Attributes were multipliers. Two creatures could have 100 physique but if one was a human and one was a giant then the giant would be vastly stronger. The System’s attributes only widened that gap even before racial and species attribute scaling came into play, let alone individual aptitudes. Some embraced this difference wholeheartedly and others resented their lot in life. This created rifts between tribes, peoples, and even entire species. Love it or hate it, the only thing that was strictly unwise was to underestimate it.
When Brivaria looked down at the titanic spinal cord they stood upon, she shuddered. This had belonged to a being that could crush most of, if not all of, Barton with a twist of its body. In the past, the angel had fought beings many times her size but this dwarfed anything she’d ever seen, let alone battled. She dearly hoped not to meet the relatives of whatever created had died here… or the thing that killed it.
“They’re gone,” Talver said with surprise. Brivaria turned around to find that he was correct. The Ogramites were gone but so was the door they’d come through. There was a solid wall of rock from which the gigantic spine emerged. The angel didn’t know what still held the spine together and in place but now it formed a walkway, gradually descending in a spiral.
“Yes and you need healing,” Brivaria replied while moving to touch his wound. He stiffened briefly but then Healing Touch activated and a few points of mana disappeared to heal the man’s injured side. It wasn’t life-threatening or the System would have spent his health to fix it but pain was a distraction they couldn’t afford.
“Ah, thanks for that.” Talver touched his side experimentally and his eyes went wide upon feeling his skin whole and intact. Healing wasn’t exactly rare but many classes were relegated to receiving a small self-heal. Brivaria having a proper heal and spending points of precious mana simply to ease his pain was very generous.
“Can you sense the direction of the next portal we need to take?”
Talver looked around. The human slowly turned in place and then his gaze drifted down to look at the bones upon which they stood.
“I can feel it but it’s below us.” He looked to Brivaria while speaking and she sighed in relief, happy that his trait was still working.
“Okay, let’s take the scenic route unless you think you can survive a fall,” the angel quipped as they both walked toward the edge to look down.
“I can’t even see the ground, boss. I’m going with no on that one,” Talver said, his previous smile returning. Brivaria peered over the edge and she, too, could not see the ground. There was a thick layer of orange clouds that shrouded everything below them. They were very high up.
The two moved back to the center of the spine and began walking down. Brivaria activated Current Control on them both, something she realized that she should have done during the previous fight. Their walk turned into a light jog soon enough but they had to be careful not to go too fast. It would be unfortunate if the guardsman survived the fight only to lose control and fall off the edge of the spine. Brivaria could have flown but she didn’t particularly want to be in the air if or, more likely, when something attacked them.
While they ran, the angel noticed the holes in the spine. The center seemed to have a viscous, amber-colored liquid running through it. More peculiar, it was moving upward rather than downward, like it was being pumped from below. The spine must have been liquid-tight because Brivaria didn’t see any leaks from the underside as they steadily circled into a position to see the bottom of where they’d entered this strange place.
The angel was just about ready to say something about how lucky it was that there were no monsters when, of course, there were suddenly monsters. They didn’t emerge from the clouds below or the clear sky. No, they rose from the strange substance running through the spine. They were winged slimes of the same amber color of the fluid in the spine. Each was about the size of a person’s head with a single dark slime core which swiveled around to face the two like an eye. They also didn’t fly like Brivaria did or birds did, they drifted through the air using their wings to change direction or speed up and slow down.
There was the briefest moment in the winged girl’s mind that these might be friendly, they might not be trying to kill anything that moved, and that the Between might be home to something that wasn’t inherently hostile to literally everything. That moment came and went as the first flying creature spat a small stream of glowing, orange liquid at them.
“Enemies,” Brivaria said, rather unnecessarily. The angel summoned her shield from her inventory and held it up. The white, heater shield blocked the orange liquid and began to sizzle. That one, small squirt had started to melt the face of her shield. It did nothing to the spine where it landed, she noticed.
