“Left!”

  Ducking and rolling, Rory barely avoided a blade of light as it swept forward, the crescent slashing through several lunging serpents. Ignoring the smaller fry, Rory continued focusing on the massive beast in front of him, its body as thick as an ancient oak, great fangs long enough to pierce through him entirely with room to spare, and eyes that felt like acid dripping on his brain.

  Fucking basilisk.

  Sweeping his chains outward, they circled the beast’s body as Rory activated the float gems and yanked himself forward, shooting through the air like a rocket before landing atop the monster’s back.

  With his chains circled around the neck of the beast -even if the giant serpent may as well have been one giant neck- Rory began to heave as the wounded monster tried to toss him free. Holding firm, Rory felt like a cowboy hanging on for dear life at a rodeo. Still, slowly but surely, the blades of the chains began to cut through the scales and meat of the oversized snake; Essence Spark channeled through the resonating chains, causing the great serpent to be washed in its own blood. For nearly two full minutes, Rory was forced to hold on for dear life, still pulling as hard as he could on the chains, until at last, the basilisk dropped, nearly bled dry, and unable to continue resisting.

  “Tough mother…” Rory sighed as he hopped off the back of the snake. “You okay over there?”

  “Fine,” Apostolos called out. He looked no worse for wear, though that wasn’t much to gauge given his spiritual body, which meant he didn’t physically show damage received until it forced a respawn. “Burning through my Anima reserves like crazy, though. I’m not sure how many more hidey-hole filled with these damn snakes I can last before I’m forced to respawn back at camp, at least not without the suns to regenerate me.”

  Rory merely grunted in response, feeling in need of rest as well. They’d spent the last four days straight pushing through what could only be described as Snake Hell. Any and every permutation of snake you could think of could be found lurking in the shadowy and uncomfortably hot and rather lush ‘forest’ they’d found themselves in, having left behind the cold stone of earlier sections of the underground.

  It wasn’t really a forest, as the ‘trees’ weren’t trees. Instead, they were a massively sprawling graveyard of strange riblike bones stabbing out of the ground with tumorous growths of hardened cartilage covered in thick mosslike hair. It was in contention for the weirdest natural phenomenon he’d seen in over a decade. The worst part was that there were snakes everywhere. They seemed to love the heat from the cancerous-looking growths spurting out from the weird rib trees, not to mention the endless crisscross network of pitch-black rivers splitting the earth beneath their feet that the serpents also seemed to love.

  All in all, for someone who’d at best been ambivalent toward the existence of snakes, Rory was beginning to really hate them.

  “Still,” Rory said after a moment of catching his breath. “I think we’re close to clearing this area. The map indicates we should be nearing the end of this ‘biome’ or whatever you’d want to call it.

  “Is that a good or a bad thing?” Apostolos questioned, eyebrows arched in a look of suspicion.

  “Probably bad,” Rory said with a sigh. “Going to be some King Snake, I’d bet. It’s going to try to eat us, and it’s going to be a fucking nightmare to deal with, all for a carcass that we can’t even bring back to the surface.”

  That was probably the most prominent sore spot for the duo. An absolute treasure trove of monster corpses, and they couldn’t bring any of them back, not without figuring a way out first. Sure, they’d collected minor spoils of war, such as serpent fangs or a few scales from some more interesting snakes, yet overall, their rewards had been somewhat lacking.

  And I’m going to need to repair my damn gear.

  With snakes came venom, and with venom came a relatively large amount of corrosive damage inflicted upon his armor. He was thankful he’d had added runes specifically for expelling such substances. Still, even the brief instant exposure began adding up after hundreds of encounters.

  It wasn’t just his armor; Rory had been bitten a few times but never by anything more potent than a mid-tier five. He’d overcome the effects between the difference in attributes and his stockpile of ossified blood essence gems.

  Which had led to one nice thing at least.

  Boon Gained

  Minor Venom resistance (Serpent Archetype)

  Rory had heard about people on Earth exposing themselves to gain resistance to things such as poison or venom or whatnot, so it wasn’t a surprise to see such a thing was possible here. In fact, it was likely even more potent now that everyday life was inextricably interwoven with magic.

  Unfortunately for Apostolos, a downside of his Spiritual Body was the inability to gain such resistance. The way he took damage completely bypassed natural physiological responses, thus no bodily acclimation.

  “You think we’ll find a way out once we clear this area?”

  “Hopefully,” Rory answered honestly. “I’m not sure I’d classify the last few areas as real ‘zones.’ They were more like entry points and trial stages. Therefore, I’m hoping there will be some way out after.”

