August 1st
32nd day on Planet Chimera
Sixty days since he lost connection to Earth.
Fifteen years since Earth gained system connection.
When he left the town, the sun had begun its long decline. He would go to the purple spire in the Verdant Forest with the quest selected. It was said the lich practiced its craft often high up. Maybe this would be it, and he would finally get what he needed.
The lich was said to have an artifact that could return lost skills. It was an artifact from Chimera's early days, like how the Earth had been when the system often dropped artifacts before it left to integrate a new world.
An arrow exploded over his defense a few feet into the dark forest. He turned to see a male elf spitting blood and clutching his chest. A wooden thorn shaped like a sharpened stake impaled him the moment the arrow hit his defense. Zack looked around for a healer, but there was none.
Zack approached as the elf lost his strength and dropped his bow. He presented a contract from his inventory. "You think I would surrender to you and owe you a favor to save my life? " the elf spat at him. "That's what I think of your extorsion."
In another life, Zack expected he would punch him to death to finish him. Life had changed, as had his builds. A close-range fighter became a defense and summoner. A portal opened, and the head of a white dragon surged out and snapped the elf up.
He picked up the lost bow and saw that it looked nice enough, so he stored it in his inventory. Maybe he could sell it later. There were fences in certain towns that wouldn't look twice about stolen or scavenged goods.
The tower loomed over the treetops, glowing with fallen light from uncountable spells. Arrows hit him, but there were no screams. Undead fell from trees with their bodies full of spikes as Zack made his way forward. Each death recharged his defense. A complete build was so much better than an incomplete one.
He breathed and let it out as his ambushers finally ran out of arrows. Zack crossed into a clearing to see twin cat girls sitting on rocks over a field of spider lilies. Atop the hill was a sword embedded in a stone overlooking a black lake filled with corpses.
"Look, sister, we have a guest. Is it time for the chosen one to draw the sword and overthrow the evil lich?"
"Are you the one who will bring peace to the land?"
He eyed one of the twins, a dark-furred catgirl with a red ribbon tied up her hair. The white-furred one had a blue ribbon tied up her hair in a different design. They were young and beautiful, and his collector's instincts were more than tempted. He raised his hand.
Portals opened and snatched both girls up, depositing them in his demi-plane surrounded by the coiling heads of his Gigadra. His dragon opened its massive eyes on each of its heads and stared at the sisters, who went silent.
As for the sword, he wasn't interested. Swords were the tools of nobles killing peasants for their king to maintain power. He had far more powerful weapons than a mere sword. But it was part of the set. A portal traveled over the sword, but it resisted it. Zack stared at the hunk of metal that fought against his will. It couldn't be F rank. That made no sense.
Zack inspected the weapon without touching it. He wasn't dumb enough to touch a possibly cursed weapon.
"That was a clever method of dispatching my guardians. But how will you deal with me." Zack turned to see an elf woman. She smiled and brushed a strand of blonde hair away. He didn't say anything to her and crossed his arms.
She had nothing he wanted, so he took the catgirls squarely.
An elf approached from the water.
"What are you, a child? The silent treatment won't work on me." He continued saying nothing.
The real question was whether he wanted an elf in his demi-plane. If he did, where would he put her? Lakes weren't rare, but she came from a corpse-filled bog, and her skin was white as moonlight. Her large blue eyes and lips, as red as blood, made him think of Snow White. Mentally, he labeled her Snow White from that point onward.
"I am the sage of this lake polluted by the mad lich living in the tower. He dumps his failed experiments, so I devoted my time to forging a weapon that could lay him low. This is the result of three centuries of effort. Behold the sword," Zack raised his fist and punched the sword. It snapped like the piece of junk it was, and the hilt tumbled off the rock and down to where the elf stood. Snow White looked down at the weapon up at him and back down at the weapon. He stomped the boulder beneath him and felt the side of it explode. "What are you trying to tell me? Use your words." The elf shrieked.
A magic arrow formed from mana and fired, shattering against his shield. A spike seed formed beside the elf and launched. A stake over six feet long erupted, and she barely managed to escape it. Zack crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. Three arrows fired, shattering his defense before three seeds appeared in three separate places and blasted stakes at the elf. Water splashed as Snow White's feet skidded across the body-filled bog water. Zack smirked. His defense had only lost a quarter and was already recovering. If undamaged, it would be fully healed in less than a minute. Twelve arrows appeared and spun before a portal opened and swept through them, sending them toward the sky in his demi-plane.
"So that's it. When you face an attack you can't handle, you send them away before they can hit you. Well, lucky for me, I have an answer to that. Behold my forbidden magic, the pain of corrupted natural energy."
Her body shifted, and a black mist overtook it. He heard a scream from her, quickly joined by thousands of voices. The mist solidified, becoming a set of black armor with a thick visor protecting her eyes while her silver blond hair poured out of the back. She screamed and bent down on all fours as her muscles bulged, white fur spread out of the cracks in the armor, and her face transformed.
Zack could taste the magic in the air, the corruption of nature, while necromantic energies warped the sage's transformation from a protector of nature to a rabid avenger. Bloody roots erupted from the ground, reaching for him as he leaped away from the cliff and landed on a nearby branch of a large redwood.
The beast crossed the distance, climbing on rocks and shattering stones as it reached out with its claws to tear his throat out. Zack jumped after she sliced the tree he stood on down. A portal opened, and a tree limb shot out so that he could step on even higher than before. Roots shot out but failed to reach him, and the beast howled and screamed.
