Part 30 - Revelations III

  Liz made some preparations just before stepping across the threshold.

  She needed to disable the portal behind her. On both ends. She’d be stranding herself in an unknown location, but it couldn’t be helped. If she left the portal standing, then she’d be letting more issues happen because it was there.

  She rigged the mana to cut off after she stepped through, and took one last shuddering breath before crossing over.

  Once she was through, the portal began to fade, and she checked around her for danger.

  The spiders seemed to be afraid of the light, so they’d all vanished, but the moment the darkness closed back in, she felt all too aware of all the distant sounds of things moving beyond her awareness.

  She’d never missed [Earth Shattering Arts] so much before.

  Regardless, what was done, was done.

  She turned and delivered a powerful roundhouse kick to the glass gate on the cavern side, instantly shattering it in one blow.

  She needed to handle the visibility, but couldn’t risk giving herself away with bright lights constantly.

  She had a few options with Proteation, but all of them were designed around illumination.

  No, Liz couldn’t risk such a reckless choice.

  Instead, she relied on her blessing.

  Seira had gifted her with the ability to organize sensory inputs into orderly flows of information as well as the ability to see mana. Mana existed in just about everything. A breeze carried a distinct bit of wind mana, just as rocks and dirt had earth mana.

  Underground, she could see the muted tones of the earth mana everywhere, and an almost unrecognizably small amount of wind mana hung on the nearly still air. Tiny bits of water mana dripped around in a few places, too. She could find her way, once she grew used to the very subtle kaleidoscope of colors all around her. She began to move forward, getting a feel for the difference between the floor and the walls.

  Running one hand along the wall to her left, she was able to recognize the smooth sensation of stone that had been smoothly molded by [Earth Manipulation] or a similar skill.

  Being as experienced in Earth magic as she was, she could tell the hallway had been sculpted by Skills.

  The hallway led to a narrow opening a few dozen meters ahead, where what looked like a secret exit had been left ajar.

  All told, the room beyond was shockingly massive.

  Liz’s eyes were adjusting, in no small part thanks to the [Adaptable] skill she’d merged into her main class skills back when she’d begun her journey. Light didn’t reach wherever she was, but the civilization that had once lived in the cavern had been a thriving one back in their time.

  Dozens of houses were lined up in perfect grids below her vantage from a walkway that connected two sections of defensible walls that surrounded the homes. She began to use the walkway to skirt around the living area, then stopped.

  Boom!

  Sound mana trembled in the underground air around her as a massive rumbling reached her ears and vibrated the stone beneath her feet.

  The mana came from multiple directions and seemed to echo from many places at the same time.

  The sound itself could’ve come from some sort of massive creature moving or fighting somewhere, but the mana in the air suggested the presence of skills, which could’ve still meant a fight, but it didn’t have to be something of a particularly large size.

  She was both intrigued and immediately calculating risks.

  If she went on a trip to investigate, it was likely to be a very dangerous foe, based on the abandoned state of the homes below her.

  She moved on, deciding she could sort those details out later, after she’d established her first course of action.

  Liz was alone, with nobody even knowing if she was alive, and she was going to have to figure out her basic survival needs as soon as possible.

  Thank the goddess for her second class having been survival focused.

  She had the benefits of being able to [Concoct] her own food and [Purify] her own water. She could also barricade herself into corridors with [Crystallize] and use runes to generate breathable air to allow for a safe haven to sleep in, if she had enough mana.

  Seira had given her all the tools she needed to survive anywhere, and she would never sit around and wait to die, not anymore.

  She squared her shoulders and strode forward, heading for the walls, looking to get a lay of the land.

  ~ ~ ~

  The cavern was roughly oval shaped, while the walls held a squared fortress city against one end of the room.

  Aside from the secret hallway she’d entered through, the only exits from the cavern were outside the walls, and the spiders lurking around the homes all avoided her powerful footsteps, amplified by her stats to make herself seem more imposing. She had no interest in burning all her mana on slaying a handful of extra spiders for the levels.

  The city gates had been closed, and every home was completely empty. It was all bare stonework, with no remnants of personal belongings or furniture. All the stonework seemed to be slightly charred, though. She really hoped that some dragon hadn’t breathed fire all over the city until it had been left barren.

  She converted her gemstone around her fists into small diamond picks, and created pointed toes on her feet, then used them as climbing gear to scale down the outside of the walls, then proceeded to inspect the three tunnels that led beyond.

