Chương 133: Chapter 110: Pest Control

Cal felt a tremor under his foot and looked down at a puddle of murky water near his boot. An expanding ring vibrated across its surface. Thump. Another ring rippled across the surface, bigger this time. Zamir answered the approach. Clang! The second challenge hammered down the corridor, its metallic voice eventually lost to the darkness. In response, the tremors intensified, the intervals shortening. Cal lifted his gaze into the black beyond the reach of their combined light orbs.

The overlapping pools of gold, white, and silver-blue created a jumble of competing shadows on the rough-hewn walls, each shifting and layering as the casters moved. Then the eyes opened. A single pair, fifteen feet off the ground, shone with a sickly green light that pierced through the dark. Below them, more eyes kindled. A dozen pairs, smaller, clustered low to the ground and weaving over and under each other in restless patterns.

They bobbed and swayed, tracking erratic arcs across the corridor floor, their green glow emitting a diseased light. The stench hit next. A pall of fungal rot, so thick it coated the back of his throat. Cal tightened his grip on his spear. The high pair of eyes had to be the troll Hope had scouted. The dozen smaller pairs below were unknown quantities: a pack of something?

He double-checked the corridor width against the cluster of movement, calculated how many bodies that space could funnel at once, and started prioritizing the nearest pairs of eyes by proximity and— Filip took the fight to the enemy. One moment the elf stood three yards away, grinning. The next he was simply gone, a streak of argent scale and crackling blue-white energy that tore down the corridor faster than Cal could track.

The displaced air hit him a moment later, a gust that tugged at his hair and stung his eyes. Angelika flooded her [Light Orb] with Mana. The sphere turned the corridor into high noon as it accelerated down the corridor to hang directly above her brother's path. Tracking the spellblade's advance required more than ordinary reflexes, so Cal engaged [Liminal Breath]. The corridor's colors instantly muted to flat grays, and the frantic pace of reality became something he could actually follow.

Beneath the bright illumination, the targets finally took shape. The rotcap troll dominated the space. A giant of swollen flesh split by dense clusters of parasitic mushrooms venting clouds of spores. Surrounding its huge legs prowled a dozen canine beasts. Fungal polyps sprouted along their spines, twisting their jackal-like frames into diseased horrors. Filip reached the pack of jackal-beasts.

In the slowed world of [Liminal Breath] the elf moved at normal F-tier speeds relative to Cal's crawl, his summoned scimitar carving a luminous arc through the air, its edge wreathed in a crackling sheath of energy that left afterimages burned into Cal's retinas. The energy blade launched from his sword and passed through three jackals in one sweeping motion, each beast coming apart at the point of contact.

One head tumbled end over end, rotating through the air while a second jackal split diagonally from shoulder to hip. The third separated halfway through its trunk, lower half still kicking. Opening his [Spiritual Perception] wide proved disastrous. The confined space was completely saturated with D-tier power. Filip's blazing aura and Mana battered Cal's senses, a blinding barrage of high-density energy that threatened to fracture his mind.

Throttling the input back, he clamped down on the feed before the sheer volume of power could render him senseless. The elf was laughing as he danced between the monsters. Cal caught a sudden warning through his [Mana Sense]. Angelika vented a torrent of Mana from her outstretched palm, standing just yards to his left. The spiritual output was staggering.

She flooded the confined space with a deluge of power, a core of compressed thermal energy burning so hot it registered as a void, a blank spot where his muted perception simply overloaded. Her Spell completed and a fireball launched. Even slowed by [Liminal Breath], the Spell tore down the corridor with the terrifying velocity of an F-tier spear thrust. It expanded as it traveled, its leading edge a boiling frontier of orange and yellow that devoured the grey air and replaced it with blazing incandescence.

Filip tracked the incoming threat and Cal caught the exact moment the spellblade registered the danger. As his silver-grey eyes widened, the elf wrenched his shoulders aside, abandoning his follow-through to throw himself laterally. The fireball punched through the empty space he'd occupied a heartbeat earlier and the magical ordinance found its true targets. Six of the jackal-beasts - clustered in a loose knot where the corridor widened - vanished inside the expanding sphere of destruction.

Cal promptly felt the detonation as a gale of scorching air slammed into him, searing his face and snapping his clothes backward. When the explosion cleared the jackals were simply gone. Charred outlines on the stone floor marked where they had stood, surrounded by a corona of blackened, smoldering residue. And then there was Filip. Annoyance, clear as a printed word on his face. Gone in an instant as it was swallowed by the fresh violence of his renewed attack.

He whipped around and savagely dove back into the remaining jackals, finishing the stragglers. Three had remained, disoriented and reeling from the fireball. His scimitar sliced through them in two deft cuts, each strike trailing crackling threads of lightning that grounded themselves into the earth with branching forks. The last jackal didn't even have time to turn before Filip separated its spine at the base of the skull.

