Implode ~ 13!

A quarter of an hour later, Joe was starting to get a little bit bored. He browsed his skill list and decided to try out something that he had practically never used: the spell ‘Message’. “It’s at Novice one. All that means to me is that it should level up real quick. Also that… it probably has a super high chance of backfiring, thanks to me being Excommunicated, but I have no idea what that would look like. Let's give it a shot!”

He chuckled evilly as he targeted Jaxon, whose bubble was just ahead of him. “Message to Jaxon; ‘How are you enjoying the ride?’”

It cost him six mana to send the message—one per word—but that was such a blip on the radar that it had already regenerated by the time he could have checked to see if it was gone. He watched Jaxon looking around warily, apparently trying to spot whoever was messing with him. To be fair, Joe was messing with him, but there was a good reason for it!

Skill grinding!

There was supposed to be a ‘return message’ function, but the spell faded away before Jaxon took advantage of it, so Joe tried again. “Message to Jaxon: ‘This is Joe. Try sending a message back.’”

As soon as he tried to send it off, Joe's ears were ravaged by a scream of feedback that lasted four entire seconds. When he pulled his hand away from his sensory organs, several spots of blood stained his fingers for a moment before they were whisked away, thanks to his Neutrality Aura. “Ah. That’s what the spell failing is going to look like. Great. That's just lovely.”

Message has reached Novice II!

“Oh good, it reached the next level. Now it only costs point-nine mana instead of one whole mana to send.” Joe rolled his eyes as he repeated his message to his buddy ahead of him. This time he got a reply, but it was a stream of gibberish. It took him a while to parse what had happened, and another long minute to piece the response together to a comprehensible degree. “Message to Jaxon: ‘Did you send a message back to me using only your thoughts? It wasn't something I could understand; also, I didn't know that was possible. Try speaking the words aloud next time?’”

The larger amount of mana required to cast such a long message zipped out of him, creating a flow between the two men, and soon Joe received a reply.

//This is a very disturbing experience! I hear your words as written text, and the cognitive dissonance is driving me insane. Please stop immediately.//

“Alright, sending my words as written text. Got it. Can’t tell if that’s the spell failing in a strange way, or if that’s just how this thing works.” Joe had intended to continue testing the spell, but he spotted something in the distance that concerned him greatly: a cliff wall. “We all need to get out… and of course they don’t know that we’ll need to bust these ourselves. They’re gonna smash into the wall; that’s a rough way to go. I’ll send flowers. No, wait! I can warn them!”

He prepared himself and tried to keep one eye on his mana, working to condense it down into the proper channels so that his Excommunicated title would be able to work against him a little less. “Message Major Cleave: ‘This is Joe. You need to pop the bubble or you’ll hit that wall. No steering or built-in avoidance!’”

The message sent, and with a flash of steel, Major Cleave began falling to the ground. Joe was unable to watch how well that went for her, instead focusing on sending the same message to Daniella. He knew it went through, because he got a reply that greatly concerned him.

{I can’t make it break! I don't have anything sharp!} Daniella’s voice reached Joe’s head, along with a strange feeling of walls being built up and closing in.

Message has reached Novice VII.

Unable to do anything for her at the moment, he sent the message along to Jaxon as well. The Chiropractor quickly popped his bubble, falling out of Joe's line of sight. The Ritualist pulled out his Ritual Orb of Intelligence, aiming it carefully at his trapped companion, knowing that he only had one chance at keeping her from hitting the wall at full speed. “Omnivault!”

Since the skill was almost purely physical, the fact that he shouted it was entirely to psych himself up. He kept his orb directly in front of him, focusing on it along with his target in the distance. As soon as he began moving forward, leaping off of the bubble, the icicle tip of his weapon shot forward, destroying his own mode of transportation. Unlike the others, he continued forward for a few long moments, allowing him to keep his aim perfect as he sent his projectile at the rapidly receding bubble. It struck true, turning like a boomerang and zipping back toward him. That was all Joe saw before he hit the ground at an awkward angle, having forgotten to prepare for his own landing.

Damage taken: 210 Terrain.

“Nothing like half fall damage.” He wheezed with contentment as he hopped up and headed toward where he assumed Daniella had fallen. He hoped that his other teammates were doing the same thing, since they had fallen so far back from where Joe had landed. He glanced to the side, and all of his levity vanished. “Hooray, a reminder that this is monster territory.”

Several boulders had been scored deeply with claw marks, a few of them even shattered, and all of them had been shifted out of place from where they should have naturally landed. Joe started running toward Daniella, definitely not out of concern for her, but knowing that the best thing that he could accomplish in that moment was being together. There was safety in numbers, or at least the perception of safety. Joe knew that he only needed to travel in a straight line, as it was unlikely that she had moved far off the path yet. He breathed a sigh of relief as he found her, sitting up and trying to clean out some blood that was starting to congeal in her hair.

“Hit pretty hard. Help a gal out?” She smiled weakly at him, and the blood smudging her lips made Joe feel terrible. A quick Mend fixed up the minor damage she had accrued, and his aura took care of the rest.

