"So you mean there's a strange spider in there that seems to know everything people will do against it, is super fast and eats nothing. Let me guess, it's starting to move." Aki guessed, smiling at the statue. "And you want me to kill it. A holy quest then!" He grinned. "Tell Ark to explain to my wives and child i love them." Laughing a little before completly entering the abyss. "I'm not allowed to die pepper head, i'm just scared. Hold the buildings for me, will ya?"
A tunnel started forming around Aki's feet, he floated for a bit and suddenly shot with great speed towards his destination, the tunnel closing quickly. It was most certainly not going to be a straight line to where he had to go, but it certainly was burried deep underground.
*****
"NOOOOOO!!!!"
"Clair! What happened?!" Asked Mari as she barreled towards the child, throwing finely organized paperwork to the air.
"I had a nightmare! I saw dad talking to a tall dwarf lady about a dangerous spider monster, then he suddenly flew down a whole with a weird smile. Mom, please take me to dad, I really need to see him right now!" Begged the scared child, tears in her eyes. "I need him to tell me it was just a nightmare!" She screamed, looking like a childish eight years old.
"Of course sweety, your dad isn't so dumb as to just go without any kind of preparations." Said the not actually so sure cat woman as she tried to sooth her child.
Whatever that idiot had done, she was going to kick his nuts for it.
Rapidly finding someone to do her work, Mari even more quickly found out that yes, Aki had skipped town on a quest for the dwarven goddess of earth and was going to kill a mighty beast all on his own. The dwarves and driads were on a ruckus, because apparently someone had been informed that there was going to be a catastrophe level earthquake later on in the fight.
"Dad said something like that in my dreams too. He asked the goddess for help holding the city up..." Mumbled the girl in her arms before bursting into tears. "I don't want that! I don't want dad to be like a hero in the stories! I just want him to stay here!" She babbled, terrified of the notion Aki would go away for years on some stupid god's errand.
*****
Time was a relevant thing, sure, lots of stuff on that, but Aki started to feel like earth was truly not ready for these kinds of things as he saw the pitch black, eyeless monster just receiving his sneak attack with severe injuries, receive it with lesser injuries, use his attack to dig more, and then go back to the second possibility as things set in place, the jet of void consuming a leg and stopping by its abdomen.
It hissed, by vibrating it's whole whole body, greatly infuriated by being interrupted while not really minding the loss of a limb.
"*%%&##@@&(-((%&%%:'" It said something in an echoing monotone, but Aki couldn't understand. He reverberated it, using the absurd amount of mana in the surroundings to power a sound attack to the possibility, which it imediatly detached itself from before launching an attack, less injured or spent than if it had to stand or dissipated the echo of it's own voice weaponized like it saw.
That still ment it was shaken though. It didn't properly understand their battlefield, being stuck to nearby time lines a new experience it had no idea how to utilize to it's favor.
The spider could still launch itself from twenty different possibilities though.
That still ment it had to take a path where it retreated though.
Aki had spent enough time to hit the thing with a wave of gravitational wells, quickly nailing it to the floor and cutting it in half with a blade of void before it could detonate or something.
He changed job and went for the next. Luckily there was a great class available.
Finally reaching the third monster encounter, he noticed that no, neither were alone.
A rainbown slime fought against a shining warrior with armor of hard light, while the ground was littered with purple and black leeches. Aki's first reaction was to throw huge amounts of salt and some thermite bombs all around.
'Shield up, the temperature's going up.' He quickly told the warrior through a rapidly formed mind bridge, not three seconds later bombing the place with a rain of fireballs homing on the slime. When one finally hit it, the thing exploded, reaching an absurd temperature as all the aluminium oxidated to the perfect amount. There were several more explosions around the room, the less digested bombs causing similar cases of molten stone.
Then suddenly the room temperature froze again, and the salt expanded, causing several small pockets of explossions all over the now white room. When the explossions finally stopped, Aki came back from the tunnel he'd first entered the room from, doing his ultmost to find any remaining leech or slime. Neither had survived with enough force remaining to flee from his magical detection, so he quickly finished them off while beggining to aid the super hot guy he'd left in the room.
Sometimes he wondered if good looks were a requirement for being a hero or if being a hero made you exponentially look better till you were almost perfect. Just looking at him made his heart skip a beat. Delicate features, golden and silky hair, a sculpted musculature that would make Michelangelo and other sculptors call themselves completle amateurs for not being able to depict...
Luckily he was not the worst kind of person this guy could find, because he was plenty sure a lot of man that considered themselves straight would start to question that thanks to whatever charm skill this guy had.
Taking the man out of the rubble he was burried under was as simple as lifting him by the arm, nevermind waking him up. As the tall blondie saw his surroundings and sensed no more of his persistent enemies, he turned to nod to the simpler mage in front of him.
"Thank you, i would have been bothered by those two for a lot longer if i had to defeat them by myself. We should be going, i can feel an atrocious battle in that direction. I can carry you if you open up a tunnel directly there." He offered, pleasentries not on his mind even as his naked body was healed.
"It won't be the most stable tunnel if i do it in a speed much higher than my own." Aki pointed out.
"Time is of essence, there are five other champions there, but at least three monstrocities for each one." The man shrugged, implying it really wouldn't matter even if the tunnel was collapsing over his head as the path was oppened by the way he maintained a neutral expression.
