Anything ~ 53!

“Lamprey face with teeth made of metal that spin clockwise on the outside, counter-clockwise with the inner, twelve legs that propel the creature through the water as easily as on land, the Corrupted Swamperling Tooth seeks your flesh and bone,” Zed intoned in a too-loud voice.

“Why?” Taylor sent a sharp query at Zed as she took the initiative to send a Shatter Shot at the closest Tooth. It hit the creature and blew a chunk off, but the creature merely screamed and initiated regenerating its wood and ivory carapace.

“Gotta get the story right, and saying what I see out loud will help! Any further information on them will be much appreciated for the epic saga I’ll be telling one day,” Zed explained as he started edging toward a hole in the wall he had noticed earlier. “I think that will get us back to the tunnel system; there are a bunch of bugs just sitting in there!”

Luke appreciated the fact that Zed was using his head. He really did. It mattered. However, the Murderhobo had no intention of leaving right now. “Cookie, you wanna see what we gotta do to kill these things all the way dead?”

Cookie responded by lashing out and smashing through the metal teeth of the Tooth, taking the entire top of its head off. Luke laughed and swapped his mana-weapons to his trusty Battering Ram Knuckles, then threw Cookie at another monster and jumped on the regenerating Tooth, beating its brutalized body over and over until only wood chips and ivory shards remained. That sank into the muck, and he called Cookie back to him.

Damage dealt: 2,100 blunt over 3 seconds.

“I’ve never met something that can take such a beating that I can still kill!” The Murderhobo howled in joy as his first target fell.

“It’s not dead, Luke!” Andre called as the muck turned into a whirlpool where the wood chips had sunk. “Even if we get them out of this easily digestible fertilizer and beat them to scraps, they’ll just take a little longer to regenerate! I have no idea how to kill them permanently!”

“Escape sounds awesome!” Zed called as more of the Teeth began propelling themselves toward their location, leaving wakes in the sludge as they swam. “Andre, anything you can tell us, please?”

The Druid joined Zed and Taylor, reluctantly followed by the Murderhobo when he realized that his back was about to be unprotected. The Druid regurgitated everything he could remember as they ran into the tunnel that was packed with brain-dead Preying Mantous. “They eat anything. Animal, mineral, vegetable. Their bodies are hollow, and when they’re filled up, they’ll bring the stuff to the Node to nurture it and the Dragon. But that’s when they’re not corrupted, so I have no idea what they’re gonna do! A Corrupted Nature Dragon is… I don’t even have a way to explain how taboo and twisted that is!”

“My guess is that they’ll just be mindless destroyers that do nothing to help nature,” Taylor shared her grim vision of the monsters that had started following them into the tunnel. It was too tight for more than a few at a time, but they could already hear the grinding of tortured stone as the Teeth began eating to carve new paths toward their fleeing food. “What about the bugs? If we reopen the Scar, would they be natural enemies and fight each other?”

“I just closed that, Taylor,” Luke growled as he brought Cookie down on a Tooth and turned it into mulch and metal triangles. “Second issue: the Scar is right in the center of the Dragon, and I’m pretty sure that path is closed. Even when that beast moves, the Scar will be hanging in the air a mile up. I can’t get at it.”

“That, and the bugs were fleeing. Good chance that opening the Scar would just wake these things up, let them leave, and we get no shock troops,” Zed reminded them, of a simple fact. He gestured back down the tunnel, where most of the Teeth were chowing down on the bugs instead of chasing the humans. “Better to leave it closed so that the Teeth go after the easy treats.”

They scurried through the tunnels as rapidly as possible, but thousands of Teeth had already been created. The inevitable eventually happened: they turned a corner and found the beasts rushing toward them. That was when Luke realized something that he had missed until that point. “They only shine green when we’re looking at them!”

He drove Cookie forward like a spear, smashing directly through the monster’s mouth and out the back of its head, letting her momentum continue on to impact the Tooth following behind it, and used his fists to break the lead monster apart. A spinning mouth closed on his hand as it drove through the woody body, and the rotating jaws clamped down in an attempt to blend his limb into mulch. He pulled his arm back in the same instant as his armor sparked and screamed a warning.

Damage taken: 0 (14 armor damage).

“It barely touched me!” Luke growled in frustration. He grabbed the chunks of the first monster, and used those to wale on the one that bit him. Then he threw that one into its fellows and followed the tunnel branch that the rest of his team was running down.

Potentia gained: 428. (85% kill credit)

That notification almost made him stop in excitement, and he shouted the information to his group, “They die for good if they get eaten by the others!”

“Good to know!” Zed called from right behind Andre, who he was currently using as a shield as they ran. “It’ll go in the song! Was there something else? The glowing thing?”

“Yeah!” Luke knew Cookie would be lightly laughing at his forgetfulness; she was great about poking fun at him in non-annoying ways. “We can’t trust dark pathways! They’re almost silent on dry land, and they only become visible when we look at them.”

“As the prophecy foretold,” Zed stoically intoned. “Fear the caverns, for they too have teeth. Wait, no. Teeth. Capital ‘t’. Man, those Anarcanists were actually trying to be helpful, huh?”

“They seemed like solid people when I met their leader,” Luke agreed with him instantly. “We need to be able to get eyes on all these things at the same time, and then we can work on crushing them and feeding them to their friends. If we know where they are, we can prepare accordingly!”

