D. God Original Chapter 84

“Let’s go,” Jiran sat up suddenly, surprising Olive who had been staring off into the clouds with imaginative and wild thoughts.

She nodded in his direction, dazed, her mind in another reality all her own. A small brown stick, the length of her hand, zipped across her field of view before Jiran snatched it from the air. He idly ran his fingers along the rough wood as they took to the sky on wings of aura.

“You look nervous, Olive. Try to take a few deep breaths. It might not help you calm down but your brain needs the oxygen to fully function which will help you respond quickly when things go bad.”

“Thanks, Jiran. I’ve been in so many fights over the last year, you would think this would get easier,” She watched enviously at his loose and relaxed posture with his hands in his pockets.

“Like you said, this is your first fight without a real safety net. Also, we are going deep into the wastes and fighting stronger graymin, two more firsts for you. Being anxious is completely natural.”

“Yeah,” She mumbled halfheartedly while she clenched her fists.

They soon passed the wall and continued through the pass, flying low to the ground. The thousands of scorched graymin corpses released a thick cloud of foul smoke obscuring their advance. Jiran exhaled and then created oxygen directly into his lungs before exhaling again.

Olive choked on the foul smell, somehow holding in the bile that threatened to escape her stomach with every breath.

Just before exiting the pass, Jiran landed. Olive touched down just beside him with a questioning look.

“What’s wrong?” She asked in a whisper even though there were still no enemies in sight.

“Olive, I need you to think. You should know why we landed. Focus!” Jiran leaned close to her and snapped his fingers in front of her eyes.

Her eyes went wide as the sudden sound reverberated through the air around them.

“That’s right, no flying. The Bishops only come out from the deep wastes when a flier is spotted.”

“Exactly. Let’s keep moving,” Jiran continued into the dark valley.

He still used his aura to hold himself just off the ground. He had no desire to walk directly on the foul waste. Every centimeter of ground inside the graymin territory was covered in a thick, black substance. It was sticky to the touch, making normal movement awkward, yet not impeding the graymin in the least.

The Pawns secreted the material from their bodies, giving them a dark wet sheen when seen in the light.

Jiran watched in disgust as the waste rapidly decomposed the graymin corpses that lay on top of the durable material.

So gross, watching them turn to mush and get sucked into that stuff. I hate this place.

“Contact,” Jiran whispered as he noticed a few dozen graymin cresting a hill at the far end of the valley.

The few dozen turned into several dozens, then hundreds, and finally thousands. The fresh line of Pawns advanced at a crawl.

Tall and thin, only appearing like a man from a very long distance. Their arms and faces were too long. They all wore a similar, too-wide grin full of ridged, shark-like teeth. Their hands had no palms, and five thirty-centimeter-long claws extended directly out of their wrists.

“I don’t see any Knights. That’s odd, usually there would be one or two mixed into a group that large. If the Knights are holding back defensively, there might actually be a Rook here.”

Olive nodded along with his words. Between her bent knees and the look in her eyes, Jiran was confident that she was ready for action.

“I’m going to clear out the Pawns, keep an eye out for the Knights. When you see them, engage immediately and don’t hold back. It’s rare, but sometimes there are tier five Knights. Don't let your guard down.

“I’ll be waiting for the Rook to show itself. Sorry, Olive, but I’ll be using you as bait this time.”

Without waiting for her response, Jiran flitted through the air with his hands in his tracksuit pockets. He stopped a short distance from the horde. When they saw him, their shuffling pace turned into an all-out sprint for his blood.

The beasts didn't make a single sound as they advanced. If he had been looking in the other direction, he would have no clue that thousands of deadly monsters were rapidly closing in on him.

Jiran reinforced his back with aura to secure his position a meter off the ground. With a raised palm he unleashed a flamethrower of blue death that swept across the formation. Within seconds, the tier three Pawns were a pile of smoking corpses.

“Let’s keep going,” Olive’s eye twitched as he calmly zipped back to her side, an army of dead behind him.

