Anything ~ 21!

The slide came to an abrupt end, and Luke jumped the last few meters to ensure there were no nasty surprises at the very edge of the moving joints. Just like at the top of what Luke now recognized as a knee, there was a forest here with trees so tall that they vanished into the mana clouds. They appeared to be roughly the same kind, so he ignored any available seeds and began trekking in the direction this behemoth was moving.

He sprinted for the majority of the next few days, eventually coming upon what he assumed had to be the creature’s head. The sheer size, lack of enemies, and utter absence of food or water was making him antsy. It didn’t help that his time was running out; Luke had no way to know if he was going to be able to make it back to the edge of the Zone. The only way forward or back was to defeat this creature here and now.

There was no discernable anatomy, not really. The Murderhobo had been hoping that he could find an eyeball that he could use to dig deep into this thing’s brain, but anything about this creature was on a scale he had no reference to in the slightest. Finding an eyeball meant nothing if it looked like an ocean to him, how would he even know he had found what he was looking for? Shaking his head, he spat, “Need to figure out how to kill a literal walking continent. This Zone sucks.”

Finding no easy path forward, Luke decided that this space was as good as any other. Turning off his armor, he devoted one hundred percent of his mana to his Battering Ram Knuckles and began slamming his fist into the ground. At the start, each blow cracked the surface and left a deep welt. After ten minutes, he had broken through the outer crust and began making more rapid progress. For the next few hours, he simply punched his way further downward.

The real problem was: if the creature’s ‘skin’ was stone and mountains, what was it going to be like to reach the bones deeper down? Luke worried about this only for a short while as he battered and sliced his way downward, but he never seemed to find a harder layer. Everything was just… hard. The whole way.

He slept in the hole he had dug, only bothering to look up a few times. Even then, he was mostly ensuring that his tunnel didn’t close up above him. He refocused on punching his way through his problems, thinking about his status as he did so.

Cal Scan

Level: 10

Current Etheric Xenograft Potentia: 3,333/14,400 to level 11!

Body: 32.4

Fitness: 40.8

Resistance: 24

Mind: 18.6

Talent: 16.3

Capacity: 20.9

Presence: 18

Willpower: 27

Charisma: 9

Senses: 23.75

Physical reaction: 27.5

Mental energy: 20

Maximum Health: 290

Maximum Mana: 324

Mana regen: 5.43 per second Overridden: 100 per second.

“Mm. Dramatic increase in Presence. Lil’ bit in Body, must be from boosting You need to Stop to the new Tier. Better body, unsurprising that it would make others like me better.” Luke looked at the other numbers associated with these changes. “I can output… two thousand and forty kilos of force at my maximum. With everything devoted to my knuckles… I can hit for over thirteen hundred damage.”

“Makes sense to me.” He looked to the sky, a bare pinprick thousands of feet above him at this point. Then he got back to punching.

It was only a few minutes later that a dramatic shift happened: the ground under him collapsed, and Luke fell into darkness. He rapidly shifted his mana, activating Feather’s Fall even as his armor sprang into being around him. Over the next few minutes, he got sick of reactivating the Skill, and instead allowed himself to fall at just below the speed that would damage him if he landed on something hard. At that point, he would slow himself and sigh as he drifted along.

A very, very soft lightsource appeared below him. Aiming at that, Luke soon landed on squishy but shockingly firm ground. “This is the brain. Gotta be the brain. Good. Let’s get to punching.”

His fist slammed down, and a wave of flesh erupted from the point of impact.

Damage dealt: 403 blunt.

There was no reaction, and nothing hinting at the fact that what he did had impacted the creature at all. He sighed, deactivated his armor once more, and began punching down at full strength. Once more he soon had a tunnel, but unlike the one that had gotten him to this point, this tunnel rapidly filled with blood and fluids. Only a short distance down, he nearly became trapped in the jiggling flesh and needed to retreat. “Still nothing from the beast. How long am I going to need to attack before I hit something that matters?”

Tearing up a huge swath of the meaty tissue, he went and sat down. “At least I found lunch. As much as he wanted to cook his next meal, lighting a fire in an enclosed area like this - one that was stuffed with volatile mana - was akin to planning to roast himself. He took a bite of the meat, pleased with the surprisingly sweet taste. As he chewed on the oddly textured treat, he looked at his arms.