“Let’s give them a proper Barton hello then,” Talver said cheerfully while pulling his crossbow from his back and putting his foot through the stirrup to cock it. Brivaria shot a Withering Ray at the first of the flying slimes only for the spell to do nothing.
They were resistant to magic or specifically her magic, one of the two. To make matters worse, after she fired the spell each flying slime split off into five others. What was eight of the things became 40. Talver jumped back to avoid a pair of molten streams from the nearest monsters then raised his crossbow to shoot one.
“Wait, shoot the second from the left,” she ordered while pointing. The angel was rewarded for her gesture with three more streams, two of which still hit the shield as she moved despite her best attempt to dodge. Talver sighted the one she pointed at and fired. The crossbow quarrel punched a hole in its body and the anti-magic enchantment detonated. It died and four other flying slimes flickered and vanished.
“Illusions?” he asked, backing up further while fumbling for a quarrel.
“Yes, my prey sense lets me see the real ones. I’ll distract them, you fire at the ones I call out,” Brivaria said while rushing forward. Talver wasn’t going to get time to reload or fire if they were harrying the duo. She had to distract them.
Tragically Wind Formation did not block the molten streams of liquid the creatures fired. The deadly stuff immediately destroyed the wind construct upon contact. Brivaria would have to distract them the old-fashioned way, by shining a very bright light into their many eye-like cores. This was incredibly successful.
The skirmish continued like that for a time. As a whole it was going rather well, Brivaria thought. Her demonic prey sense showed which enemies were real and which were illusions. Talver killed the fourth monster without missing a single shot. Four shots, four dead monsters. Considering their size and the fact that he wasn’t in the city to activate his guard skills, that was pretty impressive. The flying monsters seemed to agree with Brivaria’s opinion of the battle as they retreated back into the liquid.
Deciding not to wait around and see if the slimes came back, the two began moving again. They gave the fluid-filled openings in the spine a wide berth as they picked up speed. Brivaria made the mistake of looking behind her and that’s when she saw it. A single gelatinous tendril rose from the pool the slimes previously emerged from. It swung around until it saw them. It then receded. She suddenly had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Run faster,” the angel called in her best shouting, without actually shouting, voice. It was too late. One large slime tendril emerged from the pool two segments behind them then a second. A hulking slime beast emerged from the goop.
With its two long limbs and two short limbs, it vaguely resembled a gorilla made of transparent, amber slime goo. The head was more akin to a sunflower that rose from the body with a cluster of the eye-like slime cores. More cores flowed back and forth through thing’s body. When it began to charge at them, it had one of the most unique strides Brivaria had ever seen. Rather than running like an animal and moving its limbs forward and backward, it simply regrew its limbs in the forward position. It was like watching the bottom of a carriage wheel. Unfortunately for the guardsman and adventurer, it was fast.
“What is that?” Talver asked while pushing his body to run as fast as he could, now using stamina to avoid running off the edge.
“Slime collective,” the winged girl answered while lifting off from the ground. “It doesn’t give them new skills but it makes them a lot tougher and if they combine their skills…”
Her sentence went unfinished as the amalgamation of slimes fired a veritable torrent orange liquid. It swung from side to side, hosing everything in front of it. The orange slime promised a painful, agonizing death by melting if it covered either guardsman or angel. Brivaria suddenly knew how the bone beneath their feet had been scoured clean. The molten slime didn’t affect the spine in the slightest and seemed to simply absorb into the bone with time.
The torrent attack missed both of them but only because Brivaria flew upward and Talver never stopped running. If it had been closer to them then one or both would have been scalded by the stream. When the slime amalgamation started moving again, the angel knew it would learn from its mistake. It would get far closer before spraying again.
“How… do… we… kill it? Anti-magic… bolt?” Talver asked between heavy breaths. The downward spiral of the spine felt endless and he was running out of stamina to keep making the hard turns. It was physically impossible for either Brivaria or Talver to sprint at the speeds they were and still stay on track. It was… Brivaria stopped and her eyes opened wide.