Cal struggled to keep pace, but as his senses slowly acclimating as he'd managed to split his focus toward the troll where Hope and Zamir were working. Her aura was a revelation. Where Filip and Angelika blazed, Hope's spiritual signature was a controlled breath: a compressed sheath drawn so close to her body that it barely disturbed the ambient essence. She left almost no spiritual wake, sliding through the corridor the way a blade slides through water: parting it cleanly, leaving no trace.

If Cal hadn't been actively looking for her he would have missed her entirely. She darted past the troll's left flank, low and fast, two long daggers trailing faint red threads of energy. Two cuts. The first opened the back of the troll's left knee in a diagonal slash that severed something important; the second mirrored it on the right, a surgical backhand that bit deep into the tendon above the heel. Both strikes were exacting.

She was past the creature and melting into the shadows before the troll's nervous system had registered the damage. The huge creature buckled. Its legs folded with the slow inevitability of a felled tree, its fifteen-foot frame dropping to its knees with an impact that shook the ground. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Zamir's aura ignited.

A crimson nimbus burst outward from his body, engulfing him in a shroud of pressurized Stamina so thick it distorted the air around him. Struggling to hold the image in focus, Cal strained his spiritual senses against the output. The energy compressed into Zamir's muscles, forced through channels widened and hardened by a breakthrough Cal had not yet achieved, circulating with a speed that made his own [Crimson Overdrive] look like a lamp held against the sun. Simultaneously, a second energy flooded the warhammer.

Concentrated earth-aspected Mana poured from Zamir's Mana pool, traveled down his arms, and saturated the weapon's head. The metal darkened, its surface transforming into a deep brown color so dark it approached black, as the runes etched into the hammerhead blazed with power. A Harmonic technique! Stamina reinforcing the body, Mana empowering the weapon!

Zamir swung in an arc incongruously graceful for a man of his size, a sweeping horizontal stroke that began behind his right hip and traveled through a full rotation of his torso. The hammer crossed the intervening space inevitably, connecting with the kneeling troll's skull. The impact vaporized its head. A burst of kinetic force erupted from the point of contact, a shockwave of brown-black power that expanded outward in a flat disc.

Where the troll's head had been, a fine mist of pulverized matter sprayed against the corridor walls. The force caught the headless body, still kneeling, and hurled it sideways like a ragdoll, fifteen feet of dead weight flipping over and slamming into the wall with enough force to crack the stone in a spiderweb of fissures. Cal released his Legacy as the action came to an end. The sudden sensory flood made him stagger half a step, and a dull twinge of pain pulsed behind his eyes. That took…

fifteen seconds, all told. Against a D-tier dungeon troll and a pack of twelve lesser beasts that would have killed me faster than I could blink. He glanced to his right towards his mentors. And they haven't moved a muscle. Clearly… they didn't need to. His eyes darted past them to the hooded man, who stood behind Ido with his hands clasped, his posture unchanged by the violence. Around him the group carried out a well-worn routine.

Ido was consulting his chronometer, a crease forming between his brows as he checked the timer. Filip cleaned his scimitar with a runic cloth that hissed and steamed where it touched drying blood, arguing with his sister in a rapid, lilting tongue Cal didn't recognize. Clear enough without translation: ' you almost hit me' versus ' you should have moved faster.' Hope hadn't even glanced at the dozen jackal corpses, opting to walk toward the troll.

Cal blinked away the lingering ache behind his eyes and forced his shoulders to relax. He looked at the nearest cluster of jackal remains, the charred husks still smoking faintly, edges of the burns glowing a dull orange. He drew his harvesting knife. Resources were resources, and the mushrooms growing from the jackals' fungal hides might have alchemical value. He stepped toward the closest corpse. Selara caught his arm.

"Don't bother." She tilted her chin toward the bodies.

"Look closer." Cal frowned and pushed his [Spiritual Perception] toward a body. The monster's aura was… dissolving. Faint, steam-like wisps of energy rose from the blackened flesh, curling upward and dissipating into the essence-saturated air.

"Uhhhh… what's going on with that?"

"The shard recycles its energy. These lesser beasts have not absorbed enough ambient essence to become spiritually stable. Anything you harvest will turn to dust within the hour. Hides, claws. All of it. The only things that persist inside a reality shard are essence stones and natural treasures that grew within." She glanced toward the far wall, where the troll's headless corpse remained wedged in its crater of shattered stone.

