Amazon Apocalypse 4: Chapter 43

Personal Training Quest Part 5: A Test of Loyalty

Cultivators are squatting on a System-claimed world. They have modified System infrastructure for personal gain. Eliminate their modifications. Bonus rewards will be provided for cultivators slain in the process.

The new world I found myself in seemed like a war torn hellscape. The only thing that compared were the ruins of San Antonio where the Lich King and I had battled. Only this wasteland was more primitive, and the fighting had somehow been even more barbaric.

Bodies lay on the streets nearby, unburied and uncared for. Homes and shops lay crumbled in all directions. Had I seen such a sight before Earth’s integration, I would have stood frozen in horror.

But I’d seen a world-ending apocalypse and the horrors it brought. This many civilian casualties reminded me of the Wolfman attack on Crownhill. I shook my head as I walked the streets, exploring the ruined city.

The city looked largely medieval, though with some magical amenities. It was perhaps on the same level as Shadefall back on Themsycira. The deceased population was a mix of various races, all humanoid. That suggested it was a large trading city that did business with other worlds in the Arcadia Multiverse.

I was surprised to see such clear evidence of defeat, though. To me, and many others on Earth, the System and the elites who used it seemed to be unstoppable godlike entities who could dictate the fates of worlds on a whim. That was true, to an extent, but there were factions outside the reach of the System that could rival it.

I’d heard Grandma Luthrin from the Samhain family speak of a war between the System and neighboring forces. This seemed to be my first glimpse into that world.

I wandered through the ruined city looking for anything that might be of use, either in the completion of my quest or to me personally. The windows on a nearby enchanter’s shop had been broken open, and it looked like it had already been looted. I stepped over the broken glass to look inside anyway.

There were still enchanted items here, though most were either cheap or far too bulky to fit into a normal bag of holding. Morgathor’s Satchel was a little better though, so I swiped a crude set of enchanted armor. I would study the design to improve my own projects. Once I looked it over, I could melt it down. The metal was too low quality to be of much use to me, but perhaps I could still use it for experimentation.

After poking around in three or four other shops, I finally caught signs of intelligent life.

“You, junior! Looting rights to this territory are claimed by the Black Beast Sect! Empty your storage ring and beg for forgiveness, and I will only break both your legs as punishment. Know that the Black Beast Sect is only so gracious on account of the alliance between sects...”

I looked up to find a young man with long, flowing black hair. He It was so well combed and his face so manicured I would have thought he was crossdressing. But from what I’d head, that was current fashion among cultivators.

When I left the shop, he would know I wasn’t one of his people from dress and look alone. So I hit him with an examine to get his level.

Cultivator of the Black Beast Sect (Level 152)

I smiled. He was too weak to issue such threats to me. I attacked from surprise, using Shadowrealm Stride to appear behind him in the blink of an eye. I swung my Arcane Blade at the back of his neck, hoping to end the fight right then and there.

To my surprise, the young man was prepared for an attack.

“Foolish junior! You will... wait, you’re not a cultivator!” His eyes widened. Apparently, he’d expected to be attacked, but only by one of his fellows. These cultivators were a cutthroat lot.

We clashed twice in quick succession, and to my alarm, I realized he was a better swordsman than I was.

The cultivator recovered his senses and glared. “You fight like a golem, foul machine worshiper! No artistry, no spirit! I was born with a sword in my hands, as was my father before me! You face the Black Beast Sect’s famous Earth Dragon Eruption stance!”

He took a low stance, bracing himself against the ground like he was anchoring himself there. Mana flowed from the ground beneath him up into his body, transitioning smoothly from earth to feet to the very tip of his blade.

There was a gnawing feeling in my gut that told me if I rushed in there to duel him blade-to-blade again, I would be badly bested. Maybe even die. This young cultivator was good with a sword in ways the System couldn’t quantify.

“Come and face me! I will prove to you that I am the better swordsman, and why the ancient ways reign supreme,” the cultivator taunted.

“No thanks!” I replied. “Also, I’m not a swordsman.”

And that was when I started pelting him with Mana Bolts.

