The hallway where Aplos had co from turned dark. Not as if soone had turned off all the light, but as if sothing had simply eaten every single speck of light in the world, leaving behind nothing but an inky void. I felt sothing tug at my mind as I looked at the creature, as if the very essence of whatever I was looking at was twisted. It reminded of a broken mirror, with eyes peering at through the cracks in the glass. A dozen different reflections of what could be stared at from angles that didn’t exist in reality, sending nervous shivers down my spine. My brain struggled to comprehend what it was looking at. It was almost as bizarre and hard to conceptualize as the fish from the first world the three of us had lived in.
However, my Willpower was much higher than it had been in the past, so I quickly pieced my mind back together. So part of realized that the creature hadn’t even properly attacked us - I had simply felt a little tug at my mind from looking at the creature and trying to understand what it was. I could certainly understand why the soldiers in the base were told to watch out for odd sights and sounds. Depending on how strong their mind was, so people might genuinely go insane from looking at Aplos.
Luckily, nobody in our group had below Grade 6 Willpower. I doubted it would be an issue for us.
Aplos continued staring at us, and I tensed. But the creature did not move to attack us.
I glanced at the injured and dying soldiers near us, and then decided they weren’t ready to make any problems for us right now.
“Are you able to converse with us?” I asked Aplos. The soldiers in the base seed hostile to Aplos, but that didn’t necessarily an it was hostile to us. I didn’t really think it would work, but it was worth a shot. I didn’t want to kill sothing without at least checking if it was intelligent and non-hostile first. At the sa ti as I spoke, I swapped to my soul vision.
I spotted a large, floating candle in the middle of Aplos’s body. It was on the larger side for this world. If I was at full essence, and had at least three of my alteration ability’s keywords active, I could probably kill the creature in one hit with extinguish. However, it would take most of my mana - and I had spent a huge amount of alteration essence healing myself and Anise, and extinguishing so of the soldiers earlier. Anise and I still had bad injuries, although they were no longer life-threatening.
Aplos continued staring at , and I heard sothing speak to . It sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but it resounded directly inside of my mind, rather than in my physical ears.
And then, reality split into two different visions.
In one reality, I saw myself and my friends standing in the corridor, just as before. Anise and I both had wounds that were partially healed, and all of us were preparing for a possible fight with Aplos.
In another reality, I saw the darkness that constituted the creature’s body reach towards , like long knives made entirely of shadow. I felt searing pain in my side as they ripped into my flesh, and I imdiately realized the creature was sohow attacking with an illusion.
I imdiately pulled together every single drop of alteration essence I could, and then slamd it into Aplos’s soul in the biggest extinguish I could manage. Imdiately, about half of its candle of life disappeared, and the vision of Aplos’s body ripping into my guts disappeared. I gasped and doubled over, feeling blood drip out of my stomach.
Whatever the creature had done in its ‘illusion,’ it had sohow carried over to reality. I saw Sallia start to bleed out of one of her eyes, and Felix started shivering uncontrollably, as if he had taken a long bath in icewater.
“Hostile,” I said, gasping.
Sallia ignored her wounds, and followed up my attack by launching a spray of tal spikes at Aplos - only for them to pass harmlessly through its body.
“Body of darkness,” she said, almost sounding as if she was complaining. I glanced at Anise, and was relieve to see that her injuries hadn’t gotten any worse. Aplos had focused on the three of us, possibly because we were the ones with the least severe injuries. Then, taking by surprise, Anise looked at Aplos and pouted angrily at the creature that had injured the three of us. She launched a magic missile at the creature, and a silver bolt of force cut directly into its body.
The creature didn’t seem to take any damage from the attack - however, Anise’s magic missile did hit the creature, instead of just passing through its body, the way Sallia’s tal attack had. The creature didn’t react - it seed almost as if if it were stunned.
Perhaps it had reacted poorly to having nearly half of its life force destroyed instantly. I grinned savagely.
“How did the people in this facility keep it confined in the first place, if it just passes through physical matter?” asked Felix.
I looked at the creature, which had an incorporeal body made entirely of darkness, and blinked.
I had no idea how the facility had imprisoned Aplos. It was obvious they had confined it successfully for a long ti before our arrival - after all, the soldiers seed pretty familiar with the creature. We had seen a few other items in this facility made out of manifestation essence as well, and Anise’s attacks had seed to at least interact with Aplos, unlike Sallia’s physical attacks.
“Maybe it has a weakness to manifestation essence?” I said. Since this facility seed dedicated to studying manifestation essence, it was a reasonable guess.
Sallia’s eyes widened, and a mont later, she whirled towards .
“Miria, give your umbrella!”
I imdiately handed her the umbrella, and Sallia launched a lightning bolt out of it and into the creature’s body.
The creature shrieked in agony, and a great deal of the dark mist that made up its body seed to vanish under the light and heat of the lightning bolt.
“I’m out of essence,” said Sallia, grimacing.
I grabbed my umbrella and handed it to Anise, who launched another lightning bolt at the creature.
This ti, the creature completely collapsed.
The candle of life in its body was snuffed out by the attack, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A few monts later, my soul-vision collapsed, as even the last wisps of my alteration essence drained out of my body. I could barely even move now - and the damage to my shin certainly wasn’t helping anything.
However, I also felt relieved when I saw Aplos die. The creature had been dangerous, but nothing we couldn’t handle. After all, we were now transmigrators with two worlds behind us. While Aplos’s illusion attack had been strange and unexpected, the creature hadn’t been that hard to handle once we were on the offensive.
I checked my notifications, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Along with all the other notifications I hadn’t had ti to process yet, I could see a notification that we had killed ‘Aplos.’ I ignored the other System notifications for now - I could look at them once we got out of here.
