Chapter 2: The Pieces Move
When Raine Talis cut the mountain in two, it was entirely by accident.
At Peak Bismuth, the sheer amount of power in her newly S-tier attack Skill, [Khuroon’s Sunfire Spear of Wrath], was beyond what she expected. She had simply been trying to kill an Azoth-rank World Elite, but it seemed that putting maximum effort into the Skill was not at all necessary. It wasn’t a large mountain, for the war-world, but the grinding, thundering collapse of the mountain slopes was a sobering reminder of how much power she actually wielded.
“There is no such thing as overkill,” Leese quoted to her over radio link, the two of them standing on the air as they watched the slow motion disaster of the falling mountainside. Though, that was the entire reason for the war-worlds. In a few days, or maybe even hours, all evidence of the blow would be gone as essence remade the landscape.
“I suppose not, out here,” Raine agreed, glancing down at the corpse of the World Elite, which had fared only slightly better than the mountain. Instead of being entirely cut in half, it was only mostly cut in half. Still enough to make it dead.
The pair of them descended to the burnt-and-frozen corpse, to harvest some of the more lucrative bits to turn in to the System store. It seemed almost pointless after some ten years of the same had packed their Estates full of salvage, but it would have been awful to miss out on something they needed, whether material or money, simply because they couldn’t be bothered to loot the corpses. Of course, that all depended on finding a store in the first place, and with the sheer size of the war-world, that was proving difficult. Their Estates were packed full of valuable scavenge, but none of it was directly useful to them.
“You’d think we’d get a quest to help us find one,” Raine said, scowling at the System interface as she shared her thoughts on the availability of towns through the link. Aside from the rank-up quest, the only quest available was the [Crusade].
It wasn’t even a quest they could ignore. It was a constant pressure, a drift in a direction against Cato. Fortunately, it was a drift they could correct for. The cold, indifferent logic of the combat framework did not change, and helped correct for any outside influence that tried to affect them. That particular benefit was most obvious when they dealt with enemies wielding mental influences or illusions, but over the years it had probably done more work pushing back against the quest.
“At this rate we’ll hit Azoth before we leave,” Leese sighed. Raine snorted agreement. The only thing left was another Feat of Glory — which were not easy to come by, and not something they were specifically looking for, but certainly not something they would pass up, either. They’d come a long way from their first, hasty entry, fleeing for their lives from every Azoth beast, but reaching Azoth themselves would make the war-world far easier to deal with.
For one thing, it would be easier to move around. Even at Bismuth, the scale of War-World Osk made their movement Skills feel slow, and they’d crossed the equivalent of multiple worlds worth of distance with no sign of habitation. They had thought that going up high would let them spot something useful, but there were Alum-rank monsters lurking that far up, on the floating islands that peppered the sky — to say nothing of oppressive, deity-level bands of essence wrapped around the planet only a few hundred miles beyond those.