Chapter 56: Gestalt (Patreon)

“Lily, you goddamn moron!” Will yelled. He had tried to send her a chat message alongside his shout, but apparently, being part of the same team did not automatically put them into a party. “You can’t fight that thing!”

Her character profile wasn’t open to him, but he’d seen enough of her with Pages of the Past to tell that she was absolutely not equipped to take the gold-rank gestalt down. If it had managed to get a skill as rare as corruption resistance—albeit at bronze—then it almost certainly had counters to everything Lily could strike at it with.

The fact that the top-ranked human had not only fled for his life but also forced the problem onto another party spoke volumes as to their ability to take the kaiju down.

Not that Lily cared, apparently. The low-silver Hunter leapt forward, a skill called Hunter’s Intuition constantly active as she bounded towards the gestalt.

That thing had been piloted by someone back on Earth’s surface. Will wasn’t sure if it still was, so he didn’t know how predictable it would be, but either way, it presented a massive and immediate danger.

He inspected it again as he trailed behind Lily, keeping a wary eye on the distance between him and the gestalt, which was lounging atop the corpses of the monsters that littered the beach.

Devouring Gestalt. Level: Gold 2.

This is a clan boss. Since the last time you saw this lovely creature, it has consumed an additional three silver-rank and twenty-one bronze-rank humans. It is also a champion of Elys, Lady of the Lake, an older deity whose vetting process for accepting champions boils down to “whoever has my sigil.”

That might change after your little stunt. Elys is not happy with the champion she is now forced to sponsor, nor is she pleased with the one who forced it upon her. This monster is currently suffering from [Curse of the Lake] in addition to the benefits it gains from the sigil of the Lady of the Lake.

[Curse of the Lake] - Exposure to saltwater sharply decreases the sanity of the affected creature and reduces its resistances. Exposure to freshwater sharply increases the affected creature’s attributes, but its will is forcibly overwritten with that of the Lady of the Lake’s for 1 hour.

“You’re trolling me,” Will spoke aloud. “That cannot be real.”

The heavy presence at the back of the mind that he’d long since recognized was the presence of the Hunger providing him power shifted, and Will got the impression that the other god was laughing.

“Fuck you too,” he said. “You can’t even hide your own feelings from me. I can tell you’re nervous, too.”

The Hunger was pissed at him, which Will supposed made sense. He had, after all, extorted the god for an abnormal amount of power and extremely favorable conditions only to throw his leverage away after he’d confirmed that the Hunger would give him what he needed.

But the god wouldn’t act against him. Will knew that it had a lot invested in him going far in this trial, and despite its divinity, it couldn’t suppress its worry for him.

“Seriously, though,” Will said, looking up. “How is it my fault that you don’t vet your champions?”

To be fair, he’d fully exploited that lack of examination to protect Survivor Hill from the gestalt, but…

The worst part of this was that the curse didn’t even kneecap the monster. All it did was make it less sane, which would’ve been pretty neat as a debuff if not for the fact that it was already a mindless, rampaging monster. That didn’t even cover what would happen if it got into fresh water, if there even was any on this island—Will could guess what a massive monster with a goddess that was pissed at him specifically would do.

His immediate concerns required his attention, though, and they took the form of Lily dodging in the space between the tightly packed rain of bone-spears. Her skills combined with innate agility were giving her just enough of an edge to not get hit by the gold-rank attacks, but she didn’t have anything that would let her hit up a full rank.

Hit up a rank… hold on.

Will hadn’t been able to land a solid hit on it thanks to its bronze-rank Corruption Resistance skill before. His own bronze-rank Decaying Touch had been resisted and hadn’t taken effect—but it had evolved with everything else when Will had advanced to silver rank.

Okay. Will still didn’t want to get into this fight, but if he didn’t need to punch up two full ranks, he could at least significantly damage the gestalt. With its size and power, he was sure it would have a way to deal with silver-rank corruption too, but it wasn’t impossible.

“Fortress!” Will called. “Cover her! If she dies, we’re fucked!”

The elemental responded reluctantly, a shroud of radiant magma forming around him.

Will sent his phantasm surging forward, unwilling to get close enough to the kaiju for its defensive attacks to kill him. During its immaterial phase, he could push it through the continually falling bone spears without worrying about them breaking his phantasm.

