Millennial Mage - Chapter 222

Chapter 222: NotGravy




Chapter 222: Not-Gravy

Tala bisected the rotting corpse through the top of its head, Flow exiting between its legs.

The thing still tried to grab her as it fell, and she cut the falling pieces in half again, effectively quartering the zombie.

-Zombies arent real.-

What do you call these, then?

Tala wasnot happy.

She stood on top of the only dry patch shed been able to find so far in the incredibly odd swamp.

Swamp doesnt cover it by half.The debut release of this chapter happened at Ñøv€l-B1n.

Instead of water, she had trudged through two-foot-deep sludge that had the consistency of week-old gravy. Tala suspected it would be a deathtrap, if the end of reality werent right below the surface.

-Well, two feet down.-

Dont be childish.

-Oh, look, another one.-

Tala oriented on where her mirrored perception showed another zombie-like creature pull itself out of the gravy to stagger towards her.

Look, the ribcage is solid bone, all the way through. Theres no cavity for organs. It was never alive.

-Do you really prefer to think of these things as having been created to seem like zombies?-

Yes. Why wouldnt I?

-Think of the implications of something creating a mimicry of zombies and doing a bad job of it.-

Tala quickly chopped this one up too. The thick muck around her was becoming oddly fluffy as the dozens of still animate limbs wriggled and thrashed, effectively aerating the not-water.

That almost looks like meringue. Im never going to be able to look at that stuff the same again.

-Its a lot browner, plus, look at all the detritus.-

After a moment, Tala nodded. Thank you, that helps.

Now, though, she wanted lemon meringue pie.

Alat snorted within Talas head. -Were pretty odd.-

With no more immediate threats, Tala took a moment to scan her surroundings once again.

It smelled, awful. There was a cloying sweetness to the air, like someone had shot rotting syrup up her nostrils. To make it worse, there was no variation in the scent at all. It was utterly uniform, decidedly disgusting, pervasively pernicious.

-Whats with the alliteration?-

Anything to get the smell out of my mind.

She was roughly a hundred yards from the entrance, which looked like a stone archway from this side, freestanding in the swamp.

Overhead, she could feel the end of reality just out of reach.

This place was really oddly shaped, seeming almost like a long, wide hallway.

Reality ended about twenty feet to either side of her, and that seemed to represent the shape of this hold, extending away from her into the distance.

Nothing broke the gravy-like surface except the occasional ripple, which Tala suspected were more of these not-zombies.

Close to a mile away, if her estimation was correct, a stone wall blocked the entire passage.

Tala spoke out loud, just to give her something to hear in the otherwise vacuous silence, This place comes across like someone built it after hearing a childs summary of a horror story.

-Thatactually makes a lot of sense, yeah. Are ether holds influenced by thinking beings thoughts or concepts about things? This is simply a manifestation based on the commonalities surrounding these stories, aggregated across all intelligent species?-

I doubt thats actually correct, but it still seems like as good an explanation as anything. We really dont have enough information to know, though.

-Onward?-

Tala sighed, then nodded. Onward.

She stepped down from the small rise and grimaced as the fluffed sludge came up nearly to her waist. She ignored the feet and hands that scrabbled at her ineffectively.

She rolled three ending-seeds around in her mouth.

She had popped them in before entering this space. They should be an effective weapon if the things in here ever came at her more than one at a time or managed to sneak up on her.

Her pressure distribution scripts werent large enough to allow her to walk on the surface of the gravy, sadly. In fact, Tala had pulled power from the scripts, though she couldnt deactivate them fully.

With power flowing through them at full strength, they actually made walking harder, as it took longer for her feet to find the truly firm footing at the edge of reality.

Two more not-zombies rose out of the sludge, one after another, and Tala cut them down with contemptuous ease.

It wasnt pleasant to walk through the stuff. If shed been mundane, she might not have been able to manage it at all. Blessedly, with her magics and enhancements, she was strong enough that progressing was actually super easy, barely an inconvenience.

As she was forging ahead, confident in her strength, her next step came down onnothing. Reality continued downward as it never had before, and with a little yelp, Tala fell into a pit in the border of reality.

