Chương 68: Sweet Victory

WARHOL hit as a meteor and splintered the tentacle into uncountable pieces! His assault hit the tentacle from its tip and ripped through its whole form until he came out on the other end having shredded the tertiary limb like a lump of slow-cooked chicken. Gory viscera spread across the cosmos as muscle, bone, blood, and puss blasted along every dimension. He was coated all over in gross tentacle goo and never before was so thankful he had long ago masted a cleaning spell.

He brought his spinning to a halt long after the tentacle had been destroyed. Such momentum proved hard for him to stop but he managed with the help of a huge sum of magic. Warhol waited for the dizziness to fade before he moved again. Now, he looked at his notifications.

He filtered out the repeat notifications — all those about killing Swarm Goblins and blasting apart tentacle suction cups and barbs — and focused only on the one notification he desired: [You Have Killed Horror: Tertiary Tentacle: You Have Gained XP]. And then, the notifications he really wanted to see — those level ups! Boy, did he earn his level ups: [You Have Reached Level...] repeated not just once or twice, or five times, or even a dozen, but over five hundred times!

Disbelief was too weak a word to describe his incredible lack of response. Complete and utter astonishment was closer to his feeling. Never had he ever thought he would gain five hundred level ups after a single battle. And as he was now, too, at the zenith of the System's limits, or what he thought was the System's limits! [You Have Unallocated Boon Points: 4500] A wicked smile spread across his face and he laughed like a madman. This must've been how his son felt when he first began slaughtering bandits.

Level after Boon Point, Point-after level, his stats ever going further up. With forty-five hundred Boon Points to spend, he could now do some serious allocating! Next came the other notification he wanted to see above all others: [Artifact: Living Flesh Forge has finished Charging]. He did not think the artifact had the ability to hold 'reserve' charges or multiple charges.

That was a shame since he thought with all the might of a tentacle, however minor the tentacle had been in the grand scheme of things, that its destruction might have resulted in more than one charge. A shame, yes, as it meant he would need to hunt at least one tertiary tentacle per artifact charge, but that would be fine. If he killed a tentacle once, he could do so again. Breathing in deep, he calmed himself after the excitement of slaying part of the Horror.

He needed to flee the area, for a bigger and worse tentacle would be by soon to investigate why a tiny part of itself was destroyed, and he did not want to be around when that bigger tentacle came.

"Signet," he said, holding his hand to his communication piece.

"I am on my way out." Warhol used a substantial sum of his remaining mana to quickly teleport back to the edge of the Horror's territory, a harder thing to do than what it might seem since the Horror was always expanding. He didn't know the exact rate of expansion, but he had spent only a little while fighting the horror, but on his return trip, he had to cover several thousand more miles than on his initial penetration. That did not bode well for their solar system.

Questions of Horror expansion aside and saved for another day, he chimed Signet saying he was ready to be picked up. Powerful beams shot on moments later from a freighter ship. So strong were the beams, he had to shield his eyes. Like before, the airlock door opened and out came a smaller shuttle to collect him as a barrage of missiles fired from the ship and exploded to cover their retreat; the missiles were unnecessary, but hey, who cared. It wasn't like he was the one balancing the Neon defense budget.

Inside the warm confines of the shuttle, he rapidly defrosted. He could stretch and move without worry of a limb breaking off and careening into deep space. He let himself take in a fresh bit of air before incanting [Heal], [Clean], and [Purify] on himself: [Purify Unsuccessful: Deep Seated Rot Detected]. That was unsurprising and unfortunate. His inhuman bits were not interacting with his human system too well. Well... nothing to be done. He had already mutated himself and that was that.

He would continue to mutate himself moving into the future and there wasn't anything he or anybody else could do to stop him on his path. If the Horror was to be defeated, sacrifices had to be made. Minutes later, the smaller shuttle docked with the larger ship. He entered through the blast doors and greeted Signet with a salute. Signet returned his salute.

"That was and incredible display, Warhol. I knew you were the strongest mage among your people but that! That was incredible! Were you always that strong?"

"Was I always that strong?" Warhol teased.

"I might have been. Of course, I have been training a lot." It was a game. They both knew that. Signet was trying to probe him for information on the artifact while he was trying to decide if revealing his bodily changes would be beneficial to him in any way. He couldn't help but think, 'no' it would not help him in any way for Signet to know he was using the artifact. Of course, did it matter? Signet and his people were atheists. What did something like 'corruption' mean to him?

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"Training will only get you so far, won't it? I admit, Warhol, I have not been the most thought-provoked when it came to understanding about your world. I wonder now if that was a mistake?" A mistake? What did Signet mean, he wondered.

"A mistake for sure! Most friends ask the other about their home and then feign a complement at least once in the time we've known each other. But you? You ask about my gods, declare them parasites, then demand obedience to your relic laws." Going for the jokey navigation of what Signet meant was a risk, but anyone with a degree of social understanding would know what the true depth of the remark meant.

"No, no, you are right, old friend, thought 'friend' and 'old' are both qualifiers I am unsure of the more this crisis drags on..." Signet was going for broke. Should he? No, still too risky. Warhol went on the reverse and backpaddled.

