Chương 224: Chapter 251: Get Away From it All

Will blinked, and blinked again. The sun was a dim red, and his ears were flooded with a ringing noise that wouldn't go away.

"What happened?"

"He blew up most of the forest." Loth's voice said, seemingly from underwater. I've never been this hard of hearing before. Will reached up and touched his ear, feeling something wet.

"Here." A splash of something over his face, and suddenly the sun came into focus and the water was removed from his ears.

"Aw man, those are expensive," Will grumbled as he sat up.

"I asked you to used Sourdough on the potion, but you said the city council could wait until afternoon." Loth said as Will's head cleared up. BOOM! Will craned his neck and spotted the other Lords battling…something inhuman. Void had become…a mass of some kind. Tentacles sprouted from the coliseum-sized mass roughly the shape of a cabbage, and despite Void's grand size, he was swinging those tentacles at the Lords bouncing around him like fleas with surprising dexterity.

"How come the human becomes more inhuman than the brain-worm?" Will groaned as Loth helped him to his feet.

"I would argue that as a creature specialized in parasitizing the human body, the worm might have had a strong preference for its host to remain human. While Void simply does not give a shit."

"Not a bad gues-" BOOM! Will and Loth tumbled backwards as a pressure wave and blast of fire flowed over their dugout position. When Will climbed out of the crater, a huge chunk of the earth was missing right below where Ghoul had been flying. A cloud above him had a hole punched in it, and Ghoul was nowhere to be seen. Was the blast focused? And we got the backwash? How did he….

"It's got something to do with his body-weight." Will mused.

"Eh?"

"The mass of the thing he blows up is directly proportional to the strength of the explosion, but I've never seen him blow anything up that was more than a couple times heavier than he was as a cantrip. It was always a column of air, or a piece of a nearby floor. That chunk of ground is way bigger than the stuff he blew up in the past, but it seems to be roughly the same scale as his new body.

"Ah." Loth said.

"He must've used the Ability that allows him to shape undead to fuse their mass to his own, creating an exploit that allowed him to scale up his cantrip's power quadratically by abandoning his human form. Neat."

"It was that tree he was leaning on!" Will realized, climbing out of the crater. Void had fused with the damned tree, which multiplied his ability to cantrip explosions a dozen-fold, catching Will off guard and knocking him senseless for a moment. How embarrassing. A tingle in Will's scalp prompted him to glance up. Ghoul had reappeared in the sky above, a massive circle of miasmatic structures forming underneath him, making the sky come to life.

An instant later, a beam of energy fell down on Void, scouring away swaths of his undead flesh, which seemed to grow back in a matter of seconds.

"Where's the crown?" Will asked.

"In my hand." Loth said, handing him the glittery fire-opal studded circlet. Loth was not one to lose sight of the goal, even if something unexpected happened, like a sudden explosion and Void becoming a kaiju. Purchase Freight Door to 8 th Floor, The Ferryman's Stronghold? Yes. 13404 -> 13324 Influence remaining. Will tossed the crown over to Ghoul's Stronghold and snapped the Door shut the instant it was through, making the crown vanish like a magic trick. I'll have to thank Zodiac for the Influence.

The old man had given him all the extra Influence for the express purpose of hunting the worm, so he didn't really owe Zodiac anything, but Will still felt grateful. It had opened his eyes to how useful Influence could be while Climbing, and how badly he needed Vassals. Okay, so with the crown gone, he can't get the fae or the class-penetrating fire anymore. The last few blasts of fire had been noticeably absent the crowbar-shaped Miasmatic structures designed to tear apart defenses, and had just been normal fire.

Which was probably why Will was still alive, come to think of it. Void was still practically immortal, though, and tearing apart huge swaths of the jungle in his battle with Ghoul and Marksman. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Where's Chesmu?" Will asked.

"Oh, he's over there." Loth said, pointing at a charred corpse lying twenty or so feet behind them. The corpse let out a tiny cough. Will withdrew another supreme healing potion and poured it over Chesmu, triggering Sourdough as he did so. Sourdough 85 Charges remaining. Chesmu gave a strangled gasp for air and coughed up a bit of blood while Will pocketed the sourdough nodule.

"Ow." Chesmu groaned. The ground shook under them as Will levered the oversized Lord to his feet and carried him away from the battle.

"What're your Abilities?" Will asked.

"What's your Build?"

"Mage. Water. Ice. Weather. Boat stuff as a sub-type." Chesmu rasped. So that's why he got roasted by the explosion. Low physical stats.

"Why the Abyss did you ever leave the 6 th Floor, damnit?" Will asked, dropping Chesmu against a partially scorched tree.

"Ask myself that all the time," Chesmu muttered when he recovered from the pain.

"Carrie was carrying me up to your Floor for my Advanced class, then we were gonna do some networking at the wedding, and the rest is history." Will sat and thought for a moment. Their current problem was that Void could use all the mass around him to either regenerate flesh or create cataclysmic explosions. I don't just need to separate him from other creatures he can turn into undead. I need to separate him from everything. Part of the ten-step plan.

Will's first thought was to trap him in an extradimensional space and throw away the key, like what Kincaid did… Immediately followed by the realization that Will did not have such an ability.

"You can control water?"

"Pretty damn well, If I say so myself." Chesmu said.

"Can you control water inside people?" Will asked, hoping Chemsu could fling Void into space.

"No. Their Class interferes." Chesmu replied, shaking his now-bald head. Damn. Loth tugged Will's shirt.