  “And if there isn’t?”

  “Retrace our steps, and then we get to climbing,” Rory said with a smile, recalling his climb after he’d ‘killed’ the Alpha Variant wave monster by leading it off a cliff.

  “Lovely. Shoulda just stayed on the surface, where the suns shine,” Apostolos grumbled.

  “There, there. We can still get you home for your nappy time.”

  “Master, you didn’t have a lot of friends back on Earth, did you?”

  “Ass.” Rory snorted. “But not wrong,” He added with a sigh of defeat.

  Banter over, the duo went silent as they focused entirely on their trek. They were a well-rehearsed team after days of fighting together. Rory would lead from the front, drawing the aggro of any tier six monsters that may be around. In comparison, Apostolos would deal with the far more numerous tier-five monsters, as his blades of sunlight were perfect for reducing their more significant numbers.

  They wrought a path of death and destruction, dozens if not hundreds of monsters left dead, and even countless filler tier-four monsters had emerged, only to be decimated as well.

  They continue pushing onward for another day, the landscape changing as it sloped into a strange fusion of bog, bone forest, and even patches of ruined sewer stone. The riblike ‘trees’ began to tower overhead as slabs of dilapidated and wrecked stone buildings jutting out of the dark oil-colored bog became ever more present, as rents in the earth filled with a bubbling, fuming prismatic liquid like an angry rainbow concentrated into a hateful soup began to appear.

  “You know, I really don’t like this place,” Apostolos said, eighteen hours into their most recent day of travel. “I feel like I’m one wrong step away from being dissolved.”

  “Not surprising,” Rory said after carefully stepping, avoiding a fissure spewing barely visible prismatic fumes that screamed danger to his senses. “At this point, we’re very much into the ‘tier-six only’ territory.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. If I weren’t following you, I’d have been forced to respawn some time ago.”

  “Well, at least you’re not getting a big head on your shoulders,” Rory said with a smirk. It was no lie, either. Over the last few hours, the monsters had almost exclusively been varieties of tier-six monsters, with Apostolos more of a distraction than anything. The only reason he could help at all was due to the absolute freight train of power that was his war scythe, which meant that even tier-six monsters couldn’t take direct hits from the weapon without suffering rather odious injuries.

  “At the very least, I can feel it in the air. We’re close.”

  “Close to what.”

  “The boss of this area.”

  “I thought you said we were avoiding the boss of the floor; if we’re talking overconfidence, then if you think we’ve got a shot against a tier-seven, you might have lost some brain cells during all that mind-numbing work of the last three years.”

  “Not of the floor,” Rory said, shooting Apostolos a scowl. “Call it a sub-boss, minor boss, area boss, whatever. The point is, this ‘zone’ I’m reasonably confident has some top monster, as I said the other day. I wasn’t joking when I talked about some King Snake.”

  “And we’re close? You’re sure?”

  The difference in their ascension was clear; Apostolos was seemingly unable to sense the change. An emanating power had begun to drip off the trees and earth like some domineering creature had left traces of its metaphysical ‘scent’ behind.

  “Yeah…” Rory drowned out as the Eyes of the Architect let him see far more clearly than Apostolos could. There, in the distance, something stood out. What looked like a temple and city apartment building had a love child, half sunken into the nauseous earth. “I think I see our destination. Let’s hurry up. The less time spent here, the better.”

  “You could say that again,” Apostolos muttered, his longing for the sunlight of the overworld apparent.

  Jogging, the miles began to bleed away until they crested a rather tall hill, coming across what Rory had spotted from further away. The half temple-half apartment building had sunken halfway into a bog of angry, hissing—kaleidoscopic acid. A single pathway of uneven stones spiked out of the acid, footfalls they could use to reach the building.

  “Do we have to go inside?” Apostolos said, wincing.

  “Of course. How else will we meet with whatever horrible monstrosity is waiting to eat us?”

  “I’m not sure how I never had more nightmares growing up with your colorful way of describing things,” Apostolos muttered as he followed Rory, hopping across the stones until they leaped through a shattered window of colorful appearance.

  “Stained glass, nice,” Rory said, observing only momentarily. The interior of the building was a strange fusion of ritual and deskwork, as if some cult had decided the best way to bring people into the fold was with good old-fashioned paperwork and the tantalizing offer of desk jobs. The only reason such a strange building likely existed, to begin with, was because of Eon, who had no fundamental ‘aesthetic’ understanding, smashing different understandings of architecture and purpose together as it attempted to stitch together a cohesive tapestry for its designs.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Or maybe it’s Aelia. Or maybe both. What do I know? Not like I was a guru of Fengshui; my apartment was a couch, a bed, and a few too many Lord of the Rings merchandise from my grandparents’ inheritance. Heh, maybe that’s why Eon sucks at it as well.

