Chapter 204: Terrain Dive

10^th Floor, day 37

Our supplies continue to erode at a prodigious rate. We’ve finally narrowed the cause to a Raid Boss known as ‘Attrition’. Efforts to find this raid boss have proven to be fruitless, as it seems to leverage superior manueverability and senses to become impossible to catch.

Who knows? Maybe the creature is actually strong in battle too? We haven’t even caught sight of it.

The prospect of challenging the 11^th Floor while starving, with tattered equipment, is a daunting one, and leads me to understand that while this ‘Attrition’ is not a direct threat to our lives, it is nonetheless responsible for many deaths.

• Excerpt from an ancient, tattered journal

Once he was sure the meat was going to be safely transported back to the Stronghold, Will grabbed Badur and headed back to his tower, dropping the Logistician at his office before scuttling into his tower before anyone could stop him, like a crab retreating beneath a rock.

Technically, since the current emergency was caused by the critters using the slime, he could study the miasmatic structures inside the gooey lubricant to his hearts content.

Will carefully uncapped the lid on the cannister of slime and pulled a dollop of it out with a dropper, moving it over the super-chilled container.

The interior of this particular room of Will’s tower had some stringent environmental effects in order to preserve and isolate individual strands of miasma.

Will’s sinuses ached because it was cold as Abyss, and there was no water in the air. He felt a bit lightheaded too because of the complete lack of ambient Miasma.

Even the air itself was thinner what a human could naturally breathe without suffocating.

Will had developed a Relic specifically for spending a long time in this environment without dying or giving off too much Miasma. An amulet he was currently wearing that negated the need to breathe and neutralized any Miasma before It left his person.

Naturally this didn’t apply to his left hand, but that came with benefits.

With his right hand, Will carefully held the dropper filled with Attrition’s slime over the supercooled liquid.

Will squeezed the dropper.

The slime hit the mixture without a sound except a faint crackle as it turned to ice the instant it hit the liquid, sinking to the bottom of the unnaturally light mixture.

The Miasmatic structures, on the other hand, rose to the surface, floating like an oil spill on a serene lake. Without a medium to bind them, the individual strands untangled from each other, straightened out and separated, drifting away from each other.

Whistling in the deadly-thin air, Will took his tweezers made with from enormous scorpion stingers native to the 10^th Floor, and pulled individual strands of miasma out of the concoction, eyeing them critically.

Barely enough here for a finger. So a finger it shall be, Will thought, carefully laying the miasmatic structure down along the index finger of his left hand.

Will winced for a moment as the miasma burned off, instantly destroyed by the warmth of his flesh, incompatible with his very being.

It wasn’t bad, about as much as being struck by a spatter of grease while cooking up bacon.

Will shook his finger a moment and then inspected it.

Yep. There it is.

A perfect copy of the miasmatic structure, in the form of a bit of damage to the skin. A miasmatic scorch-mark similar to the miasma channels on Loth’s meat-bugs.

Will got back to work, laying a dozen more across every part of his finger until not a single part was undamaged.

Once that was done, Will took a deep breath, uncapped the vat of concentrated miasma and shoved his finger in, forcing Charge up left his arm, suffusing his left hand. It was undirected because it existed outside the confines of his Class, but that worked just fine.

The Charge inside his finger, and the Miasma outside, met in the damaged area of his skin and, and burned as they interacted with each other, searing the miasmatic structures into his skin.

Three…two…one…zero Will counted the seconds as his finger began to throb.

“Ow, ow ow!” Will shouted as he reached zero, yanking it out and inspecting it.

Not mutated, that’s good, Will thought, inspecting his finger. The miasmatic ‘scorch marks’ had filled in with miasma and were now glowing with power.

They wouldn’t last long, so better test them now.

Well, my finger doesn’t seem to be invisible, and I didn’t forget about it, so those worms aren’t wearing a stealth effect.

Will knelt down and poked the floor, jerking in place when his finger slipped through the floor, stopping at his second knuckle.

Well, this is weird, Will thought, sliding his finger through the stone floor without leaving a trail or any hole behind. The floor just seemed to morph around his finger. Almost like the opposite of his Aspect, where the floor would rise to meet him.

It gradually got more and more difficult as the temporary miasmatic structures that he’d copied began to fade, forcing him to withdraw his finger from the floor.

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Okay, so their slime definitely allows them to travel through terrain.

Will already suspected that, but it was nice to have definite confirmation.

Plus, with the samples I have them bringing me, I can probably figure out exactly how it works, and a way to counteract the effect.

Of course, Will wasn’t satisfied with a rough copy of a monster’s Ability. He wanted to take it apart, piece by piece, until he could make something original.

The dangling piece at the end that looked a bit like a fishhook…that had to be the ‘Terrain’ keywork. It was present in his Aspect Abilities, particularly when he grabbed stuff.

Matter of fact…

Will healed his finger, then repeated the process, this time on a different finger in order to lower the chance of mutation and having to cut off his hand…again.

Gods, the number of times I’ve mutated and/or blown up my hand by now…

When he was first getting started with deciphering Miasmatic Structures, it was a semi-regular occurance for Will to make a mistake and his left hand to explode or try to eat him as a result.

Honestly, I’m getting pretty good at it now, Will thought, grabbing a piece of air with his right hand and poking it with his enchanted finger.

Beautiful!

The ‘terrain’ fishhook shape dangling on the end of what Will was now calling ‘Terrain dive’ caught Will’s ‘terrain’ fishhook shape that was solidifying the air, and the two of them latched together for a nearly imperceptible moment before the ‘terrain dive’ fishhook bent backwards, disengaging, the rest of the miasmatic structure rippling as a result of the change in tension, and his finger…slipped right through the solidified terrain.

That’s so freaking neat! How does it even work?

Somehow the way these miasmatic structures interacted with each other led Will to believe that the two Abilities were acknowledging each other, but Will’s Ability was static and brittle, while the Terrain Dive was flexible and capable of deactivating other terrain control long enough to squirm past them.

It was more…elegant. Like a perfect solution made by nature, rather than a hamfisted one that barely worked.