The creature's long body was already surging to rear back up, so he stepped forward, slicing into its body right at the seam of two body segments. The legs above and below his target bent and blocked the strike, one leg cut deeply by the sword, producing a jet of purple blood. However, this let the creature back up, its body now in position for another descending strike.
Knowing what to expect, Axl crouched slightly, centering his body, now empowering the fullness of [Mana Shroud] on his every Attribute. The creature's incoming attack trajectory was clearer now, his mind able to formulate a proper response just in time. Still, his Agility was lacking compared to his opponent, so he had limited choices.
He lifted his sword into a thrusting pose, letting the descending attack push itself. He aimed not at the mouth or eyes, but a subtle flap of chitin just between its six eyes. It looked barely out of place among the other reddish-brown plates covering the centipede's body, but it practically oozed Mana.
Just as the dual fangs were about to reach his body, Axl took a small step forward onto the bump on the plates, giving his sword the extra reach to just pierce the flap. He activated a surge of Mana into the attack, hoping to have as explosive an effect as when he targeted the rock elemental's core.
Instead, the creature shrieked and reeled back, the dozens of its segments still on the ground seamlessly activating a retreat. In fact, the creature didn't stop there, but kept shaking its head as it climbed up a tree.
Axl scowled at his enemy being out of reach from either sword or spear. He settled on taking out one of his rocks, carefully aimed, and threw it at the flailing head. The attack missed the bleeding wound and barely seemed to push back against the creature's face.
He grabbed another rock, realizing now that his movements were just a hair slower than before. Quickly scanning the body as he reared back to throw the rock, the creature unperturbed, Axl found the cause—He was poisoned.
It was subtle, but the green liquid that splattered on him earlier had seeped through the seams in his armor and was slowly coursing through his bloodstream, the weakening effect slowly building. With a thought, he took some of the healing potion sitting in the flask nucleus of [Gastric Cauldron], but it seemed to do nothing at all.
Axl threw the rock, the creature deftly twisting out of the way, fully avoiding the attack. He braced himself for another strike, but it didn’t come, and the creature just stared at him from above.
A tense moment became a few puzzling seconds, and Axl's eyes widened, realizing what was going on.
Venting slit. It's waiting out the poison.
His hands were shaking, a sheen of sweat on his face, the poison clearly having more of an effect than he'd have hoped. What was this? Was his Endurance and Vitality not as superhuman as he was hoping? This creature was clearly in the F-Grade, perhaps further along than the ones in the caves, but the difference shouldn't be so stark.
He had to finish this quickly, then maybe he'd be able to figure a way to counter this poison with [Gastric Cauldron], or at the very least wait it out, hoping it wasn't lethal. So he sheathed his sword and brought his fist to the side of his belt, taking a deep breath.
He'd wanted to avoid using [Attuned Drill Strike] so soon in the vale, since it was bound to attract attention, but he was out of options. The centipede didn't respond to his new pose, and Axl gave it another second, in case it wanted to attack with his weapon sheathed, but no such luck.
He jumped up, barely crossing half the distance between them, the creature tensing subtly, but otherwise still. Dual spiral of Mana formed on his fist, and Axl punched at the centipede, his body now a missile charging forward.
The dense, complex Mana practically exploded in a cyclone of violence in his wake as he punched at the creature's center of mass, unable to aim more carefully. The tree shattered with a deafening roar, and Axl hurried to deactivate the technique, wanting to minimize the cutting Mana that struck at his body from every side.
His armor set did much to mitigate the damage, but some cuts tore through the resilient material and slashed into his arms and legs, the foreign Mana adding to the injuries and compounding on the poison's mounting effect.
He landed on the other side of the ruined tree and rapidly turned to the centipede, wary that he had gotten no Karmic Energy, so it was somehow still alive.
The creature was already reared up on the ground, its fangs quickly descending, and this time Axl wouldn't be able to draw quickly enough to deflect.
But then he saw it didn’t entirely avoid his attack, many of the legs on its middle segments shattered, and several of the plates along its middle body segments were riddled with thin rivulets of purple blood.
Setting aside any thought of elegance or efficiency, he forced [Mana Shroud] into pumping his legs full of Mana, exploding him forward in a burst of speed, tearing huge swatches of muscle and dislocating his left knee.