She was angry, but her rage paled compared to his own. What was the goal of restoring a lake to the world's pride? He heard the galloping of horses and turned his attention to the distance as paladins from the Oath Keepers chapter made their way toward the violet tower. He wouldn't let them take his prize.
No, they couldn't inspect the lich's treasury before him. Zack stared down at the beast before making his decision. He dropped and punched its side, feeling a plate bend against his fist and sending the monster tumbling. He punched into a portal opening through his Demi-Plane and again slammed into the monster. Zack kicked her through a portal, sending her into the lake's depths. Brackish water bubbled before bloated, rotting undead charged out.
He opened a portal above him. And Gigadra's giant white head emerged in time to unleash a sea of dragon fire. Trees all around him burst into flames from contact with the ravenous flames. For a breath of time, filled with sizzling evaporating water, it almost appeared like the sun had crashed into Chimera. The portal closed to a cloud of seams covering the stars. A dried riverbed empty of all the evils that once haunted it was all that remained of the atrocity. The elf looked up at him out of the ash on her knees, her armor falling into ash.
"You took everything from me. Aren't you going to take responsibility?" Zack turned away and began his walk to the violet tower. This might work best for him. The Paladin party was fully mounted and prepared for war. The lich would probably send everything it had at them. Zack had time to make it to the castle and plan where he would look for the treasure he needed. He had no idea what it looked like, only that he would feel it when it was near. "Stop, don't leave me."
"A sage is nothing without nature. How am I going to live you left me with nothing?" Zack continued walking, trying his best to ignore the elf. "What makes your purpose greater than mine why do you get to destroy my world and walk away?"
The woman's heels dragged the ground, making it hard to get anywhere in time. She didn't weigh anything to him, but the faces she made and the way her ears pointed down made him feel uncomfortable. Zack sighed.
He opened a portal to a pristine white lake filled with shed dragon scales where the flying lizards hunted fish and built their nests on the far-off islands. Deep over the freshwater where the dragons and their worshippers were, the most numerous Gigadra lived. The ultimate dragon he wielded. If a sage was nothing without the land they protected, then maybe she could be the sage of this land. It wasn't because she had silver skin like moonlight with moonlight blonde hair and silver eyes. That had nothing to do with it.
"Are you offering me this land untouched by civilization? I can become the sage of such a beautiful lake." Zack placed a hand on her shoulder. "Thank you for giving me this. My name is," Zack pushed Snow White through the portal and closed it behind her. With that annoyance out of the way, he turned his attention toward the white tower.
…
The sounds of battle filled the air as he crossed the distance unnoticed by the warring sides and made his way to an old elven graveyard. It was long picked clean, and this was one of the first places the lich attacked many years ago. The place was used while the lich subdued the elves and built his tower, so Zack assumed there must be a secret entrance to the tower through some tunnels or something. He followed the trails of undead soldiers to a hole in the ground.
That was the problem with large armies that didn't use portals to go everywhere. They left trails.
An ax hit him in the side of the head, and a stake pierced an undead knight through the armpit. Spears hit him from formerly invisible undead soldiers and bounced off of him. He hit half defense then and felt a little nervous. The stakes weren't doing much. Their undead bodies weren't too bothered by having stakes pierce their bodies.
"What is your business here, mortal?" Answer me, for I am the lich king of death, Azure.
He paused and felt his throat nearly break from disuse. He had lost confidence without his skill. It became so bad he rarely spoke. He preferred to convey as much information as possible when he did. "I seek a trade," Zack said.
Zack felt his words come out as raspy, complicated things his mouth could not produce. That was what a lack of practice got him.
"Interesting. Have you chosen a bad time, or will you become my alley in exchange for one of my treasures? It must be forbidden, or else you might have sided with the Oath Keepers and taken it from my hoard instead."
Zack disliked speaking to fast-talking people like the Lich. He hadn't made any deals and felt like he was being extorted.
"Well then, you will fight for me, or with my last words, I will tell them of a demon cultist with your description that sought me out and escaped." He grabbed the death knight, crushed its skull with his hand, and pulled his stake from its side. Zack flicked his wrist and tore the bodies of the undead soldiers apart. "You may have defeated my minions, but you will find my tunnels a deadly maze."
Zack preferred not to tip his hand. He was a mere silver-ranked adventurer, and that's how he liked it. People who rose too swiftly were extorted and turned into puppets of the local government. He needed to spend at least a few years in silver rank before moving to gold. Taking on this quest was a gamble. He didn't plan to turn it in but needed an excuse to travel this way. The Oath Keepers made convenient scapegoats.
His lack of speaking only made him an eccentric. He kept his illegal goals to himself and maintained more autonomy than most. Zack could travel nearly anywhere he pleased in the Western Kingdom without fear of raising many eyebrows. No one knew his true goal was to reclaim the skill his brother took from him. Using artifacts from the ancient past was strictly forbidden.
In this age where E ranks were practically gods and nearly everyone but the strongest of the strong were G ranks, Zack felt comfortable in most situations. He maxed out his skills in the G grade and had all of his attributes maxed out. He could cross into the F rank at any time but wanted to reclaim what was his first.
He used a stake and killed everything that crossed his path going through the tunnel. His Revenge Crit skill showed him where his enemies were, and he punished them brutally every time he took a hit. His defense took only minutes to recover before he was back on the trail.
It was so close that he could taste it. When he got it back, he would be whole again and then rise to the F grade.