  Boom!

  She chewed her lip at the sound and the mana as it repeated.

  She’d spent about half an hour exploring the town at high speeds before the repeat sound occurred.

  The mana was identical to the prior reverberation, too. And it came from every hallway simultaneously, not an echo. Echoes would’ve been slightly delayed. It was bizarre, but she didn’t have much to go on beyond that.

  She explored beyond the first tunnel entrance slowly, keeping her mana sight ready to pick up any changes as she went.

  If it weren’t for White’s notes on the denizens of different biomes, Liz would’ve been surprised to find a huge slime pretending to be a wall where a passageway led off from the main tunnel.

  The thing just remained there, pretending to be a wall, as she studied it.

  [Deep Cavern Slime - Ooze Lvl 486, Acid Lvl 464]

  It was an interesting ambush tactic. If she’d stumbled past, where the passageway seemed to narrow, then it might lurch out and smother her.

  Except, she’d been designing an armor set with no gaps that would flow around her, and Gemstone was very resilient to Ooze and Acid both.

  It didn’t matter.

  She was an expert at Oozes by that point. She had been messing with formulae to create new pudding dishes for weeks, and she’d found several reactions that completely ruined the consistency. On one such occasion, she’d found a combination that literally separated all the water from the slime and caused the whole food substance to dry out.

  She recreated her failed experiment and tossed it into the creature.

  [*ding* [Concoct] has leveled up! 62 -> 64]

  The thing reacted immediately, but oh-so-slowly.

  It had no speed at all… Liz did notice her creation had failed to do anything, which made sense. If a slime had any stat, it was Vitality.

  Liz glowered at the thing as it slid towards her, tiny flecks of random mana signatures inside the creature appearing as oddities—remnants of past meals—within the body of the Ooze mana it was made from. She couldn’t use her fists on such a creature, which once again side-lined most of her main class.

  Except, she did have one opportunity.

  She used [Crystallize] to conjure a handful of different gems, then tossed each one into the creature while backpedaling.

  Each one simply entered the slime and remained within it, neither breaking down nor causing the creature to react. Lis was fairly sure she could survive being swallowed by the creature if she created a helmet and sealed all the gaps.

  Instead, she turned her attention to killing the creature. She needed to know what her options were when fighting in the new environment she was in.

  The creature likely had plenty of resistance to Acid, which was something Proteation could create, but the language of Proteation lent itself more towards messing with substances than it did towards complex actions. And since Elizabeth was new to and awful at inventing her own spells, she couldn’t simply invent a spell to pull the ceiling down on the slime.

  She also already knew how useful her chlorate candle trick was.

  It was time for new shenanigans.

  She gathered mana into [Crystallize] and brought forth an idea she hadn’t been considering too seriously.

  The diamond she kept for weapons formed into a handle as raw cinnabar extended from the weapon, and with some increased use of [Gemstone Manipulation], she had it flowing and forming into a whip like Arlyen had carried around. Cinnabar was interesting because it was the main source of mercury on Earth. In her hands, she held a whip made from a nasty poisonous material that she could leave behind in the bodies of her enemies, with lethal doses of mercury being fairly small quantities, even when theoretically adjusted for Vitality defense. Not much help with the slime, but she had some training to do for future opponents, and the foe was low risk for her.

  [Fate’s Luster] was active, giving her a whopping sixty thousand mana regeneration, making the ludicrous weapon useful as she began lashing out with the tip from a distance as Liz continued to backpedal.

  Every lash with the whip was somewhat inaccurate, but the hit tore off chunks of slime anyway, leading to the creature lashing back with gouts of acid. Liz was effectively immune, with her gemstone armor resisting acid already, and sharing her Vitality with [Gemstone Binding]. She simply covered her face with some extra material and kept up her work, whip cracking sharply with a sound that signified the shattering of the sound barrier with each flick of her wrist.

  [*ding* You have unlocked the general skill [Whips]!]

  She dropped [Tireless] while it was still low level, comparatively. The sudden urge to vomit was rough, but she held it back. The skill hadn’t been as useful as it seemed when she’d chosen it, and she’d been sick of the difficulty it gave her with actually falling asleep when she had needed to.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  It was taking a while, but the slime was losing chunk after chunk of material, all while it couldn’t harm her or catch her.

  If the thing had been intelligent, it would’ve given up, surely.

