Mage Tank

Chapter 341: Fruit Ninja

Chapter 341: Fruit Ninja

Mage Tank

Despite the ominous tone permeating our wordless journey, we made it to the Dungeon without any problems. The entrance was a hundred-mile wall of slender trees packed so tightly together that they were impassable by normal means. There weren’t any obviously intended paths through the sixty-foot thick barrier, so I simply teleported us all past the minor obstacle.

The trees in this area were still dense but just widely spaced enough to walk between. This made moving through the zone more of a slog than it was in the wider forest, since most Delvers could blast some bushes and vines out of their way, but crashing through entire trees wasn’t a part of everybody’s toolkit. This was made even more difficult due to the trees being magically reinforced.

This early part of the Dungeon was about 150 miles deep, a distance that felt endless given how slowly one normally had to travel through it. The trees made the journey aggravating in other ways as well. They had hard-shelled fruits that grew on springy branches pinned back to their trunk. These were like miniaturized coconuts, about the size of a pool ball, but with one end tapered into a spike. When people or animals passed by the tree, some mechanism released the branch and launched the deadly fruit like a tiny catapult.

Baltae had once gone on at length about how he suspected the purpose of the fruit launcher was to bury its payload inside the body of a passing animal, whose death would give the seed inside of it a fertile place to grow. That sounded good, but I thought it was more likely that the trees had been designed to serve as a low-maintenance lethal deterrent.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. Hard fibrous spikes fired at rifle slug speeds would be about as effective as the pellet from an airsoft gun when encountering the armor of any reasonably balanced Delver. These trees were so packed with mana, however, that the fruits fired off like they were empowered by a skill. While they thunked harmlessly off of my own armor and shield, anyone who neglected their defenses would be hard-pressed to make it through here. There were also a lot of the fruits, which made the idea of dodging your way through a tough sell.

Fortunately, everyone present could deal with it. Even Grotto assured me he was tough enough to take the fruits head on, now that he had access to my Heavy Armor skill. The Core then promptly attached himself to my back and buried himself beneath two large shields, but that was a costless precaution so there was no reason not to do it.

After a few miles of crawling between trees and enduring the constant, thudding rain of death fruits against our armor, Major Kai stopped and turned to face the rest of us. Guar was kind enough to throw up a few of his Shield Barriers to keep the fruit from slamming into us while we chatted. His body began to hum as each block built up charges for his Stormbreaker evolution.

“Who can get us through this more efficiently?” Kai asked. “At the rate we are going, it will take more than a day to reach the next stage of this Dungeon.”

“That’s assuming we don’t stop for a nap,” I added.

Varrin looked at the deadly rain bouncing off of Guar’s shield. “How would you sleep in this?” he asked. The big guy hadn’t been inside this Dungeon before.

“The trees only have so many fruits. If we stand here for a few minutes they’ll run out of steam.”

Guar made a so-so gesture with his hand. “You sometimes get one or two that are slow to fire. They will go off up to an hour later, and it’s a mean thing to wake up to.”

“We are not stopping to rest,” said Kai. “Even if we were, I assume Closetland will accommodate us.”

“We would,” I said.

“I am more concerned with making better time. King Xor’Drel can only teleport us so often, and the trees make it difficult to find clearings large enough for all of us to appear. I can cut a path, but it would not be much faster.”

“We aren’t trying to save the trees?” asked Guar.

I couldn’t see the major’s expression beneath his helm, but the slight tilt of his head told a rich story of bafflement and exasperation. “No, Guar. Why would we be saving the trees?”

“I figured there was a reason we were being so delicate.”

“We are not trying to be delicate.”

“Huh,” Guar grunted. “Well, I have the Juggernaut evolution.”

“That’ll work,” I said, familiar with the evo.

Varrin drew his blade. “Would you like me to clear your initial path?” he asked.

“That would be great!” said Guar. He began doing a few stretches while Varrin stepped ahead of our group and past Guar’s barriers. A flash of metal sent a wide arc of trees collapsing for twenty feet. It didn’t make a path so much as a pile, but a few more swings cleared the tangle of branches and turned it into a traversable pile.

