Tom was dreaming. He was climbing mountains under some sort of invisibility spell. There were monsters around, but they couldn’t see him. Sometimes they would notice the trail he was leaving, and they would slam into the stone below him. It was fun. His fingers dug into the rock like it was putty and then he could pull himself up easily.
The whole space shuddered.
It shouldn’t be possible, but it felt like his invisibility was slipping, or maybe it was a volcanic eruption.
Something touched his hips. A terrifying monster was about to tear into him and strip his muscle from his bone.
Panic flared.
He leapt to his feet and reached for his magic. Spark coalesced and lashed out at where the monster had made the mistake of touching him. The light blanket fluttered away and his spear materialised in his hands. His spark domain crackled into existence and he tensed settled into a half crouch ready to spring in any direction as he sought out the enemy.
His domain didn’t find a monster.
He froze. His synapses firing and overcooking their calculation power to unravel what was happening.
There were people around him, not monsters, and a blanket that had fallen mostly to his feet.
The awareness of the safe room and his companions. Rahmat landing three metres away after a wild leap backward. It put him outside the effective strike range of the spear that Tom gripped in his hands ready to unleash. Unless he used lunge of course. Then again, everywhere in the cave could be reached by that ability.
More information flooded into him.
Gerald was the closest and was stumbling away. The lack of battle awareness there was telling. Usko had an axe out. Bao had summoned her magic, but no one was attacking him. With an effort of will, he made his spear vanish.
“And that’s why we wake Tom by poking him with a spear.” Michael said dryly.
Vidja smiled, and Gerald grimaced. Bao closed her hands and what he sensed was a type of force blast magic vanished.
“I presume, given how you woke up that you had a dream?” Michael asked.
Tom inclined his head in acknowledgment and focused on calming down. His heart was still thundering.
“You can tell us over breakfast,” the healer said with a nod toward Rahmat who was holding a plate with what looked like sausage on bread. He accepted the offering and while he ate, he recounted the dream, and they discussed the implications.
They weren’t in a rush. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement that this was a dream that needed more attention than usual. As he spoke, Keikain built a map of the zone based on Tom’s description. Unsurprisingly, it resembled the tile piece from the zone on the first layer. A simple crater, without any distinguishing features. You could have found similar examples on earth that had been created by a meteorite strike. Then evenly placed around it were eight portals, the dragon in the centre and the three rapid response groups that were midway between the portals and the central exit. The earth mage frowned. “If the portals send you through randomly, it’s going to make it hard to coordinate our assault. We’ll want defensive units around the giant, and this entry method is going to throw a spanner into those plans.”
“That’s only if the deployment is random.” Michael observed. “If it’s symmetric, we can predict the right actions. For example, if it’s something like every eighth person will go to the same spot… then, that’s something we can work around..”
“Can you check that, Tom?” Keikain asked.
Tom sighed. “Depending on how the insects went through then yes. But is it more important than keeping track of Selena, or working out what precognition skill we have to block?”
“No, it’s not,” Keikain admitted after a moment. Then he did a shit-eating grin. “But straight after those, right?”
“Get lost,” he shot back. “Anyway, if we’re done with this.” With a thought, the carefully created map, complete with a sculptured dragon vanished in a wave of dirt.
“Hey,” Keikain protested. “It took me ages to make that.”
Tom focused and the dragon that had taken up most of that time rose out of the dirt preserved and unhurt. “Here, I saved it for you.” Its survival had just been a lucky quirk, but he wasn’t going to tell the other man that. “Were you planning on taking it with you?”
“I was thinking you could turn it into a golem.”
“It’s tier zero stone.”
Keikain’s nose wrinkled. “Good point.” He clicked his fingers and a dart of rock shot from them and slammed into the monster’s neck. A moment later, it crumbled away to dust.
Bastard, Tom thought to himself. The earth mage had never wanted to keep it. The fuss had just been the idiot’s attempt to tease and fluster him and it had almost worked.
With a superior smile, Keikain lowered his hand. “On second thoughts now that I’ve made it once. Next time I can recreate it faster. Well, Tom’s eaten, we’ve all expressed our uneducated gut feel and absence a second dream…” he looked at Tom expectantly… “Nope there isn’t any. We’re done here… Let’s go collect some puffs.”