"Come now, Signet. I know our last meeting was challenging but we should move past it, as comrades ought to do when faced with adversity. Now, unless you want to play more games, I should be returning to my world. My son is heading the defense with my old war buddy. Obviously, they're lost without me!" Signet gave him with an appraising glare.

"Sure. I understand. We should talk more — gestate some goodwill among our people." Warhol began charging up his cross-dimensional portal, runes and sigils burning into the air as he formed the relief inside his mind.

"I would like that," Warhol finished the portal.

"Until next time, friend!" Just like so, he was back in The Grotto. The familiar smells of tea, coffee, and spices lingered in the background. He felt oddly tired. Should he go to bed? No! Yes! He didn't know. He wanted to mutate again and feel the power flow through his body. But he also knew if he mutated, he would feel too full of life to want to rest. Then there were the Holy Shop and the many Boons he could purchase; the Holy Shop alone would take up hours of his time. Oh, by the Gods, what should he do?!

He threw caution to the bed and rested. Heaven knows he needed to do something other than degrade his humanity and fight tentacled horrors from beyond their stars. When he awoke many hours later, he felt refreshed once again. Refreshed enough to spend the day browsing the Holy Shop as he once did as a much younger man, where every Boon purchased felt like a world of new strategy opening to him.

Being able to do that once again excited him and between that and his mutation, a world of new strategy was opening indeed. Warhol decided to visit the holy shop first. He walked over toward The Grotto's mini-temple and slunk to his knees to pray. The Holy Shope opened before him, but it was odd, tinted as if some strange color from space coated the images and words in his mind. Why was the Holy Shop like this? Because of his lack of humanity, maybe? He didn't see what that had to do with color, though.

Maybe it was the shop's distorted color, maybe it was his own heavy mind, or even his missing part of his humanity, but he found concentrating harder than it had been the last time he prayed. He thought to himself if he should purchase something to help shield the human parts of his consciousness from his increasingly inhuman? How much did he need such a thing, though? It wasn't like his state as of now had caused him to be undiplomatic with Signet, for example. He thought that whole interaction went well!

These and other thoughts besides caused enough havoc in himself that he was forced to stop the prayer. He opened his eyes and paced. What was going on with him? And after sleeping, too, like a good human! He grunted and tried to consider his options. Which was the other thing — what options did he have other than shop? He grunted again and fell to his knees.

"I will check out the shop, but only briefly for this mind protection crap!" Warhol prayed and focused his best on the holy pantheon in abstract. He admitted to himself that, it was possible, he had been too flippant in his mutation focus and had to slow down. He searched for Boons that were to help him in shielding himself from corruption, from mental taxation. And boy, did he find his Boons. Whispers in his head told him to forgo the Boons, but he lingered on the boons anyway...

[Holy Psychological Ward: Protects the mind from all manner of basic corruptive energies: Cost: 5 Boon Points] [Mental Armor: Shields the user's mental state from waves of corruptive energy inherent in ambient environmental conditions: Cost: 5 Boon Points] [Human Processing: Enables human-type thought patterns to persist in a limited fashion through otherwise transformative effects: Cost: 10 Boon Points] [Anti-Corruptive Fungal: Prevents the growth of corruptive fungus inside the brain: Cost: 20 Boon Points] And on the list went.

Warhol was surprised at just how extensive the list was and how he was never before considered such Boons in his long life. the full list of protective boons amounted to over twenty-five hundred Boon Points. Of course, there wasn't any way he was going to authorize so much of his Boon Points to be used in something he thought was silly to begin with — so he compromised. He bought all the Boons of the lower levels, those things which cost anywhere from one Point to twenty-five Points.

those entry level protections set him back about five-hundred points and was more than he wanted to spend anyway. [Purchase Confirmed: -500 Boon Points Subtracted] Once he confirmed his order, Warhol felt the Boons take effect. His pupils dilated, his breathing quickened, and his whole self, body and mind, felt cleansed, as if a spiritual scrubber had taken a mighty brush and scrubbed him from top to bottom, inside and out. He lost his breath temporarily and collapsed to his knees.

He puked out a black bile which wiggled on the floor, forcing him to turn away; had that goo been inside of him?! He rested for some minutes on his knees. He took deep breathes in then out. When he was ready, he stood up and used [Clean] to remove the black bile from the floor, though not before taking a small sample for future study. A quick look in the mirror told him he appeared the same as ever. Middle-aged, bags under the eyes, a brown beard glinted with magi-dust.

And yet, appearances aside, he felt different. He felt more like his old self, less demanding, more astute and willing to listen to the problems of another. The aggression and tactical duplicity he remembered exhibiting while talking with Signet was no longer there; of, if it was, it was buried at the moment, hidden as his now dominant human traits reasserted themselves thanks to his newly acquired Boons.

"That was a close one," he whispered.

"I need to monitor myself more closely. If for not my sake, then Lance's sake, and that of the world." He sat down and for a good long time, meditated, like he had when he first learned his wife was with child and he was to be a father.