"My bugs tell me he's doing something underground." Frowning, Will spun his mental map on its side like a coin, giving him a three-dimensional view of everything as it spun, including the underground. Void didn't show up as a terrain yet. Despite how big he was, it was still considered a creature and not terrain by the unknowable standards of his Map. Despite not seeing Void's body, Will could see the outline of where the coliseum-sized monster was resting in the soil of the jungle.

There were dozens of man-sized tunnels appearing almost like roots underneath Void as tentacles burrowed their way through the ground. And lo and behold, one of the tentacles had a 'Void' tag at the very tip of it, where Will had placed a Label cantrip on him at the wedding. That particular tentacle was tunneling towards the distant Stronghold. He's trying to escape to Wyrd's Stronghold and possibly take some hostages. This was no longer a battle for the sake of humanity.

This was now simply a battle to keep a powerful set out of the hands of a man with no scruples. If Void made himself expensive enough to kill, the other Lords might be forced to back off and tolerate him. Similar to how Frederick Wyrd had been tolerated, by virtue of being extremely difficult to kill because of his Thorns Build. And Void knew that, which was why he was aiming for the Wyrd Stronghold. He's aiming for a draw.

Without the resistance-penetrating faefire, Void didn't have good enough damage output to beat them anyway. Will turned his attention back to Chesmu resting against the charred tree.

"Can you damage him and mess up his line of sight?"

"Said I could control the weather," Chesmu grumbled from his slumped position.

"Practically my specialty." The lord of the 6 th Floor reached out with a single hand and a torrent of miasmatic structures and Charge shot out up into the sky. Will took a sketch and added it to his legend, marvelling as a dome of low-lying clouds coalesced out of nothing, effectively blocking Void's vision of Ghoul. Chesmu made a tugging motion and an instant later, lightning began pouring down on Void like hail, carving away his undead flesh at a steady clip, taking some of the burden off of Ghoul.

"Keep that up for a minute," Will said, leaping away.

"I could do this all day." Chemsu muttered, spitting out dirt behind him. Will shot up into the sky and found Ghoul, who was already working on a new spell, Miasma coiling around his limbs like a living thing. The miasma around him noticed Will an instant before Ghoul himself did.

"William, it's good to see you and Chesmu are alive." Will manifested his physical map, set to the depth of the tendrils under Void's enormous body.

"His real body seems to be tunnelling towards the Wyrd Stronghold," Will said, tapping on the root-shaped structure branching away from the cabbage-shaped tentacle monster undead beneath them.

"So that's what the odd tag you placed on me is," Ghoul murmured, peering at the map.

"You noticed?" Will asked.

"Well, yeah. This is kind of my thing." Ghoul said.

"And you didn't remove it?" Will asked.

"I wanted to study it." That tracks.

"Can you cut him off from the rest, and we'll pull him out of there?" Will asked. Ghoul nodded, and Will shot back down to Loth, leaving the map with Ghoul and manifesting another to give to Loth.

"I love your Map Ability." Loth mused as she studied it, insects pouring out of her barrel and burrowing into the ground below.

"I want one."

"Yeah, well, all the other options were either attack Abilities or movement ones." Will replied.

"I already had plenty of both, so it seemed like a trap to choose more of the same." While he spoke, Will switched the Relic slotted in his Phantom Hand from the Wand of the Undead Retainer to the Dimensional Coiled Serpent Amulet. A shiver ran down his spine as the finger popped and his stats shot up, causing an almost euphoric sensation that paired poorly with that of a dislocating finger. Dimensional Coiled Serpent Amulet (x12. 19) +211 Strength +79 resistance +197 Kinesthetics +13 Acuity +79 Focus 100% Audiovisual dampening while trying to hide. * Coiled strike: 5 charges, teleport up to 65 feet in any direction, damage output is increased by 1978% for 6 seconds. Applies Psychic Venom. The set bonuses from Family Gathering settled in, and Will's Phantom Hand split into five snakes.

A twinkle of light shone through the cloud cover, and an instant later, a thin beam of miasma shot down from above, piercing the earth above where Void was hiding.

"Go," Loth said. Will crouched down and vanished, his body completely masked by the Amulet an instant before he shot forward. BOOM! The ground erupted in a shower of boulders and dirt as Loth's trap flung Void and everything around him straight into the air. It was a maelstrom of rock, roots and dirt, all moving at explosive speeds.

A normal person wouldn't even be able to perceive it as anything but a confusing blur, but Will's monstrous Acuity and Kinesthetics allowed him to pick out a flash of Void's arm from within the flurry of stone. Coiled Strike. 80 Charges remaining. Will appeared behind Void and delivered a hard strike to the man's spine. CRACK! The hefty Coiled Strike damage bonus bypassed Void's outrageous Resistance and the blade buried itself in the man's spine. Maybe I should've done this the first ti-oh crap!

Will's axe bounced back as Void offloaded the damage to the huge cabbage-shaped undead mass in the distance. Right, the damage offload. He spotted Void reaching out to the nearby rocks as they flew upwards together, aiming to gain control of them. Nope! Will smacked the thread of miasma with Thumb, and grabbed both Void and himself with Pinkie and Middle, leaving Ring and Pointer doing a double helix around them as they shot straight up into the sky.

If he can turn anything into an undead to heal and offload damage into, then all I need to do is make sure there's nothing at all around him. Will knew from experience that after a couple miles up there was nothing. They'll kill his minion while I'm up here, and that should be the end of it. Will took a deep breath.