Chương 133: Chapter 131: Aftermath

There are no death throws. No stumbling around as if it hasn't realized that it's dead yet. It just collapses into the ground, filling up the hole that it had formed, leaving the beach overturned, a shallow but massive divot to show where it had been. You have defeated Beach Guardian. You receive (550, 000/6) 91, 666 experience. Not even enough for a level up. That was easily the most difficult battle we've ever had, and it wasn't enough for a level up.

It was enough for Ash and Gigi to level up, but not enough for me. I'm only about halfway there. It seems like it was enough to get Vincent over the hump to level forty seven, too. So just El and I failed to level up. And Amanda. Amanda puts her swords away and looks at us all with a huge smile on her face. I notice that I once again can no longer see how many hit points she has. She must have left the party the instant the battle ended. I check all the notifications I got during the fight.

My bow skill is up to 41, my dagger skill is up to 14. Also, my dodge is up to 37, my shield to 20, spellcraft to 42, my sword to 41, and my throwing to 15. That's a lot of gains. It was a pretty major fight.

"That was one hell of a fight!" she says, laughing.

"You guys are awesome."

"Couldn't have done it without you," I say. She shakes her head.

"No, we couldn't have done it without you. You were the one who figured out that we had to stagger our attacks and let people catch their breath. I would've just kept fighting, and probably would have died when I ran out of stamina."

"Running out of stamina sucks," El says.

"That's usually how I die."

"Yeah, good thinking there, Caleb," Ash says.

"Good looking out." I shrug.

"I knew it was the only way we were going to win. I just had to think about what advantages numbers gave us."

"So what now?" Vincent asks. He looks at Amanda.

"Are you going to head out to sea?" She takes a deep breath.

"Not yet," she says.

"I need to recharge everything. And that's going to take a while. I figure I'll leave in the morning." It's barely past noon.

"How long do we have before this thing respawns, do you think?" I ask, looking at the huge mark in the sand where the beach guardian used to be.

"Twenty four hours," Amanda tells us.

"According to Root, anyway."

"So you can afford to take the night," Vincent says.

"I can."

"What should the rest of us do while you're out there?" Gigi asks.

"I mean, we can't very well follow you, can we?"

"I probably could," Vincent says.

"I've got about eighty five hundred mana, and I regenerate three per second." Three per second? That's faster than I regenerate stamina.

"I can maintain the spell for as long as I need to."

"You want to travel with me?" Amanda asks.

"You're a bit fragile, aren't you?" Vincent only has 2, 585 hit points. That's not nothing, but compared to the rest of us, it's pretty low.

"I can take care of myself," he says.

"That doesn't answer for the rest of us," Gigi says.

"What do we do? Are we supposed to try to swim our way across?" That makes Amanda laugh again.

"I don't think that's exactly possible," she says.

"Not even for us." Yeah, there are limits even to what superhuman demigods can do.

"Should we try to find a ship?" I ask.

"There are no ships," Amanda points out.

"Too many beach guardians, remember?" Right. That's how they keep the different lands separate. No one travels across the ocean, because no one can get into the ocean without fighting a beach guardian. That would definitely prevent cities from popping up along the coast, and would stop ships from being built. Unless and until someone invents air ships, it seems like levitation or flight is the only way to get across the ocean. I take another look at the huge mark where the beach guardian used to be.

"Do you think that will attract a dragon?" I ask, pointing to it. It's a huge discoloration in the beach. Should be visible from above from miles away.

"It might," Amanda says.

"You think you can convince a dragon to fly you across the ocean?"

"If anyone can, it'd be him," Ash says. My charisma is effectively 136. So maybe I could. I've got a bunch of negotiation.

"We'll need something to bribe them with," I say.

"Something that will help us convince the dragon to take us across."

"We don't even know what's on the other side of the ocean," Gigi says.

"Are we sure we want to go there?"

"I'm going," Amanda says.

"That's non negotiable."

"Do you know what's over there?" I ask.

