acaswell
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Chapter 178: Aplos (2) - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2023-11-23 06:34:34 +0000 UTCThe hallway where Aplos had come from turned dark. Not as if someone had turned off all the light, but as if something had simply eaten every single speck of light in the world, leaving behind nothing but an inky void. I felt something tug at my mind as I looked at the creature, as if the very essence of whatever I was looking at was twisted. It reminded me of a broken mirror, with eyes peering at me through the cracks in the glass. A dozen different reflections of what could be stared at me from angles that didn’t exist in reality, sending nervous shivers down my spine. My brain struggled to comprehend what it was looking at. It was almost as bizarre and hard to conceptualize as the fish from the first world the three of us had lived in.
However, my Willpower was much higher than it had been in the past, so I quickly pieced my mind back together. Some part of me realized that the creature hadn’t even properly attacked us - I had simply felt a little tug at my mind from looking at the creature and trying to understand what it was. I could certainly understand why the soldiers in the base were told to watch out for odd sights and sounds. Depending on how strong their mind was, some people might genuinely go insane from looking at Aplos.
Luckily, nobody in our group had below Grade 6 Willpower. I doubted it would be an issue for us.
Aplos continued staring at us, and I tensed. But the creature did not move to attack us.
I glanced at the injured and dying soldiers near us, and then decided they weren’t ready to make any problems for us right now.
“Are you able to converse with us?” I asked Aplos. The soldiers in the base seemed hostile to Aplos, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was hostile to us. I didn’t really think it would work, but it was worth a shot. I didn’t want to kill something without at least checking if it was intelligent and non-hostile first. At the same time as I spoke, I swapped to my soul vision.
I spotted a large, floating candle in the middle of Aplos’s body. It was on the larger side for this world. If I was at full essence, and had at least three of my alteration ability’s keywords active, I could probably kill the creature in one hit with extinguish. However, it would take most of my mana - and I had spent a huge amount of alteration essence healing myself and Anise, and extinguishing some of the soldiers earlier. Anise and I still had bad injuries, although they were no longer life-threatening.
Aplos continued staring at me, and I heard something speak to me. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but it resounded directly inside of my mind, rather than in my physical ears.
And then, reality split into two different visions.
In one reality, I saw myself and my friends standing in the corridor, just as before. Anise and I both had wounds that were partially healed, and all of us were preparing for a possible fight with Aplos.
In another reality, I saw the darkness that constituted the creature’s body reach towards me, like long knives made entirely of shadow. I felt searing pain in my side as they ripped into my flesh, and I immediately realized the creature was somehow attacking me with an illusion.
I immediately pulled together every single drop of alteration essence I could, and then slammed it into Aplos’s soul in the biggest extinguish I could manage. Immediately, about half of its candle of life disappeared, and the vision of Aplos’s body ripping into my guts disappeared. I gasped and doubled over, feeling blood drip out of my stomach.
Whatever the creature had done in its ‘illusion,’ it had somehow carried over to reality. I saw Sallia start to bleed out of one of her eyes, and Felix started shivering uncontrollably, as if he had taken a long bath in icewater.
“Hostile,” I said, gasping.
Sallia ignored her wounds, and followed up my attack by launching a spray of metal spikes at Aplos - only for them to pass harmlessly through its body.
“Body of darkness,” she said, almost sounding as if she was complaining. I glanced at Anise, and was relieve to see that her injuries hadn’t gotten any worse. Aplos had focused on the three of us, possibly because we were the ones with the least severe injuries. Then, taking me by surprise, Anise looked at Aplos and pouted angrily at the creature that had injured the three of us. She launched a magic missile at the creature, and a silver bolt of force cut directly into its body.
The creature didn’t seem to take any damage from the attack - however, Anise’s magic missile did hit the creature, instead of just passing through its body, the way Sallia’s metal attack had. The creature didn’t react - it seemed almost as if if it were stunned.
Perhaps it had reacted poorly to having nearly half of its life force destroyed instantly. I grinned savagely.
“How did the people in this facility keep it confined in the first place, if it just passes through physical matter?” asked Felix.
I looked at the creature, which had an incorporeal body made entirely of darkness, and blinked.
I had no idea how the facility had imprisoned Aplos. It was obvious they had confined it successfully for a long time before our arrival - after all, the soldiers seemed pretty familiar with the creature. We had seen a few other items in this facility made out of manifestation essence as well, and Anise’s attacks had seemed to at least interact with Aplos, unlike Sallia’s physical attacks.