  Liz herself was close to calling her idea a failure when she was suddenly struck from behind.

  Her armor had failed to stop the attack, cracking and allowing the force to drive into her body with a violent splitting sound that implied a broken bone somewhere.

  [Crystallize] didn’t take long to have her body on the mend as she caught herself from falling and turned to face the opportunistic attacker.

  [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 687]

  Elizabeth ran some rapid calculations based on the blow she’d already taken.

  The creature was fast, but it only had one element, and it was a stealthy hunter-type.

  It even tried to blur back into the shadows as it stalked around her, but to her mana sight, the creature was a mass of darkness within a cavern of earthy-brown mana.

  The creature was some sort of panther or other big cat, but it had six legs instead of four.

  She followed it with her eyes as she readied her whip again, finally seeing a chance to get extra usefulness from the weapon choice.

  The true deadly value of cinnabar was that if it was heated, it would easily release mercury vapor, which was very toxic. Even if her opponent, who was likely faster than her, managed to escape, the vapor could poison and maybe kill it.

  Liz had her mouth and nose covered by her helmet, and she had her breathing spell active. She sent some of her new mana pool into [Balance of Order] to enhance the skill that was moving her whip, causing the molecules to move faster, creating heat from friction, slowly vaporizing the mercury and polluting the air.

  She had to keep aware of both the creatures she was fighting, but instead of putting her back to the wall, she began to cycle the heated whip around her, all while finally mending the last cracks in the back of her armor.

  The big cat lunged at a gap in the whip’s movements, but Liz saw it coming, and cracked the whip into the beast by simply manipulating the end. She hadn’t actually needed to wield it as a whip at all, but she’d been taught to play tricks on her opponents when Arlyen had been her instructor.

  The tip of the whip caught the cat in the side, raking a gash in the flank of the beast, which twisted in mid-air to bite at the weapon while it lunged past Liz.

  She left a bit of the mercury-rich mineral inside the creature, all but sealing the thing’s fate. That much mercury could poison and kill an elephant.

  She wouldn’t see the effects soon, but she’d see the notification when it died, even if it ran away.

  Which it did not.

  It turned and bit at her leg, which was a mistake, as that leg wasn’t even flesh and blood. Still, it got a solid grip on her. Liz simply let [Cleavage] take over and make a debut for the first time since the big class merge.

  The skill did not disappoint. She’d given up so much of the amazing effectiveness of her old combat skill, but the new one embraced her body with the energy of the goddess herself.

  Her body blurred as she spun, right foot catching the Cavern Stalker as she delivered a copy of her earlier roundhouse kick, only this time it had the speed of her buffs involved. The wall shattered under the impact as the cat was briefly smeared across the stone, bones audibly snapping as it slid to a halt further down the hall.

  She didn’t have time to assess, as the slime had gotten close again.

  She needed to deal with the threats right away, and the cat hadn’t been killed by the kick, even if it was horribly injured. She no longer had the liberty to play around with her prey.

  She dumped a hundred thousand mana.

  [The Tower]

  Elizabeth drew a card from the Deck of Fates—a name she’d come up with for her divine artifact on her own—and let out a mental cheer.

  She directed the power towards the slime and felt the mana humming in the air as her mana sight was blinded.

  Pure golden—divine—mana washed out everything around her as the fate was made manifest, and when the light cleared, the slime had a huge hole in the center of it, as if it had been blasted clear through with a laser.

  [*ding* You have slain a [Deep Cavern Slime - Ooze Lvl 486, Acid Lvl 464]!]

  The Tower held a meaning of destruction. It was the perfect card for handling an annoying foe she no longer had time to worry about.

  She kept her level notifications disabled as she turned to face her other opponent.

  Now that she could focus her attention, she realized the cat was starved and desperate, which explained why it hadn’t run. She was this critter’s do-or-die final chance at a meal.

  She felt a little pity, almost as if she should lie down and offer herself up.

  Yeah, no. She didn’t have those kinds of emotions. She wasn’t big on animals, usually.

  It was limping and baring teeth towards her, but it wasn’t attacking.

  If the poor thing wouldn’t take the initiative, then she’d oblige.

  She nearly overshot her attack. The first kill had spiked her stats by a larger margin than she’d expected.

  The distance was closed in a heartbeat as her whip snaked in impossible patterns to hook one of the beast’s stable legs, pulling it off balance before it could counter her charge.