The attack let him barely avoid the descending strike, and he crashed into the creature's midline, encircling the body in a hug, his arms barely long enough to join on the other side. He then used [Mana Shroud] to form a thin line of Mana within the circle of his arms, the ambient Mana brought to heel as the layers of complexity were separated into a dozen thin sheets, pierced inwards.
A powerful strike hit his back, puncturing a lung as his arms met each other, fully parting flesh. A flood of Karmic Energy filled his body, far more than he'd ever experienced at once, something flicking in his mind. However, his body collapsed on the ground, seizing in pain.
Rousing his increasingly addled attention, he stayed awake, realizing he would die if he didn't address his wounds. His messed-up legs from the explosive use of [Mana Shroud] and the various cuts and burns from [Attuned Drill Strike] could be dealt with easily enough by a potion and some rest, but the poison was now roaring through his body. Any hope this wouldn’t be deadly was quickly discarded as it felt like he was being consumed from the inside.
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The culprit was the creature's final strike, its fangs finally managing to reach him, piercing a lung. He was now venting air through the wound and had a thick morass of the brackish green fluid stuck throughout the injury.
He sat up, back against a tree to see Moxlin frantically setting up defensive and illusion talismans around him. Good , good.
Then she was pouring a healing potion down his throat, a surprise. Wasn't she still setting up the perimeter? Slit, my sense of time is all off. I'm fading. Is this what my voice sounds like inside my head? I sound like an asshole.
He forced himself to focus, frantically plowing through [Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium], finally reaching the recipe for an emergency poison serum. A small globule of the poison coating his lung wound was dragged into [Gastric Cauldron], a golden-hued talisman enveloping it, the simple glyphs dragged out like tearing a rusty nail through burnt skin. After an eternity of effort, the barely processed poison was pushed into the default spherical shape of the flask nucleus, Axl not having any attention for a more optimum construction, and a burst of fire later, he pushed the resulting liquid into his heart.
He threw up a mouthful of brackish, green-tinted blood, but immediately felt better. Moxlin was on his shoulder, holding up another healing potion, which he took, letting it deal with the normal wounds as he focused back inwards.
The poison was still running around, and his lung wounds were serious, but some of his attention was back, and the pain, while strong, was more reassuring than the addled numbness he'd narrowly escaped.
He took another chunk of poison and started on another batch of serum, again going through the simplest possible version of the process, his attention still barely enough to go through the creation. His instincts were proved correct when the fire-activation spell almost went haywire, requiring Axl to frantically add modifications to the glyphic pattern to compensate for a simple mistake in execution.
The next burst of serum through his body brought an even larger clarity, the pain now stabbing more clearly into his mind, the healing potion struggling to reform his lungs while the poison gunk kept attacking the newly formed tissue. But pain he could deal with.
He took another sample from the poison, this time a smaller one, where it was densest, and now used a pair of talismans to refine the offending substance into a fine mist. He held the mist in place as he reformed his cauldron's flask into an oblong shape, and in a moment of inspiration set quickening lightning to course through one end of the shape.
The glyphs along the flask activated in series as the mist passed through the activating lightning, slowly consolidating into a pale orange liquid. Without delay, Axl pushed the liquid into his heart, letting his circulatory system deliver the serum.
The properly formed serum simply tore through the poison in his body without resistance, soon only the thick nodules in his lung remaining, but even they were rapidly shrinking. He took a deep breath and activated [Mana Shroud] to help with the healing, all the while monitoring the slowly receding poison from his body.
It all gone, Axl kept up his vigil on his body for a few long moments longer, but the serum could find no more lingering poison to attack, and was starting to tear into his body now in turn. But this was a creation attuned to his will, so he prodded it back into his [Gastric Cauldron] with barely any effort, aiming for it to pool at the bottom of the flask nucleus. Instead, it went elsewhere.
He barely noticed it happening, and had to turn back to his alchemical spiritual organ, surprised the serum was in a spherical vial orbiting the misting space for ingredient preparation, like a small planet around the sun. Axl could guess what this meant, but first he opened his eyes.
