Chapter 333: At the Edge of the World
Rubedo dismissed the logistical readouts of the Morval foundries. The automated conveyors and blast furnaces churned through the harvested monster cores at a constant rate. Building a continent-spanning industrial complex required years of background processing.
He swiped the macro-management tab to the corner of his crystal console and pulled up the tactical grid for the Fourth Continent. Crimson markers dotted the map where the automated dungeon outbreaks continued to fracture the landscape.
The game engine triggered these rifts to compensate for the sudden lack of deities, and if a new deity had taken over a territory ruled by another god. In a way, it was a safety mechanism of the affected god.
If the player was inactive and didn’t log in, even for a week, two years would pass in the game. To stop the player from losing his territory to another player and preventing the affected player from losing interest in the game for losing his territory, the game had a defense mechanism, which was this automated event.
During that event, the affected player would have a chance to log in and reclaim his territory, by attacking the player when they would already be busy dealing with the automated defense event.
"Now that I think about it..." Rubedo checked his profile and progress. "A little over five years have passed since I was summoned here, and according to the timeline, it has only been 15 days outside. But if I count my time from 2024, around 50 years have passed. This feels so weird."
Rubedo switched the display to a different sector. The camera zoomed in on the extreme western coastline of the Seventeenth Continent. A colossal spatial tear hovered over the ocean.
Gorak had fought a continuous tide of migrating anomalies there for over a year.
’The system generated an automated notification for the Fourth Continent rifts while remaining entirely silent regarding the tear at the edge of the seventeenth continent,’ Rubedo analyzed. He tapped his fingers against the armrest. ’The server treats the coastal anomaly as an undocumented error rather than a scheduled event. Is someone exploiting a bug?’
He accessed the live telemetry of the shoreline to check on Gorak.
Black blood pooled across the coastal rocks in an expanding lake. Gorak ripped his war-axe from the pulverized skull of a winged aberration. He kicked the twitching carcass onto a towering pile of slaughtered beasts.
"Is this the best you ugly bastards can do?" Gorak spat a glob of blood onto the wet stones. "I get more of a workout hauling coal in the Onyx Hall."
Blue lightning cascaded down his armored arms and leaped across the steel haft of his weapon. The extradimensional tear bled unnatural light across the churning water. Another wave of twisted silhouettes poured through the breach.
Gorak planted his plated boots into the blood-soaked bedrock to secure his footing. Searing electricity gathered in his free hand. A colossal serpent launched itself from the portal. Gorak unleashed a blinding column of blue lightning directly into the monster’s open maw.
The electrical surge instantly vaporized the creature into a cloud of falling ash. He swung his war-axe in a massive horizontal arc to intercept a second beast diving from above. The blade cleaved cleanly through thick chitin and sent the severed halves spiraling into the dark sea below.
"Next." Gorak rolled his shoulders to shake loose a severed claw stuck in his bone-plating. "Come down here and earn your death."
The extradimensional tear reacted to the concentrated biomass scattered across the beach as boiling seawater surged upward from the shoreline to swallow the mountain of corpses. The severed limbs and crushed skulls violently fused together under the blinding light of the rift.
"Oh, wonderful." Gorak rested the flat of his axe against his pauldron. "You learned how to recycle. The Spiral will be thrilled."
A colossal entity pulled itself from the sludge. The guardian possessed a towering exoskeleton constructed entirely from fused bone and hardened chitin. It mirrored Gorak’s exact physical proportions and dropped into a crouched brawler stance.
The beast raised a pair of bladed forelimbs.
Gorak spat another glob of blood and charged the anomaly. He channeled his Abyssal Thunder directly into his right fist. The beast copied his movement and launched itself forward. Their knuckles collided in the center of the rocky beach.
The kinetic impact cratered the bedrock beneath their boots.
"You punch like a sick pup." Gorak bared his serrated teeth.
The creature absorbed the physical blow and attempted to grapple Gorak’s shoulders. Gorak flooded his internal mana core to maximum capacity. A blinding pillar of blue lightning erupted from his chest plate to engulf the monster completely. The extreme voltage overloaded the creature’s stolen biology.
The fused bone plates blistered and popped under the electrical surge. Gorak swung his war-axe to cleave the paralyzed beast completely in half.
"Imitation is just an insult." Gorak grunted as the bisected halves of the guardian crashed onto the wet stones.
