Chapter 245: Leaving Steve (Patreon)

“Eleven Coils ago, these buildings, this Floor was outside the Tower. It was the cradle of humanity, and it was not unlike the 6th Floor, a series of islands connected to each other via a vast ocean.” Loth said as she paced back and forth while Will delicately cut the pod away from the floor.

No chance I’m not gonna take this home and study it, Will thought. He was currently experimenting with the giant’s crystal bones, and if this machine could freely manipulate them…there was a lot on the table to learn.

“So the Tower, when it heated up would boil the ocean around it, creating dense clouds that rose up to the stars and clogged them up with salt and minerals, causing the ocean to rapidly lose heat, and the weather to be violent.

By the time Ezykial the serpent came around at the end of the coil, the world was nearly frozen, and he climbed the Tower with his trusty snake, Steve, in search of a solution.”

Loth glanced up and waggled her eyebrows at Will.

Will looked up, beyond the ceiling, picturing the monstrously large snake above them, that composed a massive chunk of the Floor itself.

“…No way.”

“Probably not. It could just be an homage that the natives don’t even remember the reason for. Or just a dumb-luck coincidence.”

“I’m less and convinced that dumb-luck coincidences are a real thing,” Will mused, following a wire back to it’s origin and delicately removing it along with the box it connected to.

The more of this Will could get back home, the more easily he could set it back up…

Who am I kidding, I don’t have the technology to set it up…

Ghoul might though.

Will finally got the last piece of the pod out of the ground and exercised his rights as a Lord.

Purchase Freight Door to 10th Floor, Burned Stronghold?

Yes.

15772 -> 15662 Influence Remaining.

For a crisp 110^1 Influence, Will purchased an extra-wide Freight Door that delivered large loads of goods without a Climber travelling along. There were plenty of restrictions, like being more expensive, not allowing anything alive, and so on, but for this purpose, it was fantastic.

Loth’s bugs shoved the pod and its peripheries straight through the Door to Will’s Stronghold with a note attached to it for Anna.

Will stood up and stretched his back, having gotten what he wanted from the ruin.

“The message said to leave the journal, not the pod.” Will said to himself, wondering if the other two would be pissed.

Will made a note to leave a journal detailing the results of his studies next time he came across a place like this.

“So the Coil began to turn and Miasma flooded out of the tower, and monsters began to spawn in the cold waters, which gradually began to turn ethereal and fade from existance.” Loth said.

“Despite all odds, the civilization survived the end of the Coil, but they never made inroads into the Floor beneath them. Rather than trying to bend Miasma to serve them like the civilization that came after, they tried to adapt themselves to Miasma. By strategically embedding miasmatic structures into the hip bones of civilians, they were able to create systems that diverted Miasma away from unborn children, allowing them to reproduce in higher miasma concentrations.”

“Huh.” Will grunted, prying the lustrous metal panels off the walls and shoving them through the freight door as well.

“During the chaos of the end of the Coil, Ezykial The Serpent returned with ancient knowledge that eventually led to the creation of the the Miasmatic Crystalizer,” Loth pointed at the gap in the floor where the pod had been.

“Ancient knowledge he got in a dream, derived from the…thirty eighth floor.”

Or the forty-ninth for me, If I add 11 to it.

“Scientists immediately set about applying this knowledge, and Ezykial left his wounded familiar behind to recover and began his trek back up in search of more Relics that might help preserve his nation…and they never saw him again.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Will said.

“Anyway, the author says he helped the researchers for a time before he settled down and got married to one of them. The journal cuts off after describing serious civil unrest. Guess whose journal it is.”

“Reese’s.” Will said.

“Wow. How’d you guess?”

“The timeline couldn’t have been short, and Reese is always settling down and getting married.” Will said, scanning the room for anything else they could pilfer.

Without finding anything, Will and Loth left the journal sitting on its lonesome beneath the wall of text that Will and the others had been using to send messages across time.

Will didn’t think it would survive Steve exploding, but who knew? If Void never blew up the undead snake, maybe Ezykial would stop by and add his third message to the wall in a thousand years or so.

After all, Steve was no longer alive to digest the building any further.

Will and Loth rejoined the caravan of floating islands and continued their trek ‘south’.

The speed was much slower than Will and Loth’s original ascent from the tail to the mouth, but despite the many roadblocks, they managed to make steady progress, until they arrived at their point of egress.

The butthole, in other words, Will thought as they overlooked the exit, the giants around him making plans on how to get the entire island through. There would be some prying involved.

Look up.

Will looked up. A quarter mile or so above them, the snake’s eggs were pressed against its inner walls, looking something like a grapevine of islands strung together.

Oh. Steve is a girl. Huh.

Twitch.

Twitch?

In front of his eyes, one of the island-sized eggs began to shudder as the snake inside woke up. Perhaps the death of its parent or the heat of the faefire had woken something up inside it.

Maybe it was a spawn’s last-ditch effort to birth itself from a corpse.

In any case…

“We need to leave.” Will said.

“Eh?” Mann asked.

“WE NEED TO LEAVE!” Will shouted into the nearly deaf giant mayor’s ear.

“We are leaving, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get out without damaging the island.”

There was a ripping noise that resembled a peal of thunder that stretched on and on forever as more island-sized snakes began to tear their way through the walls of Steve’s stomach.

“Oh,” The aged giant said, staring up at the writhing cluster of snakes above.

With a final, explosive peal of thunder, the walls gave way and chunks of bone and viscera began to rain down from above.

Despite that, it would take a minute or two to arrive, that’s how big and far away everything was.

“Loth, if you wouldn’t mind.” Will said.

Loth flew up and perched on Harold’s shoulder and began relaying instructions.