“Before we go,” Michael interrupted. “Tom, I understand you were considering getting a ranged heal?”
Cautiously, Tom nodded. He had been, and it had been a good idea.
“We crowd sourced some options last night after you fell asleep. There’s some ones you might want to take a gander at.”
“Oh, really?” Tom said suddenly engaged with the conversation. “Any good ones.”
“The absolute best.” The healer handed over a list, and he glanced at it. Spell: Dead Healers Touch – Tier 5 Spell: Life Twisting Debuff – Tier 4 Spell: Lightning Bolt Taunt – Tier 4
Only the last contained the word taunt. “What are they?”
“They’re the best options we could find in the store for you. I assumed a tier six skill would be too rich even for you.”
“Maybe,” Tom muttered. He figured that with the experience he was getting that tier six was affordable for the right skill though tier seven might be beyond his means.
“Well, we judged the tier six and seven options weren’t as good, anyway. Now about the list. The first two use your healing affinity and the last your lightning.”
“Why are their two healing options?”
Michael smiled at that. “Because there were no good Earth affinity taunting abilities and the healing spells are quite different. They aren’t like your Lightning Enrage. They’re not designed to be a taunt rather the taunt effect is a consequence of the other actions of the spell. In terms of the typical user, how it attracts attention is considered a negative and not a feature. Without the taunt component, both, I dare say would be ranked a tier higher.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” Thor interjected. “Dead Healer’s Touch talks about the way it uses healing to damage the opponent and then has a big warning at the bottom that it is a painful process and tends to enrage any monsters or sapients it’s used on. Squishy healers should only use it as a guaranteed finisher.”
“Thor likes that one,” Michael said with a laugh. “I preferred the second one because it effectively debuffs the monster’s agility and to a limited extent its strength. It doesn’t atrophy muscles but instead grows muscles fibres at cross purposes to the natural ones. When you contract the muscles, you have fibres pulling perpendicular to the intended direction. That causes both pain and substantially reduces the effectiveness of the muscle, which makes the target amongst other things clumsier.”
“They are nonstandard alternatives,” Clare told him. “The lightning bolt is designed to taunt monsters. It does limited damage but can stun the opponent.”
“That’s interesting.” Tom replied neutrally. “Which one should I take.”
“Dead Touch,” Thor cheer led instantly.
“No, mine,” Michael said in a juvenile voice. “More seriously. They’re the best three options we could find. Personally, I wouldn’t buy lightning bolt because it overlaps with your existing enrage ability. If a future opponent is resistant to electricity, then you won’t be able to taunt it.”
“Counter point,” Clare said quietly. “Is that it’s a dedicated long-range taunt. Yeah, it might fail against the occasional monster with lightning resistance. But it will work better than the other two against almost everything else.”
Tom glanced between the three of them. They all had their favourite, but his preferences were the only one that mattered. He shut his eyes and stepped into the system room.
Detailed descriptions of the three spells appeared on his wall, but he didn’t read them immediately. Instead, he thought about the advice he had been given. The first two were proper attack spells, with a taunt component as an extra. The lightning version was dedicated only to enrage the enemies that it hit and, as Clare said would almost certainly be more effective… But he agreed with Michael that a second lightning taunt was foolish.
He could easily imagine a situation where his target was invulnerable to that element and his friends dying because Tom couldn’t force a monster to attack him. If it was his job to attract aggro, then leaving a gap in the monsters he could do that too, was a risk he would not take. The consequences of failure were too high.
Nope, he was taking one of the healing skills for sure. The question was which one.
Spell: Dead Healers Touch – Tier 5
This is one of the rare healing spells designed to deliver damage. It achieves that by growing Quolic Spores in or near the skin of the targeted enemy. An individual Quolic spore grows to the size of a grain of rice with razor sharp sides. En masse they can shred the toughest armour or carapace.
The spell is exceeding efficient at stripping natural armour from opponents and can deliver lethal damage if used upon a deep wound near vital organs. It is an instant cast with a range of two hundred metres and at level one targets an area of up to a metre squared.
