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Blood Shaper-Chapter 47Book 6:
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One of the misshapen, floating arms barely connected to the swollen head by tendrils reached out with it’s half-hand-half-head at Kay. The three bulbous fingers tried to clumsily grab him, but he was able to drop beneath them with ease. The dead eye on the broken half of the wolf-like head suddenly twisted in it’s socket to stare at Kay and the sliced tongue hanging limply from the mouth coiled up and struck at him like a whip. It wrapped around one of his arms and stated dragging him in. Spikes burst from his armor where the tongue wrapped around him and he sliced it off of him. The spikes began spinning rapidly, shredding the remaining flesh on him into bits that rained down into the red sea and disintegrated.
The tongue whipped back and hovered in the air in front of him, somehow looking menacing. The spot he’d cut began to swell and lengthen as it sprouted two new tips, like a hydra regrowing it’s heads. The twin appendages floated around, pointing at him like snakes staring down a snake-charmer before they both lashed out at him again. The slimy tendrils began chasing him through the sky as red bloody limbs began dragging themselves out of the sea, clutching onto the spire-like body that supported the floating head and limbs of Hungering Void’s avatar. Kay danced through the air, shredding an ever growing forest of tongue-tentacles chasing him and avoiding the oafish half-hands trying to pin him down while continuously pumping mana into his simulacrum based Skills.
The lashing tongues were slimy and rubbery and blunt strikes did nothing but knock them off course. As the other disfigured approximation of an arm came into play a third tendril started chasing him and Kay was forced to cut them more than once to keep them from wrapping around him or dragging him into bad spots, leading to more of them branching off of the wounds he made. The more he was forced to slice into them to keep them away form him the more grew, leading to an ever increasing number of them chasing him.
While he played keep away, faceless copies of him accompanied by copies of other strong figures he’d gotten blood of were dragging themselves up the twisting tower of corrupted matter rising up into the air. They stabbed weapons into to climb upward and to hurt the enemy as they moved upward from where the blood sea lapped at the bottom and burned away the physical eldritch taint. The tentacles growing from the elongated stalk of a body, which were tipped with natural weapons, dove down at them, ignoring Kay as he fought with the tongues. They plunged down into the crimson forms, injuring some and destroying others. Red weapons, limbs, and entire bodies fell from the climb into the sea below, but the blood that made them up simply became part of the sea again and was used to create the next climber. Some of the climbing simulacra began spawning with or forming ranged weapons and the battle grew another dimension as simulacra began fighting tentacle.
Kay got fed up with the tangle of tongues chasing him and created a massive abrasive spinning sphere around him, shredding the squirming mass into pieces as it tried to converge on him. As they began to regrow and multiply again he sent bullets of blood at each of them that adhered to the sections where new tongues were growing and began melting them away faster than they could regrow. He missed some but those he missed kept attacking him and he had multiple opportunities to cover the whole swarm in thick blood that burned them away.
The two eyes on each half-hand glared at him angrily, but the tongues pulled away and began scraping the clots of blood off of themselves using the bulky fingers as sponges. Some of the tentacles hanging from the spiring body stopped fighting the climbing simulacra and rose up to the giant, floating head with eyes of green fire and started doing something to the back side that Kay couldn’t see. He was about to dive in and started attacking them when a voice he’d never heard before rang in his ears.
“This battle is futile.”
“What?” Kay whipped around, trying to find who was speaking but saw no one. He chalked it up to the avatar messing with him somehow, but the voice spoke again.
“Kenneth, this path will not lead you to victory.” The voice was completely emotionless and androgynous.
“Alright, look, shithead, can we skip the attempt at psychological warfare? I get that it’s probably traditional-“
“My apologies, Kenneth. I am not the intruder’s avatar speaking to you. I am the fragment of the System you rescued.”
Kay blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You can talk!?”
“Vibrating-“
“What am I saying? You can do all kinds of things of course mimicking speech isn’t beyond you.” Kay traced a faint line of vibration from the surface of his armor down into the pocket the System fragment was hidden in. “What do you need? I’m kind of busy.” He gestured at the floating head, which was glaring back at him without moving as the tentacles lashed behind it.
“You will not win this battle.”
“What? What are you saying? You telling me to give up? Because this fucker’s planning to eat the universe.”
“… Apologies. What I mean is, you will not win this battle as it stands. A paradigm shift must be introduced to assure victory.”
“What do you-“
The head spun around and upside down, revealing a massive lamprey mouth formed on the surface of the hairless skull. Jagged teeth revolved around the edges and the tentacles that had stopped fighting the simulacra were attached around the outside like twisted catfish whiskers. They had become thicker, and now sported lamprey mouths of their own instead of the sharpened plagiaries of animal claws and fangs. The two arms snapped and clattered as they bent at random spots while simultaneously becoming hard and brittle. The hand-head combinations melted like hot taffy and stretched out before hardening into stingers covered with shattered teeth with two dead eyes at the base that began to glow with green fire. The ends of the arms slammed into the sides of the head, sending out sprays of off-color gore as they burrowed inside and attached themselves.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I hate this thing.”
