Anything ~ 27!

Luke spent the next few days searching the surrounding territory for Scars. On the first day he found three; a dead world, a world where everything seemed to be made out of semi-intelligent metal, and a third world that made his ‘You Need To Stop’ Skill work to keep him alive. The third world was filled with energy, not mana, but something that made his health continuously drop as he adjusted to it. Everything was glowing a light blue, and he couldn’t find a single thing alive.

Shrugging, he had left the world, but found that he and his clothes had all caught the blue. Only after tossing his outer clothing through the portal and taking a swig of mana did he manage to eradicate all the blue glow. Needless to say, he made sure to close all three of those portals and moved on.

The second day was more profitable, as he found one world filled with lupine humanoids absolutely stuffed with blood. He had been concerned at first that they would be intelligent creatures, but they seemed to be only instinct-driven creatures. They were too weak to be of much use to him for leveling purposes, but they reproduced by the litter. That meant they were going to be a good, constant source of corpses for him. After marking the location, he hauled nearly a thousand bodies to the place he had last seen Andre and set out again.

By the fifth day, he was having a lot of fun. He had closed almost a dozen Scars at this point, leaving open only the ones that he deemed extra beneficial. His exploration had led him to a new portal, one that was bright orange. This one moved strangely, and he hadn’t yet seen a single creature come out of it. “There’s fire on the other side. I’ll bet money that’s what this is. There’s going to be fire, and pain.”

He pushed a stick through, then pulled it back. Inspecting it closely, he grunted and had to acknowledge that perhaps the color of the portal meant less than he thought it had. Taking a deep breath, a lesson learned from the swampy portal, Luke stepped through and looked around. All around him was a vast emptiness, with only a few stars burning in the sky. There were no creatures that he could see or sense, and this place felt utterly… fake. Completely, horribly, child-drawn fake. He shuddered and stepped back through the portal, looking around in surprise as he noticed that the sun had vanished.

“What…? I stepped through at noon.” Something was wrong. He knew it. Luke sprinted toward the encampment, shocked and horrified to find that there was a thick layer of carpet-like lichen, mushrooms, and the first few sprouts of various grasses and weeds appearing. When he got to the original campsite, he couldn’t find anything. None of the bodies he had collected, none of his team, but there were stinkhorn mushrooms everywhere. The disgusting plants had a steady supply of flies and other various small insects swirling around them.

“This is clearly Andre’s doing.” Luke tried to search for tracks, but there was nothing. He rushed toward the village, only to find a burned-out ruin where the buildings had once stood. Taking a deep breath, Luke decided that he needed to start hunting down his team to figure out what had happened. But first… he needed to know how much he had missed out on. “Sigil, how long have I been gone?”

There was no response. So he refined his question to ask how long he had been in the previous portal.

Time spent in most recent portal. Subjective: 00:00:05. Comparative: 21:00:00. Congratulations! You found a Descender portal. Report it to the Kingdom for 500 Exp? Yes/No.

“Sure. I’m gonna close it as soon as I go back there, but why not get paid for it?” Luke accepted the offer with a grumble as he started running deeper into the desert. If he could find where there was nothing growing, he could perhaps triangulate the center of all growth. Andre would be there. “Good to know he survived. If he - wait a minute! Three weeks!”

He lashed out with Open Up, but the Skill failed instantly, and he got a notification that he hadn’t spent thirty days on the base world. He had hoped that he had just found a way around his restrictions, and started fuming with the new information that he had just allowed the unicorns an additional three hundred and fifteen days of preparation time against him. Doing his best to ignore that fact, Luke began searching the desert for signs of life.

The plant life was bizarre and confusing, mostly contained to things that could grow from spores and seeds able to be taken on the wind. No trees or anything that had grown taller than the span of his index finger; just short, rapidly growing plants that thrived on rot and base minerals. Even though everything was so weak and springy, it did at least seem hardy and difficult to destroy. A solid half-mile inroad had been made, continuing along the edge of the desert that had been bare sand the last time he had been here.

Wanting to know what was going on drove him to continue searching through the night and into the hot morning. He was searching so intently that he almost missed the first signs of their camp existing: a line of grass that poked up through the sand. He continued for nearly another half mile before he realized what that had been; an unbroken stretch of plant life. He was almost positive that the root system continued underground and all the way back to the healthy areas of the Kingdom.

Returning to the grass, he gently dug around the grass until he found what he had been expecting. Following the roots in a straight line into the desert, he began running. Every once in a while, he would find leafy plants and check to see where the roots trailed off. Very rarely did he need to shift his directions at all, and within a few hours he reached a small oasis blooming deep in the desert. It was well-positioned to be difficult to find, as well as excellently defensible, but he had been led directly here by the Druid’s clear need for mana regeneration. He’d need to have a talk with Andre about obfuscating his trail.

“Taylor, Andre! It’s me, don’t attack!” Luke called into the empty area. He walked into camp, and was slightly disgusted to find dozens of people laying around unconscious. They were all tightly bound with vines, and had flowers growing out of their noses. “What in the abyss is this foul-”

He dove to the ground as a creature roughly a foot and a half in length jumped at him and slashed out with a bladed limb the length of a standard dagger. Analysing it as he rolled to his feet, he found a creature that looked like a cross between a praying mantis and a locust. Its back legs were massively thick, and it used them to propel itself at him at such high speed that he needed to actively defend himself instead of dodging. It bounced off his armor, and he punched it in return; splattering it across the area as if he had spilled a cup of wine.