-Oh, thats evil.-

Tala couldnt see through the swamp gravy, so she pushed her bloodstars up, out of the liquid to watch for enemies.

She calmly reached around herself, trying to find anything she could grab onto.

There was nothing.

Her movements gained a bit of frenzy as she scrambled in the mirk for any way of rising one again.

I will not drown in this nasty sludge!

-Would you rather drown somewhere else?-

Tala pushed power down a different path within Flow, transforming the weapon into a glaive. She then swept around herself, searching for any firm surface. The only one was directly in front of her.

With her bloodstars mirroring her perspective for Tala and Alat, she knew that shed gotten turned around, and that what she had found was the shelf that shed just stepped off of.

It was a good three feet ahead of her, and already two or three feet up.

Worse, if she understood what she was feeling by searching around herself with Flow, the border of reality extended back, underneath that shelf.

There could be anything under there, watching, waiting to devour her.

Tala would have thought swimming in gravy would be easier because it was heavier than water, so she should be more buoyant. Unfortunately, because it was a semi-solid, it didnt flow around her as shed have liked or expected.

Her movements didnt accomplish anything but spinning her in place as she slowly sunk deeper.

Tala was beginning to panic.

She felt like eyes were on her from every direction.

Think, Tala. Think!

There had to be a way out.

She had to have an ability or item that could save her.

-Well, you wont drown for a long, long time. The damage that would kill a mundane will be healed by your scripts so long as they last, and you have reserves, which youre full of.-

So, no solution meant drowning for likely at least a month.

Not better!

-Tala?-

This would be such a stupid way to die.

-Tala, we have a problem.-

I know! Quiet, let me think.

She tried throwing Flow away, over the under-gravy shelf and pulling it back towards her, but that just brought the weapon back to her hand, it didnt move her in the proper direction at all.

There was nothing for a grappling hook to grab onto, even if she had one, which she didnt.

Her lungs were burning.

I am not inhaling this stuff.

She was kicking her legs, trying different methods of movement, even as she continued to slowly slurp lower through the sludge.

-You really need to actually notice this!-

-Skip the second!-

They could tell that the second was too close to triggering for her to work with it.

So, she drove her aura into the third spell-form, even as the first activated.

Reinforcing magics blossomed within her, the power hauntingly familiar. It was the power she had absorbed so many, many times before.

Ending-berry power.

The second spell-form activated right afterwards, destruction radiating outward and clashing with the reinforcement.

Unfortunately, it is easier to destroy than to protect.

All the inverted seeds power was consumed, and the acid within her stomach was broken apart.

The disintegrating magics slammed against her stomach lining, eating away at it, but no longer having enough power to break through the defensive magics there.

But Tala was focusing on the final seed.

Almost

The flow of power snapped into place even as it hit its activation threshold, and reinforcing power swept through her in a wave.

The three seeds had triggered barely a second apart, from first to last.

Her stomach churned, even as her regeneration scripts fought to rebuild her perforated stomach.

Base, highly volatile substances spilled into Talas insides, causing chemical reactions all through her abdominal cavity.

Her magics minimized the destruction, and repaired the damage, but it was still agonizing.

She grit her teeth against the pain, tears streaming down her face and spoiling her vision.

Thankfully, she could still see through her bloodstars, and she fought on, hampered through she was.

In the aftermath, the creatures were able to drag her back down into the gravy, and she broke the working on herself and cast it again.

Restrain.

With that, she rose back up above the surface, regaining her composure and continuing to deal destruction and spoil their attacks with Flow, tungsten, discs, and her bare hand and feet.

-Rusting slag!-

Tala coughed up bits of her lung that had been destroyed by the processes within herself, spitting to clear her mouth.

That rusting worked? A wave of relief washed through her, and she found herself laughing, even as she continued to rain not-zombie parts down on the thick liquid below her. That worked!!!!

Her jubilation helped pull her away from the remembered pain, even as the substances within her finally reached an equilibrium.