A crystalline object wriggled within the exposed spinal column of the lower torso. The parasite launched itself from the gore. It latched its segmented legs directly onto the haft of Gorak’s war-axe.
The blue lightning crackling across the weapon immediately sputtered out. The parasite drove microscopic tendrils into the steel as the Abyssal Thunder drained rapidly from his mana core.
"Get off my weapon." Gorak gripped the parasite with his free hand and attempted to rip it from the weapon. The crystalline legs fused perfectly with the iron socket.
A fresh wave of shrieking wyverns poured out of the spatial tear. Dozens of winged anomalies dove toward the coastline. Gorak needed to deliver the parasitic artifact to the Bastion for analysis.
He swung the infected war-axe with pure physical force to crush the jaw of the first descending wyvern.
"You want to eat my magic?" Gorak laughed and battered a second beast with blunt trauma. "I will beat you all to death with a dead stick and emerge victorious."
"I am Gorak, the warlord of the Spiral!"
Gorak smashed the blunt end of his axe into the nearest wyvern. The skull caved in with a sickening crunch. He ripped the weapon free to intercept another descending monster. The crystalline legs of the parasite dug furiously into the iron haft.
Microscopic tendrils pierced the steel and burrowed straight through the leather grip. A sharp sting flared in the center of Gorak’s palm while the parasite drove its spikes directly into his skin.
"You biting little bastard." Gorak shook his arm to dislodge the weapon.
The parasite fused his hand permanently to the hilt. Blue lightning sparked violently from his mana core to travel down his arm and collide with the invading foreign code.
The blue bolts fractured completely and morphed into a violent crystalline energy that encased his entire right limb in blinding light.
A searing heat chewed through his veins. Gorak watched his own scales crack and blister under the mutated magic. The crystalline energy offered a massive power spike while simultaneously burning his biology to ash. He welcomed the pain with a wide grin.
He swung the fused axe in a wide arc. The new magic unleashed a wave of crystallized force that completely atomized three approaching wyverns. Dozens more wyverns poured from the glowing tear hovering over the ocean.
They swarmed the beach and completely buried the mountain of corpses.
Claws scraped against his armor as the sheer volume of monsters threatened to bury him alive. Holding the shoreline was a complete waste of time. Gorak looked up at the spatial tear.
"If you want my magic so badly, you can have all of it."
Gorak bared his teeth at the swarming monsters. He channeled the new crystalline power into his boots. The kinetic force launched him straight off the bloody rocks. He soared over the snapping jaws of the wyverns and plunged directly into the blinding light of the spatial tear.
He crossed the boundary into the undocumented dimension. Thousands of shrieking monsters waited inside the twisted spawn point. Gorak raised his fused axe and unleashed the mutated energy into the heart of the swarm.
Rubedo watched the telemetry data flood his primary monitor.
The spatial tear coordinates stabilized on the screen to reveal Gorak surrounded by an undocumented biological landscape. An incubation core throbbed with blinding white light right in the center of the terrain.
A multi-armed entity blocked the path to the structure, weaving strands of purple mana between its bladed claws.
The parasite embedded inside Gorak’s palm absorbed the surrounding magic. Crystalline spikes tore out of his skin and multiplied rapidly up his forearm. The foreign code raced toward his chest to target his heart.
Gorak swung his infected axe at the approaching entity to halt the assault.
The entity parried the blow with a pair of crossed blades. It channeled a beam of concentrated energy directly into the parasitic growth on Gorak’s arm. Crystal plating thickened across his ribs to encase his torso. Gorak dropped his weapon onto the sludge and raised his free hand.
Balling his fingers into a fist, he drove his knuckles straight into the center of his own chest. The impact pulverized the encroaching shell into hundreds of tiny shards like a makeshift arsenal harvested directly from his own body.
Gorak scooped a handful of the broken fragments from his torn skin. He lunged forward and hurled the bloody shrapnel straight into the entity’s face.
’I make my own weapons,’ Gorak thought.
The broken pieces shredded the entity’s multiple eyes and embedded deeply into its skull. The blinded creature shrieked, dropping its guard to claw at its ruined sockets.
Gorak stepped inside its reach and gripped it by the throat. He flooded his right arm with Abyssal Thunder and shoved his hand entirely through its torso.
Electrical surges vaporized the internal organs to turn the body into ash. Gorak stepped over the dissolving remains and grabbed the pulsing incubation core.
The crystalline mutation on his arm halted immediately, starved of the magical catalyst it needed to spread.