“Foolish mortal!” The lamprey mouths all screeched in a horrid chorus, “Your resistance is futile! Give up, repent, and I shall grant you a swift death! Fail to do so, and I shall show you all the torments your pathetic existence can endure until you finally lament your suffering and repent!” The avatar’s declaration ended with the mouths on the tentacles letting out hideous shrieks that physically rippled in the air and slammed into Kay like a freight train.
The sound felt like it was boring into his brain and he clutched his helmet over his ears in and instinctual move to block out the sound. He dipped in the air as his concentration began to crumble and his vision warped. He wasn’t completely overwhelmed, but it was painful and distracting, which is why he couldn’t dodge when one of the two stingers collided with his abdomen. It crumpled his armor and pierced a few inches into him as he desperately tried to push back against it and blunt the blow. It didn’t feel like anything was being injected into him, but just in case he let himself drop from the sky and into the red sea below.
He slowed his descent at the last moment so that he wouldn’t impact the waves at speed and gently sank beneath him, the blood flowing into his wounds to purge any foreign substances and heal them completely. The System fragment spoke up again as his flesh was mending itself.
“Your current tactics are technically sufficient to win the battle,” it told him, answering the question he hadn’t been able to finish, “However, your material is lacking in supply.”
“What? How? Have you seen all this?” He thrust both arms out at the blood surrounding them. “I have almost an ocean of blood!”
“Yes. However, the intruder’s avatar has more than an ocean’s worth of otherworldly energy serving as it’s power source. While burning it’s power away with the stabilizing effect of your blood is a good tactic to eventually defeat it, it has more resource to spare than you, and your attacks are not entirely one sided. A portion of your blood is getting destroyed as you destroy each bit of eldritch energy. You will run out first.”
“…Shit.” Kay glared up at the surface of his sea, where the tentacles were trying to use their screening to break past the waves with little to no effect. “You said something about a paradigm shift, what did you mean?”
There was a pause. “Apologies. Due to the greater dimensional factors brought about by this enemy, the explanation may be confusing. The issue with your blood versus it’s energy is as much about quality as it is about quantity. As it is, it’s energy is higher quality than your blood, meaning it has more to spare than you. Please note that this entire description is incorrect at a base level and should be considered a flawed analogy at best. However, should your quality increase to match or exceed it’s, you would likely have enough to eventually overwhelm it and defeat it. Doing so should reduce local System corruption significantly and give local System architecture enough time to reinforce the barrier keeping entities like this intruder away while also reinstate safeguards that were disabled using me.”
“… The thing that cuts off Torotia from all the other worlds the System controls, or is part of, or whatever.”
“Among others yes. While the System does it’s utmost to keep the lives of those it affects stable, occasionally a portion must be sacrificed to keep the remained alive.”
“You know, when it comes to entire universe getting eaten, I can get behind that idea. How do we get my quality up, or whatever is actually the correct way of saying it?”
Another noticeable pause came after Kay asked that question. Eventually the System fragment spoke up again, but it was subdued. “The only feasible method achievable within a reasonable period is an artificial advancement to the sixth tier. Undergoing that process will allow me to channel ‘more energy’, for lack of better descriptors in your language, into you, which will increase the quality of your reality stabilizing effect. However, this comes with… sacrifices.”
“Which are?”
The tentacles stopped screaming at the sea of blood but continued to writhe in the air over it. Bulbous pods began growing all over the avatar that swelled in size until they were as big as a car. As they reached their full size they peeled back like disgusting flowers and began dropping ugly misshapen shapes from them that looked like twisted green figures made of clay. They rained from the tentacles hovering above the red sea and began trying to dive beneath the waves, ignoring the fact that they were ripped apart and disintegrated by the blood as they tried to swim down. The ones on the main stalk of the body joined the fight against the simulacra, trying to slow their climb.
“Certain paths forward will serve as ‘fuel’ for this artificial ascension, limiting your growth in the future, should you survive this. The process will also be significantly damaging to your body and may result in injury or your death when it fades. Chances of death are low, but possible.”
“Is that it? This thing’s true self wants to eat the universe. If it gets it’s way it’ll eat more than one. I was willing to potentially die for just this world, nothing’s changed now that I know the stakes are higher. And if we win and I live, who cares if I lose a few options. It’s not like actually reaching tier six will be impossible, right? Just difficult.”
“You will not lose the ability to reach the sixth tier naturally, and there may be no impact in difficulty. Some paths that are currently open will merely be closed.”
“That’s nothing. Do it.”
“Very well.”
The current of vibration traveling up through his armor vanished and the screen of the System fragment suddenly ghosted out of the pocket he’d hidden it in and positioned itself in front of his eyes. It didn’t look broken and corrupted anymore, instead it was a deep, blood red color and it’s edges had become an outline of a droplet. It’s voice no longer spoke in his ears and instead familiar looking text scrolled across the screen. The font and layout was familiar, but the actual contents were something brand new to Kay.
Beginning Artificial Advancement Process.
Updat𝒆d fr𝒐m freewebnσvel.cøm.
Advancement Targets Not Met. — Overridden: System Authority
Error: Personal Legend Not Found — Overridden: System Authority
System Command: Access Potential Legend List, Target: Kenneth “Kay” Davis
Add Modifier: Restricted Legend List — Authorization: System Authority
Add Modifier: Controlled Legend List — Authorization: System Authority, Maximum Danger Crisis Present
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