Guar trotted forward, then began sprinting towards the trees beyond Varrin’s lumberjacking. The sergeant let out a whoop as his body began smashing through tree trunks. He moved through them so easily it was like the tree self-detonated at his lightest touch. Unlike Varrin’s slice and dice, Guar’s movement made a five to ten-foot wide hole in the packed trees, which were close enough together that the surrounding trees supported the ones Guar was blasting through.

It wasn’t perfect, but the man was leaving a path that the rest of us could easily follow. Varrin went first, adding some precision cuts to carve away branches and trunks that had fallen into the path despite the knotted canopy keeping most of it aloft. The big guy barreled through the occasional obstacle with a similar effect to Guar, although that was simply because of his size and Herculean Strength score. Guar’s evo still left a cleaner path.

Guar was a Speed-focused tank and could smash through the trees as fast as he could run. Varrin had no trouble keeping up, but the pair left me and Kai in the dust. After a brief back and forth, Kai agreed to let me carry him and I activated Therianthropy, picking the major up with my tentacles. While the equine addition to my transformation had given me an epic hairdo, the real benefit was the boost it gave to my speed. It hadn’t quite doubled how fast I could tear through the air, but it had come damn close.

Our group became the roar of detonating trees and faster-than-sound movement. I still couldn’t keep up with Varrin and Guar, but my group reached the edge of the death fruit zone only a few minutes behind the two. Like the entrance to the Dungeon, the border to the next part of the Heavy Armor zone was obvious.

The trees immediately thinned out, but more noticeable was the way in which they grew. Rather than being mostly vertical, their trunks arched into smooth nautilus spirals. The branches were the same, spinning into themselves in random directions, but always according to the golden ratio. Their offshoots divided into smaller and smaller replications of the pattern, giving the entire space the look of an intricate fractal. It was honestly confusing to look at.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The area also played hell on my spatial senses. Not only was the sky above us growing ever more compressed, but the orientation of space ahead of us was in constant flux. For the moment, the effect was mild, with subtle twists and curves that appeared as a gentle breeze blew through the area. Branches swayed, their spirals flowing in unexpected patterns like a mass of horrifying marine worms.

While it all looked incomprehensible, the truth was simple enough. There were two core mechanics:

1) Spatial dimensions rotated away from any object moving through that space.

2) The higher an object’s relative velocity, the greater the severity of the rotation.

For whatever reason, knowing the rules didn’t help most people pass through the place. For me, it was a playground, but the overwhelming majority of people giving it a shot despised it.

On second thought, maybe it wasn’t that simple. Coordinated Thinker might have provided me with certain advantages that trivialized the non-intuitive spatial behavior of the area, but that wasn’t required to figure out a solution. The plebs just had to stop being lazy and start putting in a little more legwork. Being dimensionally challenged was no excuse, and any advantages I possessed were naturally due to pure talent and not at all due to happenstance.

Hold on. Give me a moment so I can bask in the warmth of all this privilege that I definitely

 earned.

Ahhhh, yes. Wonderful.

Moving on, here’s another way to think about it. A person walking into the area would experience the moving parts of their body constantly rotating out of alignment. Fortunately, the phenomenon created large channels of rotation and was fairly forgiving with how fast it scaled to higher velocities. Blinking your eyes wouldn’t twist your eyelids away from your face, and the steady beat of a heart wouldn’t cause its chambers to collapse.

Still, spending long enough in the zone would have some undesirable consequences on the body, as evidenced by the weird-as-shit trees, but brief jaunts were fairly harmless. To us. A regular person would have their muscles and bones slowly twisted apart. Then again, a regular person would have never made it this far into the forest. They’d have died of mana toxicity way before this point, or been eaten.

Once me, Kai, and Grotto arrived, Varrin gestured at the area ahead with a grimace. “Why does looking at this make me ill?”

“Because your brain rightfully understands that it’s dangerous and confusing?” I suggested.

“Many things are dangerous and confusing, but I cannot recall any that made me feel so nauseous.”

“It looks like a seabed filled with things that will sting you,” said Kai. “Combined with a nest of parasites that will crawl into your gut and not leave until you’ve been eaten from the inside.”

“That sounds like Drowner’s Reef,” said Varrin.

Kai looked over at him with surprise. “You have been to Seaward?”