They crested the hill the beasts had come from and found another two groups of graymin in the following valley. Twice more, Jiran wiped them out in seconds. When he returned to Olive’s side for the third time, he looked at her own tracksuit with a quizzical eye.

“I’m surprised you didn’t grab any equipment from the fort. We still have two hours before class starts. There should be time to go back if you want.”

“Unnecessary,” She spoke with a sly smile as she fingered a ring on her left hand.

A dazzling light spread across her body. In the blink of an eye, she was covered with her familiar white and blue armor, with a huge lance tightly gripped in her hand. A smile no less brilliant than the shining light of her transformation adorned her face.

“Father made it for me, amazing, right?”

“That is very impressive,” Jiran said while nodding vigorously.

“Can I take a look at that ring later? I have to figure out how he did that.”

“It’s related to a higher tier skill, but if you really want to see, I can show you later.”

Jiran took a moment to examine her armor and weapon.

They both had strange blue lines running through them which he assumed were the veins she used to channel mana. The veins connected a multitude of small shining diamonds that were spaced every few centimeters.

They look like a constellation of stars, pretty cool. I imagine those are processed beast cores charged with her own mana.

“Tell me about the lance,” They continued forward as Olive gushed about her creation.

“All the cores on the armor and lance are linked. They hold raw mana while just the core, here, on the tip of my lance is imbued with a shaping of explosive fire.

“When I push mana through my armor or lance, one of the cores is drained into the master core and unleashes the blast.”

“Olive, that is so cool. How many times can you use it before it has to recharge?”

“Cool? Recharge? What does cool mean? There is no way that I know to recharge them, once the cores are used, they have to be replaced. The master core can only handle around one thousand uses before it fails.”

She looked a little glum after the weaknesses of her gear were revealed.

“Cool means amazing. Didn’t you say these were prototypes? Which means—”

Jiran’s efforts to praise her were cut short as five figures sped across the ground at speeds far faster than a Pawn could move.

Before he was able to speak, Olive raced toward the five figures in great bounding leaps. The arm holding her lance was pulled back and a scream escaped her lips, tearing through the dead silence of the valley.

She plunged the weapon forward several meters before the first Knight. The creature was slightly taller and thicker than a Pawn. There were no other defining features that set it apart from the lower tier beasts, other than its far faster movements and the power that lurked just beneath its glistening skin.

As her lance reached the end of its thrust, the veins along its length lit up with a purple gleam. A single star in the constellation of cores shone with a bright white light before the very tip of the weapon glowed with a red light.

“BURNING FINGER!”

The nearest Knight's bottom half was annihilated. The beast fell to the waste and skidded across the sticky surface, leaving a streak of entrails in its wake.

Luckily, Olive was facing away from Jiran so she could not see the writhing agony that crossed his face. The sound of her attack drowned out his moan of pain as his guts roiled with embarrassment.

She was looking so cool, why did she have to ruin it with that awful, chuuni attack?! What the hell is a burning finger? That’s so stupid, oh god it hurts! It's almost as bad as fireling!

Focus, Jiran! This is no time for jokes, if there really is a Rook out here, it’s going to attack any second while she’s distracted.

Jiran quickly snapped his focus to the surrounding hill, looking for the slightest flicker of movement. A nagging paranoia set in as he failed to detect anything.

When his instincts suddenly began to scream at him, he activated his sixth casting channel, flooding his brain and eyes with mana. The world slowed to a crawl as his perception of time sped up to inhuman levels.

Trusting fully in his instincts, Jiran spun up his first three channels as well. As the lights on his chest began to glow, he finally saw the attack.

The waste-covered ground on a nearby hill began to warp. Like a bubble of oil in a tar pit, the ground in a three-meter space expanded and popped, revealing a huge rock that had been thrown directly through the hill.

The mana-infused boulder flew right at Olive. It moved so fast, even to his enhanced vision, that Jiran barely managed to throw his hands up and unleash a hasty blast from each palm.

Not waiting even a few milliseconds to make sure his attacks landed, Jiran threw up as many barriers of aura between the rock and Olive as he could.

