The Red Forest (2)
One of the King of the Red Trees opened an eye among its six.
Its roots had detected the intrusion of some creature.
Small in size, yet carrying a fair amount of weight — perhaps one of the winged things had become ensnared.
The winged things. That arrogant brood, forever poking and prodding every corner of this place on the orders of the Black Old King.
But the King of the Red Trees was fond of them. They tasted exquisite.
The mere thought of that rich, succulent flesh set its mandibles dripping. A single drop of saliva slid down its long jaw, and the cocoons carpeting the ground around it gave a faint shudder.
The King knew well what effect its secretions had on other creatures.
Even beasts that came to slay it became instant slaves the moment they consumed the red substance. They would let the King tear off and devour their own heads, craving only more of the red matter.
Using this power, it had devoured every living thing in one territory after another, then moved on — again and again. After hundreds of winters, its power had grown to the point that even the Black Old King regarded it with wariness.
One day, I will devour that insolent king as well. So the King vowed as it waited for a new slave to approach.
But no matter how long it waited, the unidentified intruder never appeared before it.
What came instead was an unpleasant sensation — pain and loss. That feeling it had known only in its young and helpless days stirred awake again, pricking at it like needles.
Someone was destroying its treasure vault.
The instant the King grasped this, rage flooded through it.
Who dares defy me, King of the Red Forest?
The first suspect to surface was the Black Old King — come in person, dragging its colossal bulk, to punish the one who had devoured its herald.
But the King dismissed the thought almost at once. The Black Old King it had seen was an enormously massive being. If that thing had descended here, it would have been impossible for the King not to notice.
Beyond that, various candidates came to mind — the serpent dwelling beneath the earth, the beast of the sky, the monsters roosting on the mountain peaks — but not a single one fit.
Evidently, the intruder rampaging through its territory was a newcomer to this place.
No. It no longer mattered who the thing was.
The intruder that had wrecked the prey it had labored so long to gather deserved death.
The King of the Red Trees sent a signal through the roots threading the soil beneath it: seize the intruder and drag it here.
At once, several cocoons nearby split open, and the creatures inside burst out into the open air.
Their appearances and species varied wildly, but they all shared one trait — the red moss coating their bodies. Every one of them was his loyal slave.
"GRAAAAAGH!"
"Grrrrrrr!"
"Keng! Keng-keng!"
The slaves, answering the King's command, charged out to drag back the target.
It needed only to wait at its leisure, and the slaves would bring the wicked intruder before it. That was how it had always gone.
But once again, reality refused to follow the King's expectations.
One by one, its senses of the slaves it had sent out to seize the prey began to go dark.
The clamor that had echoed through the forest moments ago had fallen utterly silent now. A sinister stillness hung over the whole of the woods.
And that ache in its roots — the one it had been feeling since before — was steadily deepening.
At first it had felt like pinpricks; now it was agony, as though a swarm of insects were gnawing at it alive.
This was no longer a matter confined to its storehouse of prey. Its roots, spread across a vast domain, were under simultaneous attack at every point.
Finally, unable to endure the pain any longer, the King opened all six of its eyes.
The King knew exactly how to act in such a situation. It focused its senses into its own roots and began severing, piece by piece, every region where the pain was felt.
Each amputated root brought considerable agony of its own, but it was a far gentler thing than being devoured alive by a swarm of vermin.
By the time it had pruned away the broad-reaching roots, its domain had shrunk to a fraction of what it was.
It was obvious that reclaiming that territory would take a very long time. The King resolved to send out even more slaves and bring the creature down.
Just as it was about to transmit the signal, something caught its eye.
It assumed the light was simply filtering through the branches. Some of the tangled boughs that blotted out the sky must have snapped, letting the sun pour through.
But it was wrong. What hung there was a mass of shimmering bubbles ablaze with countless colors — bubbles of light and hue that writhed like living things.
Where had they come from? Who had made them? There was no way to know. There was only the wave of bubbles, dazzling to the point of vertigo, surging toward it.
At the sight of the oncoming foam, the King's heart began to pound furiously.
Alarm — and fear. Emotions that had lain dormant in its memory.
The King screamed without meaning to, frantically urging its slaves to sweep the bubbles away.
Only moments ago the slaves had rushed out to protect it — but not now. Even as the King shrieked, the cocoons around it did not so much as twitch.