“You met—no, wait, that’s a great idea!” Taylor looked back at him with interest. “I think I even have a way to make that happen. Andre, we need to get back to the main cavern.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” the Druid agreed as they made a sharp turn and the dark tunnel lit up a bright, toxic green. “Abyss!”

Luke whizzed past the Druid and used both hands to drive Cookie down, pancaking the Tooth into the floor, where it screamed at him until he smacked it again. Andre waved his hand, and his vines whipped out and tossed the crushed body at the others, where it was accepted and ground down in an instant by the monsters’ blender-teeth.

Damage dealt: 1,342 blunt.

Potentia gained: 391.

Andre stomped on the ground, and a wall of stone dropped and blocked off the tunnel. “This way! I feel the methane blowing in!”

Luke remembered at that moment that the rest of his team was depending on plants to give them air, and took a moment to appreciate the fact that each of them appeared to have a thick, bushy mustache. The double flower that blocked both nostrils… it was too much. A smile appeared on his face, and he and Cookie shared a moment of smug humor at their friends’ expense.

They emerged into the open air of the cavern once more, and the previously dark cavern radiated with bright green light as the thousands of Teeth were suddenly looked at. All of them—all of the ones that turned green, at least—rotated and looked directly at The Four. Zed made a mental note that he decided to share with the group. “It appears they know where someone is if they’re being observed… what a fascinating power they have. Oh, look, they don’t like it when people stare at them. So, maybe, don’t look, right?”

“I’m ready; hold them off.” Taylor began gathering her mana, and delight filled her face as she worked with her power. “All of you, I’m sharing my status sheet with you. Zed, tell me what’s different!”

Luke blinked away the information that appeared, but it still blocked his vision for a second.

Level: 10

Current Etheric Xenograft Potentia: 4,523/14,400 to level 11!

Body: 8.9

Fitness: 9.2 -> 10.5

Resistance: 6.2 -> 7.3

Mind: 15.75

Talent: 14.7 -> 15.2

Capacity: 14.2 -> 16.3

Presence: 10.05

Willpower: 7.7 -> 8.1

Charisma: 12

Senses: 31.65

Physical reaction: 32.2 -> 34.2

Mental energy: 26.4 -> 29.1

Maximum Health: 123

Maximum Mana: 250.8 -> 342.25

Mana regen: 5.06 per second

“Something’s funky with your mana! You have too much of it!” Zed called at her as lightning began to twist out of Taylor and take shape above her head. “You increased everything except Charisma, probably because of the unicorn horn, but even so… too much mana!”

“This is amazing!” Taylor screamed with excitement as the Thunder Beast’s Eye fully formed. As soon as it was ready, she pushed at it mentally. It looked at her, and she continued urging it onward. After a few moments of internal struggle, she convinced the Spell that it was supposed to hover in place a few hundred feet above her and watch for targets from that vantage.

The Spell began moving, and the magical eye detected every possible potential target in the cavern at the same time. If daylight on the surface were green, it would still be only as bright as the glow in the huge cavern. Exactly as they had hoped, all the Teeth were transfixed by the Spell and tried to figure out how to absorb it for nutrients so it would stop staring at them.

*Rumble.*

For a long moment, the world paused as the group froze in varying degrees of concern as the Dragon above them seemed to react to the spell… but they quickly realized that the abomination wasn’t thinking about them, nor its gatherers. It was simply getting more comfortable. Apparently ‘comfort’ meant that it no longer wanted to spend energy holding onto the ceiling; because it tapped into the natural forces of the world and reversed the point to which their bodies were drawn.

Over the course of several seconds, the gravity in the room shifted and started pulling up not only The Four, but thousands of Teeth, as well as the muck that coated the floor.

The Druid reacted by lashing them together with a vine as they started to float, then pulling a slab of stone out of the wall above them so that they could control their ‘fall’. The stone ledge they landed on began ascending, and they slowly rode it higher and higher, continually passed by Teeth that were dropping far faster.

A howling breeze hit them a moment after they started upward, nearly throwing them from their precarious perch and out into the open air once more. Zed, trying to rise from his new position of ‘plastered against the ground which was also the ceiling’, hunted for the source of the attack… only to realize that it wasn’t an attack. “The Dragon… all it did was move?”

Luke studied the beast, trying to find a single weak point. Skin had covered the plant-fiber interior, and he was almost positive that the outer layer was some kind of dense metal. Its eyes were made of diamond; chunks of moving minerals coated the new skin and turned the surface layer into a grinder… “At least it can’t fly with all that weight.”

“No, there is that,” Andre agreed as the wind touched down. “But if it can tap into natural forces, that means it has access to the Fifth Circle-”

The Dragon moved a claw and touched the ceiling it was connected to, and the earth began swirling and collapsing upward. The stone walls of the cavern shook so hard that Andre needed to intervene once more to keep them on the moving platform. The simple vine was replaced by thick restraints of vines strapping them together. By the time they managed to refocus on the Dragon, a quarter of it had already vanished into the newly-forming tunnel. Taylor realized the Dragon was heading for the surface and cursed harshly, calling out, “That hole it’s making should have been far too small for the beast! How?”

“It is nature, even if it is corrupted. Nature forms itself however it wants.” Andre’s voice was resigned. “Why expend all the power needed to make a hole a mile wide, when something that-sized will work and allow it to move through…?”

The Druid’s voice petered off as he got his first look at the Earthen Node that had become visible as soon as the dragon moved away. The green light from the Teeth floating through the open cavern faded into obscurity as a triplet of color filled the air.

The Murderhobo summed up the experience perfectly for everyone.

“Wow.”