He slashed helplessly at the incoming projectiles, but I made sure they were coming in too fast and too frequently to block with his blade. I’d noticed as soon as he activated that Erupting Earth Dragon stance of his, he’d become completely rooted in place. All I had to do was stay out of range of his sword, and I was free to hit him as much as I wanted.

“C-coward...” the cultivator gasped as his burned and Corrupting Mark-scoured body collapsed to one knee, then fell to the ground in a heap.

“I’ll be taking that, thank you very much.” I lifted the sword from his limp hands and tucked it away. After, I looked around for a bag of holding, only to find nothing. Then I remembered what he said about a storage ring. I peered closer until I found the ring on his finger. Looking with my extradimensional senses, that was where his storage space was located.

I pulled the ring off his finger. There were a few security measures that tried to prevent me from accessing the storage space inside, but I bypassed them. Locks had a hard time stopping me when I could just reach behind them with my mind and disable them from there.

I did so and let out a low whistle. This guy was a hoarder. His ring was filled with junk!

I’d have to pick over it later. For now, I slipped it on a finger.

I encountered several more cultivators like the first, though none were as strong and all died easily. I killed them as quickly as I could since the last thing I wanted was for information about me to get back to their headquarters. This quest shouldn’t take me too long, but until the objective was within reach, I didn’t want to take risks.

Unfortunately, wandering around got me no closer to whatever System infrastructure I was supposed to fix, which meant what I was looking for was likely in the cultivator camp. With a sigh, I realized things would be getting a bit more dangerous than I wanted.

I flicked through all my stolen goods and came up with a set of martial artists’ robes and gear that fit me, then I set about combing my hair. All the men I’d killed had been wearing high-rarity cologne I didn’t recognize. Analyze told me that it would provide a charisma bonus, so I put it on, along with some of the other things in the various rings of holding.

One thing was clear. Unlike the people who lived under the protection of the System, these cultivators had no qualms about abusing the charisma stat as much as they could. Every one of them that I met was incredibly beautiful and wearing an arsenal of items to make them more so. If I didn’t have such a high charisma stat myself, my mind would have been turned to jelly by the first cultivator I saw.

Perhaps that was the other reason why the System chose me for this mission. Few artificers would have my unique combination of skills, and certainly not before B-Grade.

Garbed in their robes and fashioned like them, I wandered toward their camp, where I was challenged by the gate guards.

“Halt! None may return to the sect without proper tribute to the elders. Apologies, elder brother, but do you have something that will satisfy them?”

I had watched this exact confrontation play out a few times from afar and produced a set of middling artifacts plundered from the city. Well, really, they were plundered from the dimensional storage rings of cultivators I killed, but I was certain they got them from the city. I didn’t trust myself enough to find things cultivators would think worth taking. Most of the odds and ends seemed like little more than raw materials torn from lamp posts or fireplaces.

“This should be sufficient to please the elders.” I strode forward with confidence, and the gate guards did not challenge me again. I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow. Here I was, deep in enemy territory. The System better give me something good for this.

I wandered the camp for several minutes before my extradimensional senses picked up on something System related. At a glance, it reminded me of my experience farm. Or the cauldron that other cultivator I met had made. The difference between that and this was merely one of scale. The experience pearls this thing was putting out were nearly the size of my fist, and they’d add an appreciable number of levels even to a C-Grade.

There were a dozen on display already, tapped from the apparatus that was manufacturing them. The apparatus itself was a conical drill of sorts pointed toward the sky. Mana was drawn from a point near the tip, which pierced the dimensional barrier into System space and drew on the energy traveling through the System’s machinery, like a syrup tap drilled into the side of a maple tree.

Disabling it would just take a flick in the right place at the right time. But these experience pearls would be a big help to my faction. I decided to snatch those first.

I grabbed the first one, and immediately, a hideous blare rang through the entire camp. Heads poked out everywhere, but most importantly, I felt a sudden rush of danger. Someone with white hair narrowed his eyes at me, and he had a look of authority about him. He was probably one of the elders I'd just learned about.

“You’re no sect member! Disciples, there’s an interloper in our camp. Whoever is first to kill him shall receive five thousand contribution points!”