  Her left hand struck from above as she slammed her fist down, feeling the big cat’s spine turn to bone dust under the force of all her combined skills and leveled up stats.

  [*ding* You have slain a [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 687]!]

  She wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but the feeling left her as she spotted two lumbering forms approaching her.

  [Hollow Dweller - Earth Lvl 896]

  [Hollow Dweller - Earth Lvl 816]

  Liz felt exceedingly uncertain about her odds as the level factors kept going up.

  Both of the two creatures were vaguely humanoid, only they were hunched giants. They looked like a sculptor’s discarded attempts at clay statues with their faces appearing entirely smudged and lopsided. Both were armed with clubbed fists coated in stone, like a clumsy attempt at what she’d been doing with [Martial Arts] early on.

  The slime hadn’t been too dangerous thanks to the speed issue, and the Stalker had lost the advantage of stealth due to her mana sight.

  The pair before her were brutish and seemed to be eying her suspiciously, as if they couldn’t tell if she could be their dinner. They seemed really hungry too.

  She didn’t have the luxury of playing with such powerfully high level enemies. She needed to outsmart them, run away, or overpower them at an opportune moment…

  Boom!

  The sound—and the resounding mana that came with it—echoed once again, seemingly at the half hour time marker again.

  Like her silent prayer had been answered, both of the giants clutched at their heads, as if the sound disturbed them.

  Liz had just burnt a lot of her mana on the card from before, but while facing the giants, she was enjoying the mana regeneration boost from [Fate’s Luster] which made her rate…

  Her eyes bugged out slightly as her mind worked over the math internally at superhuman speeds.

  The two creatures she had felled had launched her stats by a smooth fifty levels…

  [Fate’s Luster] was now at level one hundred ninety-nine.

  Her base Mana Regeneration was already her highest stat at thirty-seven thousand, and with the bonus, she was regenerating one million mana per hour. Roughly seventeen thousand mana per minute.

  Her mana pool was also already nearing a couple hundred thousand…

  She grinned at the two giants who clutched their heads in silent agony from the sound of the pounding in the distance.

  She would have been forced to flee, had she not had a literal trump card to play.

  [The Chariot]

  The card’s power stood for motivation and victory.

  She drew in the energy of the card in a heartbeat, feeling her entire body fill to bursting with power. In an instant, she knew the card had the ability to turn the tides in dire combat situations. It felt as if she had gotten a couple hundred levels for a brief period of time.

  She lurched forward like a meteor, her whip long forgotten as she delivered another punch with her left fist on the first of the two giants.

  It did not wait for her to strike it first.

  The creature wasn’t as fast as she was in that moment, but it had enough of the stat to flail its arm like it was swatting a sudden fly coming towards its face.

  Liz connected right before the hulking creature caught her in retaliation.

  The face of the monstrous thing caved in and crumpled as she was launched sideways into the cavern wall, barely able to protect her head before collapsing in a pile of loose stone as her bones all groaned in protest.

  She stumbled to her feet as she groaned, her armor having flared with barriers that had taken enough of a beating from one strike that they’d shattered. As had the plates of gemstones beneath. She’d need to carefully go over every rune and ensure they weren’t too damaged after she was back to safety.

  If it weren’t for the boost from the card, she’d have been quite finished by that simple swatting motion.

  Instead…

  [*ding* You have slain a [Hollow Dweller - Lvl 896]!]

  It had been an Earth creature with a ton of Vitality… Everything must’ve combined in the perfect way to allow her to simply shatter the creature’s most vulnerable point.

  She couldn’t celebrate yet, but she did feel herself growing in strength again. She also felt her bones [Crystallize] further, and she guessed she’d fractured a lot of them in that impact.

  She was likely already at the two hundred fifty-six class up in her first class.

  Then the other giant stopped clutching their head and charged forward, seeking to avenge the fallen… sibling? Mate? Something.

  Liz was not about to let herself be struck again, and launched herself rapidly backwards down the hall as the monster kicked up a huge cloud of debris with a slam into the wall where she had just been.

  The card effect waned from her as she drew on her Proteation.

  She couldn’t risk another hit like the last one without the card running, so she needed to use other tricks. She first used a tiny amount of mana for [Concoct] to create some sticky slime and throw it at where she could see the brute’s head moving around.

  She had some trouble seeing it through the debris cloud, since it only had Earth mana, and being underground meant that everything was slightly coated in the same shades of brown.