  It had always been amusing to see the reaction of the few friends or women he’d brought home when they looked around his apartment. By that point, the Lord of the Rings movies were over thirty years old.

  “Is there anything we should be grabbing from here?” Apostolos said, interrupting his reflections on the past.

  “Unless it’s well hidden and masked from detection skills, nah. I’m not picking up anything.” Rory said, gesturing toward his eye. “Let’s just climb to the top floor.”

  Picking their way through the several floors was easier said than done, given the slant at which the building had sunken into an acid bog. They finally emerged several minutes later, appearing like an alter and ritual side had been plunked atop a high rise.

  “How long until something goes wrong?” Apostolos asked as they looked around, nothing appearing out of the ordinary, even if what was ‘ordinary’ was somewhat nebulous given their current area.

  “Depends. Is something going wrong, nothing happening at all, or would you say something going wrong is the inevitable monster attacking?”

  “The latter?”

  Rather than answer, Rory only grinned as he noted that bubbles began to emerge from the acid depths. Something large was clearly swimming around down there and surfacing fast if the movement of the liquid was anything to go by.

  “Don’t even start,” Apostolos said with a sigh. “I get it, you were right… Again.”

  “Of course I was right,” Rory chuckled. “It’s called a cliché for a reason.”

  The jovial humor was short-lived, as finally, from the acid depths, something emerged, massive beyond any monster he’d seen before, save for the giant Ash Worm. No worm emerged, though, even if it had some similar appearance.

  Whatever quips may have been at the tip of Rory’s tongue withered away as he saw the monster. It was… divine, albeit in the ‘Do not resist, salvation is upon ye’ sort of way. It was a massive anaconda, putting to shame the corny old movies from his grandparent’s collection.

  Yet what was surprising about it, or one of the surprising things about it, was that while its scales were green, they were not the green of putrid rot and acid. Instead, they reminded Rory of the green shades of blooming plant life and crisp mornings in a healthy garden. Coursing through channels winding throughout its body was a constant stream of liquid lightning, shock blue rather than the yellow one would expect from regular lightning. Atop its head, rather than the hood of a cobra or any bony crest, great antlers rose from its majestic head, with carp-like whiskers descending from its face. Lastly, and most importantly, it seemed to have intelligent eyes that spoke of determination and steadiness, which Rory customarily expected from the most self-assured people he had once known.

  It was, perhaps, the most intimidating monster Rory had ever seen.

  “Master?” Apostolos spoke up, voice wavering for a moment.

  “Yeah, I’m seeing it,” Rory said, examining it.

  The Koi that would Be- Empyrion Serpent*

  Level: 63**

  The heavens do not simply bless those who try a thousand times to succeed; they instead bless those who succeed after trying a thousand times. A serpent that has defied its environment and sworn a new path to challenge the very existence it has known. Coursing with heavenly lightning and purifying power, no corrosive existence shall be abided.

  “Master, what does that name mean?”

  “I have no idea about the first part,” Rory whispered, the serpent staring at them from above. “Probably some old universe mythology that I’m not aware of. The Empyrion part seems clear, though. This is some wanna-be divine monster.”

  It was quite the subversion of expectations, the boss snake of the wasteland of acid and death being a damn near holy serpent.

  “So… do we fight it?”

  “IT?” A voice boomed from above, shaking the floor beneath their feet. “Transgressors have the nerve to refer to me as a mere it!?”

  Sharing a glance that spoke a hundred words, Rory shook his head at the young man before glancing up to make eye contact with the massive serpent.

  “Uh, apologies. Not quite used to monsters, well, talking.”

  “Such apologies are warranted. Now, speak, why have thou come to my home?”

  Thou? Rory thought to himself, mentally shaking his head. “Honestly… we came here exploring. We’ve been traveling for some time now and looking to leave, so we figured we wouldn’t be able to until we slay whatever monster was the boss of this place.”

  “You wish to seek my death? Then come, I shall sunder your very existence for the audacity of intruding upon my home and seeking my head!”

  “Wow, wow, slow your roll,” Rory called out, raising his hands placatingly.