Lily was far ahead of him, conjured spears shining bright. She kicked herself high off the ground as another set of massive bone shards came soaring through the sky.

This time, the shards were spread across enough of a radius that they were going to hit him even if he tried to teleport away.

“Christ,” he muttered. “Murderhobos are a pain in the ass.”

Will gauged the distance between the shards and the ground as their dark figures blotted out the sun. As the shadows solidified into deadly sharp spears, he slowed time.

Skill: [Time in a Bottle]

- Spell (chronomancy).

- Cost: high mana per second.

- Cooldown: scales based on how long the skill is used.

Silver

Accelerates your perception of time, enabling you to experience twenty seconds for each second that passes outside.

Silver-rank addition: previous effect of time dilation is doubled. At high mana cost, you can increase your movement speed for one objective second, though this effect ends if you use another skill or an attack.

At silver, this skill was extraordinarily effective as a last-second dodge technique, especially against telegraphed attacks. Will’s mana had refreshed enough that he was comfortable chewing through it in order to keep himself from getting hit.

The rain of spears was centered more on Lily, so there was enough space for Will to easily identify a gap between the gold-rank’s bodily weapons before letting time accelerate back to normal.

Sand burst up into his eyes, obscuring his vision as the impacts of the spears kicked the entire beach up into a dusty cloud. Will got above it all with an air-dash, mindful of his mana quickly dipping with his assortment of flashy high-cost skills.

The gestalt still hadn’t moved. It didn’t even consider them a threat right now.

Rather than dodging, Will saw, Lily had propelled herself further into the air, using the bone spears as platforms to leap from. She was up even higher than Will now.

He had to admit that it was impressive. Though he was too far to use Pages of the Past and see what skill she was using to be so agile, he could tell that it was obviously magic letting her be so inhumanly good at gymnastics.

A flash of light followed by a spurt of dark blood from the fleshy centipede-like gestalt’s side indicated that Lily had managed to throw one of her spears, though the lowered visibility caused by the minor sandstorm that Lu Jie and the kaiju had whipped up made it hard to tell exactly what was happening.

The effect, however, was obvious—nothing. The devouring gestalt didn’t even make a noise of pain. Instead, an entire array of legs that were little more than sharpened bone and chitin struck out at mind-bending speed.

Will saw Lily’s spear flash with light again, then go quiet. He didn’t receive a notification that she was dead, though, so he assumed he was still alive. He hoped so, at least. Taking his first loss of the tournament this early because of a dumbass teammate was not on his to-do list.

“Get the fuck back!” he shouted angrily. “You can’t do anything to it!”

The same legs flicked out once more, but a sudden wall of bright fire pierced the storm, blocking off the entire beach from ocean to meadow. Though it didn’t seem to do significant harm to the gestalt, the silver-rank spell came with some kind of protective barrier in it. Bone crushed through radiant forcefields, smashing it to pieces, but it provided enough cover for the dark figure that Will recognized as Lily to bounce backwards.

“He’s gotten real strong,” Lily said down below. Will’s silver-rank hearing caught the words even through the chaos of the battlefield. “Damn. It’d take me a while to take him down.”

So she still thought she could beat him, but not now. Did she have some kind of superior item that would let her increase in power over time like Will did? She seemed to be a strong single-target fighter just like him, so there was a possibility—

As Will’s mind ran through what avenue Lily could possibly use to defeat a gold-rank monsters, the kaiju moved.

It was faster than it had been just before they’d entered the trial. Every step it took shook the ground beneath it. Will thought he could hear the sound of distorted screaming with its movements, but he wasn’t sure if he was making that up.

His ears pricked at a terrible grinding sound within the behemoth, which was approaching a hundred feet in length now.

It scuttled forward like a snake, its corpse-formed body oscillating with horrific speed as it approached the three of them. Will dashed backwards, using the pieces of the hunger phantasm he could spare to glide. The gestalt didn’t even bother to slow down when parts of it caught fire as it ran over Fortress’ spell, napalm-like magma sticking to its body and burning flesh away but not appreciably harming the entire body.

During the entire fight, Will had kept a safe distance from the monster, but two hundred feet quickly became a hundred, then less than that.

Cursing, he sent his hunger phantasm out, full-force, enveloping what looked most like a head, blocking its vision.

That wasn’t enough. Either it could see through magical darkness or it simply had other senses, because it charged on.