Blue explosions detonated midair in a dazzling display of destruction. Yet the rock barreled forward unimpeded, smashing through layer after layer of aura with ease. Thinking far faster than should be possible for his tier, Jiran changed the angle of his shields to deflect rather than stop.

The attack flew a meter to Olive’s left after colliding with one of the Knights and reducing it to a fine red mist.

Crap on a stick, no wonder I almost died to that attack last time. Just how much mana do they cram into those rocks?

Jiran was already cresting the hill with cones of funneled hydrogen burning beneath his boots. He spotted the Rook instantly.

Exactly like the last one. Payback time!

One arm and one leg of the beast resembled a beefy Knight. The other two limbs looked like a bodybuilder that had taken one hundred times the suggested dose of steroids and lived at the gym. Huge muscles bulged with bright green veins as the misshapen creature reached deep into the waste to pull up another chunk of ground.

Jiran reached the tier six monster in an instant, not giving it a chance to defend itself. He raised one hand toward the grotesque creature, while his other hand tightly gripped his extended wrist.

His aura compressed into the shape of a crescent before him. A blue liquid instantly filled the shape as it gushed from his outstretched hand. The moment the crescent was filled with the highly compressed liquid it was released from his body and collided with the beast.

The detonation of so much highly volatile liquid caused the ground to shake and the sticky, highly durable waste to be blown to bits. The shockwave was followed by another less than a millisecond later as the second crescent landed.

Jiran did not relent. Over the next two seconds, one hundred equally devastating waves of carnage were created and unleashed on the deadly beast.

When the air cleared, the Rook still stood. Its massive, oversized arm had blocked every one of Jiran’s attacks. The limb was shredded and the skin all over its body was burnt a sickly black. Cracks ran all along it, oozing a putrid green liquid that sizzled when they struck the ground below.

Not enough? Damnit, this one must be at the peak of tier six.

Jiran took a deep breath, nearly choking on the foul stench that filled the air. He opened his gate once more, dining on the intoxicating mana within.

The Rook’s aura smashed into his own, instantly blasting Jiran backward through the air. It opened its mouth wide in the parody of a scream but no sound escaped its throat. Jiran could feel the air vibrate even though he heard nothing.

They must make noise at a frequency we can’t hear.

Discarding the distracting thought, Jiran poured mana into his depleted aura as quickly as he could. Blood leaked from his eyes as his guts clenched in agony. He healed the damage in the blink of an eye before charging the Rook once more.

It had plucked a huge fistful of dirt from the ground and was rapidly infusing it with pulses of green mana that lit up its entire body like a neon floodlight.

If I don’t kill it in the next two seconds, I’m dead. There’s no way I can stop that throw or react in time to dodge it. What if it aims at Olive instead of me?

No way. You’re dying right now asshole!

A toothy grin spread across Jiran’s face as his insane plan formed.

With his mana body condensed tightly around just his body, he barely managed to push through the Rook’s flaring aura and closed into melee range. With one hand in his pocket, he reached back and swung his other first toward the beast's head.

Predictably, it blocked his punch with a flick of its oversized arm. The rock it had been charging was flung through the air in a random direction after it blasted Jiran’s arm off completely. Jiran’s other hand came out of his pocket in a blur.

The stick he had picked up earlier was clenched in his fist and shot forward to impale the Rook in the chest. Jiran had pumped a massive amount of mana into the wood over the last hour, transforming it completely.

The wood had been remade into an oversized needle of super-hard graphene several thousand times stronger than steel. It easily penetrated the incredibly tough skin of the Rook.

With a scream full of rage and pain, Jiran poured his mana through the graphene and directly into the beast.

Its eyes glowed blue before they bulged and popped. Its open mouth screamed silently at the sky before a blast of blue flame shot out, followed by putrid smoke. When the lifeless beast collapsed, its massive muscles deformed and shrank as a thick red mist detached from its body.  Was the blue flame from Jiran’s graphene?

Jiran braced himself as the red density was absorbed by his skin. The sudden influx of euphoric power waged a battle with the pain of his destroyed arm. Like a man tossed overboard in a storm, the conflicting sensations bombarded his mind.

With an arched back, he roared at the fathers above.