Chương 128: Chapter 204: Terrain Dive

10 th Floor, day 37 Our supplies continue to erode at a prodigious rate. We've finally narrowed the cause to a Raid Boss known as 'Attrition'. Efforts to find this raid boss have proven to be fruitless, as it seems to leverage superior manueverability and senses to become impossible to catch. Who knows? Maybe the creature is actually strong in battle too? We haven't even caught sight of it.

The prospect of challenging the 11 th Floor while starving, with tattered equipment, is a daunting one, and leads me to understand that while this 'Attrition' is not a direct threat to our lives, it is nonetheless responsible for many deaths.

Excerpt from an ancient, tattered journal Once he was sure the meat was going to be safely transported back to the Stronghold, Will grabbed Badur and headed back to his tower, dropping the Logistician at his office before scuttling into his tower before anyone could stop him, like a crab retreating beneath a rock. Technically, since the current emergency was caused by the critters using the slime, he could study the miasmatic structures inside the gooey lubricant to his hearts content.

Will carefully uncapped the lid on the cannister of slime and pulled a dollop of it out with a dropper, moving it over the super-chilled container. The interior of this particular room of Will's tower had some stringent environmental effects in order to preserve and isolate individual strands of miasma. Will's sinuses ached because it was cold as Abyss, and there was no water in the air. He felt a bit lightheaded too because of the complete lack of ambient Miasma.

Even the air itself was thinner what a human could naturally breathe without suffocating. Will had developed a Relic specifically for spending a long time in this environment without dying or giving off too much Miasma. An amulet he was currently wearing that negated the need to breathe and neutralized any Miasma before It left his person. Naturally this didn't apply to his left hand, but that came with benefits.

With his right hand, Will carefully held the dropper filled with Attrition's slime over the supercooled liquid. Will squeezed the dropper. The slime hit the mixture without a sound except a faint crackle as it turned to ice the instant it hit the liquid, sinking to the bottom of the unnaturally light mixture. The Miasmatic structures, on the other hand, rose to the surface, floating like an oil spill on a serene lake.

Without a medium to bind them, the individual strands untangled from each other, straightened out and separated, drifting away from each other. Whistling in the deadly-thin air, Will took his tweezers made with from enormous scorpion stingers native to the 10 th Floor, and pulled individual strands of miasma out of the concoction, eyeing them critically. Barely enough here for a finger. So a finger it shall be, Will thought, carefully laying the miasmatic structure down along the index finger of his left hand.

Will winced for a moment as the miasma burned off, instantly destroyed by the warmth of his flesh, incompatible with his very being. It wasn't bad, about as much as being struck by a spatter of grease while cooking up bacon. Will shook his finger a moment and then inspected it. Yep. There it is. A perfect copy of the miasmatic structure, in the form of a bit of damage to the skin. A miasmatic scorch-mark similar to the miasma channels on Loth's meat-bugs.

Will got back to work, laying a dozen more across every part of his finger until not a single part was undamaged. Once that was done, Will took a deep breath, uncapped the vat of concentrated miasma and shoved his finger in, forcing Charge up left his arm, suffusing his left hand. It was undirected because it existed outside the confines of his Class, but that worked just fine.

The Charge inside his finger, and the Miasma outside, met in the damaged area of his skin and, and burned as they interacted with each other, searing the miasmatic structures into his skin. Three… two… one… zero Will counted the seconds as his finger began to throb.

"Ow, ow ow!" Will shouted as he reached zero, yanking it out and inspecting it. Not mutated, that's good, Will thought, inspecting his finger. The miasmatic 'scorch marks' had filled in with miasma and were now glowing with power. They wouldn't last long, so better test them now. Well, my finger doesn't seem to be invisible, and I didn't forget about it, so those worms aren't wearing a stealth effect.

Will knelt down and poked the floor, jerking in place when his finger slipped through the floor, stopping at his second knuckle. Well, this is weird, Will thought, sliding his finger through the stone floor without leaving a trail or any hole behind. The floor just seemed to morph around his finger. Almost like the opposite of his Aspect, where the floor would rise to meet him.

It gradually got more and more difficult as the temporary miasmatic structures that he'd copied began to fade, forcing him to withdraw his finger from the floor. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Okay, so their slime definitely allows them to travel through terrain. Will already suspected that, but it was nice to have definite confirmation.

Plus, with the samples I have them bringing me, I can probably figure out exactly how it works, and a way to counteract the effect. Of course, Will wasn't satisfied with a rough copy of a monster's Ability. He wanted to take it apart, piece by piece, until he could make something original. The dangling piece at the end that looked a bit like a fishhook… that had to be the 'Terrain' keywork. It was present in his Aspect Abilities, particularly when he grabbed stuff. Matter of fact…

Will healed his finger, then repeated the process, this time on a different finger in order to lower the chance of mutation and having to cut off his hand… again. Gods, the number of times I've mutated and/or blown up my hand by now… When he was first getting started with deciphering Miasmatic Structures, it was a semi-regular occurance for Will to make a mistake and his left hand to explode or try to eat him as a result.

Honestly, I'm getting pretty good at it now, Will thought, grabbing a piece of air with his right hand and poking it with his enchanted finger. Beautiful!

The 'terrain' fishhook shape dangling on the end of what Will was now calling 'Terrain dive' caught Will's 'terrain' fishhook shape that was solidifying the air, and the two of them latched together for a nearly imperceptible moment before the 'terrain dive' fishhook bent backwards, disengaging, the rest of the miasmatic structure rippling as a result of the change in tension, and his finger… slipped right through the solidified terrain. That's so freaking neat! How does it even work?

