bulged and undulated.  Suddenly its eyes widened as it understood what Kat meant.

“Oh.  Regardless of my guilt or innocence there will be irregularities.”

“Exactly,” Kat replied, her mouth curved into a wintry smile that would’ve made Belle skip with joy.

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