When your mana has finally recharged, you resign yourself to having to climb the tower again. You don't feel nearly well-rested enough to try it, but damn it all, your friend need help. So, you begin your climbing. You're not even halfway up when you start sweating, but you haven't fainted yet, which is nice. You don't plan on looking down, considering you already know damn well that you'll die if you fall now. As you go up, you feel a headache coming on, on just one side of your head. You squeeze four of your eyes shut, trying to push away the discomfort, but it doesn't help. In fact, it just makes it worse. When your eyes open, they feel warm and itchy, which is just what you wanted for this absolute joy of a sensation.
Then you look ahead, and nearly fall. From the right side, you see a squirming mass of limbs, undulating and moving incessantly. Looking over, raising your fist as some sort of futile defence against whatever this monsterously huge thing is, you get a good look at it. It looks like... a leech? A huge leech with a truly massive abdomen, swollen with something blue and glowing. It keeps on moving, and all along its body in seemingly random places are long lines of hair. Those "limbs" you saw out the corner of your eye. They don't seem to do much other than move around incessantly, in ways that should be impossible. Despite that, it is still moving is a sort of wavy pattern. At the very top of the creature, not too far from the window you plan to climb through, you can see the head. Three massive spikes (teeth?) seem to embed itself into the tower, and four long, far more solid-looking limbs at the top seem to anchor it as well. As it keeps moving and seemingly eating, it doesn't seem to take note of you. Considering the size difference and your current condition, you hope to keep it that way. You need to get to the top.
You keep on climbing, as the headache seems to weaken, but the leech remains. This thing can't be real. It's not like you would have missed that thing, it's huge, nearly 20 meters long and covering a large portion of the tower. That arm is causing more side-effects, isn't it?
You'll deal with it later. Though this is starting to be a lot to unpack.
Fortunately, the shocking encounter distracted you from being so tired. You reach the window, though you need a little help to get through it. As soon as you have solid ground underneath you, you proceed to collapse, your legs falling out from under you. Yunikki is quick to jump to your side, and you give her some platitudes, to make sure she doesn't worry too much. You're just tired, it'll be fine. The old man has been collecting bones, in the meantime, and he found a very large book that he feels wouldn't be missed from this collection. Some old, inaccurate atlas they meant to throw away for some time now. Of course, jamming 15 bones in there isn't exactly easy, but it was a very large book you just don't need an entire bone, just a shard will do. By the end of it, the book is quite obviously nigh unreadable, but it might still work.
Now, you just need to get it to the brain. You begin walking with this collection of paper that might generously be called a book, covered in all manner of sharpened bone that took you about an hour to get right. You feel ready to pass out, honestly, especially now that you're all out of mana. You have no sensation in your fingers, but you're still conscious at least.
The sad thing is, killing the brain was... uneventful? When you handed it the book, your pinworks just went off and ripped the soul out of the creature. It almost instantly disappeared in a puff, not even giving you time to trap it! The body of the creature follows soon after. Turns out that doombolts kill the target by tearing the soul out without the rebound effect. It makes sense for necromancy, intact corpses make for good minions.
Before you get any ideas, however, this corpse is functionally worthless. It's immobile, and most of its power came from magical brainpower, of which it wouldn't even have as a zombie. It'd be a big bag of blubber that you couldn't even shape into a proper golem (unless you want a braingolem. Which is as gross as it is of questionable use.)
The tower is yours...
Now what, though? You should head back and get those books and parchment in the hands of those who need it, but you had a plan for when the tower was clear, right?Basic Stats
Level: 13
Health: 20/50
Poison stings: 1/1
Restraint 1/3
Mana: 00/60
Items and equipment
Items:
410 gold coins
Magic Cookbook.
Book On Far Eastern Royalty
5 rations
Equipment:
Scimitar
D-VA armor
Skills and spells
Magic:
Summon Tome: You can take out your piece of the Tome of Eternal Darkness from seemingly nowhere. Others cannot see the book unless you want them to, and it's still headache-inducing to do so.
Resurrect vermin: Allows you to resurrect very small creatures such as rats(invests 2 of your max mana) (no mana cost)
Resurrect average beast: Allows you to resurrect creatures such as dogs, cats and other similar-sized creatures.(invests 7 mana) (no mana cost)
Resurrect Humanoid: Allows you to resurrect humanoid creatures. (Invests 10 mana) (Costs 14 mana)
Reshape minion plus!: Allows you to majorly change the appearance of your resurrected minions.
Control Undead: Allows you to attempt to control an undead that doesn't belong to you. (mana cost of 2 per second, unmastered)
Minion Vision: Allows you to see what a minion sees. The minion must have eyes.
Disintegrate undead: Delete a corpse you currently control.
Animate Piece: Allows you to animate just a piece of dead tissue. It requires your constant attention, and cannot act independently. (Drains 0 mana)
Graft: Allows you to use dead tissue as a replacement limb. Requires a lot of mana. (1 per second) (average limb takes around 20 seconds to properly graft)
Gather Soul: Allows you to make a soul visible. You could try putting it in a flame of some sort to keep it around. (9 mana)
Soul battery: Allows you to use a soul-infused flame as a small mana-boost. This snuffs it out, however
Undead flashbang: Allows you to blow up a minion for a flash-bang effect. (9 mana)
Stitch: allows you to close a wound and stop bleeding as fast as you can stitch. Costs zero mana, but requires something to stitch with.
Siphoning Cloud: Breathe out a cloud that drains the life from victims and gives it to you. Adds a LOT to intimidation (4 mana)
Smoke Cloud: Breathe out harmless but thick smoke. (1 mana)
Deathbolt: A bolt that hurts the body's connection with it's soul. Causes minor wounds to appear over the body as it attempts to compensate (1 mana)
Doombolt: A more powerful version of the above (4 Mana)
Pinworks: You can apply spells into a bone spike, relative to the size of the victim. You can also make traps if you use an offensive spell. Allows creation of free zombies.
Cantrip
Spark: Allows you to set something on fire, provided it is flammable to start with.
Skills:
Claws: Your arm has been replaced with a powerful claw. This is BOUND to you, and cannot be removed. Also, Alexia, your insane alter ego, lives in it now. She can decide where her face appears, at least, signified with a green ring.
Pride: You have a mind-controlling leech in your arm. This is so mindblowingly unethical/illegal it would put you in "kill on sight" status with a lot of organisations/people.
Broodmother: Once per day, you can sting something to create spiderlings, which are large, clever spiders that adore you by default. Your instincts cause you to be VERY protective of them. (not possible right now)
Crossbow usage: Novice
Adaptation: You regenerate mana faster than most
Gun usage: Novice
Oral Fixation: Can cast spells spells from the mouth.
Draining: Can drain blood using fangs.
Incredible experience in blocking and swordplay.
Climber
Crafty: Bolas
Cooking skill: Excellent
Corpse Cutting: Quite Decent.
Animal handling: inexperienced.
Necromantic knowledge
Soul Sniffer
Author
Topic: Web of Life: A Drider's Adventure (Ended) (Read 189563 times)