Anything ~ 19!

- Luke -

Something was different. Luke knew it was. At first glance, Zone eleven was the same as the other areas that he had been in for his entire time in Murder World, but… he couldn’t place what was different, and it was putting him on edge. Whipping his new scourge back and forth a few times to recenter himself, Luke decided that sprinting in would be the best course of action.

He crossed the boundary while moving as quickly as he could, getting a chime and a message from his Sigil at the same time. His eyes were drawn to a different and far more concerning effect: the mana fog that swirled around the edges of the ground was receding.

When the Murderhobo had sprinted into the area, he had seen that this Zone was just a continuation of the previous one, but now that the fog was rolling away… or maybe…?

“My brain hurts!” He barked as he increased his pace. There was something wrong, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He knew that if he was fast enough, he wouldn’t need to deal with it, so he decided that speed was king. Yet, no matter how fast he ran, there was more ground to cover. He let his eyes flash to the side, and he looked over the flashing notification.

Welcome to Zone 11! There is only one enemy in this area, make sure to find it as quickly as you can! The enemy will get larger and harder to kill as time passes. The landscape itself will also expand to accommodate the growth of this creature, making it harder to escape the Zone in a timely manner! Defeating the creature will resize the Zone to its original size, and respawn a new creature that you should come back and defeat every once in a while to allow newcomers a chance to move through here without undergoing a massive trial.

C@uti0n! Spatial anomaly… detected.

“Great. Another ominous system message.” Luke didn’t let the message kill his speed. He understood what had happened, and this also confirmed another few things for him. “There’s someone that came through here before me. Someone else that survived the mana baptism at the start of the world. That’s the only reason there would be a Zone this far down that was activated. How long was it since they came through here?”

The ground started to tremble. Lightly, as if there was a herd of stampeding horses approaching. Luke looked into the distance carefully, for once not at all blocked from looking into the distance. The fog had receded past the horizon, only staying in the air above. With his sharp eyes, he couldn’t see a single opponent, or the edge of the world. For all intents and purposes, he may as well have been on a planet. An actual world instead of a spiral downward.

In fact, it was only when he really concentrated that he could notice the downward slope in this Zone, allowing him to feel relief that he was going in the correct direction. So, while the rumbling was concerning, he could tell that there was nothing around him. Hours passed as he moved, and the vibration on the ground only increased. A mountain range appeared in the extreme distance, and he wondered if there was a volcano erupting among them. The distance that he was attempting to traverse never seemed to decrease, and frankly he was getting more annoyed than anything else. The hours turned into days, and he started to worry about his timeline for getting out of here.

“Gotta get to the end of the next Zone, for abyss-sakes.” Luke had taken to screaming every once in a while to see if he could attract the attention of whatever the creature he needed to fight was. If he could beat it, the Zone would shrink back to its original size, and he would be able to zip across it without issue if he needed to do so. “This trembling is making my feet go numb.”

He really wanted to be in the air, Feather’s Fall-ing just so that he didn’t need to touch the shaking earth. Before he could go too much more insane, Luke finally noticed movement. There was a mountain-sized floating pillar ever-so-slowly floating through the air in the distance. Luke sped toward it: a floating mountain was almost guaranteed to have the creature he needed on it. Something like that didn’t just come along by chance.

He ran at maximum output for the next full day, and the mountain came closer and closer. However, the trembling of the ground had intensified to a dangerous degree. Not only that, but there was constant wind as if a hurricane was attacking at full force. All of this combined to slow Luke’s speed, but that was fine with him: the mountain was coming closer to him on its own. It was also coming lower and lower, as if it was going to reach the ground soon.

“Is it welcoming me? Coming to fight me? …Is something controlling that mountain?” Luke didn’t have any good answers. There was no way to know what was going on until he got there. Half a day later, the mountain was almost to the ground. Even so, Luke still couldn’t see the top of it; concealed as it was by the clouds of mana fog roiling up above. He could see the edges, but at this point it was filling the entire horizon.

“Goat beards.” Luke screeched to a stop as he cursed, getting bounced into the air as the trembling of the ground fought against him being still. “How fast is that rock actually moving?”

The mountain touched down, instantly hidden by a debris field that expanded upward and outward at hundreds of miles per hour. Luke’s first instinct was to burrow into the ground and hope against hope that the area he was in wouldn’t be annihilated or buried. Instead, he dumped every bit of mana he had into his armor and charged at the initial shockwave head-on; a waterskin in his mouth that he was doing his best to utterly drain as he ran.

For some reason, he felt that having a body utterly stuffed with mana was the only thing that was about to keep him alive.

A wall of compressed air and thunderous noise hit him like a professional athlete hits a ball, sending him back and up. Luke shot into the sky with dozens of broken bones, and his skin torn to shreds. He regained consciousness as he started to fall, as the mana he had ingested removed the trauma that had occurred in his brain. He thanked his lucky star that he had gained the ‘I Have Concerns’ Skill, and had a way to self heal in this miserable dimension.

As his ravaged body sewed itself back together, he shifted some mana so that he could activate Feather’s Fall, and began controlling his descent back toward the mountain. His reflexes and defenses were put to the test over and again as the airborne earth followed after the initial blast. Luke smiled as he put his practice against the pteranodons into play. Sure the rocks were moving several factors faster than the overgrown chickens could ever hope to match, but that didn’t change the fact that he could use Bum Flash to move around or on top of them, using some of the slower-moving among them to act as launch pads to refresh the requirements of his movement skill.

A standard human would never have been able to see how he was weaving though the field of death, but then again they would have been turned into paste by the shockwave at this range. The shards of stone and walls of earth were moving so rapidly that all but the lowest-flying had been bypassed in only a few seconds of rapid movement and hurried choices. Then the air was clear, and Luke was zooming toward the lower reaches of the mountain.

He landed on the wide mountain and began running. Whatever was controlling this flying behemoth had to be at the top. He stared into the clouds and nodded as he began moving once more.  “Things are looking up for me. Up, and up, and up.”