Elder Cultivator

Chapter 991

Unfortunately for Durff, their group happened to be inside the area of the Misi-designated planet devouring class distortion beast… and the designation didn’t rule out devouring other things. Like, say, all of them.

“The snake is still trying to eat us!” Durff yelled as the creature’s fangs sank through the facility- in some parts it crushed walls and in others it simply slipped right through, the angles making no sense to any of them. “Do we just leave the shiny rock for it?”

“No!” Juli yelled. “It’s already noticed us, that won’t help! We have to, um…!”

“Fourth dimensional gut melter!” Misi declared, pulling something out of his bag. He dodged the incoming teeth of the great worm as he held a packet of powder. “Maybe if we can get to a sensitive spot?”

“How do you have something so specific?” Jyotsana yelled as she rushed alongside him. “But if it’ll melt this thing, great!”

“Well it’s not really-” Misi shook his head. “We have to try something and fighting directly won’t work!”

“I know!” Durff grumbled. “How annoying!” He’d smacked a few fangs with his hammer, and while he could crack them it didn’t seem like there was a limited number of them. It was certainly more than he could count. Snakes were only supposed to have two, but maybe they got more if they grew bigger. There was also an issue where sometimes the fangs hit him even though his hammer and armor were supposed to be in the way.

The other three were also having a difficult time avoiding things. Walls kept getting in the way, unseen and unsensed until that moment. And, sometimes, they dodged the wrong direction. The fangs, which Durff was certain were straight, also seemed to curve or just straight up change angles. Nobody’d been impaled yet, but that was only barely comforting because if they had it would have taken out their whole body. The few impacts he’d taken had greatly diminished his defenses, though, and his body was sore. More than just from the golems.

Something was wrong with the walls. All of them were bad, obviously, but Durff was specifically thinking about the outer ones. The ones at the edge of everything, that the big snake was outside of. They could all see those, sometimes, and also the inside of the thing eating them. It just kept moving, covering the whole dimension they were in and stretching beyond. Durff wondered if it had an end or continued on forever.

Well, if it didn’t they could fix that. Just chop it off so it stopped making his head hurt. He didn’t have a big sword but burning it would probably work? Jyotsana was in Integration now… but it was kind of big for her to burn through.

Ah well, they’d try that gut melter thing! He smashed his way through wall, sometimes getting them caught up in him. He ripped them away regardless, so that the others could follow.

Despite how hard they were all working, with Jyotsana trying to burn any part of this thing that got close and the twins trying to do something with bells when its teeth got close, it wasn’t really trying to kill them. And Durff couldn’t allow that, because if it was going to kill them he at least wanted it to try.

They needed something more. In his imagination, he gained cool insights that led him to break through to Augmentation and smashed the thing into a powder. In reality, they were half dead by the time they reached close enough to the outside to potentially attack it. Some parts of it were many kilometers away, but some of the snake's guts brushed into the structure.

Misi threw his fourth dimensional gut melter and… the fourth dimension melted the powder. Which is to say, it seemed to disappear when it went outside of… everything? Sure, that fit. Where the big snake was.

“We need to find a close part of the worm!” Misi said.

“Over there,” Juli gestured. “It’s compressing in a rhythmic pattern, and that should be the tightest point, I think…”

“We’ve gotta do it right!” Misi grimaced. “I only have one more handful of this.” He looked around at the rest of them. “Can you… just burn it? Or squash it?”

Durff stuck his arm outside, and when he pulled it back his hand was backwards. In every way that was possible, he thought, though he didn’t really know for sure. Maybe it could have been inside out too? It didn’t hurt, but he was very relieved when it returned to normal. It would be difficult to hold a hammer if it had to be inside his wrist.

Jyotsana’s attacks did manage to make their way outside, though the flames spiraled off in odd directions. When they reached the beast, the damage was minimal. She shook her head. “I’d exhaust myself long before causing any serious damage. Let’s try Juli’s thing.”

No amount of damaging the teeth seemed to do them any good, so they moved towards where the worm’s body was inside the stabilized space just a bit. Any formations and walls that might have stopped them were entirely chaotic, if they weren’t already pulverized. Finally, they got to a decently exposed patch of worm insides- though anyone who actually knew about such things would have been able to explain how it was missing key biology.

“Try to soften it up!” Misi said. “If we could get it deeper inside, it would be better!”

Durff smashed, and was entirely insulted when there was not a twitch or cry of pain. He did manage to cause some sort of bleeding as he tore away a chunk. A weird liquid that transitioned through various colors of the rainbow covered his arms and was fortunately not caustic or otherwise immediately dangerous. He didn’t want his arms to melt.

Jyotsana burned the same spot as they ran along, following the movement of the worm. It was huge, but not fast. It wasn’t clear if it could move faster or not. Maybe it didn’t care.

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Misi was having trouble getting the next dose of powder out of his bag. The packet that carried it seemed to have fused into a few other things, and maybe turned inside out. He held the whole concoction together with his upper energy, hoping that at least some of it would do something.

He thrust the whole package shoulder deep into the worm- which was practically irrelevant compared to its size. Its muscles almost crushed his arm, and Durff had to yank him out. The good news was that hopefully the powder would stay in there.

“Is that gonna melt it?” Durff asked.

Misi didn’t have the heart to tell the others that the fourth dimensional gut melter was just pepper. Magical, extremely potent pepper? Yes. Multidimensional? Also yes, though whether that would help in this particular situation . It wasn’t that it couldn’t do something to this distortion beast. He was fairly certain it was the best thing in his bag, at least.

“I think that’s the best we can do for now,” Misi said, as the body of the worm pulled away- not in pain or fear, as far as he could tell, but just through natural expansion and contraction. He hoped it helped, but he was pretty sure they were just going to die.