Slaughter: Kill ‘Aplos.’
Achievent 450
There was also a notification that I had received a new skill for killing Aplos, but that could also wait.
I turned towards my friends, and then towards the dying soldiers in the corridor. Whatever Aplos had done to them, it seed to have nearly killed the soldiers who had survived the fight with us. I looked at them, and then shook my head. They had fired at us. Their life or death wasn’t my problem anymore.
“Let’s keep running,” I said. “We need to get out of this facility.”
Sallia nodded, and quickly removed the next wall from our path. I stopped for a few seconds to steal Anise’s manifestation orb and stuff it in my backpack, since I still had a little absorption essence left over, and then we kept moving. I had a hard ti running on my injured shin, so Sallia picked up and started carrying as we continued fleeing from the facility.
For once, luck seed to be on our side. The first corridor we had run into was also deserted, just like the previous one.
I grabbed the four swords we had seen as well, feeling my absorption essence reserves strain, and grimaced as I shoved them into my backpack. I was running dangerously low on absorption essence, and my alteration essence was completely gone. Sallia apart the entrance to the facility.
And there, on the other side of the facility, we found another forty soldiers sitting in formation and staring at us down rifles.
I resisted the urge to curse.
We had been running so fast that I hadn’t had ti to look at our destinations through the use of my spatial eyes. And now, we had been nearly ambushed by another group of soldiers.
The person who was standing at the back of the soldiers looked at us in disbelief, and then his eyes flicked towards Felix.
“You…?” he seed stunned by our presence, before he cackled. “I knew there must be sothing special about you. There’s no way you could have been normal! I knew you were faking it!” he grinned toothily at Felix, seeming to ignore the rest of us. “Tell how you did it, you little bastard, and I’ll-”
I’d heard enough.
I spent nearly half of my remaining absorption essence to blast the toothy fucker down with a lightning bolt from {Storm’s Breath}. No one treated my friends like that.
His eyes widened as he died.
Felix raised his hand, and several guns twisted and warped in their owner’s hands.
“Fire!” yelled a frightened-sounding soldier, and I expanded my spatial senses to their limit. At the sa ti, I held my umbrella in front of like a shield, sothing I should have done during our last encounter with soldiers but had forgotten, and prayed with all my heart that the umbrella was bulletproof.
My umbrella rattled and shook, and my arms and shoulders felt like they had been hit by a truck. I heard one of my arms snap, because my bones just weren’t sturdy enough to withstand the hail of bullets. But in that ti, I managed to teleport nearly twelve bullets back to their owners, killing them on the spot.
Sallia and Felix were no slouches either, and Sallia constantly took control of bullets and tal fragnts to kill the soldiers attacking us. Felix, anwhile, broke the rifles of nearby soldiers. Since he couldn’t catch bullets the way Sallia and I could, he seed to have found a different way to help.
As chaos started to break loose, I reached into the vision of another of the nearby soldiers, and made us disappear.
“They disappeared!” yelled one of the remaining soldiers, before several other soldiers started wildly looking around. They looked terrified, but still managed to form back up. I scanned the remaining soldiers.
Perhaps twenty were left standing, and another half a dozen were left moaning in pain on the rocky ground.
I sent over the friendship bracelets.
The soldiers continued scanning their surroundings for several seconds, before they started shuffling around, kicking at suspicious-looking patches of air. The four of us very, very slowly and carefully started making our way towards the entrance of the tunnel.
“Block them at the entrance!” yelled a soldier, as we were trying to make our way forward. “Soone get more reinforcents from the base, and I’ll let the guards at the entrance know to stop them. They can’t escape with the test subject!”
Then, the man took off towards the alchemist workshop we had entered this facility from.
I felt the urge to curse the man rise up, and wished I had enough alteration essence left to drop him on the spot.
asked Sallia.
I hesitated, and then nodded.
The four of us took off towards the entrance, and the sound of our shoes slapping against the stones quickly gave away our position.
“They’re still here!” yelled another soldier, before several of them pointed their guns at us.
Felix quickly ruined a few more guns as another wave of bullets ripped towards us. However, since the soldiers didn’t know where we were, a lot of their shots were horribly inaccurate.
I grabbed the bullets that were heading towards us, and then used them to kill or injure the other soldiers firing at us - as well as the soldier who was running towards the entrance.
That soldier, as well as several of the shooters, dropped dead. The soldiers continued blindly firing at all of the places we could be, but the sound of gunfire was so loud it made it impossible for them to track us through sound.
The four of us quickly made for the entrance, and after a few monts of struggling, managed to open the door. I maintained an illusion over the eyes of the alchemists and guards inside of the workshop. They seed to be alert to the idea that sothing was wrong, and the sound of gunfire echoing through the tunnels definitely made them nervous. The alchemists and guards were no longer producing potions, and were instead warily scanning the area with their guns ready.
But they couldn’t see us, and while they seed worried by the sound of us opening the secret door, they didn’t open fire at us instantly. So under the cover of my illusions, the four of us slipped back to the door to the sewers. I had spent almost all of both of my essences, and I was starting to feel tired and drained. But I had just enough left to cover us for another minute or two.
I breathed a sigh of relief as Felix wrenched the non functioning door using his tal attunent, and then the four of us charged into the sewers under the watchful eyes of the alchemists and guards.
I was out of both kinds of essence, Sallia had almost no absorption or manifestation essence left, Anise was tapped out of everything, and only Felix still had a little bit of alteration essence left in him. However, as we slipped back into the sewers, and the din of the hidden laboratory faded into the distance, I couldn’t help but want to cheer and laugh in excitent.
We had rescued Felix!
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