  It was clear to Rory this was a monster not to mess with. It wasn’t even an Alpha Variant; it was quite literally a Territory Alpha. If he were to gauge its strength, it was closer to a peak tier-six monster, somewhere around the ballpark of level 68 or 69 in strength. Not to mention, the match-up was downright terrible for them. Apostolos and the giant snake were purifying types. Apostolos used solar affinity magic, and the serpent was noted as using heavenly lightning. In a vacuum, the two affinity types had reduced effectiveness against one another.

  In reality, all that it meant was that Apostolos’s solar magic would do nada to the giant serpent, whereas the lightning the giant serpent could undoubtedly conjure would still be more than enough to blast away Apostolos with the strength difference.

  Leaving Rory and the serpent’s opposing nature. At its core, blood affinity was a corrupting affinity, or at least it was how Rory always used it. While that meant that his chains, when using his blood affinity, would still be effective, whereas Apostolos’s solar magic wouldn’t, the sheer strength gap once again meant that the monster would be able to purify his blood affinity, the blood loss effect unable to take hold.

  Thus, their only way to win would be direct damage, and for a monster of such size and strength, in simple terms, that meant a direct shot to the heart or the brain. While Rory had worked in a lab on Earth, they’d never studied snakes the size of redwood trees; thus, he would make no predictions as to the location of its heart.

  Which left the serpent’s brain. They’d have to manage to punch through its scales and drive an attack straight into its head without ever dying in return.

  Yeah. Sure.

  Rory wasn’t an idiot, and while he’d been bored of doing nothing but crafting over the last few years, he wasn’t about to commit suicide via needless battle against a Territory Alpha that hard countered them and was intelligent to boot.

  “Look, I know I said we came here to fight a boss monster, but that’s only because we thought that would be our only way out. If you could point, er, tell us which way to go, we’ll be out of your hai-whiskers.”

  The serpent was silent for several moments before lowering its head, now on their level.

  “You do not seem the fool to me.”

  “Uh, thanks?” Rory said, unsure how to respond. Aside from Apostolos, he hadn’t had many conversation partners over the last decade, only a sparing few words shared with the World Spirit, so he wouldn’t blame himself for being out of the practice of speaking with strangers, especially strangers that could be mistaken for Jormungand.

  “I do not appreciate the feel of those.” The serpent’s tongue flicked out, smacking the chains wrapping his arms. “They feel similar to these lands.”

  “Sorry. Blood affinity, been using it for… well, a while.”

  “Hmm. Tis an affinity a degree more noble than these lands, at least. You, hatchling, you meanwhile, have quite a pleasant aura. It speaks to me of my own.”

  Apostolos’s eyes bugged out momentarily as if silently asking ‘me?’ in response to the serpent’s comment.

  “Yeah... It’s solar affinity. You know, like the suns?”

  “Suns?” The serpent seemed confused for a moment before understanding crossed its face. “So, you come from the surface world. I should one day like to bask under the glory of the overworld. Alas, I must remain here until I ascend to a higher Realm and cleanse my lands. Your scales have the same feel, yet they do not seem to be of you. Explain.”

  Apostolo’s expression seemed to scream, ' Scales? ' Yet the young man put two and two together nearly instantly.

  “Oh, my armor. Yeah, my master made them.” Apostolos said quickly, pointing at Rory and punting the football of responsibility his way.

  Right, thanks, kid.

  “You can make such items?”

  “Yeah, I’m the one who made nearly all of our stuff,” Rory said with a shrug. “Do they interest you?”

  Rory wasn’t sure what a giant semi-divine snake would care for armor, yet he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  “I would make a deal with you, those who bask of the Above Lands.”

  Interesting phrasing.

  “Go on.” Rory prompted, curious.

  “I have been set a great task by the Spirit of the World and the Eternal.”

  Eternal? Oh, does it mean Eon? I guess that’s sort of another way to call Eon. Heh, clever, honestly.

  “What is this task?” Rory questioned.

  “It is of three parts. First, to claim my lands in full. While I have the Divine Claim of the lands as the Territory Alpha, it does not mean I have subjugated the lands, of which, even with my power, it is a constant struggle, for there is only one of I and the land and its inhabitants fight me at all points.”

  The giant purifying snake doesn’t like toxic waste bone land, which makes sense.

  “Second, I am to reach the Tenth Realm.”

  Tenth Realm? Tier ten?

  “Third, I am to subjugate at least ten nearby lands.”

  Oh, so the third floor is a big turf war. Nice.

  “To reach the Tenth Realm shall take time, time spent deep within the endless depths fighting foes of similar power and absorbing the flow of power from our Great Mother herself.”