Will felt the moment his aura enforced itself upon the gestalt—and he felt the moment its gold-rank aura overpowered his, preventing him from tearing it down. Its aura control was horrifically precise, and even if it wasn’t quite as good as his was with directed training, it was a full rank higher than him.

But he didn’t need the hunger aura. He didn’t need the ineffective fire spells from Fortress, nor did he need whatever Lily was doing.

Okay, she’s running away like a little bitch now that she knows she can’t hurt it. Will had to take a moment to sigh at that. What an awful teammate.

Thirty feet. Even with his movement abilities assisting him through the air, the gestalt had so many legs that it was gaining rapidly.

Now that it was within his range of fine control, Will used the phantasm to blanket its skin, manifesting it physically.

As expected, the monster adapted immediately, bony protrusions quickly bursting out of its body to break his phantasm, but that moment of contact was enough.

In a single instant, Will expended the bulk of his remaining mana.

You have marked [Devouring Gestalt] for death.

[Decaying Touch] has been cast through the [Hunger Phantasm].

You have inflicted a level of silver-rank [Corruption] on [Devouring Gestalt].

[Devouring Gestalt] has attempted to resist [Decaying Touch].

[Devouring Gestalt]’s [Corruption Resistance] (Bronze) failed to negate the effects of [Decaying Touch] (Silver).

An instant later, the sound of scuttling was abruptly drowned out by the ring of a bell tolling, necrotic energy coursing through the gestalt as Will doubled the amount of corruption inflicted on it and added a layer of wither.

The entire eighty-foot-long flesh and bone centipede froze up in a moment, seizing up as distorted corruption worked its way down the front of its body.

Then, abruptly, the massive chunk of stitched-together skin and viscera that Will had assumed was its head simply tumbled to the ground, nearly a fifth of the entire gestalt vanishing like a gecko shedding its tail.

The kaiju further proved itself to be the prey animal in this scenario by immediately reversing its direction, dashing towards the meadow with crazed haste. Will sensed his aura overwhelm the gestalt’s, sapping of it of stamina and mana to restore his own, and though he welcomed it, it took him a moment to realize why his hunger aura had abruptly started working again.

Oh, he thought. It’s scared of me.

He tumbled to the ground, his hunger phantasm depleted enough that he couldn’t make proper wings. Wind Walker and Escape Artist lessned his fall, and he rolled as he hit the ground, thankful that the damage he’d done was enough to restore him to full health.

The mass of organs and twisted biology that the gestalt had dropped was still suffering from corruption, dark distortion spreading through the entirety of it.

“Don’t go near that,” Will warned Lily and Fortress as they regrouped. “Actually, feel free to go near it, but not before we’re done with this challenge.”

He mentally cursed himself for revealing his corruption, but it had to be done. Will would not have been able to survive a fight against the full power of the gold-rank gestalt without his corruption.

“Holy shit,” Lily said, a newfound awe in her voice. “Didn’t realize you had more than just cheap tricks in you. Scaring off a clan boss? I mean, man, even I can’t do that.”

“Great,” Will deadpanned. “Now I have the respect of someone who thinks a human life is worth a buck fifty.”

“They’re worth more than that,” Lily said. “At least twenty dollars. Inflation hurts.”

And now she was joking with him, as if the capacity to commit acts of horrific violence were the only criteria she had for picking friends. Will made a resolution to ditch her as soon as he could.

“You,” Fortress thundered. “You use chaos and corruption. You are the reason why your planet will fail. You will repeat the folly of Arcadia.”

Will tilted his head, staring at Fortress flatly. He let his hunger aura pulse out, resisting the urge to laugh as the high silver fire elemental flinched back.

“Don’t be so scared,” he said coldly. “This folly of mine just saved your life. I’ve had enough of you wasting my time. While that thing’s scared to shit, we’re going to find a changeling. Now hurry the fuck up and follow me unless you want to join that thing.”

Right on cue, a chunk of flesh hit the sand, falling apart as the fallen head deteriorated under the effects of two layers of corruption.

Will walked away, not bothering to look back. He opened a chat window to Caiyeri, intent on coordinating their meetup.

Fortress and Lily followed in his footsteps, one of them unwilling to contest him for fear of his power and the other perversely obsessed with his strength.

This challenge can’t end soon enough.