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“Don’t eat that, Fuzz!” Alva chastised him, but he only responded with an I-know-what-I’m-doing growl. Well, he was a lot more intelligent these days. But even if it wouldn’t kill him, there was no way he could fit any significant portion of the distortion beast inside him before he just literally exploded.

Fuzz never stopped, though, and his belly never grew full either. Not that he could eat infinitely, but it was rather that he wasn’t actually eating it. He just didn’t have time to try to explain that anything that entered his mouth at the moment would be consumed by the raging furnace inside him. The ashes would be scattered, though most of it was instantly exploded out into waves of plasma. Directing that back towards the worm was also part of his attack plan.

Next to Fuzz was Timothy, stabilizing… everything and fending off some sort of corrosive sludge. They had to occasionally pull back when they got too far from the semi-stable space, or if it seemed like they would be carried away from it. Catarina was on the other side of Fuzz, and it appeared she was trying to carve runes into its ‘stomach’. The distortion beast defied biological rules, which meant it could have teeth inside those places.

It tried to chomp them with the teeth, but nobody was going to let that happen. Velvet kept her presence hidden, trying to find opportunities to cut into the beast’s belly when it overlapped with the stable space. She made use of everything she had, not just the sharpness of her blades. She didn’t carry a large amount of poison, but she figured she might as well use what she had.

Her voidsteel dagger was used as a follow-up attack after she’d already cut open a wound, attacking the slightly more vulnerable inner parts and cutting through while easily slicing through defensive energy. She had to be careful with its usage, though, because it was not unbreakable and any damage it sustained was more or less permanent.

Alva just shot arrows in random directions. No, that wasn’t true at all. She knew very well that the directions weren’t random, she just didn’t know why they weren’t random. All she was trying to do was hit something important. About half the time, she hit a wall. Half of the remaining time, she ran into one of the billion or so teeth- and she realized that might not be as big of an exaggeration as she’d first thought.

Some of the rest of the time, she hit part of the worm’s body. It didn’t have blood vessels in a traditional sense, but she was lucky if she clipped something like that instead of just hitting solid muscle. Or worse, the outside of the beast.

But none of that was what she was aiming for. She had ‘seen’ something that looked extremely vulnerable. Her senses were locked onto it, but she was having trouble figuring out how it got there. Without any idea, she just followed what seemed right.

Sometimes, that resulted in shooting a thousand arrows and causing no meaningful damage. But if the thousand-and-first arrow hit something meaningful? It would all be worth it.

It didn’t. Neither did anything up to the one-thousand and seventy-third. Nor the fifteen hundredth. She lost count at sixteen hundred and thirteen, but it wasn’t that long after that one when she finally did it.

Her arrow flew in what she was going to generously calling a straight line, and saying it was going ‘towards’ the distortion beast was also incorrect. It was entirely possible to miss it even though it was in every conceivable direction and a large number of inconceivable ones.

For some reason, her arrow went through a dozen kilometers of fluid inside the distortion beast. Her target wasn’t at the end of that, but due to weird partial dimensional garbage she knew she would either hit her target or, more likely, run into a tooth somehow. Or shoot her own foot, which had only happened twice but very much annoyed her. Timothy had generously ignored the one that nearly struck the back of his head.

Nothing made sense… but even so, it all clicked together. Making arrows out of energy didn’t make sense either, but she did it all the time. This was just a few tiers of comprehension further from normal physics.

Her arrow hit something hard, creating the tiniest chip. The entire worm trembled, even though it was a fist sized crystalline structure inside of an at least moon sized distortion beast- she couldn’t feel either end of it, so she wasn’t certain.

Fuzz, Catarina, and Timothy were working a vague helix pattern into the stomach of the creature as they tried to maintain a position relative to stable space. The creature’s energy was seemingly unending and so were the amounts of live-giving fluids, but they didn’t give up. It was fairly clear to them that the toxins Fuzz had sensed were part of the beast, however, and came along with it. The concentrations were higher closer to its body.

Alva leaned just slightly, and a hundred or so fangs missed her. She was really starting to get this whole dimensional mess. She was going to shoot this guy until that thing broke, and then she was going to vomit into the nearest star and hope her brain wouldn’t feel inside out and backwards permanently.

She needed a really specific angle that involved her shooting her bow backwards under her armpit. That seemed to be the only way to do that while not getting random chunks of nearby rubble or teeth stuck inside of her. Did it make sense? No, but her bad shooting posture worked out regardless.

She hit the structure, cracking it once more. The distortion beast began to coil, its whole body circling in on itself and bringing its many, many teeth into greater density around them. Timothy and the others rushed back, defending Alva. She was glad for that, because a few hundred teeth of unmeasurable size was too many for her.

Another shot. It missed, as did the next ten.

One more… and it was blocked by the reinforced energy of the distortion beast. She just didn’t have enough energy to break through that, and it was more than omnidirectional so she couldn’t get a better angle.

If she had to do better than that… she just would. Because at this point it seemed that breaking out into real space would be inconvenient, with it trying so hard to chomp them. Not that it wasn’t doing that before they provoked it, just more slowly.

Alva lined up one arrow after the other, shooting as many as she could hold onto in sequence without them falling apart. They didn’t go in the same direction, but they all arrived at a single point together. Then something cracked. The worm couldn’t roar, but it did send tremors throughout everything, pulling them into unstable space. Or rather, the four who were together.

Velvet got caught up in the worm’s motion, being pulled along by its very presence as she was cutting her way deeper into it. It looked like she wasn’t going to be able to get out quickly, and she was getting pulled further away from stable space. Maybe, she could make it forget she was there and sneak away somehow.

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