Moxlin was on his shoulder, looking worried, another potion held in her forelegs, looking comically too big for her small body. He shook his head, however, and she stored it away, not wanting to build up potion resistance in case another centipede attacked.
He looked out and saw the halved body of the giant centipede, the area drenched with its purple blood.
"How long was I out?" he asked, his voice raspy and dry.
"Barely a minute, maybe as much as two?" Moxlin's voice was shaky.
"Huh, it felt like a lot longer."
"Don't you huh at me! This was scary! I thought you were going to die!"
"It looked worse than it really was," he lied. "I guess the enemies in this sanctuary are no joke."
She shook her head. "I can't believe we ran into something so strong this soon. It was in the middle of F-Grade at least. And that venom is something else. I collected some samples, but I'm too scared to keep them in any of my holes, even in sealed and reinforced vials."
Axl nodded, glad she was being careful. "Good, I can use them to make a serum to counteract it. Without the poison, or venom, or whatever, that thing really isn't so tough."
"Okay!" she replied, her previous bubbliness immediately back. "I'll go properly harvest the stuff then—or are you going to be weird about me harvesting this one too?"
"Go for it, make sure to get good things for us," he snorted, and turned to look at the messages waiting for him. Plus the one improvement that he already expected, from the new feature of [Gastric Cauldron].
Spiritual Organs: Gastric Cauldron (root G)
Technical Arts: Glyphistry: Glyphic Alchemy (G.3), Glyphic Spellcasting
His Glyphic Alchemy technical art increased one proficiency step, a result of either altering the serum to be quickened by lightning instead of fire or from making something new even when brain-fogged from poison. He guessed the latter. Furthermore, [Gastric Cauldron] now had an indication that it was "Root G", which he assumed was better than just noting the grade itself.
Regardless, the result was simply spectacular, a dedicated storage space where he could keep an alchemical product for use later. Before, he'd simply kept it in the flask nucleus, but now he could store two things. Just beautiful—this last battle wouldn’t have been a big deal if he could have had access to both the serum and a healing potion to take it as needed.
This battle also finally gave him something he'd been looking forward to for quite a while.
>> New Level Obtained: Level 17
>> Class: Usurpation of Balance (Rare): +3 to all Attributes, +0 Free Points, +0 Free Boons
>> Title: Oocile's Chosen (Oocile, updated): All Attributes +17 (scales with level)
The gain in Attributes wasn't very dramatic, just an increase from 107 to 111. The real benefit was the relief that he wasn't stuck in a bottleneck for some reason, the level-up bringing him closer to ascending a grade. The delay in getting that level probably just meant that he'd be rewarded with far more Karmic Energy for pitched fights than for mindlessly plowing through weak enemies. Not the best scenario he could hope for, but far from the worst. Hopefully, he could manage to strike a sustainable balance later and not get himself almost killed every time he wanted to progress.
In fact, he wondered if the Deep System was in an unusually good mood today or something, because his final notification felt like a gift tailor-made to the advancements he just made.
>>Quest: Poisonous Vengeance
>>Defeat Viletouch Centipede hive (66% elimination or killing hive swarmer) within 3 days.
>>Reward: Challenge rift (Body tempering to poison)
>>Accept? Yes/No
Axl was about to accept, but hesitated, remembering Moxlin's shaken frame as she fed him healing potions. He turned to look at her as she cut off the centipede legs with a harvesting knife strapped to a foreleg.
"Hey, Moxlin," he said. "Are you feeling alright? Do you want to head back? It's okay if this is too much risk for you."
She jumped onto the stump of the centipede's lower half, raising her forearms emphatically. "What? Oh, absolutely not! These legs are the ideal, and I do mean ideal, material for the Mana gathering array I was hoping to build. And don't get me started on those fangs! They just keep making F-grade poison on their own, even with its holder dead! This alone was more than I ever expected to get my entire life in the F-grade, we can't just leave now! You just have to cheat harder."
Axl chuckled, content that greed also overruled her companion's common sense. "Then maybe we can go on. I got a quest to wipe out a full hive of these things, and this is a Deep System quest too, so the results are bound to be pretty good."
Moxlin shrieked, her forearms swinging wildly in the air as she jumped around, splashing wildly in the purple blood. Axl accepted the quest and got up, ready to go on a hunt of his own.