NOVEL FROG (Vol 5) Chapter 14: Time to Get Crackin'
Staring at that spiderweb crack, Sammy knew it extended out further. She slowly approached, walking around a spiral, temporarily making the damage disappear to her. When she got back to the flat platform the Lightstone had been on, she had to kneel so her eye was level, and angle herself to see down the trajectory she knew the crack went…
She yelped and jerked away as her vision became totally disoriented once it passed into the spot. Her eye watered as if it had been damaged. It felt like she had been cracked. Carefully, she put her hand through the same angle of wrongness… but felt nothing.
Sammy could just vaguely feel something as she extended her 'extra' senses in the direction the crack went. It was more extensive. Or there was a… source.
Unsurprisingly, this disturbed her immensely, as this was in some way, Azure and her. “What the absolute fuck?! How is this even possible? Fortuneteller? How?! Answer me!”
Bitter, mocking laughter from the darkest of the amalgamate reached her. Choice ‘types’ of the greater whole, it seemed. ‘Ho ho… You think that the mistakes you’ve made don’t have consequences? The Lover obeys you at the universe’s peril. Perhaps you should ask her for another boon? She can dig her hands in here and see what happens.’
Fuck my life. That favor is biting me in the ass again. Can’t I ever live it down?
“If you’ve satisfied your gloating enough, can you maybe help me out here? How dangerous is this? Will it spread? Can’t we do something about it?”
‘It’s exceedingly dangerous and destructive, with random results. It will spread, slowly. As for what you can do, there is the potential to resolve it — or to perish trying. This is no matter to simply wave your hand and fix. Spaces that should have never been crossed were violated. Now they are overlapping. The structure cannot heal.’
“If I don’t deal with it now, will it get harder to deal with later?”
“Likely.”
Sammy sighed grandly, eyes cast off in the direction of the unknown threat. “Can you tell me anything more about it?”
“No. Details are indistinct. Shadowed. Do as you will. Risk always lies in the cards, after all.” The Fortuneteller vanished.
“Great… I can’t just leave this in a place I need to use. This is the route to Ozzy’s engineering section. I have to fix this.”
Sighing again, Sammy made her way slowly down paths corresponding with the angle of the crack, but certainly not dead on.
New Quest unlocked: “Filling In Cracks” — Learn more about the damage discovered and potentially resolve it.
● Rewards: +30-100 FE, 1-7 exp in [Goddess], 1-5 exp in most relevant sub-class used during quest.
Oh shit… max 7? Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit… okay. Okay! No big deal, minimum 1, we can hope for smoothness, right?!
She willfully continued on. The crack widened and grew in size, and more cracks became evident — a blurring and marring of the multihued structures of the maze. Broken kaleidoscopes. An increasing feeling of damage along with an ‘itch’ somewhere in her mind. She did her best to navigate around the damage while trying to get to the central cause.
Along the way, she paused as she noticed a new hairline crack extending outward… and then began to heal, smoothing over slowly back in the direction of the mass.
At least there is some potential for that, right? Nonetheless, it made her extremely uneasy. Even queasy, somehow. The space she was in was in some fashion a part of her soul. And Azure’s soul.
She considered having Azure there for insight, but she was nowhere near the same capability level in that space. Had even been awkward within the place last time and disliked being there. Or was that more the back alley spaces of the palace? Eh.
Fortunately, Azure was distracted enough that she didn’t notice imminent danger, or she might’ve come anyway.
Yeah… let’s keep her out of this. This has to be my wheelhouse. Somehow, someway, this is my shit. Or predecessor shit from way, way back.
She prepared a few protection spells and the like, just in case. All internal or personal, as external elements such as Hard Light were useless in that place.
With that done, she moved on, drawing closer, feeling a pressure in her mind increase. Feeling enough to attempt it as a target, she tried to reach out with [Pneumamancer], tried to prod at the damage to see if she could manipulate it…
New, darker cracks split with a shaking vibration through the structure, and numerous fractures shot toward her like lightning.
Holy hell!
She dodged immediately and made like mad directly away, but the cracks were faster, and she found herself in a zig-zag dance as she tried to get out of range — and then she felt a cold stab in her back. One had lapped around somehow and caught her.
The stab from the invader was an absorption, a transportation… a transfer to a realm.
✦•············•✦•···········•✦
A distorted, warped landscape greeted her like a melting watercolor painting she was inside of. All around her, trees were the biggest victims, melting strangely yet also on fire. Blackened, with almost all leaves turned into flames. It was blisteringly hot, and thick, billowing smoke filled the air. In the distance, in every direction, wailing resounded. Cries of pain and death.
Some subtlety made everything worse. A sense of wrongness or horror in the fiber of the realm. It was a madhouse.
Fuck this place.
Immediately, Sammy tried to bounce back to her mindscape realm, but it was impossible. Her connection had been reduced to a squeezed-down thread and access blocked.
It was something like what she’d done to Zadkiel, though she hypothetically had all her powers available, and her base capabilities were leveraging [Pneumamancer] like the primary class. The realm couldn’t take that from her.