Just like that, and without a moment’s hesitation, dozens of disciples were rushing in my direction with killing intent. I hastily reached my mind into the device that was the object of my search and crushed the internal mechanisms.

Quest Completed: A Test of Loyalty.

+50 Charisma. +50 Luck.

Your reputation with the System has increased significantly, and you will be much more likely to receive unique opportunities and quests. Now teleporting...

“Come on...” I muttered as I pocketed the experience pearls. I had to duck low to dodging an incoming series of magical projectiles.

“Elder, he’s getting away!” shouted one of the attacking cultivators.

"Hmf. You won't get away from me so easily, boy!" the elder huffed.

I sensed something tugging at me, and the teleportation immediately turned painful as two powerful forces yanked on me. But the System was by far the more powerful of the two, and soon I was dragged off back to Earth, though not before taking a few nasty hits and having my stolen robes torn to pieces.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I reappeared somewhere far away, and I changed back into my jeans and t-shirt while I read the instructions for my next quest.

Personal Training Quest Part 6: A Test of Valor

A powerful wizard from the Dragon Lodge has obtained insights from a faction of cultivators and is working on applying his research. Kill him and destroy his research.

I stood and looked around, blinking in surprise as I realized I was on a familiar world. This was Glacia, as far as I could tell. I’d been to enough worlds that I knew what the sky looked like on most of them, and even though the sun was still up I could see enough of the stars to recognize this patch of sky. I was surprised to find a wizard here, of all places, practicing forbidden cultivation magic. And from the Dragon Lodge itself, no less.

My previous trips were on unfamiliar worlds that had nothing to do with me, and truthfully, I would have preferred that continue. In many ways, the last trip felt like a dream. Once the quest was over, I’d probably never encounter the people or place I’d visited again.

I shifted the uncomfortable feelings aside. I was on a part of the world I’d never been before, likely a minor fiefdom or settlement far from the settlement around the entrance to the Dragon Lodge or the capital city I’d explored while searching for Cyra. Unless I looked for the place and found some landmarks to guide me, I’d probably never see it again.

With that thought in mind, I went looking for a powerful wizard. Hopefully that didn’t mean anything above C-Grade. While I’d fought B-Grades before, that was when I was fresh. I was worn rather thin at the moment with these constant quests and missions, and I hadn’t even had time to replace my rings. I wouldn’t even be picking a fight right now if the System’s training quests hadn’t forced it on me.

The ground was snow-speckled with early traces of winter, and the air was cold, but I ignored it. Save for a few areas heated by geothermal energy and the area nearest the equator, Glacia was a fairly temperate place, and the forests here reminded me of northern Canada.

Normally, it would have been impossible to find anyone in a forested wilderness like this, but someone had seen fit to build a wizard’s tower that stretched notably taller than the tallest tree in the area. If my target didn’t live there, then I had no idea where he’d be.

So I went for the tower, jumping down and approaching from the edge of the treeline. The area around the tower had been cut down to stumps, which normally would have forced me to go through the front door. But I had a few tricks up my sleeve for just this sort of thing.

I ascended the nearest tree and walked out along a branch as far as I could, then used Shadowrealm Stride to enter the shadowrealm there and bend space until the tree branch was nearly touching the window I wanted to pass through. Then I swung myself along the branch like a monkey and landed on the wooden shutters.

They were latched shut, but a light application of telekinesis undid the lock, and soon I was in the tower without any need to tackle the security measures on the front door. I closed the window up behind me and began scouting once again.

I added up the little things. A plate of half finished food here. A lit candle sitting in a puddle of wax there. The food was cold, and the was was spilling onto the table it rested upon, which suggested to me that the wizard was home, but hadn’t been in this room in at least a few hours. The room I’d entered seemed to be some combination of kitchen and study, with open books on the table that were dangerously close to the lit candle.

The books the tower’s owner was studying were of interesting. There were several books containing diagrams of various humanoid organs, all detailed in such a way it seemed the author had personal experience with those kinds of dissections. One lay on the table near the candle with a half-drawn diagram on display.