Note: This spell tends to enrage any monsters it is used upon because of the immense pain it causes and most creatures after being struck with the spell will drop everything to try to kill the spell caster. Healers should only use it from within solid fortifications or as a finishing attack because of the aggro it will cause.
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Cost 330,000
It sounded amazing, and he wanted it.
He checked the second option, and it read much like the first, but instead of shredding a layer of flesh it mutated muscles to impair coordination and strength.
Spell: Life Twisting Debuff – Tier 4
This spell is an instant target ability with a range of a hundred and seventy metres. The spell bypasses most magical defences and can penetrate up to twenty centimetres into the target where it will mutate muscle tissue and rob the target of agility and strength.
Cost 120,000
Then there was the same warning as with the first spell. Tom knew if he pressed further he could get a better understanding of the mechanism it used but Michael had already done that and explained it earlier.
He considered the two options. Both would work for the current situation. The question was which would be best for him long term. If monsters were physically attacking him anything that slowed their attacks would magnify his dodging advantages further. Between Black Dodge and that spell, he would be able to take on monsters that were ten times faster than him… but if a single creature was ten times faster than him, then it would be… Tom struggled to imagine the level it would have to be at… And something that strong would possess magic… and it could probably destroy him with said magic without difficulty.
He shivered, thinking about it. Unless a monster was ridiculously lop sided with its attributes... if they had the raw speed to trouble him currently, they would probably have an area of effect magic that would cause even more problems.
Also, getting Life Twisting Debuff to help him in his melee defensive role ignored all of his experience. Since receiving black dodge singular opponents had not troubled him. It was mobs with lots of random attacks which were the most dangerous. Dead Healers’ Touch, on the other hand did real damage and against powerful enemies it could strip away natural defences like skin and scales and create holes for others to exploit.
With a thought, he purchased the ability and over three hundred thousand experience vanished and the knowledge of how to use the new spell appeared in his head. It was sight based and all he had to do was to see an enemy in range and trigger it.
The spell would do all the rest. It was a significant contrast to something like Throw Rock that relied on his physical skills to elevate it from a meh ability to a deadly one.
He returned to real life a tiny smile on his face.
Michael peered at him. “Dead Healer’s Touch? Am I right?” The healer roared with laughter at Tom’s reaction. “I knew it. Tom was always going to choose the option that would let him kill things faster.”
“That wasn’t why I got it!”
“Of course, it wasn’t.” Michael gave him an exaggerated wink, and everyone laughed.
With them all in a slightly better mood, they left the safe room “There are more enemies active than there were last night,” Everlyn warned.
They clambered out of the crevice in a wave of force. The moment he saw the sky Tom understood that Everlyn’s casual supposition the previous day was correct. The monsters were active at set times. The sky had been nearly empty last time. This time, the deadly creatures were everywhere.
Their emergence above the crevices did not go unnoticed. Four of the monsters immediately broke from their lazy flight to attack them.
Everlyn snapped her fingers and pointed. “The fat one’s going to dive and attack physically. The others will do anything they can to avoid closing.”
“I’ll taunt the ranged ones.” Tom called out. Clare was more than capable of checking the melee monsters for the few seconds the rest of the team needed to burn it down. Three monsters to dodge the attack of seemed about right. Enough to pressure him, but not so many he would be in danger.
He took off at a run and leapt over a crevice to land on his own patch of rock, and then he searched for his enemies. There were two fishes, like the monster from the previous night and in less than a second his magic had tagged them and then the third. The final monster looked more like an eagle with orange tipped feathers.
Tom watched, fascinated, as his new magic activated. The entire underbelly of the fishes changed colour as his spell dug in. Going from the shiny silver to a dark mess. They spasmed and shifted direction. There was a madness in their eyes as they focused on him.
He smiled. The spell was at least working as advertised.
