Chương 180: Chapter 256: Curiosity

"Loth's awake." Brianna said from across their little stone table. They'd been taking a break between searching for a Key Site and moving large quantities of meat received from Zodiac.

"For good?" Will asked.

"For good." Brianna nodded. Now that Loth was awake, they needed to find a Key Site and clear it to rejoin with the others and resume the Climb. Where's the nearest Key Site in need of clearing? Will asked the Tower. It was something he'd picked up over the years. The System always told a Climber where the closest Key Site in need of clearing was when they entered the Floor, but they could also directly ask whenever they wanted. There is a Key Site in need of clearing to your north East, twenty-five degrees upward.

Will consulted his Map, spotting the place in a matter of seconds.

"looks like the one we passed last time we came through got infested." Will mused. Some floors had very few monsters and took a long time for Key sites to be in need of clearing again, but thankfully the 12 th Floor that wasn't the case. Little boulder-like crustaceans liked to swarm around the Key Sites and soak up all the miasma as soon as no one was looking. Their larval form resided in the endless stone beyond the narrow tunnels of the 12 th Floor, so there was no way of getting rid of them. Let's see here…

Will traced a mental line from the distant Key site, down through the labyrinthine tunnels towards where they were currently. The view pulled out like it was, the tunnels looked like an angry snarl of wool, each strand of hair one tunnel, and not all of them connected. After a few minutes of tracing and starting over a couple times, Will found a route that didn't require cutting through any walls, and he applied the line to the map, making a semi-permanent mark that he could follow.

"Alright, I have a route." Will said.

"Should take us about an hour, give or take." Being able to consult the line he'd drawn on his map at any point in time, they made excellent time, only behind messengers who specialized in the 12 th Floor. When they arrived at the Key Site, he and Brianna exterminated the stone mites and hopped through the Door to the next Floor. Will picked up himself and Brianna and cruised through the bleak grey sky of the 13 th Floor, avoiding clumps of proto-curses as they flew.

Will started to a strange checker pattern a couple miles out, and when they arrived at the rendezvous point, Will had to stop and do a double take.

"Loth…"

"Mmyes?" Loth asked as Will and Bree landed beside her.

"This setup is freakin' awesome!" Will said, gesturing to the surrounding swamps. In the short time that the former kobold had been awake, she had set up a grid pattern across the swamp that maximized the space for monsters to spawn and directed them towards the party to be disposed of in an orderly fashion. With a cry of pain, an emaciated crocodile-looking thing leapt out of the water, desperate to escape, yet taking the pain with it wherever it went.

Boils formed on the crocodile's hide and burst forth with dozens of bullet wasps, some of whom went on to seek out more victims while the rest effortlessly picked up the corpse and carried it towards the growing pile of monster flesh degrading into miasma.

"Is it the new Ability?" Will asked.

"How does it work, what's the name?" Will slapped his forehead and checked his Party list, where Loth's new Ability was revealed.

"Draconic Domain!?" Will exclaimed. Nora had been able to use harness the proto-curses in the environment to some extent around her lair. That seemed to follow with what Loth was displaying.

"What's the range?"

"Currently? Only three miles." Loth said, raising her snoot in pride.

"Three MILES!?" Will shouted.

"That's cheating! I want a re-do!"

"Cry to your goddess of eyeballs and hunting." Loth said with a smug grin.

"Your map Ability is sixteen at the moment, isn't it?" Loth replied.

"Yeah, but I can't change the stuff that's represented on my map!" Will replied. The ability to actually affect the terrain warranted a much smaller range, so three miles was… whew. Maybe I shouldn't have given her Attrition.

"I can't change the stuff that's on my map…Or can I?" Will mused, struck with sudden inspiration. What kind of Sacrifice would do that? Some kind of voodoo creature? Something that established a link between an object and a representation of the object. I can't think of Anything like that. Stll, Map had a lot of spare upgrade slots. At least four, and at best seven. Maybe he could figure something out. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. In the meantime…

"You coming after me? Huh?" Will asked, jabbing Loth with his elbow.

"You trying to beat me at terrain control?"

"I'm pretty sure I already have?" Loth said, gesturing to the industrial slaughter of the 13 th Floor's inhabitants. It was definitely at a level that Will would struggle with.

"Will, aren't you going to complement Loth?" Rotwitch asked. Will glanced at Loth and frowned.

"About…what?"

"How she looks!" Rotwitch said, gesturing to Loth. Loth was still wearing her gilded cuirass, but had done away with the robe. She was exactly the same height as Will now, and her face was slightly more expressive than before. Her legs were long and made for sprinting, her fingers slender and tipped with short-but-sturdy claws that didn't interfere with her dexterity.

The stubs emerging from her back when Will left to secure a food supply were now massive leather wings draped over her shoulders, forming a makeshift cloak. She looked totally different. Will turned and looked at Rotwitch.

"You don't know Loth very well." Will said, turning away from Rotwitch's offended gasp and back to the former kobold.

"So I saw that critter explode with Bullet Wasps, but I didn't see any Charge leave your body. I know it's not a cantrip, there wasn't even any miasma leaving you, either. The miasma just like…coalesced on it and turned into parasitic wasps. Freaking amazing, how did you do it?" Will was giving Loth the compliments she wanted.

"A lady must have some secrets," Loth preened.

"It's gotta be an environmental effect from Draconic Domain. But how? You didn't even pay for it." Will snapped his fingers.