There were numerous rocks, perhaps carapace, that were stuck in his skin. Attacking rock at full force with no armor on had perhaps not been his most intelligent move, but the fact that they couldn’t get too deep into him or hit a vital spot helped him ignore the minor damage. Yet, if he wanted those spots to properly heal, he needed to dig the shards out.

Using a sharp knife from one of his many pouches, he peeled back his skin and tore out the damaged areas one by one. A simple sip of his ‘water’ later, the bleeding would stop and his skin would appear unblemished. “Flesh wounds are so easy to deal with. I can’t believe people complain about-”

*Sizzle.*

An unexpected sound made Luke’s ears twitch, and he spun to face the direction it had come from. What met his eyes confused him: there was a black, practically necrotic patch of brain where he had… his eyes widened. “That’s where my blood landed! Yes! Right! I’m basically poison!”

He went over to the hole he had dug earlier, the one filled with various fluids, and sliced open his inner thigh. From his experience, this particular spot would let him bleed out rapidly, but not too fast to stop by drinking some mana down. “Unlike you, armpit. No wonder you always stink. Trying to scare off your attackers has never helped, has it?”

When no reply was forthcoming, he took that as agreement and watched his blood mix with the fluids below. Apparently his now-Tier-four Skill was a potent weapon in a situation like this; as shown by the withering and utter destruction spinning out from anywhere that came into contact with his blood. “Still too slow. Gotta start punching until I find a vein or an artery.”

He got right to it, and had soon scooped out a crater of goo. Eventually he hit something important, and the crater started to fill with blood as if it was a new well. “Next step, figure out where the output and input are.”

Soon he had matched up the broken ends of the vein, and stuck his leg into the hole after re-slicing his leg. Each time he began getting weary, he would take a break and heal. A thick slice of brain worked as a blanket, and he slept well in the safe and warm environment.

Days went by, enough so that he worried that his plans were failing… until they suddenly weren’t. The brain damage appeared to have accumulated to the point that it became self-propagating, and the creature began to spasm as a massive stroke and seizure took hold.

Unsurprisingly, a creature of this size took a long time to die. If Luke had been on the outside of the body, the mere earthquakes and storms kicked up by the rapid movements would have killed him a dozen times over. But, he was in its head. The safest place to be by far. Eventually, he got the message he had been waiting for.

Zone cleared! Detected Anomalies destroyed: 1/2. Potentia gained: 500.

“Five hundred Potentia? That’s it? For this?” Luke waved around the huge hollow that he was in as he shouted at the air. “This thing would have been impossible to kill for almost anyone, ever!”

No matter the size, this was only a Tier five creature that had no method of defending itself against your attacks at this size. Most of the creature’s Potentia is stored within its flesh. Hint: You can capture 60% of all its Potentia by eating the entire carcass!

“You’re an evil, evil Sigil.” Luke muttered discontentedly. “That just isn’t possible.”

Would you like to abandon all attempts to eat the creature so that the space in this Zone can be reverted to its original size?

“Yes. Absolutely do that.” The air around Luke fluctuated, and he shuddered as the density of power in the area reached a point that it began impacting reality. The… insect? The bug-like thing that he had broken into… it shattered with a cataclysmic ringing that seemed to last forever. A Skill pearl appeared in front of him, and he grabbed it and gulped it down without a second thought. He waited for a Skill screen to appear, but… nothing?

He began to fall; the continent under him was hundreds of kilometers away, and his resting position was gone. The wind rushed past him in a torrential hurricane as space was compressed. Luke was tossed around as the ground approached at a speed that was unnatural: the stretched space was being put back where it was supposed to be after who-knew-how-many millenia.

After an instant that seemed to last forever, he stood on the ground, blinking in confusion. A glance around showed him that he was around a third of the way through the Zone, and a red timer appeared in his vision denoting the amount of time he had remaining to find an exit before he would be forced to turn around and sprint for the opposite edge of Zone ten.

As he had killed the only enemy in the Zone, it was a cakewalk to get to Zone twelve. He saw motion directly on the other side of the boundary, and prepared himself to fight right away. There was a strong possibility that getting to the other side of this Zone would grant him a new exit point, and-

“Hello, there! Did you defeat the Giga-ant? You freed us! Please tell me you’re friendly?” Luke stumbled to a halt as a horse galloped toward him, a cheerful falsetto voice echoing from atop it.