But raw Pneumamancy like in Limbo was not feasible. She also noticed all of the protections she’d had coming in had been wiped completely, her preparations all made irrelevant.
“Finally.” It was a voice from above, from everywhere, full of animus and spite. Sammy had pins and needles crawl through her, suddenly knowing what it felt like to be a victim in a realm, like Blum, Tinny, or the troll she had terrorized. She felt… small. “How I’ve dreamed of this day… how I’ve savored my vengeance to a million iterations…”
“I don’t even know you!” Sammy answered with a cry, even as she summoned her shield and staff.
“Liar!” was the retort, which distorted demonically, and down from the sky came a hail of a hundred arrows, all burning as bright as the sun at the tip.
Sammy interposed her floating shield, which had three arrows pierce right through it, though the warped, still flaming heads bounced off of her armor after. Another arrow dented in her armor at the elbow of her weapon arm. Others glanced off.
Your shield has been damaged to Moderate levels. -1 Armor.
Your armor has been damaged at special location (Left Arm: elbow). -1 Armor.
At least I’m not tortured with impunity, right? This is high-level shit, though.
Briefly, Sammy tried to get some kind of bead on a target, but she dismissed it as a long shot compared to the obvious defensive necessity. Instead, she activated [Sheath of Light].
Energy flashed and enveloped her in a blinding aura, and her armor transmuted into a thick coating like frozen plasma.
Mocking laughter resounded, spiraling into something that sounded almost pained with the humor. “Hnn ha ha ha! Light! Brilliant, glowing, resplendent light-light-light. Darkness underneath. What a joke. Another lie, another travesty for you to wear it!”
She realized something, somehow, through the translation of the words in her head. Elven? He’s speaking Elven, I think. What-
Without warning, a slurry of arrows came at her from three directions at once — four, when she quickly flashed her eyes behind her — out from the burning trees, this time all with pointed bronze tips. They had a strange, slightly curving trajectory rather than coming at her like an exact cross.
Sammy wasn’t much inclined to test the armor against dozens of armor-piercers, so she took the easiest path away — up. With no flight capability immediately available, she had to try for a jump.
With all her might she leapt, and it was certainly a jump to shame any mortal. Fortunately, the sheath seemed to help the movement, doubling her already supernatural capacity. Her reaction time was supreme, and she crested right over it all.
Ha! How do you like- oh no.
Four arrows had been held back or delayed, and now they were streaking up at her while she was in midair.
Damn it! Jumping sucks. I’m never doing this again!
She blocked one arrow with her floating shield, which was penetrated easily but shifted enough in its path to miss her body entirely. The other arrows, she tried to contort and dodge or block with the staff.
Another arrow was dodged, but there was too much tracking and agility needed in too short of a window. She whiffed on the parry to take an arrow in the shoulder, while another hit her thigh from behind. Wound negations ticked off one and two, and soon thereafter the sheath regrew into the holes made, pushing the arrows away from her skin to fall through the air having never pierced her body.
Sammy landed with a great thud into the dirt and did a roll, ready to act. Instead of refreshing wound negations, she activated her Contingency, which fortunately had not been wiped with the buffs upon entry. Mystic Armor gave her one wound negation without any time commitment.
She needed to find a target, somehow, or she was screwed.
The curling arrows… were they fired from somewhere then? It was her suspicion and intuition. The ‘why use arrows’ question could have any answer, and her foe seemed a bit ‘touched’ which was perhaps fortunate for her. But if she had just created arrows out of nothing to fire them from four directions, she wouldn’t have them on some kind of spin.
If they were fired, steered, then curved, making a spiral, they’d all have an apparent trajectory… each arrow was curving left to its own ‘perspective,’ to converge on me. Yes.
“Hey, fucker, why don’t you show yourself and fight me fair?! Are you a coward?”
“As if you ever did?! Die trying! Die in ignorance! Die lost and afraid as we did!”
Sammy frowned at that, but her intrigue at mysteries was entirely trumped by deadly combat. Fine, then. I’ll come for you.
The knowledge didn’t tell her a definitive direction, nor did she have time to deduce more. So she guessed and channeled [Intuition] — in this case, she had enough information and time to leverage it as a contest or a ‘level check’ instead of a raw percentage chance. She was able to bridge through the full sensitivity of [Pneumamancer], too…
She picked an angle she felt drawn like a lodestone toward, and ran at high speeds past burning trees, not bothering to breathe in the acrid smoke she had to pass through.
A great wall of arrows flying at her told her she’d chosen correctly.
Somehow, I don’t feel very lucky!
Sammy went highly evasive, pulling an acrobatic maneuver to the side, inclined to roll and turn her eyes in every direction for hidden angles, knowing the archer often tried to attack from behind. She avoided all but one arrow in the primary volley that caught her in the arm, expending a wound negation.
True to form, four arrows came down on her from behind, and she was ready with her shield and staff. Two pierced through the shield and thudded off of her armor with reduced force and at unfavorable angles, leaving her shield pin-cushioned but otherwise still functional.
She blocked another, and one arrow struck home on a leg and pierced her armor. In that place, the apparent physical reality held some psychic effect, and she felt a spike of pain arc through her.