  Liz threw the slime like a baseball, aiming for the eyes, with a boost from [Adhesion], if it helped.

  A moment later, she narrowly danced backwards from another slam that would’ve pasted her across the floor. So much for blinding it.

  Her landing was not graceful. The aftershock of the blow propelled her a bit further down the hallway than she’d been expecting, somehow nearly right back where she’d begun the slime encounter. No way was she going to let that sort of thing hit her without the card boosting her stats.

  She wasn’t fast enough to engage something so high level on equal footing.

  Elizabeth needed to pull from her tricks that could trivialize the creature’s numerical advantages..

  Proteation—boosted in no small part by [Balance of Order]—had finished creating the sequence to conjure a large amount of chlorate candles, now seeming like her favorite tool at her disposal, in a square space that filled the majority of the tunnel floor between them.

  She used herself as bait and hoped her boosted Vitality could handle the indirect heatwave.

  Her spark went off the moment the giant lunged at her again, while she dove sideways into the hallway the slime had been lying in ambush within.

  She cried out as her left leg was clipped by monstrous strength before she reached the side passage, feeling her bones shatter from the glancing impact.

  Just in time, the heat melted the stone in some places, boiled the pools of water in others, and pressed the air outwards in a gust as the Hollow Dweller was caught in the center of the incineration zone of the flames.

  Her own skin felt seared by the heat with her lack of defensive measures for the initial wave. She put mana to work making a barrier of Garnet to protect her as the thing started howling in pain.

  She didn’t ever want to hear such a noise again. The long, echoing agony of the giant as it was baked alive was haunting. Small children might’ve had nightmares as Liz made a face of combined agony and distaste.

  The creature seemed fully unaware of how to handle fire-related damage as it didn’t seem to be running away, dropping on the ground, or trying to save itself in any way. There was only so much Vitality could do to protect something from such intense heat, though.

  She was in a ton of pain as [Crystallize] set to work mending her body, setting bones and turning her burnt skin to glittering gemstone. She had the mana to invest in cranking up her pain nullification effects in the skill, though she still refused to leave her sense of pain totally disabled.

  She was going to need a [Healer] before too long. She wasn’t looking forward to the experience.

  Liz finally got the notification as the howling sounds petered out.

  [*ding* You have slain a [Hollow Dweller - Earth Lvl 816]!]

  She was tired. Adrenaline was wearing off and she needed to backtrack to find a solid vacant house she could barricade herself inside of. Or better yet, the secret passage from before.

  She only spent a few minutes gathering up some of the slime monster’s body before returning the way she’d come, limping slightly as her left leg protested against every movement.

  She barely had the mental fortitude to look over her stats after the insane stunt she’d just pulled.

  [Name: Elizabeth Fereday]

  [Race: Living Gemstone/Human Hybrid]

  [Age: 21]

  [Mana: 190,240/190,240]

  [Mana Regeneration: 326,734 (1,334,024)]

  Stats

  [Free Stats: 4,918]

  [Strength: 2,594]

  [Dexterity: 20,004 (66,213)]

  [Vitality: 24,444 (80,909)]

  [Speed: 21,600 (71,496)]

  [Mana: 19,024]

  [Mana Regeneration: 43,606 (144,335)]

  [Magic Power: 22,615]

  [Magic Control: 23,317]

  [Class 1: [Crystalline Oracle of Order - Gemstone : Lv 256 ]]

  [Balance of Order: 182]

  [Gemstone Mastery: 256]

  [Gemstone Manipulation: 256]

  [Crystallize: 226]

  [Cleavage: 239]

  [Gemstone Binding: 234]

  [Fate's Luster: 231]

  [Templar's Conviction: 123]

  [Class 2: [The Hermit - Ooze : Lv 128 ]]

  [Purify: 65]

  [Concoct: 68]

  [Minor Botanical Transmutation: 72]

  [Ooze Resistance: 43]

  [Adhesion: 59]

  [Rune Molding: 128]

  [Ooze Layering: 128]

  [Survival Sense: 128]

  [Class 3: [Locked]]

  General Skills

  [Mental Partitioning: 256]

  [Reusable: 73]

  [An Eye for Detail: 256]

  [Perfect Recall: 84]

  [Whips: 68]

  [Learning: 256]

  [Stunning: 84]

  [Imaginative: 256]