"It's Focus-based, isn't it? I bet when you're at Full Charge it moves extra Charge that you would have generated into the environment to trigger Abilities from your Class automatically."

"That's a theory." Loth said, turning to look at the destruction she was wreaking upon the 13 th Floor.

"And it's a good one. The Ability does not specify how it fuels itself. Upon reaching a safe zone, I should empty my Charge to see what effect it has on the Ability."

"We'll need a good clock and lots of paper." Will mused.

"Sadly, since this is related to my bid for Lordship, I'll be testing that alone. It will have to remain conjecture for you." Will clicked his tongue before he thought of something.

"That reminds me." Will pulled out his sketches of the miasmatic structures in Loth's Class as they transformed her body.

"I made these without your permission. They're sketches of your class while you changed. I figure you at least deserve access to them, given that you're the subject." Loth peered down at Will's sketches.

"What happened when these snippy-parts did their work? Do they still exist inside me?" Loth asked, pointing at a sketch of a strand of miasma with a scissor-like protrusion cutting into another strand.

"No, the snippy parts snipped parts of your class, then they fell off, something like how baby teeth fall out, then the ends of the strands fused together." Will flipped to the next sketch, where the two strands met to create a whole.

"Fascinating." Loth mused. Will considered asking if she were planning on doing her Class advancement now, but that was a silly question. She probably felt chagrin about becoming a burden on everyone because of her over-eagerness, and intended to follow through with the plan, hitting level sixty before retreating back to the 10 th Floor Stronghold. So what she likely wanted to do was…

"let's get these levels out of the way." Will said. The 13 th floor was similar to the 4 th Floor in that it was a swamp. The monsters seemed to have adapted to the proto-curses floating through the air, absorbing them into their own offense and defense. The giant mosquitos were cloaked in miasmatic structures that made them nearly impossible to sense, and they injected curses that they fermented inside their own bellies.

The strange, emaciated crocodiles that Loth was currently harvesting had a strange pull to them. They had donned a sort of curse that made walking into deep water and drowning yourself seem like a good idea. Will was interested in how that particular curse worked, given that it didn't directly interact with the viewer.

It was a sight-based curse that worked in a novel way, by making the viewer hyper-afraid of drowning for a brief moment, somehow tiring that specific portion of the brain faster than any other, making the viewer numb to the fear in a matter of seconds. Clever, if a bit horrifying. Travis was a good sport about it. Well, Travis didn't know Loth and Will were watching him nearly get eaten multiple times, but he was still a good sport about it. You are now a level 57 World Traveler!

The XP requirements to level were getting fairly ridiculous. Even with Loth's hyper-optimized setup, whereby monsters were spawning and dying in droves, levels were few and far between. They settled into an easy pattern. Loth's traps, bugs, and Draconic Domain passives thinned the nearby monsters, while Will's Phantom Hand wielded his tomahawk and picked off any that were tougher-than-average. Travis provided convenience and defense for the party while Brianna kept the camp in good order.

When we go higher, we should consider bringing Badur to preserve food. Except Badur wasn't a great fighter. Which meant he needed a bodyguard. Which meant they needed more food for the bodyguard. Which meant more laundry and equipment to carry. The size of the party expands exponentially, Will mused to himself on the third day of camping above the swamp. He was practicing flicking spheres of miasma out of his left hand while studying Loth's Ability. It was more subtle than the miasmatic structures he was used to.

It wasn't rigid and strong, but soft, gossamer and easily torn. Practically designed to be torn. In fact, Will himself could tear Loth's control away from Draconic Domain easily. He reached out and seized the miasmatic structures with his Phantom Hand and tore a gap in them, watching as they fluttered like shredded silk. A moment later, the edges of the ragged hole in Loth's controlled space grew back together. Regrowth. Adaptability.

No matter how thoroughly Will shredded Loth's control of the area around her, it would grow back in a matter of seconds. It was a different form of persistent control that made Will reconsider his stance on terrain control. He touched the ground and had Aspect firm it up, watching as his rigid crystalline miasmatic structures tore apart Loth's weak, cloth-like ones.

The moment he let go, Dragonic Domain's raged edges linked together again like the barbs on a bird's feathers, seamlessly filling in the gap as if his control had never happened. No matter what, Loth's Ability was determined to be the first and last in control of the terrain around her. He glanced over at Loth, who didn't seem to be aware of his experiments in the slightest. So she isn't actively conscious of her domain, otherwise she would notice a big gaping hole being torn in it. That's good and bad.

Will could feel his Aspect being used on things, and he knew when something was messing with it. On the other hand, he always had to use it actively, which meant mental effort. I wonder what makes the decisions for Draconic Domain? Her Class? The System? The Tower? Her subconscious? Perhaps her Ability did subconsciously what he did actively when he tagged things as 'terrain' or 'not terrain' when he solidified the air.

Will idly flicked a sphere of miasma at the nearby tree stump as he pondered the details of Loth's new Ability, his mind racing with new ways to implement his own research. I'm especially fascinated by the interlocking hook design that allows the miasma to suffer damage and then reattach easily. Almost like designed faults that absorb the force of an impact and then reattach, suffering no true damage. What kind of Ability could I make with- CRACK!

Will blinked, glancing over at the tree stump he'd been flicking miasma spheres at. It had been split in half by a heavy blow from… Will glanced down at his Classless skeletal left hand, newly regrown. There was no Class supporting his hand or focusing the miasma. He'd done it with a completely normal… ish hand.

"Huh. I just did magic."