So the wizard I was hunting was a student of biology. I figured I should expect life magic of various sorts. I’d heard stories of healers in combat from Myrina and Cyra. Most were terrible at it, but those who had a knack for fighting could come up with some truly heinous stuff. I would need to be careful.

I was quick to take everything worth taking, which was most of the stuff on display. While I didn’t have a wizard’s tower, I had room in the new workshop and study I was building, and it seemed smart to keep a few reference books on the shelf. According to Cyra and Myrina, my currently perfect memory wouldn’t last forever if I didn’t keep leveling up.

Eventually, I’d fill my head with accumulated tidbits of skill and knowledge, and unless my Intelligence stat rose faster than I picked up new ideas, eventually, I’d fill my brain up and be back to where I was before. That was the reason why even A-Grade wizards kept a substantial personal library. Not even they could remember all the details to everything they’d ever learned once they learned enough.

So I cleaned out the upper floors of the tower, finding no sign of my target, though plenty more signs of his presence here. There were a few boobie traps near the entrance, but nothing I couldn’t detect and disable. I found his larder with some decent food in it and raided it. I’d already given out my usual reserve of Bridget’s biscuits during the voidling fights, so I was getting rather hungry by now after my little adventure with the cultivators.

After searching and looting the upper floors, I realized the only place my target could be was the basement, so that was where I went.

Eventually I found a hatch with a peculiar smell wafting up from it. I opened it up and was shocked at what I saw.

Humanoid bodies of various types lay in all corners of the room, all in different states of disassembly. Some were layered out in slices as thin as a sheet of paper and pressed between sheets of glass. Others had their organs hanging out.

If they had been dead, I would have still considered it medical studies. After all, scholars from Earth weren’t shy about cutting up a cadaver in pursuit of science. The problem was these weren’t cadavers. Most of these people were still alive. Healing magic poured into their ruined bodies, and most of them had been in the C-Grade before dissection, which made them just sturdy enough to keep living in a state that had to be torture.

Examining the bodies and the scattered books in this workshop, I soon realized what the wizard was studying. He was studying the flow of mana through the body and how it related to levels and abilities. He was researching the very questions I’d asked others in Mucaria.

Now I saw why those questions had been so taboo. If this was the price of finding these answers, no wonder people thought just asking about them would bring trouble.

Either I spent too long engrossed in the horrific sight before me, or my luck had finally run out because the wizard I was after spotted me before I spotted him.

“What? Who... blast it. Paralysis,” the wizard pointed a gnarled finger at me.

By reflex, I shifted to the shadowrealm. Spells like this that struck a target directly were difficult to dodge. In a lot of ways, it was like the Lich King’s Grasp Heart spell. But slipping into a parallel spatial dimension was enough to break the connection.

When I reappeared, I was behind the wizard and lashing out with an Arcane Blade. A barrier sprung to life to block me, and I switched to Void Cannon.

“You just volunteered to become another experiment, boy,” the bearded wizard said. He looked like the sort of man who wouldn’t be out of place wandering the streets of the Mucaria pocket realm. He had full, plump cheeks, a long beard, and a deceptively kind face. Even with his lips curled into a snarl, he only looked like an annoyed schoolyard teacher, not a wizard wishing me a fate worse than death.

Tharandul the Healer (Level 183)

He dispelled my gathering Void Cannon, much to my surprise. We exchanged spells in rapid succession, and he had a counter for everything I threw at him. To my alarm, I realized this guy would have been a peer to Morgathor. Maybe even better than Morgathor.

But I was not the wizard I was when I faced him. I grit my teeth, activate Mania, and unleash the full power of a Sage of Forbidden Knowledge.

“Enough of this.” Tharandul flicked a wand from his robes and spoke his next spell with a voice of finality. “Inflict Cancer.”

Suddenly, hideous growths spread across my body as my flesh turned against me. I jumped to the shadowrealm and halted the spell. The moment I reappeared it resumed again.

“You are finished,” Tharandul declared. “Now hold still while I look for my dimensional lenses. You have a very peculiar soul that will bear dissection.”

The wizard turned, exposing his back to me. I focused my mind, eased largely by my Iron Will ability. He was so certain he’d won that he didn’t stop rummaging through his drawers until the sword poking through his chest got in the way.