"I have hints from Root," she says.

"It's a place no player is meant to go. It's a place that is dangerous beyond measure. A place where only immortals dare to tread."

"We're not immortal," Vincent points out.

"We've all died at least once."

"But that's just it," Amanda says.

"We are immortal, because we come back when we die. So it's the land meant for us. It's where the secrets of the world are. More danger equals more treasure. More risk equals more reward."

"So that's how you'll become a god?" Gigi asks. Amanda looks embarrassed.

"I really hate to talk about it that way," she says.

"It makes me sound so arrogant. I'm just looking for a challenge at this point. Something that will let me stretch myself, let me be all that I can be. Something that will let me see how far I can really go." This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"And if that means becoming a god, then so be it?" I ask.

"I guess," she says.

"It's just the next logical step. I have to remove myself from this part of the world."

"Why?" Ash asks.

"Because I'm so much more powerful than anyone else in this world," Amanda says.

"It's not fair. I'm broken, at least in comparison to everyone else around me. I can conquer cities if I want to. I can destroy cities if I want to. I could fight entire armies to a stand still."

"Yeah," El says.

"We've done that."

"So you understand," Amanda says.

"It's not fair for me to be out here. I am like a force of nature in this world, and I don't fit in. I need to ascend to the next plane, or go to the next area, or something like that. It's like I'm playing in the beginning area after I've already beaten the game, you know?" I do know. I understand her feeling like that. That's how I felt in Elmspire. I didn't want to stay there because we were all famous, but also because we were so far advanced from everyone else around us. Our sheets are broken.

We're so far ahead of everyone else. And while someone else might catch up if they figure out the math for the death cycle, especially if they find someone like Wrax to help them do it, no one else had done so yet. And I suppose if someone else does, they'll eventually get the same urge to leave the world. Are we going to end up with a pantheon of thousands of gods? Or will something stop others from following the path that we're blazing right here?

Will the world somehow patch the death cycle, the way a video game would?

"So we go to the more dangerous continent," I say.

"That makes sense to me. Almost impossible to get there." Amanda nods.

"The impossible dream."

"But is it?" I ask.

"When you say that, I hope that you mean something positive for the world. Right the unrightable wrong, that kind of thing." She smiles at me.

"You know your literature," she says.

"Yeah, that's what I mean. I want to do good for this world. I want to do the best possible thing I can for this world. That's part of why I want to leave this part of it. I am a disruptive force. So are all of you. You five will change the path of history wherever you go. You will alter the structure and the use of power. Maybe for the better, but maybe not." I imagine that there will eventually be guilds who want to kill us. Or people who want to take us out because of the impact that we can have.

You can't trust us to do what you want us to do, so you have to get rid of us. Otherwise, you end up following our agenda whether you want to or not. We are like tyrants, even if we don't want to be. So yeah, maybe getting us out of the world is the better idea. The more we talk about it, the more I agree that we need to leave.

"Let's make camp," I say.

"Let's figure out what we have to offer a dragon in exchange for passage, and then let's get to this new world." El laughs at me.

"So we're heading to America?" she asks.

"God, I hope not," Gigi says. We camp on the beach, right next to the remains of the beach guardian. I know that we have twenty four hours before it respawns, assuming we can believe that Root told Amanda by proxy, but it still makes me nervous. It makes me feel like it could respawn at any time, ripping through the ground once again and trying to lash at us with tentacles. I'm not sure I'm going to sleep much at all tonight. But I suppose that's okay.

I mean, apparently, we don't have to sleep even as much as we do. If Amanda can go five or six days without sleeping, I can probably survive one night without my four hours of sleep. So I'll be okay. We have to figure out what we can offer a dragon. We don't know when one is going to come by, but I'm guessing it will be in the morning, once the sun has risen. When the sun sets, it's going to be harder to see the marking on the beach that shows that we killed the beach guardian.