“Listen up, we’re going for the butthole right now!” Harold shouted above the growing panic. “We’re gonna hit it hard and fast, so some buildings are likely to get scraped off! Everyone gather at the center of the island and hold on to each other!”

Without restraining themselves for the safety and comfort of their passengers, Loth’s bugs began to put their backs into it, and the island began to move.

Food, books, unsecured toys and games flew sideways, clattering against the ground, or falling off the island entirely, but the women and children were held secure in the center of the island by a wall of strong arms holding onto the surrounding crystal with everything they had.

Will shot up into the shy and began sprinting along above the island, creating a curved platform of air with every step, making himself into a moving umbrella. The giants didn’t need shrapnel raining down on them from above in addition to the sudden acceleration.

A minute into the sprint, his umbrella was tested.

Wet plops and hard clatters sounded as pieces of flesh and bone impacted against the solidified air, held in place for the brief moment it took for the giants to move beyond them.

The snarl of snakes above was the bigger concern. They would surely be hungry.

Crack!

Will stumbled in place as pale crystal shrapnel shot through his solidified air, nearly dropping him from the air. He set his next foot down just as the object hit the island, toppling a building and causing a cry of alarm from the huddled giants who were about to be buried underneath.

Straining his control, Will continued to run, refreshing the protective dome above the island, while simultaneously seizing the air around the building, arresting its collapse mid-flight.

An instant later, Loth’s bugs grabbed the toppling building and flung it away from the giants.

Will glanced up and spotted the heads of the newborn snakes following the island. They were nowhere near as slow as their progenitor.

The quickest of them were already moving, looking to secure their first meal and gain an advantage over their siblings.

“HERE WE GO!” Harold yelled as the island tilted, it’s orientation compared to Steve changing radically.

Thankfully due to the nature of the island, its gravity was constant, so no one fell off.

Will sprinted down and landed on the edge of the island, reaching up with a hand, and down with a foot, shoving the rain of viscera and bone away with his right hand while trying to reinforce the edges of the island with his foot.

The island was cobbled together over time and it had never been designed to deal with the force of being squeezed through a giant snake’s asshole.

Will did what he could, and he was sure he had an effect, but the buildings on the edges of the island crumbled and sheared away, creating a floating field of crystal boulders that followed behind them, attracted by the faint gravity in the island’s wake.

As soon as they stopped, it would rain back down on them, but that was a problem for another time.

Or it could be a solution…Will thought, narrowing his eyes.

Will was wearing the Hammer of God.

Might as well put it to use.

Will had used the Relic imprinted in his Phantom Hand to break the army Caddock had  assembled to wear him down on the 10th floor, and it was the single most powerful long-range Relic Will had ever made, especially when boosted by Phantom Hand.

Hammer of God

+323 Strength

+161 Resistance

+242 Kinesthetics

+22 Acuity

+107 Focus

107 degrees of correction.

+337% to Lightning damage inflicted by user.

Lightning damage dealt by the user will chain to up to 40 other enemies, dealing 4% less damage with each jump

Upon striking their target, projectiles fired by the user are converted to lightning bolts, with potency based on the projectile’s potential damage on impact.

projectiles gain a large amount of mass and speed over time.

Will seized the air around the field of boulders floating in the way of the island…and gave them a little nudge, releasing the boulders as he set them tumbling away towards the horde of approaching constellations.

The chunks of crystal ranged in size from a pebble to enormous chunks of buildings, so large that they could easily be carved into human habitation.

Each and every one of them, once Hammer of God registered them as projectiles, began to rapidly gain speed towards their targets, breaking free from the wake of the island and shooting up into the sky towards the snarl of island-sized snakes.

A moment later, the first of the crystal boulders hit their targets, creating a net of lightning as each impact drew a line of lightning between where it landed, and the nearest ten enemies.

The sky above became vibrantly bright, and the world was filled with echoing thunder, but it was no more than a distraction, because when the light faded, the island-sized constellations were recoiling stunned and disoriented, but alive.

I suppose I didn’t give it two hundred miles of build-up this time, and these snakes are…rather large.

But it bought the time they needed.

Moments later, the giant island and the Key Site emerged into the cold air that lay beyond.

“Don’t let up!” Will shouted to Loth, reaching out with Phantom Hand and grabbing the Key Site ahead of them and wrenching it around to face behind them.

Will’s shield of compressed air meant nothing in the face of an explosion of faefire that could turn the entire Floor into ash.

Even using the Key Site as an umbrella was a slim chance.

Time went by and nothing happened as Steve gradually faded into the distance, his, her form rapidly vanishing into the night sky as her camouflage rendered her invisible.

Will could only think of one reason why Void didn’t blow up Steve as soon as they appeared.

He’d spotted the Key Site and guessed its purpose as a shield against the explosion.

We’re in the game now.

“Look what hit the building.” Loth said, approaching with a torso sized chunk of crystal giant bone.

Will blinked.

That’s not giant bone.

It looked similar, but it was perfectly rounded, almost like…

An egg?

Will frowned before licking his hand and wetting the egg. The matte crystal exterior turned translucent and revealed a crystalized snake coiled around itself inside the clear eggshell, perfectly preserved.

Clink clink. Will rapped his knuckle against the egg. Snake eggs were slightly soft, but this was hard…It was not alive. The snake inside did not move. It’s crystal heart didn’t beat. It almost seemed like the entire thing had been fossilized by some unknown process, becoming almost opalescent.

“Neat.” That would certainly make a good conversation piece.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Loth asked, wiggling her eyebrows.

“You want to try to incubate it inside the pod we just sent to the Stronghold and see what happens?” Will guessed.

Loth blinked.

“That’s way better than what I was thinking. And if that doesn’t work, we can still dissect it.”