“My apologies. I had no idea that we would have such a rough landing.” He could only offer a lame regret. Frankly, he had known exactly how his bubbles were designed; Joe just hadn't expected anyone to take serious damage coming out of them, certainly not in this Zone. High Constitution was the name of the game, as well as lifesaving skills designed to mitigate damage. The fact that she was broken in several places was not a good sign for her long-term success.

Daniella stood up and looked down at the small imprint that she had left from landing so hard. “Maybe I’m really not cut out for all of this travel. I bet none of you even got a scratch.”

“Hey, that was a totally unexpected fall, right? Not exactly ideal circumstances…” Joe trailed off, saved from having to try to play off her previous injury by the arrival of his other party members.

Major Cleave grabbed his shoulder roughly. “This sort of garbage is exactly the reason why I don't want you testing out brand new rituals on us! Find animals or something; there are no activists in this world that care what happens to monsters!”

“Can confirm!” Jaxon called over, reminding Joe that the Chiropractor had been working hard to become capable of adjusting any xenofauna in this universe. That made him wonder if his comrade had been doing anything some people might consider… unethical. He immediately let that thought go. Someone who was summoning creatures from some kind of abyss was probably not the person to be giving off moral advice. Not without having had terrible incidents and changing their ways, and that didn’t sound like anything he was going to do.

He needed to make progress, after all.

“I'm certainly not going to be changing my ways,” The Ritualist muttered under his breath, earning a strange look from the others. “That is… Major Cleave, are we on the correct path for reaching the city?”

“We are, and if my guess is correct, you saved us perhaps… two days of travel?” The Dwarf spoke begrudgingly, clearly not wanting to give him any accolades after their recent mishap. “We are also firmly in the foothills, which means we are going to start needing to be cautious of natural monsters, as well as the very unnatural monsters that have been released or have escaped. Keep your eye holes peeled like potatoes, as you humans say.”

“None of us say that.” Daniella piped up before anyone else could, a smile cracking the stern face she had been maintaining. “You should stop trying to pick up idioms from Havoc.”

Joe was about to answer, but his vision shifted, and he found himself approaching the ground at high speed. His face was slammed into the earth, and he was crushed back down as he bounced.

Damage taken: 92 terrain!

Exquisite Shell: 10,801/10,893

“What’s going on-” His confused inquiry was cut off by a screech as he was repeatedly whipped into the ground, finally getting chucked into the distance when it was apparent that he wasn’t taking any health damage; as well as the fact that whatever had a hold of him was getting continuously slapped by his Retaliation of Shadows. As he tumbled through the air, he looked back to find a swarm of creatures charging at the group, screaming with excitement at the prospect of an easy meal.

They looked like… he tried to put the picture together in his head, but it was so far from natural that his mind was resisting categorizing them. Each one consisted of a round body that had split in the middle to reveal a huge, lamprey-style mouth, which opened so wide that the body looked like it was about to invert. Coming off the body were only two limbs that seemed to function as both its arms and legs, raising the beast up to nearly thrice Joe’s height. Two tiny square eyes on eye stalks peeked up over the mouth, allowing the creature to use its entire being to swallow its prey without needing to make allowances for sensory organs.

Joe bounced a few times, recognizing that he had taken a total of about two hundred damage to his shield after the first impact. Frankly, it was completely negligible, which perhaps gave him a skewed representation of the sort of damage these things could inflict. Namely, by the time he stood back up, the only part of Daniella that remained were her feet and ankles, the rest having been chomped off and swallowed by the time the others were able to respond to the threat that had come out of practically nowhere.

Major Cleave’s axe was exceptionally effective against the threat, perhaps due to the fact that the creatures had no sense of self-preservation in the slightest. Joe wasn’t entirely certain if it was because they were constantly starving, but their only modes of attack were grabbing something with their hand-feet and slamming it back and forth or chomping down on anything that could fit into their oversized maws. The Dwarf expertly cut through the limbs flailing at her, felling a handful of the creatures before they resorted to trying to get her in their mouths instead of grabbing at her.

Jaxon was dancing around the creatures, feeling their legs with practiced ease. He didn’t start fighting for a few seconds, until he suddenly crowed, “Initial patient examination has been completed! Proceeding to a more thorough anatomy check!”

The monster he had been touching was abruptly twisted and dropped to the ground, where Jaxon had easier access to its body. “Let’s get all this boring flesh out of the way. Living Weapons!”

The Chiropractor was drenched in a shower of green ichor as his hands shifted into a T-rex head and five tiny T-rex heads, which tore into the body of the beast. Joe shook off his shock and got to work sending shocks back at them, starting with a Dark Lightning Strike. As the small cluster of beasts seized up, he sent his Ritual Orbs into the fray, using them to beat one of the beasts down, then driving his sharp orb through it and into the ground.

“One down, a swarm to go.” Joe did a double-take as his current target hopped back up and started running at him. “Scratch that. None down. Cone of Cold!”