“I’ve got an idea,” she replied, hoping he heard her voice despite still trying not to shout. She drifted down to the path, dropping back behind Talver and purposefully letting the monster get closer. Sensing it was close to claiming its prey, the slime amalgamation sped up. The angel was constantly checking on it as it got closer and closer to her.
Just when it seemed to almost be upon her, she activated Current Control. It wasn’t her body that she activated it on—it was the slime’s. The wind was suddenly driving the thing forward, pushing it to move faster and faster. The skill wasn’t a particularly strong one despite being the result of a fusion but Brivaria’s arcane attribute had grown significantly since she’d gotten the skill. The angel was getting ever closer to the magical 100 arcane mark where some skills and spells could be around twice as strong as their baseline.
She was also taking advantage of a loophole in the System’s logic. Normally when two entities were hostile to one another, a creature’s endurance or spirit would oppose whatever another creature did to them. One creature’s arcane was countered by another creature’s spirit. This was part of why the angel was less afraid of fireballs and other offensive spells than cold, hard steel. Her spirit was far, far higher than her endurance. However that interaction didn’t come into play when a spell was considered a beneficial effect. If the System judged one creature to be helping one another with a beneficial spell then not only would the spell effect just occur but it would go wholly unresisted. Of course, the creature could attempt to resist it if they knew how and if they wanted to. Most creatures didn’t know how and that was really too bad for the slime.
The mass of slimes realized too late that the speed boost was far from a good thing. The winged girl had swerved straight up and out of its path but it kept accelerating until one of its massive arms came down on empty air. It couldn’t turn fast enough to stay on the path. It also didn’t have the coherence of a single mind and body to use a burst of stamina to quickly alter course in the way Talver or Brivaria did. Instead it simply careened off the edge of the spine.
Talver stopped running to watch it fly off. Brivaria was grinning ear to ear when a long tendril shot out of the slime and attached to the edge of the spine. It was like a grappling hook of slime. Their celebration ended as the cores flowed up the tentacle began pulling the bulk of the slime back up. Brivaria began raining Withering Rays on the thing trying to stop it from getting back up but to no avail.
“Get back,” Talver called out. The angel winced at the words that disturbed the silence but flew up and back. She saw Talver kneeling with his crossbow extended. Loaded into the bow was a quarrel that the angel recognized. It was one of the anti-magic bolts that the guards in Barton used against the abomination which caused it to detonate. She had the realization of what would happen before it did. She started to shout for him to stop but it was too late. The slime had pulled itself back to the bone road and Talver fired the crossbow.
Since crossing into the Between, the loudest thing they’d said or done was the crash in the armory from Brivaria leaping onto an Ogramite. The two had fled the room immediately before the consequences of that became apparent. As the crossbow bolt flew through the air, she knew this would be far, far louder. The whole thing seemed to move in slow motion. The bolt penetrated the slime and then it detonated. A dozen cores or more were instantly destroyed within the slime body as was most of the slime amalgamation itself. It was like a sphere of the goop was simply vaporized by the projectile. That sphere of air pushed its way out of the slime.
The sound the release of air made was like a terrible, wet fart. It had that moist quality that made even Talver cringe but, worst of all, it was loud. It was so, so loud. In the near silence of the Between, it was a sound that rang out and echoed off the cliffs. At that sound, the Between woke up.
Darkness fell upon everything briefly causing both Talver and Brivaria to gaze skyward. The trepidation that crawled up Brivaria’s spine was a terrible feeling that made every hair on her body stand on end and left her feeling cold. It was like someone had walked over her grave. Looking up to the sky was a sight more frightening than she had words for. What she and Talver had assumed was some kind of solar eclipse was not. The black dot in the sky with its glowing ring was not a sun and moon. It was an eye. A creature of truly incomprehensible size had blinked and then it focused on them.
“Oh no,” she breathed.
