Chapter 251: Get Away From it All

Will blinked, and blinked again. The sun was a dim red, and his ears were flooded with a ringing noise that wouldn’t go away.

“What happened?”

“He blew up most of the forest.” Loth’s voice said, seemingly from underwater.

I’ve never been this hard of hearing before.

Will reached up and touched his ear, feeling something wet.

“Here.”

A splash of something over his face, and suddenly the sun came into focus and the water was removed from his ears.

“Aw man, those are expensive,” Will grumbled as he sat up.

“I asked you to used Sourdough on the potion, but you said the city council could wait until afternoon.” Loth said as Will’s head cleared up.

BOOM!

Will craned his neck and spotted the other Lords battling…something inhuman.

Void had become…a mass of some kind. Tentacles sprouted from the coliseum-sized mass roughly the shape of a cabbage, and despite Void’s grand size, he was swinging those tentacles at the Lords bouncing around him like fleas with surprising dexterity.

“How come the human becomes more inhuman than the brain-worm?” Will groaned as Loth helped him to his feet.

“I would argue that as a creature specialized in parasitizing the human body, the worm might have had a strong preference for its host to remain human. While Void simply does not give a shit.”

“Not a bad gues-“

BOOM!

Will and Loth tumbled backwards as a pressure wave and blast of fire flowed over their dugout position.

When Will climbed out of the crater, a huge chunk of the earth was missing right below where Ghoul had been flying.

A cloud above him had a hole punched in it, and Ghoul was nowhere to be seen.

Was the blast focused? And we got the backwash?

How did he….

“It’s got something to do with his body-weight.” Will mused.

“Eh?”

“The mass of the thing he blows up is directly proportional to the strength of the explosion, but I’ve never seen him blow anything up that was more than a couple times heavier than he was as a cantrip. It was always a column of air, or a piece of a nearby floor. That chunk of ground is way bigger than the stuff he blew up in the past, but it seems to be roughly the same scale as his new body.

“Ah.” Loth said. “He must’ve used the Ability that allows him to shape undead to fuse their mass to his own, creating an exploit that allowed him to scale up his cantrip’s power quadratically by abandoning his human form. Neat.”

“It was that tree he was leaning on!” Will realized, climbing out of the crater.

Void had fused with the damned tree, which multiplied his ability to cantrip explosions a dozen-fold, catching Will off guard and knocking him senseless for a moment.

How embarrassing.

A tingle in Will’s scalp prompted him to glance up.

Ghoul had reappeared in the sky above, a massive circle of miasmatic structures forming underneath him, making the sky come to life.

An instant later, a beam of energy fell down on Void, scouring away swaths of his undead flesh, which seemed to grow back in a matter of seconds.

“Where’s the crown?” Will asked.

“In my hand.” Loth said, handing him the glittery fire-opal studded circlet.

Loth was not one to lose sight of the goal, even if something unexpected happened, like a sudden explosion and Void becoming a kaiju.

Purchase Freight Door to 8^th Floor, The Ferryman’s Stronghold?

Yes.

13404 -> 13324 Influence remaining.

Will tossed the crown over to Ghoul’s Stronghold and snapped the Door shut the instant it was through, making the crown vanish like a magic trick.

I’ll have to thank Zodiac for the Influence.

The old man had given him all the extra Influence for the express purpose of hunting the worm, so he didn’t really owe Zodiac anything, but Will still felt grateful. It had opened his eyes to how useful Influence could be while Climbing, and how badly he needed Vassals.

Okay, so with the crown gone, he can’t get the fae or the class-penetrating fire anymore.

The last few blasts of fire had been noticeably absent the crowbar-shaped Miasmatic structures designed to tear apart defenses, and had just been normal fire.

Which was probably why Will was still alive, come to think of it.

Void was still practically immortal, though, and tearing apart huge swaths of the jungle in his battle with Ghoul and Marksman.

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“Where’s Chesmu?” Will asked.

“Oh, he’s over there.” Loth said, pointing at a charred corpse lying twenty or so feet behind them.

The corpse let out a tiny cough.

Will withdrew another supreme healing potion and poured it over Chesmu, triggering Sourdough as he did so.

Sourdough

85 Charges remaining.

Chesmu gave a strangled gasp for air and coughed up a bit of blood while Will pocketed the sourdough nodule.

“Ow.” Chesmu groaned.

The ground shook under them as Will levered the oversized Lord to his feet and carried him away from the battle.

“What’re your Abilities?” Will asked. “What’s your Build?”

“Mage. Water. Ice. Weather. Boat stuff as a sub-type.” Chesmu rasped.

So that’s why he got roasted by the explosion. Low physical stats.

“Why the Abyss did you ever leave the 6^th Floor, damnit?” Will asked, dropping Chesmu against a partially scorched tree.

“Ask myself that all the time,” Chesmu muttered when he recovered from the pain. “Carrie was carrying me up to your Floor for my Advanced class, then we were gonna do some networking at the wedding, and the rest is history.”

Will sat and thought for a moment.

Their current problem was that Void could use all the mass around him to either regenerate flesh or create cataclysmic explosions.

I don’t just need to separate him from other creatures he can turn into undead. I need to separate him from everything. Part of the ten-step plan.

Will’s first thought was to trap him in an extradimensional space and throw away the key, like what Kincaid did…Immediately followed by the realization that Will did not have such an ability.

“You can control water?”

“Pretty damn well, If I say so myself.” Chesmu said.

“Can you control water inside people?” Will asked, hoping Chemsu could fling Void into space.

“No. Their Class interferes.” Chesmu replied, shaking his now-bald head.

Damn.