"Speaking of which…" Cal looked over, and the troll's body shuddered, then imploded. Matter fell inward toward an unseen point at its core. Operating like a microscopic gravity well, the collapse swallowed the enormous carcass in moments. Fifteen feet of flesh and bone vanished into a single coordinate, fully erasing the creature from the shattered stone. The air rushed inward to fill the sudden vacuum with a percussive pop that made his ears ring.

Where the monster had been embedded in fractured stone only the crater remained, and a glittering red stone clattered out of the depression and skittered across the floor, spinning in the pooled light of their Spells.

"First one's mine!" Hope snatched it from the ground before the spin had fully stopped. She held it up triumphantly between two fingers and winked at Filip. Filip scoffed.

"You only hamstrung it. I could have done that in my sleep."

"And yet, you didn't!" She tossed the red stone in a high arc toward Ido. Without looking he plucked it from the air and made it disappear, then produced a small slate from a pouch on his belt. He pressed the stone to the slate's surface. A red rune sparked, then faded just as quickly.

"Hope, one," the commander intoned. Selara walked over to inspect something on the wall. Cal looked from Ido's slate to the crater, then to the dissipating wisps still rising from the jackal corpses, and finally turned to Aurelian. The alchemist stood a few paces back with his hands clasped behind him, his ball of light hovering placidly above his right shoulder.

"That troll was a Veteran," Aurelian said, answering the question Cal hadn't voiced.

"A monster of above-average power for this shard, heavily saturated with ambient energy over an extended period." He raised a finger.

"It is not a guarantee of a stone, mind you. The probability is simply higher. Much rarer for the lesser creatures, though even those can absorb sufficient essence over time." He motioned toward the walls, encompassing the corridor and everything beyond it.

"You must understand that the shard itself acts as a crucible. Upon death, the immense spiritual pressure of the environment forces that accumulated energy to crystallize. That is why the stones only form in here." He pointed at the dungeon floor. Then he gestured at the slate in Ido's hand.

"And do not mistake their enthusiasm for serious need. This is mostly just sport. The stones are merely how they keep score." Cal processed this, the concepts of saturation and reclamation turning over in his mind.

"So the monsters... they just form to hold the energy?"

"A perceptive question. Ultimately, the 'why' is a matter of discussion for essence scholars and archmages operating at tiers you and I will not touch for centuries. The practical answer is that they are a self-regulating defense mechanism. The core leaks ambient essence and monsters form from that leakage and absorb it, growing in number and power. If left unchecked, they continue to absorb the core's output until the shard's containment fails." He paused, allowing what he'd just said to sink in.

"It 'breaks.' A catastrophic event that unleashes a horde of essence-charged monstrosities upon the surrounding land." Cal tried to reframe things in a way he understood. So this place is like a nuclear reactor, and the core is the fuel rod assembly, leaking radiation into a sealed environment. The monsters are control rods, soaking up the ambient output. The jackals are new rods, lightly saturated and easily recycled by the system when they're spent.

Veterans are the old rods, heavily saturated, the ones that have been absorbing energy for months or years. And you have to cull them so the system has room to generate new, unsaturated ones. If you don't replace the old rods with new ones fast enough... if you let the saturation build past the containment threshold... He looked at the shattered crater in the wall and the fading wisps. The whole system goes critical. The corridor was quiet save for the sounds of the party preparing to move on.

Ido was stowing away his stone tablet. Filip had finished cleaning his scimitar and was sliding it back into its scabbard that had appeared on his waist. At the head of the corridor, Zamir stood with his shield already up, his warhammer resting on his shoulder. Cal looked behind them, back toward the direction they had come.

"So the Ordo... they're not just gatekeepers," he said, almost to himself.

"They're maintenance crews. Making sure the dungeons don't break." Aurelian lifted his right eyebrow a fraction of an inch. The expression lasted perhaps half a second, a momentary crack in the veneer of perpetual condescension.

"Indeed, apprentice. While they possess a much-deserved reputation for corruption and pettiness they do serve a vital, multifaceted function to the Dominion. The dungeons must be controlled for safety. But beyond that, controlling the dungeons means controlling the stones. Controlling the stones..." He trailed off, the implications speaking for themselves. Means controlling everything else. Yeah. He looked at Team Zenith, pondering the strangeness of it all.

To them it's just a sport that doubles as a very, very profitable form of pest control and keeps the world from being overrun. And the Dominion has built an entire empire on their monopoly. Ido clapped his hands, the sound loud and surprising in the confined space. Cal flinched out of his reverie.

"Good start. High Tide is in three and a half hours. Let us not waste anymore time." The party formed up and Cal fell in line behind the Veils, his spear resting on his back where he now knew it would stay. My combat prowess is worth exactly nil in here. A Peak F-tier spearman in a D-tier dungeon is just a spectator with a pointy stick. If I'm going to be anything more than baggage I have to use the one tool they can't measure on a scoreboard…