There would be internal clean-up to do after this, but that was far better than losing her lower half to this place.

-I still dont think it would have been quite that bad, but I am glad that you succeeded.-

Tala smiled at the accomplishment, reveling in what she had done.

As she continued her active defense, contemplating her success, her eyes widened. She was struck by a realization that was the obvious follow-up, and she began to laugh.

-Tala, is that really a good idea to try right-

Tala pulled in a deep breath and drew some power from the defensive scripts in her flesh into the air in her lungs.

With a deft will, she jammed her aura into the swirling flow of power and watched the spell-form come back together, inverted.

With a powerful exhale, she breathed out a gust of disintegration, and every enemy in a ten-foot conelost a few layers of bone and flesh.

Tala grimaced.

Not enough power.

She took in another deep breath and strained to pull many, many times the power of the first attempt through the defensive scripts and into her lungs.

She could feel how doing so strained the inscriptions, and she knew that she would need to get them refreshed far sooner, if she used this very often.

Then, with an increasingly familiar motion, she thrust her sharpened aura into the flow, redirecting and inverting the form.

She exhaled and time seemed to slow as the power flooded out with her breath.

Firstly, the magic obliterating every part of every enemy in a ten-foot cone.

But there was still power in dissolution.

Tala had never seen that before. Ending-trees always imparted almost exactly enough power to destroy what they acted on.

-Um I think that might be bad.-

With nothing else to act on, the power broke apart the air itself.

There was a brilliant flash as a reaction of the now separate elements bloomed into heat and light.

Fire.

Her overuse of the power had lit the very air ablaze in one shining moment.

It wasnt a forceful explosion, though it was loud and bright.

Even as she flinched away, Tala began to laugh, her mirth echoing across the surface of the not-swamp close on the heels of the explosion.

-Too much power. I think with those two samples, though, I can help you use the right amount.-

Still laughing with glee, Tala nodded. Lets do this, then.

She threw Flow and drew it back again and again, cutting through many enemies each time.

Whenever she could contain herself enough to do so, Tala paused her laughter and repeated her breath of disintegration. With Alats guidance, they didnt use too much power and the attacks were simply exhalations of disintegration.

The lesser use of power also put less stress on her inscriptions. She would still need reinscription sooner than she would otherwise have needed such, but she wouldnt run them dry in a single battle or even a few conflicts.

Finally, after another minute or so of fighting, Tala was once again alone, hovering in place above a frothing mass of sinking parts.

She still had a gleeful grin stretched across her features.

She surveyed her surroundings and sighed. Now what? If I remove the working, Ill drop straight down.

-I have an idea for that.-

Tala cocked her head to one side. That just might work.

A bit less than five minutes later, Talas feet slammed into the stone wall at the far end of the ether hold.

She had cut the working drawing her that way as soon as shed gained a good amount of speed, and now she altered her perception of herself and her needs sufficiently to break the Restrain working as well.

With a lithe twist, she landed in the six-inch deep muck before the wall.

Wow. Im glad this wasnt another pit.

She could have used another Restrain, but she should have thought of the possibility beforehand.

That worked amazingly, Alat.

-I am glad to be of service. Weve been wanting to try out some of our potential methods of flight, and that worked beautifully, at least in this confined space.-

Yeah, I wouldnt want to do that outside of a hold

That could end quite badly, if she wasnt careful.

She examined the stone wall before her, and the massive gates that were the only way through. The tightly fitted stone was braced against the edges of reality all the way around.

You know, what? Why would Pallaun think this would be fun? I cant imagine that combat would have challenged him.

-Well, he did tell us this was a smaller one, and he shirked it off onto us.-

Tala grunted. Might be that hes more concerned about us than he let on.

-You think he gave us an easy one?-

She shrugged. Maybe. Or, maybe a combination? It was easy and disgusting, so why not give it to the new girl?

Alat huffed a laugh. -Yeah, maybe. Or things are about to get a lot more interesting.-

Maybe, yeah. Shall we see what lies in the evil fortification?

-Yes, lets see what the collective understanding of a mad Mage might be.-