Anything ~ 24!

- Taylor -

The air thrummed like a drum being beaten to death, and the world gave way as a portal was torn open. Luke fell out of the rent in the air as it slammed shut behind him, not bothering to catch himself as he dropped to the ground. Blood pooled around him, enough that the people waiting for him clearly thought that he was either dying or dead.

A massive sense of unease swept over Taylor, and she reacted by using Fissure to grab the ground under Luke with all her strength and bodily hurled him as far out of the area and into the desert as she could manage. Only a few moments later, pure mana detonated into the world, and a storm centered on Luke sprang into being. The Murderhobo stayed in the air and only slowly fell, appearing to be a meteor falling to earth. Where he touched, the ground warped and shifted in and out of reality for a few minutes before settling as the ambient mana in the area reached unprecedented levels.

“Think he died?” Zed casually questioned Taylor as he watched the lightshow. “I really wouldn’t put it past him to be able to explode after he died. That seems like a very ‘Murderhobo’ Skill to have.”

“No… I don’t know what just happened.” Taylor sighed and shook her head. “I don’t think he died, I got a strange warning feeling from something he was carrying; not from him directly. Besides, mana does strange things to him, so I’m completely certain he’ll actually be better off than he was a moment ago.”

Sure enough, Luke came walking out of the cloud of dust as if nothing had happened. The swirling mana didn’t show any signs of slowing its spread, but they ignored that fact for now. He had a thunderous expression on his face, but Taylor didn’t think that meant anything other than ‘hi, I’m Luke’ at this point. Even so, she let out a small sigh of relief at seeing her friend unharmed. “What in the world happened?”

“I was this close, Taylor.” Luke took repeated heaving breaths. “I found Cookie, and I wasn’t able to get her! Do you have any idea how…”

He couldn’t continue speaking, instead looking to the side and punching a rock that was jutting out of the sand. Taylor wasn’t sure how to handle the situation, but she did know for sure that she not only needed him to get away from the village, she also needed him to come and close the Scar she had found. “Come with me and tell me what’s going on. I found a thing you need to punch.”

That seemed to lift his spirits. At least, it no longer seemed that he would tear someone apart the moment they opened their mouths. Taylor made a mental note to divert Luke when she needed him to refocus, not to try and talk him down. She turned and sprinted away, but Luke appeared next to her in the next instant and didn’t even seem to be having trouble keeping up. He had gotten stronger. Luke had caught up to her in her area of specialization. That shocked Taylor, and she vowed to take more time for training in the near future.

It took only a minute for them to arrive next to the wispy Scar, and the sight of it had Luke interested. “This is… unexpected.”

“Can you close it?” Taylor worried as he inspected the mirage-like portal. “The world on the other side is dead and empty, but there are… I don’t even know. Creatures that we would consider divine there that are going to scourge the planet soon. If we don’t close this, I fear we may suffer for it.”

“Yeah.” Luke lashed out with a single fist, and the Scar closed like a soap bubble popping.

Taylor stared at the spot the wavering portal had been a moment ago, then back at Luke. “How in the abyss do you use a Tier eight spell in an instant like that?”

“What do you mean?” Luke sat down and sighed, bored now that the excitement had already passed. “What Tier eight spell? I only have Skills.”

“Same difference!” She sharply sounded off. “Conventional wisdom stated that anything above Tier six requires a significant casting time!”

“Who said I’m using a Tier eight Skill for that?” Luke looked at her quizzically. “Open up is Tier six, level nine. I’ve been holding off on upgrading it until I can’t go back to my world for a while.”

“You said it was Tier eight!” Taylor insisted, managing to hold off from pointing a finger into his face.

“When?”

“Back when you closed the Scar and we were fighting the Chimera!” Taylor exploded at the Murderhobo. “You shouted ‘Tier eight, Open Up’!”

“Oh. Yeah, I do remember that.” Luke chuckled as he watched Taylor’s face shift around angrily. “Heh. I was trying to throw people off. I figured that if they thought I had some high-Tier stuff available, they’d back off a little. Plus, everyone was calling out the Tier of their stuff, I didn’t want to look like I couldn’t keep up. That goat guy had just shouted about his Tier nine spell, so…”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Taylor dropped to the ground and covered her face. “I’ve been working so hard to catch up to the Tier of stuff you use, and you were just making crap up. Do you even have any Tier eight Sp… Skills?”

Luke shook his head in the negative. “I will honestly admit that I don’t have any Tier eight Skills.”

“Okay, well… at least I know the-”

“Mainly because I just upgraded my main combat Skill to Tier nine.” Luke’s casual statement made Taylor freeze in place. He didn’t notice that she wasn’t moving, and just continued speaking. “Haven’t had much of a chance to test it yet. I was going to wait until I found some better gear or… or Cookie.”

Taylor swallowed her roiling emotions as she heard the pain in his voice. It was subtle, as the Murderhobo wasn’t exactly an anything-but-fury-expressing sort of individual. Even so, she knew he needed a friend… and Zed wasn’t around. She decided to give it a shot. “You said you found… Cookie? What happened?”

“A bunch of overgrown snails were worshiping her as their god.” Luke sighed discontentedly and held his hands out to show his confusion and anger. “I swear, she makes friends anywhere she goes.”

“Snails.” Taylor nodded slowly at the crazy man. “Interesting. Interesting. Yup. Murder World sounds… interesting.”

“Oh right, any idea what plant this is?” Luke held up a seed, and Taylor shook her head. “Yeah, I knew that was a longshot. I’ll bother Andre with it. He come back yet?”

“No.” Taylor’s lips pressed into a firm line, and she changed the subject. “Why did you explode into a mana storm when you got back?”

“What? That was really foggy for me, I was exhausted. The chickens had messed me up pretty bad when I was going up the chain.” Luke cracked his knuckles as he planned his revenge. “That last one nearly knocked me off the world.”

Taylor nodded, her lips twisted to the side of her face as her mind tried to make sense of what Luke was talking about. “Yeah, that sounds… bad. Um. When you got here, you fell. My Sigil pinged me that something bad was about to happen, so I threw you into the desert, and you vanished behind a wall of mana.”

“Mana?” Confusion shone for a moment in Luke’s eyes, then horrified realization as he slapped at one of his pouches. He pulled it toward him, only to find that it was charred completely through. “Unicorn feces. Now I need to find a way to bring that back without it exploding? Why would it blow up like that?”

“What was it?” Taylor inquired in a hushed tone. “It was clearly powerful…?”

“I found some mana, I figured that if the water would be fine in a waterskin, the crystal version would be fine too.” He tapped the charred and glowing bag and shook his head. “No deal.”

“Mana… crystals?” Taylor furrowed her brow. “There are theories that mana can become so dense that it becomes solid, but… no one has ever seen it on this plane. If you really found some, then… hmm. Yeah, it would make sense that bringing it here would make it go boom. The sheer density of mana, oh boy, taking it out of a mana-rich environment in its basic form would make it explosively decompress. Did make it decompress, I guess. Unless you could find a way to turn it into structured magic, it would just-”

“Turn it into something or put it in a sealed container, got it.” Luke rolled his eyes as she tried to make the issue harder than it needed to be. He opened another few pouches, and pulled out a pinch of dust. “Right, this stuff. Can you think of any uses for powdered snail shell?”

“Not off the…” Taylor’s voice trailed off as she stared at the shining powder. “Luke… is that powdered Unicorn Horn?”

“Pfft. They’re glorified horses with a face-sucking parasite, don’t give them more credit than they deserve.”