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Chapter 126: Change is Bad
🕑 Added 2023-10-30 17:50:48 +0000 UTCMatt thought of trust as an earned thing, something that would be as immoral to withhold as it would be to deny a worker their paycheck. And for better or worse, Survivor’s Reflexes had always steered him in the correct direction. Where it said something was vulnerable, it was. When the weak spots ended up being unhelpful, it was almost always because Matt failed to get to the target or strike it particularly well, not because there wasn’t an actual vulnerability to be exploited.
Matt might not have trusted this tattoo absolutely, but the skin-markings were working through Survivor’s Reflexes, with its permission. He trusted that. If the skill said there was a place he should hit based on new information the tattoo was providing, he felt he owed it to try.
There was a downside in play beyond that kind of trust-or-don’t-trust risk in the fact that he hadn’t actually informed anyone of the tattoo. While he was beginning to trust Brennan and the others more and more, he didn’t think it was a good idea for them to see every single card in his hand as soon as he got it. And that meant that Lucy also didn’t know. This decision, for better or worse, was all his. He hadn’t found the time to talk to her alone and had decided to keep everything a secret for the moment.
He smacked the second orb, sending it at the crack. It detonated with the same loud noise as before, and nothing happened. The crack didn’t break, or change. Matt sighed, disappointed.
And then barely made the jump to get back to safe ground when a full fifty feet of the cliff trembled, started sliding into the gap over the enemy army, and fell.
The birds were the first victims of the rock. They had made what would normally be a sound tactical choice and hidden under the plane of the cliff, probably reasoning that doing so would protect them from any stray Artemis-arrows and the orb explosions. They were completely unprepared for hundreds of tons of rock suddenly shifting directly on top of them, and were pinned to the bottom as it fell.
The next victim was the peregrine commander, who spared the barest fraction of a percent of his attention to try to figure out what the unearthly explosions, stone grinding, and bird-screaming sounds behind him were about. In a battle with Brennan, who relied on split-second precision to land hits on critical spots and end battles in a single blow, that was a mistake. It was, in fact, a mistake he never really realized he had made, as the strike to his neck was powerful enough to get his windpipe and his brain stem in the same transaction.
The subsequent next victim would have been much harder to calculate. It could have been the people that the cliff mass landed on, or it might not have been. It turned out that the energy in the demon hearts liked to release in a controlled, prepared way, but by no means had to. The rock landed directly on two of the hearts, missing the third by several feet on one side of the impact and the fourth by even more on the other side.
The force fields held the entire mass suspended for just a split second before they cracked, at which point the hearts simultaneously exploded. It’s possible that this killed all the people the rock would have hit, but there was no way to tell.
The next kills were, for better or worse, combination attacks. The power released from the hearts rushed straight into already compromised rock. The resulting frag-grenade explosion of stone was so thick and fast that there was no doubt in Matt’s mind that it would have killed their entire team, were they not hundreds of feet above all the explosions.
The same was not true for most of the invading enemy army. Having a mountain fall on you was already a pretty bad deal. Having a mountain fall on you, destroy most of your super weapon stock, then explode into fragments ranging from tiny, sharp needles to good-sized boulders at you and all your friends was a worse one.
If you really wanted to make the deal as bad as possible under conventional circumstances, you’d have all of that stone-and-magic explosion trapped in a relatively small, contained granite space. One that compressed all the damage, reflecting the stones back where it didn’t break and collapsing on you and crushing you even more when it did break.
If you for some entirely unexplained reason wanted the situation to get as bad as possible while including unconventional situations, unlikely occurrences, and shit that just flat-out shouldn’t be possible, you might add two more intact super weapons, then jostle them just enough with everything that happened before that they began to detonate, conventionally this time.
Matt saw all of this happening. The others only arrived in time to see the remaining two hearts start to put out pulses. They stood there slack-jawed as they began to watch the mayhem unfurl further below them.
Demons were not, it turned out, unselfish people. And selfish people are rarely brave. If they had kept their heads about them, it was possible they could have run at a fairly orderly pace and got most of the troops out of the range of the two hearts before the pulses got out of hand. Instead, they didn’t even manage to pick a direction. Long before the pulses actually claimed their first victim, Matt and the others watched several demons fall to good-old-fashioned trampling, as demons bashed into each other, overtook each other, and ground each other into the walls and earth.
Almost the entire army ended up being in the range of the pulses of the two hearts. What they didn’t get, the eventual inferno did, leaving the pass clean and sanitized, if a little ashy.
“We have to get down, now.” Artemis said, as she finally shook herself out of the shock of watching most of her immediate problems literally evaporate in front of her. “Brennan, get the rope set up.”