"Pleasure working with you then." Smilled the other. "I can't let my daughter waiting for me for too long." He rolled his eyes, not ressisting the tipical princess carry and focussing entirely on creating bursts of excavation in a way as to never stop tunneling. No more words were exchanged as the adonis assumed a running possition and his muscles tightened, bursting into motion as the way opened and constantly accelerating as Aki got faster and faster thanks to the building familiarity with the tecnique.
It was only after a dozen minutes that they reached the intended cavern, jumping into the air and quickly assesing the situation as several dinossaur and insectoid fought against diverse people with ridiculous auras.
'Trow me at the floating blue thing.' Aki commanded, imediatly being catapulted away from the now burning warrior as his armor sprang back. He and the floating eye had a starring contest for a bit, however, it quickly dismissed him and began controlling the battle field again, even it's momentary lapse in concentration having... *THUNK* As the mage collided shoulder first into the gigantic being, he did not dare stop, sending a barage of void, gravity and time bullets.
In reality, it looked like he'd only slightly cut the small, human sized globe and shot three bullets at it while grinning like a madman. To whoever could see through the several timespans and possibilities, Aki had just slashed hundreds of eyes off a gigantic hive as it now starred fixedly at him and tanked the barrage of impossibilities.
The gods would be furious if he ussed such toxic and damaging attacks and didn't have anything to show for it, so he didn't let the ugly bastard escape, turning himself imaterial and speeding himself towards the soul of the wall of eyes that had sprouted out of nowhere, which now shot beams at him, completly ignoring the others. He just ignored the damage, tunneling inside the thing and bringing out more and more of it's mass out.
It didn't know what to do, it'd not ever had so much weight and pull in several points like this, so it went beserker trying to preserve it's dwindling life as it fought the fourth dimentional being equivalent of death by having all your body extremities pulled in different direction by furious work horses being repeatedly wipped.
The screams were a horrible thing, making many a powerhouse bleed, but they simply loved the sensation in comparison to the seamingly random bolts of several magical schools, mind magic and nuliffication of their attacks that the thing had been providing. The fact their enemies weren't being buffed anymore also helped, even if many wouldn't admit. The unnending cascate of eyeballs that came when the screams stopped was almost a welcomed sight. Almost.
As the tables turned and Aki instead assumed the role of support caster, he noticed that yes, he could barely keep up with a couple of the people in the room. Seeing how useless it was to try and directly heal such ridiculous being, he instead focussed on augmenting their regeneration, providing extra mana for the other mage on the room and controlling the battlefield.
While his skills to give bonus stats to troops and people under his command were static and barely made a dent of difference, none were complaining about having someone maintaining coordination efforst through a mental network or getting magical support, showing oppenings and allowing them to avoid blows that would otherwise need to be defended against.
The old man with a white goatee standing next to Aki was greatly impressed with the young man, he could see how he was ussing mind magic to simulate more gray mass and coordinating multiple forms of perception to properly assist five or six battles at the same time. While pulling and refining the surrounding's energy to ussable mana even faster than he could in this kind of enviroment. Truly, the extra ten percent energy per spell were quite nice for his damage thanks to his modifiers.
It'd only taken a couple of minutes for the other monstrosities to perish, an assasin even joining in on the battle as he decapitated something that could only be compared to a tiranosaurus rex with cancer on the outside. A sarkic-saur? It was a great flesh abomination that died when decapitated and was later cut in half vertically for good measure.
"Anyone else got to level 100?" Asked Aki, as everyone got their bearings.
"You have a job changing crystal?" The before mentioned assasin questioned, it's voice extremely neutral.
"Actually do. You?" He nodded, asking the mage by his side, who nodded, taking his crystal out too. Everyone around would happily gang out against someone trying to steal something this precious exactly because they needed all the help nescessary, and someone like that was simply not fit for a situation like the one they faced, the hidrance would probably cost them a price they did not come to pay while benefitting the perpetrator, meaning it was safe to take such things out. None present were that good natured as to sacrifice everything for strangers like this.
The good guys looked at the bad guys and the bad guys looked at each other, no one willing to be the one starting trouble.
While the elders raised their blood pressure with inconsequential problems like that, Aki just looked through his list of available jobs. There were a lot of them even if 'Thaumaturg' was the same a super apprentice, a job to reinforce other jobs, however, one stood out.
[You are now a level 1 Eldritch hunter.
The unique skill Hunting: Collosy is now level 1
The unique skill Hunting: Anomaly is now level 1]
Skills that were absurdly rare, gave bonus XP and damage and were already advanced. Truly a ridiculous job with ridiculous requirements. Looking at the numbers next to his XP bar, Aki noticed that he was going to need to massacre a lot more creatures like the last big one if he wanted to get anywhere close to maxing out this job. Ever.
There was a big and shining {Divide XP received from anything other than hunting eldritch by a thousand.} right at the top of the modifiers for the job. It was considered only on the same rank as the Saint job, but it needed at least a hundred times more XP.
The monsters trying to create an outpost in this planet did, however, also give out ridiculous amounts of XP.
If the job had not been automatically selected for him, Aki would have maxed out plenty of other combat jobs, maybe more than a dozen even.