“Maybe it has a weakness to manifestation essence?” I said. Since this facility seemed dedicated to studying manifestation essence, it was a reasonable guess.
Sallia’s eyes widened, and a moment later, she whirled towards me.
“Miria, give me your umbrella!”
I immediately handed her the umbrella, and Sallia launched a lightning bolt out of it and into the creature’s body.
The creature shrieked in agony, and a great deal of the dark mist that made up its body seemed to vanish under the light and heat of the lightning bolt.
“I’m out of essence,” said Sallia, grimacing.
I grabbed my umbrella and handed it to Anise, who launched another lightning bolt at the creature.
This time, the creature completely collapsed.
The candle of life in its body was snuffed out by the attack, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A few moments later, my soul-vision collapsed, as even the last wisps of my alteration essence drained out of my body. I could barely even move now - and the damage to my shin certainly wasn’t helping anything.
However, I also felt relieved when I saw Aplos die. The creature had been dangerous, but nothing we couldn’t handle. After all, we were now transmigrators with two worlds behind us. While Aplos’s illusion attack had been strange and unexpected, the creature hadn’t been that hard to handle once we were on the offensive.
I checked my notifications, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Along with all the other notifications I hadn’t had time to process yet, I could see a notification that we had killed ‘Aplos.’ I ignored the other System notifications for now - I could look at them once we got out of here.
Slaughter: Kill ‘Aplos.’
Achievement +450
There was also a notification that I had received a new skill for killing Aplos, but that could also wait.
I turned towards my friends, and then towards the dying soldiers in the corridor. Whatever Aplos had done to them, it seemed to have nearly killed the soldiers who had survived the fight with us. I looked at them, and then shook my head. They had fired at us. Their life or death wasn’t my problem anymore.
“Let’s keep running,” I said. “We need to get out of this facility.”
Sallia nodded, and quickly removed the next wall from our path. I stopped for a few seconds to steal Anise’s manifestation orb and stuff it in my backpack, since I still had a little absorption essence left over, and then we kept moving. I had a hard time running on my injured shin, so Sallia picked me up and started carrying me as we continued fleeing from the facility.
For once, luck seemed to be on our side. The first corridor we had run into was also deserted, just like the previous one.
I grabbed the four swords we had seen as well, feeling my absorption essence reserves strain, and grimaced as I shoved them into my backpack. I was running dangerously low on absorption essence, and my alteration essence was completely gone. Sallia apart the entrance to the facility.
And there, on the other side of the facility, we found another forty soldiers sitting in formation and staring at us down rifles.
I resisted the urge to curse.
We had been running so fast that I hadn’t had time to look at our destinations through the use of my spatial eyes. And now, we had been nearly ambushed by another group of soldiers.
The person who was standing at the back of the soldiers looked at us in disbelief, and then his eyes flicked towards Felix.
“You…?” he seemed stunned by our presence, before he cackled. “I knew there must be something special about you. There’s no way you could have been normal! I knew you were faking it!” he grinned toothily at Felix, seeming to ignore the rest of us. “Tell me how you did it, you little bastard, and I’ll-”
I’d heard enough.
I spent nearly half of my remaining absorption essence to blast the toothy fucker down with a lightning bolt from {Storm’s Breath}. No one treated my friends like that.
His eyes widened as he died.
Felix raised his hand, and several guns twisted and warped in their owner’s hands.
“Fire!” yelled a frightened-sounding soldier, and I expanded my spatial senses to their limit. At the same time, I held my umbrella in front of me like a shield, something I should have done during our last encounter with soldiers but had forgotten, and prayed with all my heart that the umbrella was bulletproof.
My umbrella rattled and shook, and my arms and shoulders felt like they had been hit by a truck. I heard one of my arms snap, because my bones just weren’t sturdy enough to withstand the hail of bullets. But in that time, I managed to teleport nearly twelve bullets back to their owners, killing them on the spot.
Sallia and Felix were no slouches either, and Sallia constantly took control of bullets and metal fragments to kill the soldiers attacking us. Felix, meanwhile, broke the rifles of nearby soldiers. Since he couldn’t catch bullets the way Sallia and I could, he seemed to have found a different way to help.
As chaos started to break loose, I reached into the vision of another of the nearby soldiers, and made us disappear.
“They disappeared!” yelled one of the remaining soldiers, before several other soldiers started wildly looking around. They looked terrified, but still managed to form back up. I scanned the remaining soldiers.