  And apparently, if you dive deeper into that acid lake, it bleeds off into an entire massive undersea ecosystem with more tier-six and maybe even tier-seven monsters. Good to know.

  “I believe you may already have begun to see my plight.”

  “Only one of you, you said it yourself,” Rory answered. “You need to grow in strength, but time spent doing that lets the lands further corrode upon itself, and other challengers may appear.”

  There had been other tier six serpents, though none of nearly the same strength as the Empyrion Serpent before him, yet that didn’t mean they wouldn’t ever reach that level, especially if the giant serpent went M.I.A.

  “Three tasks, one of you. Time spent on one means time lost on the others. So, you believe we can help break that deadlock problem you’ve found yourself in.”

  “Correct.”

  “So, we help you… and what? How does that benefit us?”

  Perhaps Rory should have simply been grateful the giant serpent didn’t want to eat them. Still, Rory wasn’t just going to let a perfect opportunity pass.

  “I shall open a path back to the surface for you. It is locked to me until I have completed my heaven-sent task, yet it should still be useful to you. Second, I will enter into a contract with you. These lands shall be open to you, and we shall be like partners if not allies, should you prove yourself in the future.”

  Well, now, isn’t that interesting?

  Still, Rory knew when to drive a hard bargain.

  “And?”

  The serpent, for once, seemed to shift as if uncomfortable.

  “A boon. A hope I sought to push forward with my tasks, a matter of future strength.”

  An undulating movement seemed to take hold of the giant serpent until Rory realized it was heaving something. A pulsing sphere was expelled from its mouth only a moment later, floating toward him on a cloud of blue lighting before dispersing as Rory caught the item.

  Hot damn, a monster core from a still-living monster!

  Excitement gripped Rory. The two monster cores he’d obtained in the past had always been gained post-death, so to receive a monster core from a living monster likely meant something good.

  Well, it’s good enough for me, at least.

  “Alright, you’ve got yourself a deal, I think. Still, what do you need of us?”

  “Conduits of aura, to radiate the blessing of the Above Lands to these corrosive wastes.”

  Huh. I have no idea what that means or how to do that, but it sounds interesting, at least.

  “Such conduits, if they carry the same aura as the hatchling, will aid in purifying these lands. I shall attune myself to them, and my aura will suppress potential foes, leaving me the ability to push the power of my Realm to the heights required of me.”

  Eh, I mean, it can’t be that bad. Sure, traveling took a few days to trek through these wastes. Still, if an Aura Conduit or whatever covers even a few hundred meters, that should be nothing more than a triviality aside from figuring out how to make such a thing in the first place.

  “Yeah, sure, why not. I agree to such terms.”

  The snake seemed pleased, and a moment later, Rory saw why as an interface popped up before his eyes.

  Partnership with the Khan of Blue Lightning

  Requirements: Fully establish an Aura Conduit network within their territory.

  Rewards:

  Initial- Boon of the Blue Lightning Khan, Warp Point Access, Monster Core

  Upon Completion- Partnership Status Improvement to Potential Ally Status

  Accept: Y/N?

  Nifty. Rory thought to himself before mentally clicking yes.

  Dusting his hands of non-existent dust, Rory smiled at the serpent. “Well, now that the business of-”

  Before Rory could finish, he felt something strange tickling at his brain. It was as if his existence was suddenly being stretched in all directions before snapping back in place like a released rubber band. Wincing, Rory reached to cradle his head.

  It took only a moment for Rory to realize the cause. Comprehension and awareness had flooded his mind. The land they had passed through, which had only taken several days to travel from one end to another, was only a fraction of what was there. It was as if it had existed within a compressed space, just beneath their perception, like the infinity between integers. Like the world hidden just beneath the ocean waves, that same compressed space had suddenly opened up to them.

  All that was to say, the territory which had spanned no more than a few dozen miles, Rory suddenly understood, was a hundred times that.

  Fuck me. Did I get scammed?

  It had turned out that Rory, who had thought he was getting the most out of the deal, had been sorely understating the scale of the task before him.

  Wincing internally, Rory didn’t let it show as he forced a smile and nodded to the giant serpent.

  “Happy to be working with you… partner.”

  no sense for them to be able to beat a Territory Alpha of near comparable level to their own, with their current gear, the only one with a weapon suited for that is currently Apostolos. This is not to say that it won't happen in the future (There is still the matter of the Territory Alpha that has 'claimed' the territory their camp belongs to after all), but this wasn't the time or place for it.