Somehow the way these miasmatic structures interacted with each other led Will to believe that the two Abilities were acknowledging each other, but Will's Ability was static and brittle, while the Terrain Dive was flexible and capable of deactivating other terrain control long enough to squirm past them. It was more… elegant. Like a perfect solution made by nature, rather than a hamfisted one that barely worked. Now, the important question: how do we stop it from working?

Will kept working on the problem until he got a message from Anne that June was back with the trackers. He reluctantly cleaned up his mess and went down to the lobby of his tower, the part that didn't require special gear in order breathe.

"How did it go?" Will asked as June tromped into Will's tower, brushing off a layer of dust. Will had first met the Scout babysitting the Nuker Mason and his Tank, Reggie. She was a competent leader who had decided that her Class wasn't going to be able to carry her much higher than the 10 th Floor, and became one of Will's first Vassals.

"How do you think it went?" June asked.

"I think you probably got led around by the nose for a few days and came up empty-handed." June eyed him for a moment before nodding.

"Yeah, pretty close. We managed to lay some tracking Abilities on a few of them, but they just ate 'em. The damned worms could always tell if someone was using magical tracking to follow them, too, and if someone had an Ability that covered a wide range, they simply scattered." Will nodded.

"We did have a technique that had modest success," June admitted.

"We buffed one of our scout's ears high enough that they could hear the little bastards moving underground. We were able to track them for a few miles before they scattered in every direction." Will frowned.

"Whereabouts was this?" He asked, summoning the physical copy of his map and laying it out in front of them.

"Here." June said, pointing to a spot on the map to the east of them.

"Where did you start tracking them, and where did they scatter?" Will asked. June got a glint of understanding in her eyes, and she drew a line on the map, ending at the point she had marked previously.

"You know why they scattered?" June asked.

"These things are about a foot long at best, and can perceive out over a hundred paces. If the raid boss follows that scale, if it's the size of a proper Raid Boss, it could have a detection radius of miles." Will said, rubbing his chin.

"You wanna send out other groups using this method to triangulate it?" June asked.

"It's the best option we've had so far, but I'm afraid it's not quite accurate enough. Just a hundred feet off or so and that would buy Attrition enough time to escape."

"That's assuming it's as fast as its little feeder worms." June replied.

"Not a bad assumption to make," Will said. Nothing would go wrong for them if Attrition was slow, but assuming it was slow when it was fast was a recipe for embarrassment.

"True." June said with a shrug.

"But assuming it's fast and only escapes, that narrows down the ways you can kill the beast. You an either locate it and then surpass its speed, trap it, albeit with completely nonmagical means, or finally, you could make a damage chain with some Nukers and wipe it off the map before it has a chance to move. I find the last method to be the method with the greatest chance of success."

"Overwhelming speed, overwhelming planning, or overwhelming firepower." Will summarized, nodding.

"I agree with you that triangulating it's position and then vaporizing a square mile around the creature's location might be the most cost-effective way to kill it…but we aren't going to do that."

"... Why's that?"

"Because Attrition just might be the best Scout Sacrifice in the whole Tower." Will said.

"And I'm greedy like that. I don't want to vaporize it. I want my scouts to have the best maneuverability and senses in The Tower."

"Ah." June nodded.

"Come to think of it, I can think of a decent-sized list of people a Sacrifice like that could work well for." She glanced down at Will's Map, then back up at him.

"Starting with you." Will shrugged.

"I'm just concerned that the extra time spent being careful enough to acquire its whole corpse may cause people to…you know. Starve." June pointed out.

"While you were out, we managed to kit out our farmers in a way that allows them to mas-produce steak-bugs. We also enchanted some golems to stomp around the fields as scarecrows. We're limping along, but nobody's going to starve."

"For now." She said. That was one of the good things about June. She didn't let Will get a big head and assume he was a genius that was always right.

"For now," Will admitted. What about homefield advantage? What if I could… Will paused.

"What about option four:" Will said.

"What if we trap it with completely magical means?"

"Go on." June said, motioning for him to continue.

"If I can make a terrain that doesn't allow the fishhook thingy to engage and cause the the rest of the script to do the ripple-y thing, then the worm is basically trapped in place. If I can make a terrain like that, then I can load that terrain into a specially prepared extra-range Homefield Advantage. Then by wearing it, I become the trap." That could work, Will thought, stroking his luxurious wizard beard. Nothing can burrow through the earth at that speed nonmagically.

If I can neutralize the thing's slime, it's basically already mine. June gave him a flat stare.

"The Abyss is the gibberish coming out of your mouth? I understood none of that."

"I don't have a vocabulary for it, I just started peeling back the secrets of magic and nobody's named anything yet."

"Mhmm."

"Also, when is Ghoul visiting?" Will asked, turning his attention to Anna.

"I wanted to work on something with him."

"You're really gonna lock yourself in your tower and play around with Ghoul while all this is going down?" June asked. Maybe June is a little too honest with me.

"It might seem like that, but Ghoul and I have made great strides decoding the nature of magic, and it's going to allow us to come up with a method to trap Attrition." June looked skeptical, but she nodded.

"He's scheduled to arrive in three days." Anna said. Alright, three days. I should be able to create an extra-large Homefield Advantage amulet and 'Terrain Dive' proof terrain before then and Ghoul can provide feedback and help polish it up. No proble-"Also, Sammohan and the other miners are back in town, and they're causing trouble." Will groaned.