Perhaps twenty were left standing, and another half a dozen were left moaning in pain on the rocky ground.
<Don’t move or make a sound,> I sent over the friendship bracelets.
The soldiers continued scanning their surroundings for several seconds, before they started shuffling around, kicking at suspicious-looking patches of air. The four of us very, very slowly and carefully started making our way towards the entrance of the tunnel.
“Block them at the entrance!” yelled a soldier, as we were trying to make our way forward. “Someone get more reinforcements from the base, and I’ll let the guards at the entrance know to stop them. They can’t escape with the test subject!”
Then, the man took off towards the alchemist workshop we had entered this facility from.
I felt the urge to curse the man rise up, and wished I had enough alteration essence left to drop him on the spot.
<Run faster and hope for the best?> asked Sallia.
I hesitated, and then nodded.
<Let’s go.>
The four of us took off towards the entrance, and the sound of our shoes slapping against the stones quickly gave away our position.
“They’re still here!” yelled another soldier, before several of them pointed their guns at us.
Felix quickly ruined a few more guns as another wave of bullets ripped towards us. However, since the soldiers didn’t know where we were, a lot of their shots were horribly inaccurate.
I grabbed the bullets that were heading towards us, and then used them to kill or injure the other soldiers firing at us - as well as the soldier who was running towards the entrance.
That soldier, as well as several of the shooters, dropped dead. The soldiers continued blindly firing at all of the places we could be, but the sound of gunfire was so loud it made it impossible for them to track us through sound.
The four of us quickly made for the entrance, and after a few moments of struggling, managed to open the door. I maintained an illusion over the eyes of the alchemists and guards inside of the workshop. They seemed to be alert to the idea that something was wrong, and the sound of gunfire echoing through the tunnels definitely made them nervous. The alchemists and guards were no longer producing potions, and were instead warily scanning the area with their guns ready.
But they couldn’t see us, and while they seemed worried by the sound of us opening the secret door, they didn’t open fire at us instantly. So under the cover of my illusions, the four of us slipped back to the door to the sewers. I had spent almost all of both of my essences, and I was starting to feel tired and drained. But I had just enough left to cover us for another minute or two.
I breathed a sigh of relief as Felix wrenched the non functioning door using his metal attunement, and then the four of us charged into the sewers under the watchful eyes of the alchemists and guards.
I was out of both kinds of essence, Sallia had almost no absorption or manifestation essence left, Anise was tapped out of everything, and only Felix still had a little bit of alteration essence left in him. However, as we slipped back into the sewers, and the din of the hidden laboratory faded into the distance, I couldn’t help but want to cheer and laugh in excitement.
We had rescued Felix!
Author’s Note:
So, update.
My thumb still hurts.
It has been about a month now.
It still hurts.
I will probably go to the doctor this weekend or early next week to see what they have to say, since some of the other injuries from a month ago have largely healed, but my thumbs still quite hurts. Depending on what the doctor says, I may need to not write much next week, or even start my vacation earlier if the doctor says I need to. We’ll see what they have to say. Fingers crossed that it’s easy to fix, but I’m letting you guys know in case things slow down earlier than expected. I’ll keep you updated.
Thanks and sorry for potential future schedule disruptions,
-Acaswell
Comments
Rain
Freedom! TFC!!
Syrahl
Miria gets kill credit and the skill for Aplos even though it was Anise (using Miria's lightning umbrella) who got the killing blow? I remember an author note on an earlier chapter where you said you had to edit a scene so Miria got last hits on a couple of monsters, so this seems inconsistent. Unless it's because Anise used Miria's bound market equipment? In which case that interaction probably should be mentioned at some point.
MinE
It could’ve been a weird use of manifestation essence. That would explain how they had and knew to use manifestation essence against it, if they’re from the same world.
Dreamysyu
So, I guess Aplos was some kind of monster from a slightly higher-tier parallel world that uses the Alteration essence? And the reason it decided to break out, perhaps, was that it sensed Miria using the same essence as it does? Though it doesn't make much sense how these alchemists even have access to the other world. Perhaps, the contact came from the other side? We'll see, I guess. Edit. Or, perhaps, not the Alteration essence, but the Absorption-related skill that affects people's minds.
Invalid Entry
Keyboards can definitely be more of a strain on the thumb and pinky than other fingers. Can easily see how that repetitive strain would prevent healing. Could do speech to text though it’s legit difficult not to feel ridiculous using those programs.
Isley
good chappie