Then his eyes flicked to the eagle who had been furthest from him. The spell was instant, but the crystals took a moment to grow and he had tagged this last monster half a second after the others. For a moment, it flew unaffected by his spell. A majestic creature gliding through the air. Then it beat its wings. It was like a bomb went off next to it. An explosion that resulted in a cloud of dust spreading out from it. Speckled brown and orange debris hid it from sight for a moment. When it burst clear, the impact of his spell was apparent. The feathers covering half of its underside and one wing had vanished to leave pink skin. It was comical, with one fully feathered wing and the other missing all of its feathers. The one stripped of feathers was left looking to be about a quarter of the size of the undamaged one.
It beat its wings again, and panic filled its features. Unlike the fish, it relied on physics to control its flight and it was now unbalanced. Another beat and in spun in a circle the good wing pushing it through the air far more effective than the featherless one. In response, it flapped its wings harder, an effort that just made it spin faster in its death spiral.
Tom lost sight of it as it vanished and presumably crashed into one of the many crevices.
Time slowed.
He jerked his attention back to the real threat.
The fish monsters had not waited to get closer and had instead launched their attacks the moment they got into range over seventy metres above his head. Tom tracked the incoming strikes and fell to his knees and to the side. A simple manoeuvre that evaded all but one of the blades and that one was reduced to clipping his shoulder. If his dodge skill was more standard, he could have avoided that one as well, but Black Dodge always forced you to choose the lesser of many evils. Its unique form of magic ensured that he was damaged by every group of strikes. All of his choices only let him reduce the severity.
The patch of skin that was about to get hit turned to stone. The wind blade struck and left a long scratch on the converted skin that would have been five or six times deeper if he hadn’t used Living Rock. He sprang to his feet as they spiralled closer, dropping down toward their optimal range of fifty metres. Once more they went hazy as the air in front of them trembled with the energy they were packing into it. There was a thrum and then the magic was released. This time, the attack of both were spread more and a total of eleven blades shot down at him.
He leapt into the air, twisted and then teleported. Underneath him and behind him, scars were cut in the rock as the blades collided with it.
Fate was building up around him with each dodge attempt.
Tom smiled. He had this under control.
More attacks came all of which he effortlessly evaded. He wondered if he should have brought the melee creature into attack him as well, but when he checked, Thor, Rahmat and Usko were cutting it into pieces. Less than twenty seconds had passed and most of that time had been the monster swooping down to strike the main team.
They had destroyed the threat effortlessly.
He twisted and spun through another round of attacks. The eagle reappeared. Some of the more critical feathers of its wing had regrown, but it had a gash on its chest presumably where it had collided with the ground. A sizzling ball of green was shot at him. His alarms went off, and he used a teleport to fully evade the dangerous material.
The three continued to try to kill him, but it was going to be short-lived. With the melee opponent defeated his companions had switched their efforts to the secondary threat. One by one they died, but more monsters were coming, and Tom tagged them when they flew down with his new taunt.
Fish, birds, bat like creatures, a variety of aerial threats came to destroy them. There were wind blades, fire bolts the dangerous acid attacks, but none of them hit him. Usually he only had three or four attacking at once, but on a number of occasions that number rose to six, but even that many was not enough to bother him.. With fate protection established, his magic shields and Channelled Damage Mirror, if he couldn’t dodge, he had opportunities to block. Their loud fight attracted more enemies and almost the entirety of his mana went to Dead Healer’s Touch to ensure they focused on him. It was mana that was well spent because it freed up everyone else to coordinate their strikes and their collective efforts burned down one of the monsters every thirty seconds. He kept fighting and forty minutes later they stopped coming as all the active fliers in the nearby area had been slaughtered.
Tom could see two dozen corpses littering the tableau, but that was a small fraction of the total number they had destroyed as most when they had died had fallen into the crevices.
With the immediate area cleared, they proceeded more deeply into the zone.
They fell into a routine.
The geography was basically a series of small mountains or hills, with between ten and twenty of the ridiculously tall spires rising out of the top of it. Once in position, on top of one of those hills, they would clear the nearby monsters and then a scout would identify the one or two spires that contained a flower and either Rahmat or himself, as the best climbers would climb up to retrieve it.
Based on their progress the scouts crunched the numbers. The good news was they were going to comfortably beat the layers timer, but it was still going to take five or six days to do. They moved slowly and carefully with a prolonged break at midday because so many of the monsters were in the air.