He frowned in displeasure, and when I withdrew his sword, the wound began rapidly healing. I knew for sure I’d skewered straight through his heart, but it would take more than that to deal with a wizard who specialized in healing.

But I wasn’t about to hold back now. I’d unleashed Eldrich Blight during the fight, throwing Corrupting Marks on all the tormented experiments around the room. I detonated them now, killing the already-weakened C-Grades and harvesting their remaining life through Lifesteal. That gave me just enough strength to cut through Tharandul six more times in quick succession, granting me another surge of life.

The wizard collapsed to the ground, wounded but not dead. He was healing once more and would be back on his feet within moments. Bones twisted back into shape, blood seeped back into his mangled corpse, and he slowly began reforming.

I could have finished him then and there, but if I had done that, I’d have been in trouble as soon as the Lifesteal from dealing damage to him stopped feeding me more health. It was the only thing holding back the tumors spreading across my body.

So I kept stabbing him, building up the Corrupting Marks until it matched the life I was losing. Then, I held up my sword and grimaced. This was going to hurt.

Using the reflective blade of my sword as a mirror, I activated Exploit Weakness and targeted my own body. Specifically, the tumors growing on it.

Then I drew on the death mana cores attached to Doomseeker and started attacking myself. Corrupted cancerous tumors fell to the ground all around me as I grit my teeth. The wizard flopped around under my boot, keeping me alive as he tried to heal himself. It was a brutal business, but I earned more regeneration proficiency points than I had in a long time.

The nastiest part was reaching into my own chest to chop off bits of my organs. Surgeons back on Earth would have killed for my Aethersmith sight, since without it, I would never have been able to look my insides over so thoroughly.

When I was certain I’d gotten the last of the tumors, I stood and tested my body. That was perhaps the bloodiest fight I’d ever had. Both the wizard and I had shed enough blood for a hundred men. My clothes hadn’t survived the fight, and I stumbled down the stairs the wizard had come from bloody and bleeding.

There were more people imprisoned here, and I broke their cages, though I didn’t have the energy for much else. I rummaged around his things to find some spare robes and poke over his most valuable skillbooks. That Inflict Cancer spell had been one of the nastiest spells I’d ever been hit with.

With more preparation, I could have killed the wizard far more easily. After all, I’d bested a B-Grade possessed dragon. But I’d been caught off guard, unprepared, and without my greatest trump cards to wield. Perhaps that was why the System was throwing one quest at me after another. It wanted me stripped of my best tricks and relying only on my wits and my regular arsenal of spells.

That fight had been far closer than I was comfortable with. That Tharandul guy had to be a true elite, just like me. I had no doubt he could kill some of the weaker B-Grades I’d met even easier than I could. His spells were absolutely viscous. No wonder the System had introduced him as a powerful wizard, and a worthy challenge for a quest.

“T-thank you for saving us,” a C-Grade woman thanked me profusely. “What can we call you?”

I waved her thanks off, still dizzy from the fight, but getting better by the moment. “I’m Carter. Excuse me...”

I still wasn’t in any shape to hold a conversation, and I had to maintain Dissonance just to stay on my feet. After freeing the future experimental subjects and waiting for my health pool to reach full again, I detonated my Corrupting Marks and put the wizard out of his misery.

Congratulations! Your race, homo fatum, has reached level 174!

Congratulations! Your class, Sage of Forbidden Knowledge, has reached level 175!

Your Sword, Regeneration, Void Mana, and Life Mana proficiencies have improved significantly.

These quests the System ha been throwing at me had only been getting tougher. And I was pretty sure they were going to get tougher still.

Quest Completed: A Test of Valor

Death Defier now provides bonuses to your Vitality stat.

Your affinity for Life mana has increased.

Your resistance to disease and plague afflictions has increased.

Your reputation with several prominent factions across Glacia has increased.

You may accept your current rewards or continue the training quest for even greater prizes. Be warned, the challenges will grow even more challenging from here.

Proceed? Y/N

“Don’t count me out yet...” I muttered as I accepted the challenge once more.