As though its commands simply were not reaching them.
Before it knew it, the bubbles had arrived right in front of it. It hurried to wrench its rooted lower body free of the earth — but it was too late.
The bubbles came creeping in and began to cling to its body. Wherever they touched, its hard carapace started to crumble.
The King did not savor hunting its own prey, but that did not make it weak. Its carapace was immensely hard, and its wings strong enough to bear its tremendous weight.
But against the bubbles, none of it mattered.
Like a serpent constricting its meal, the foam coiled around it. It remembered the time, back when it was still frail and young, when the serpent below the earth had ambushed it — the most nightmarish hours of its life. At the memory, it thrashed its whole body in resistance.
But just as it had been helpless in that memory, reality did not change in the slightest. The bubbles clung on all the tighter, as if mocking its struggles.
In that endless heap of colored light and shimmer, the King of the Red Trees slowly suffocated.
...Well, I didn't see that coming.
Before me lay the master of the Red Forest — the Glacier Fiend — collapsed halfway out of the soil, its body plastered with bubbles of every imaginable color.
On a frozen world where everything was locked in ice, the thing looked for all the world like a man who had fallen into a lake and drowned, barely clinging to life.
And here I thought Psychic Breath was the impressive one.
The Color of the Abyss applied to three traits: Monster's Tentacles, Psychic Reflection Carapace, and Gaze of Horror.
In the case of Monster's Tentacles, the enhancement hadn't gone to the tentacles themselves but to the Psychic Breath they fired.
The empowered Psychic Breath had changed from a beam of searing heat to the projection of a sphere.
When a sphere made contact with its target, it spawned bubbles carrying a disintegrating effect. And those bubbles didn't vanish when the target did — they hurled themselves at the next victim nearby.
Only when there was nothing left to consume in the vicinity did they finally dissipate, like a plague of locusts stripping a grain field to the stalk. All that remained where they dissolved was a slick, sticky residue.
That was more or less how I'd verified the new Psychic Breath's performance, looting the Fiend's pantry on the way. And while I was at it, I decided to test the other traits too.
Next up was the Psychic Reflection Carapace — but unfortunately, no special effect emerged. I'd probably need to take an actual psychic attack to see what it truly did.
That left Gaze of Horror. A trait that torments an intelligent being with terrifying hallucinations until it goes mad.
A little while ago, while fleeing the Fiend's slaves, I'd resolved to use it on them. Honestly, I hadn't expected much — as far as I knew, it only worked on sapient minds. I'd figured that at best it might slow them down or bind them for a moment, and used it on a whim.
But the result blew far past my expectations.
It's on a whole different level.
When I activated Gaze of Horror, my strength drained away for an instant even as a single bubble of interwoven green and violet took form.
The bubble, radiating an eerie iridescence, drifted serenely through the air and latched onto the head of a Winter Walker chasing me down. The instant it touched, it swelled explosively and swallowed the creature's head whole.
The thing that had taken the bubble full in the face raged like a madman for a few moments before collapsing.
The truly frightening part came next. The moment its target fell, the entire mass of foam detonated.
The bubbles blasted outward, latching onto other slaves nearby, and coiled around their heads exactly as they had with the Winter Walker.
Physical force — and contagion. The enhancement Gaze of Horror had received was transmission through the medium of the bubbles.
Its range had shortened, but its power had skyrocketed. Better still, its targets were no longer limited to sapient minds; it now worked on a whole host of other creatures as well.
Once I'd cleaned up the slaves that came after me, I tested it on the Glacier Fiend itself. If it worked on that thing, every hunt from here on would become incomparably easier.
I bounded through the forest, activating Gaze of Horror again and again. Countless bubbles slipped between the trees and streaked toward the Fiend.
Now that's a real advantage.
The range had shrunk, yes — but I could fire it over and over. Against a fast-moving enemy it might be useless, but against a target pinned to one spot like this, it was devastatingly effective.
And so the Glacier Fiend, struck down by Gaze of Horror without ever understanding what was happening, collapsed before a being far weaker than itself.
I had no idea it would be this easy.
The Glacier Fiend was a far trickier opponent than the Ice Horror, which just bull-rushed everything. Without the Color of the Abyss, I could never have dispatched its slaves this cleanly.
The creatures were merely addicted to the narcotic moss — all their original abilities remained intact. If anything, they were more dangerous, since they neither feared death nor felt pain.