“There must be set activity cycles,” Michael concluded. “I wonder if they’re only active in the middle of the day.”
“Middle of the day and midnight,” Rahmat answered immediately. He pointed at himself, Puma and finally Everlyn. “We were monitoring overnight. It’s pretty clear early to mid morning and just before sunset is the best times to hunt.”
“Are we changing our sleep patterns,” Michael asked. “I mean if we’re inactive during peak times we might as well be sleeping.”
Everlyn shook her head. “No need to do so yet. It could save a day in this zone, but it also might stuff us up in the next one. Better to keep standard hours with Tom taking a siesta at lunchtime.”
They fought all afternoon and when sleep time came, Tom directed his True Dreaming to check on Selena’s group.
Because he was expecting it he had no trouble identifying that once more he was sharing Mahar’s mind and body. True Dreaming definitely preferred to use the same person if there was a choice.
The other team was navigating through a desolate landscape with visible lava flows. Currently, their combined group was threading a path between two such streams, walking on a strip of stone only five metres across. They were all watching the flanking magma flows like they expected monsters to appear.
Tom in their place would have done the same thing. It was never wise to trust a pool of molten rock. In his experience, they always contained something nasty even if they weren’t supposed to. Ahead of him, Jenny approached the pair of wador, who, because of their enhanced senses, had taken the vanguard position. .
Mahar scowled at her and Tom could feel the sharp jab of anger. To calm himself, Mahar repeated the same phrase over and over in his head. ‘It’s only words. She doesn’t have the sign off or votes to do anything. It’s only words it can’t hurt us.’
Everything went white.
Tom found himself unable to see, hear, or eavesdrop on Mahar’s thoughts. He was completely blind just like before.
They were using the same ability as last time and internally he cursed. Part of him had hoped that they would get sloppy. With nothing else to do he tried to measure the time.
The whiteness cracked into pieces and vanished. On his count, three to four minutes had passed, which felt like less than the last time, but it was hard to tell.
The angry thoughts in Mahar’s mind had faded to resentful and when he probed for more information, the white static got in the way once more but luckily only blocked access to Mahar’s mind. His vision and hearing remained unaltered.
The wador who was next to the leader that Jenny had been chatting to had collapsed and now lay prone on the ground. Mahar could not see anything and nor could he hear much either but the enhanced senses from True Dreaming let him hear laboured breaths and its two front paws were being held over its eyes.
“Our time is over,” the wador leader said grimly.
“But last time we got five minutes.” Jenny whinged. “Three minutes. We barely got beyond pleasantries.”
“Enough stupidity,” the wador snarled and stared at her coldly and then inclined its muzzle toward its companion. “Our time is over.”
The dream ended, and Tom smiled. It seemed like their ability to block him was reducing. At a minimum he was making their attempts to conspire harder. He was definitely going to continue using the dreams to spy on them. Based on what he was seeing doing so might even break the one blocking him. If his magic could cause permanent mental damage it would make him happy.
The wador was not his of humanity’s friend, and he had to keep reminding himself of that.
He was awoken without theatrics while it was still dark, and they set off just as the fake sun rose. The fights went similar to the previous day and when they travelled between their intense battles, he watched the group dynamics with interest. It seemed like there had been a subtle reorganisation. The core of the two separate groups remained unchanged. A cluster of his friends, and then a second silo with Vidja at the centre. Michael, Thor and Bao were attempting to act as the ice breakers. The three of them were often in a third cluster who, by their presence encouraged people to break away from the insular groups and socialise across teams.
He found it very interesting to see the changes. It was possible thanks to those efforts that by the end of the zone they would be a single functioning team once more.
Most of the monsters used air blades which drove him to start trialling stone armour. It was difficult, but if he caught sight of an incoming blade early enough, he could use a tendril of stone to intercept. The rock would shatter on impact, and he would lose a small handful of gravel each time, but the technique helped him avoid damage because the guarantee hits that Black Dodge enforced instead of hitting his body could be battered away.
They had found a large cave under one of the mini mountains to rest for the night. Everyone wanted him to chat, but he waved them off and collapsed into a deep sleep, wondering if he was going to receive another enlightening dream.