But hopefully it will show up before noon, before the thing respawns. In the meantime, all I have to offer is a little bit of money and the pieces of equipment that I've been keeping there. It includes a dragon bone bow and the slayer's blade, along with the stellar recurve bow. But other than that and about fifteen magic crystals, there really isn't much to offer. Some dire bear hide? I don't know what would appeal to a dragon.

I just hope that whatever dragon shows up, it will be willing to fly us across the ocean for whatever we have to offer it. I don't much care if we have to give it everything we have in our spatial bags. It's going to be a long trip, and I don't mind compensating it for flying the four of us across the ocean. Especially not if it takes more than one trip. Once camp was set up, Amanda immediately dropped down and started meditating. I understand that.

When I meditate, I regenerate mana at a rate of one per second instead one per minute. If she already has mana regeneration, it probably just increases it for her. I decide to sit next to her and meditate myself. I have less than five hundred mana right now, and I don't feel like waiting eighty six hours for it to regenerate. I'd rather just sit with my thoughts for an hour and a half and call it good. Meditation is a strange thing.

It's always been very difficult for me to get my mind to just quiet down for a little while. I know people say that you're supposed to think of nothing, to slip between the borders of your thoughts and just exist, but that doesn't work for me. As soon as I start doing it, I start wondering if I'm doing it right, and then start berating myself for not being able to do it.

I try to force myself to be calm, to focus on one thing, but there's always this secondary train of thought that questions whether or not I'm doing it right. So I can't meditate the way other people do. What I do, what works for me, is to focus on something, rather than trying not to focus on anything. I fixate on one thing, like the feel of my mana through my body. It's hard to explain, as I never had mana before the end of the world, but I can actually feel the magic in my body.

I can feel it coursing through me, like a tingling feeling. Like an itch that you can't scratch, that keeps moving around. A little bit deeper than skin deep, so that you couldn't scratch it even if you could reach it. I focus on that feeling, trying to reframe it in my mind. It's not uncomfortable. It's not distracting. It's focusing. It's the thing that I need to pay attention to. I feel it pumping through my body sometimes, like I can actually feel my blood coursing through my veins.

But that's not the right analogy either. If I try to find the right analogy, I won't be meditating, so I just accept all these conflicting ideas as being all correct, even if none of them are. All of them and yet none of them. That's like a mantra, I suppose. I follow the feeling through my body, feeling it grow, feeling it almost fester within me. I pay attention to the feel of it in my muscles, making the individual fibers twitch just a little bit, like I'd gotten a mild electrical shock.

I feel it through all my extremities, paying attention to every part of my body. Not just the tips of my fingers, but my second knuckles, my cuticles, the pads of my fingertips. Not just my toes but my instep, my ankles, that space halfway up my shins. I focus on all the little parts of my body that I usually ignore, feeling the power roll through me, feeling it grow.

I focus on the emptiness inside me, the place where the mana points are supposed to go, and I feel that emptiness shrinking as I fill back up, as magic once more becomes mine to command. Of course, I have to focus on the physical feeling of emptiness. If I let myself focus on the mental emptiness, well, that way lies madness. The emotional emptiness is not worth focusing on. I can't fill that up. I have to just accept that. I have a hole in my soul, and no amount of meditation is going to fill it.

I'm not sure anything ever will. So I just focus on what I can control. I pay attention to the tingle of my arm hair, noticing each individual hair as it covers my forearm, spreading over my wrist and up the back of my hand a little bit. I pay attention to the crook of my elbow, the thinner skin right there that would have made it a really painful place to get a tattoo. I focus on all the little parts. And that seems to help.

That seems to get me a better idea of the mana inside me, and it helps regenerate that mana. It also helps time pass by, so that it doesn't feel like I've been sitting her thinking about the parts of my body that I usually casually ignore for an hour and a half. It helps me just sit on the sand and think about my body, about the blood coursing through my veins, and about the bones deep within my flesh that produce the cells that keep me healthy. I focus on myself, and my mana refreshes while I do it.