Worse still, creatures yearning to become its slaves streamed into the Red Forest without end; no matter how many you killed, there would always be more.
And that wasn't to say the main body was weak.
Hardened carapace with resistance to all manner of attacks, and wings fast enough for rapid flight. In a contest of pure close combat, it was a match for a White Gallagon.
Its only real weakness was its slow movement on land — and even that hardly counted as one, given the wings.
And I had brought down a predator that dangerous without so much as a scratch.
Kill first, figure it out after.
The Glacier Fiend had only lost consciousness — it wasn't dead yet. I closed the distance.
Its stag-beetle-like head was slathered in a riot of multicolored foam. All six of its eyes had rolled back, and bloody froth was bubbling steadily from its mouth.
I swung the pincer on my tail down onto its neck. With a heavy boom, cracks spidered across the carapace covering its throat.
A few more blows finished shattering it, and I raised my tail high to crush the neck entirely.
And that's the end of— guh?!
Passive defense engaged — physical agony dampened.
A pain far more violent than anything I had ever felt in my life erupted from the tip of my tail. My legs buckled before I knew it, and I crumpled onto the dirt.
H-h-hot! It burns!
A searing, white-hot agony — and out of nowhere, a memory from my childhood surfaced.
When I was young, I'd been in a car accident and suffered severe burns. I spent most of my childhood in a hospital because of it.
That horrific scalding pain from back then was being replayed through my body right now.
I-I have to stay conscious!
Semitext boxes popped up in front of me, one after another, as if the system had short-circuited.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to check whether my body was actually on fire.
There was no flame raging anywhere on my body. Even as my mind clouded over, I threw everything I had into focusing my auxiliary organs.
The four auxiliary organs beneath my jaw set out to find the source of the agony that was killing me — and discovered something clinging to the tip of my tail.
On the surface of the pincer was a smear of foam, shimmering with blended colors.
The Color!
I flung my jaws wide and bit down hard on the middle of my own tail. Chunks of flesh tore away in ribbons, but I felt no pain from it at all.
The searing agony streaming from the foamed-over section was so utterly overwhelming that no other sensation could register.
Even as I gnawed at my own tail, I kept my eyes fixed on the foam engulfing the pincer.
The bubbles were growing — slowly, but steadily. What had begun as a slight seepage had now swallowed the pincer whole.
Ghk—!
The pain was so extreme my jaws went slack. Unable to bite down any longer, I released my tail and hauled on it with my combat arms and legs.
My tail made a sickening sound. Muscles tore; bones snapped. The carapace and synthetic scales had been pulverized long ago.
The foam had already devoured the entire pincer. That heap of grotesque, shimmering light was now coming for the rest of my tail.
My mind was already at its breaking point under the crushing agony.
Come on—!
I poured every last ounce of strength into my combat arms. In the end, I managed — barely — to tear my tail free.
Two-thirds of my tail dropped to the ground. The foam clinging to the severed piece lost its distinctive luster in an instant.
With the source removed, the scalding agony that had been crushing my brain vanished as though it had all been a lie. Pain welled up from the stump in its place, but I had no strength left to hurt.
As I lay facedown, half-conscious, a new text box appeared before my eyes.
Partial evolution conditions for Sub-adult → Adult have been fulfilled.
APEX: 2/30 (Requirement not met)
With the Glacier Fiend's death, the light drained from the bubbles clinging to its body.
The Fiend was dead, and the bubbles had changed from before — but I couldn't let myself relax.
The bubbles made by Psychic Breath never stopped until their target was gone. Just because circumstances had changed didn't mean this foam had truly lost its effect. I had no way of knowing for certain.
......
Staring at it wouldn't accomplish anything, so I stretched out a single finger and poked the foam.
I fully intended to lop the finger off the instant any pain began — but no matter how long I waited, I felt nothing.
So it loses its effect when the target dies.
Evidently the bubbles created by Gaze of Horror, unlike Psychic Breath, worked on a creature's mind.
It probably conjures the very pain the victim considers most unbearable.
The moment the foam touched me, I'd felt the agony of burning. The Glacier Fiend and the slaves who'd been caught in it must have endured something much the same.
...I'd better be careful with this.
Experiencing it firsthand made one thing clear.
My newly acquired Color of the Abyss was, in every sense of the phrase, a double-edged sword.