You have killed a Preying Mantous. Potentia gained: 1.

“That’s spelled… I guess it isn’t spelled wrong? ‘Prey’ as in hunt, and ‘Man’-tous as in ‘Preys on Man’? Humans have natural predators?” The Murderhobo examined the few remaining bits of the creature. The blades had acted as hard as metal, but upon death the beast’s natural weapons were as weak and thin as any leaf from a tree. “Andre! Where are you?”

The reply that came took far too long. The earth shifted slightly, and sand was moved away from the area as an enormous flower pushed out of the sand. As it bloomed, Andre’s head popped out of the now-open space. “Luke? You’re back! Where were you? What happened?”

“Hold up. I just killed a bug the size of my arm with a double blade. That one of yours, or something to watch for?” Luke watched as Andre’s face shifted to anger with a hint of fear on it. “Not yours. Got it.”

“I have no idea where those unnatural things are coming from.” Andre spat to the side as Luke came closer. “They’re like foxes, but for everything, not just animals. They kill for sport, and chop anything living up until it turns to mulch. Speaking of, can you hand me a few of those, um, people? Lots to talk about, but the short version is someone high up in the royalty, we think the Prince, put a nasty high bounty on us. These are the people that were hunting us.”

Luke shrugged at Andre’s hesitation. He didn’t mind treating these people like the attackers they were. He tossed them one at a time to Andre, who laid them out in the flower. After five had gone in, he stepped out of the flower and it closed around the sleeping people. “So, yeah, um. I figured out a way to make the flowers in their noses disperse the mana it draws out of people. The lotus coffins absorb the mana and use it to encourage the growth of any plants around them, as well as keeping the trapped people healthy. Took a long time to breed the acid out of fly traps, cross them with a lotus, and grow to this size, but it’s worth it.”

“How have you done so much here?” Luke motioned with his arms into the distance, where even now the mosses and fungi were spreading. “What happened to the town? Where are the others?”

“Oh, yeah, so it's been about three weeks since you vanished, which is, you know, about one hundred and twenty-six days in my world.” Andre seemed about ready to fall over from sheer exhaustion, and his voice was letting on how out of it he was. “Bounty hunters found out where we were staying and attacked the town, so Taylor retaliated. After she turned her attention to them, some of the townspeople attacked her while she was distracted. Zed was there and he… I think he melted their brains, Luke. It… it was horrible. They were going to attack Taylor, then they just… died.”

“Okay.” Luke was pleased to hear that Zed had been working to save his team. It showed he cared deeply.

“The worst part? No one else reacted to it. It was like those people had never existed to them. Zed used the attack to figure out who was loyal, Luke. Thank the celestials that he swore to never use his abilities against us.” Andre laughed too loudly as he motioned to the remaining people. “Taylor hasn’t killed a single person that attacked us, thinking that it’s all political. She thinks that as soon as we do so, someone will show up with the actual authority to bind us. I’m not cut out for this nightmare of politics, Luke. I make pretty flowers and stuff. I don’t understand the tricksy words and double meanings; the plots within plots.”

“So don’t bother.” Luke eyed his friend, weighing the benefits of putting the man to sleep with his fist. He decided against it; wouldn’t do to give the man a complex. Instead he started walking around the slipshod campsite and looking over how to improve the defenses. “You don’t wanna do politics, don't. Someone tries to force you to do something? Put ‘em in a lotus coffin and use them to help regrow the desert. They bring an army? Use their blood to water your flowers. Pretty sure you could actually do that, and it’d even make your flowers better able to fight against the next army.”

“But… but what if-”

Luke cut him off with an impatient grunt. “Look around you. This was done by a Druid. A single guy basically wrecked an entire country. Get so strong that they’re terrified you could do it again. If they force you, actually do it again.”

“I could never-” Andre tried again.

“Never? Pretty sure that’s what the last Druid said.” Luke glared at Andre, his hand shooting out to completely capture his lower jaw. “Stop talking, go to your world, and sleep for a day. Come back when you’re useful, and we’ll talk about what we need to do. Nod if everything is fine for now, shake your head if we need to rescue someone.”

Andre slowly nodded. Luke let him go, and stepped back. “Words are fine. For a little while. Then they just get in the way. Go sleep, I’ll protect the delicate little flowers.”

He kicked one of the unconscious men, and Andre winced in sympathy. The Murderhobo glared, and went to kick another. Andre waved frantically for him to stop, and slowly, painfully, opened a portal before stepping through. Luke looked on as the portal vanished, and slowly grinned. “He musta boosted the ambient mana in the area a whole lot if he can open that here. No one else knows it’s possible to portal here right now… that’s a good advantage for us.”

Luke sat on one of the lotus coffins that was peeking out of the sand and took a deep breath… promptly hacking a deep cough as sand flew down his nose. “The sand is attacking me! Die, sand!”