Matt glanced around, looking for the new threat. “Are more birds coming? More Artillery fire?”
Artemis shook her head, grinning like a maniac. “No. It’s time for mop-up.”
—
There were plenty of demons left, but it was “plenty” in the sense that it was a satisfactory amount, where they no longer posed any real danger. The hearts and falling mountains had not only crushed the demons’ formation, but also their morale. Artemis was leaping from tree to tree, raining down arrows like a vengeful thunderstorm. Derek, Brennan, and Matt mowed through demons like they were threshing grain.
There were hundreds of demons left, but only a few were left who posed any real trouble. It turned out that the peregrine falcon had been the best the demon army had to offer, combat-wise. A few others probably would have come close if they weren’t already banged up by the localized apocalypse Matt had dropped on their heads. When Matt identified those few remaining battlelords and kings, the team came together and made short work of them without much real danger.
Overall, it was a satisfying thing, a good and relaxing end to a hard day.
—
As they moved through the ranks of the demons, Matt ate small amounts of them when he could. Most of the traits were trash, as always. He ended up keeping only two of them. The first came from the Falcon commander, who he took a sneaky, feather-filled bite out of once the others had disappeared over the edge of the cliff.
Swooping Momentum
Swooping Momentum allows you to convert the momentum you have moving in one direction to another direction at a 70% efficiency rate on the ground, and a 100% efficiency rate when falling from heights greater than ten feet. When activated, it creates two charges or uses that can be put into play within three seconds of activation, followed by a one-minute cooldown.
Meta-Trait Occupied: Movement
This was exactly the kind of trait Matt needed at the moment. It would eat up his demon disguise, sure, but it would also make it so that he could outmaneuver faster enemies in battle, or run away with direction changes they couldn’t match. He quickly replaced the morphing skill and vowed to use the new movement skill in front of others only if he absolutely had to.
The next move he decided to keep was an attack trait picked up from some kind of cobra-looking demon. His charge-up strike was so powerful that he was reluctant to get rid of it, and instead stored the new trait as a kind of hold-out weapon if he ended up in a tough, constrained spot.
Quick Bite
Quick Bite allows you to lash out with your teeth at ten times the normal speed. For the duration of the strike, your bite strength, bite penetration and tooth durability are increased tenfold.
The speed increase provided by this attack skill is restricted to motions of the head and neck. The attack itself is repeatable with no cooldown.
Matt couldn’t imagine what specific scenario this would be useful in, but he ran into weird, specific scenarios all the time. Worst-case scenario, he’d let it languish in his storage until he found something better. For now, though, it was another secret he could keep in case things went sideways on him.
When the bulk of the demons were dead, the party agreed to split up a bit to increase their chances of finding any stragglers who had avoided the blast. They remained within earshot of each other, but spread out as they walked to increase their overall observation range and sweep up any demons that they might have missed.
At this point, Matt didn’t carry enough bloodlust to really care if they got the last few escapees. But he agreed to the plan immediately anyway. He desperately wanted to catch up with Lucy on a few things.
“Okay, that should be far enough.” Matt said, once they had some distance on the others. Luckily, Artemis wasn’t the closest to him in formation. He wasn’t sure how far she could hear, but he didn’t want to put it to the test. “What are you thinking?”
“So far, the others have been alright. Surprisingly so. Brennan and Derek seem like good guys, and the fact that they don’t love the system is helpful. You might be able to trust them.”
“What about the other?”
“Artemis? She’s still a wild card. You heard her defend the Church, right?”
“Yeah, but so did the others.”
“Not in the same way, Matt. To her, everything about the Church is normal. And if I’m hearing what they are all saying the right way, the Church controls most of the adventurers. I think she probably works for them.”
“As a spy?”
“Not quite, I don’t think. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if she reported things back to them, even things the others think of as secret. Remember, it all seems normal to her. If the Church ends up being a bunch of great guys who are really trustworthy and kind, that’s fine. But I think you are a threat to them, no matter what. That makes this all unpredictable.”
“Why would I be a threat? I hardly care about them. And I’m not going to be here long.”
“Because, dummy, you are here explicitly to change things. To them, you are the wild card. And they are currently holding almost all the power. When someone’s winning, change is bad for them.”
“So we keep an eye on them. Agreed.”
Comments
Jake Holland
Matt is really, really strong now. So he can jump really high, and then when he reaches terminal velocity falling back down, he can redirect his momentum to go right back up. And he can do this twice, meaning he can effectively triple jump.
Lyncher98
Tftc