“I sailed my father there and back to prove my seamanship when I was twelve. We did a few dives off the coast, nowhere near Drowner’s, but the stories of that place gave me nightmares for a month after.”

“I dived it after I received my first level,” said Kai. “I was looking for treasure, but only found bodies.” The Littan appraised the forest for a moment. “It is somewhat similar.”

“I’ve been here twice without any problems,” I said, “and you two have now made me want to turn around and hike back to some other Dungeon.”

“Who cares about parasites?” said Guar. “If we get any, I have one of those cleansing wands.”

The man jumped forward into the mess of spirals and began doing a hypnotic shuffle. He moved one leg forward until he became duck-footed from his leg migrating out of position. The rotational movement hit the limit of his armor’s joint range and stopped. Guar could then push the limb forward despite the growing force trying to rotate his leg, since his hip joint was being protected by the rigid structure of his armor.

The force twisting his leg would eventually grow too strong, but Guar moved his other leg just before that point. He positioned his arms so that the direction of the rotation eventually pressured an armored joint with restricted movement, and his gorget groaned as the Dungeon strained to break the man’s neck.

This all led to some strange looking mobility, and it only worked if a portion of your body had notable velocity while the rest was relatively still. The benefit was that it made a person extremely aware of every place their armor prevented hyperextension. It was also good for learning how to present the most rigid structures against incoming force.

“Are there actually parasites?” asked Varrin.

“No,” I said. “Guar’s been here with me before. He knows there are no parasites.”

We watched Guar’s trance-like movement for a time, the Littan growing faster and more confident as he went. Eventually the man was moving at a decent kip, which is when the trees started firing off their lethal fruits.

The trees fired the projectiles at an angle that accounted for the spatial drift, causing them to arc through the air and hammer into their target. This wouldn’t have been an issue if these were like the fruits from the forest where we’d just come from, since those didn’t have the oomph behind them to harm us. However, these fruits had a layer of Sonorite coating them. A direct hit would punch through the armor that any of us were wearing, with the sole exception being my indestructible shield, Gracorvus.

While the shape of the fruits made for a weighty, penetrating impact, they needed to hit their target dead-on. Angling your body even slightly would cause the fruit’s tapered point to clatter off your armor, leaving the rounded body of the fruit to hit you. That was much less harmful, and generally didn’t cause damage.

It all ended up being a weird game of dodge ball, and because the fruits were tipped with Sonorite, it was a very loud game of dodgeball. Coincidentally (or not), the noise made when a fruit struck its target directly was a harsh gong. When the fruit was deflected, it emitted a pleasant ding.

There’s no way that shit wasn’t intentional.

Guar ran off and began hopping over trees and branches growing into his path, locking his joints down and dragging himself from one angle to another. The air was filled with dopamine-inducing chimes, which we continued to hear well after Guar disappeared from sight. There was eventually a single gong, followed by a distant “Fuck!”

“Could you teleport us past this?” asked Varrin.

“Suddenly appearing somewhere counts as a type of relative velocity in this Dungeon,” I said. “You’re considered to be moving extremely fast for a very brief amount of time at your portal destination.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Of course. I wanted to see if my deific teleport would negate it.”

“Did it?”

“Nothing’s actually interfering with the teleport, so no. It’s a conditional effect that happens to your body once you appear, like somebody stabbing you after you teleport into their face.”

“Then what happened?”

“Guar says I exploded, but I think what really happened was that I spun so fast all my limbs came off. Alternatively, all my limbs went in different directions and were twisted off, but if that’s the case I don’t think my head would have stayed attached.”

Varrin nodded, while Major Kai slowly turned to look at me.

“I’ll go next,” I said, hopping forward in a contrapposto stance. I migrated across the zone and through the obstacles without issue, momentarily directing my second instance of focus to monitor the incoming death fruits. I made it across without a single penalty gong, which was the first time I’d been able to manage it.

I found Guar pulling one of the fruits from his gut, although his armor was unscathed otherwise. He tossed it aside and looked me over.

“Perfect score?” he asked.

“Perfect score,” I said, holding up a hand. The Littan gave me an arm-numbing high-five, and I got the notification I’d been hoping to see.

Your Heavy Armor skill has increased to level 40!

Then I got a notification that I hadn’t expected.

You have earned the What a Twist! achievement!