Author's Note: Okay so didn't get sick, yey. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 51: The Avatar
The Bow, Spear and Sword heroes were not abandoning Shieldfreeden to the wave contrary to what the people they were initially there to meet would like to believe. In fact they were quite reasonably certain that Maple was under attack at the moment and hence were now rushing off to provide her with support. No the fact that Kyurie quite plainly stated that Maple sent him back for this exact reason did nothing to dissuade them at all from throwing yet another screaming match. Then the ground started to shake.
"This mine is for Mythril, you can collect any that you see here, it will replenish itself over time." Ost explained as she led the group consisting of herself, Maple, Filo, Raphtalia, Sadeena and the three other worlders Glass, L'Arc and Therise through the inside of the mine in question.
"We're going inside of the Spirit Turtle." Maple started as if she suddenly need confirmation about something.
"Correct." Ost stated brow in the air.
"Through a hole that you said isn't the mouth or on the head." Maple continued as she dreaded both the realisation of where they were and what she was collecting.
"Since you insisted on not being eaten? Yes." Ost replied as she let out a sigh.
"So then that means that this is...?"
"Unfortunately yes." Ost stated as she already figured out what Maple was talking about.
"And what I'm collecting is..."
"It never seemed to bother the villagers before." Ost stated as she let out a sigh.
With that in mind, Maple went through the unpleasant process of using her shield to Devour her way through any obstruction of solidified rock laced with Mythril that she could find. On the flipside...
'Shield of Compassion III Unlocked.' And good thing too, considering that some of these boulders were starting to look pretty good and all that. While Maple pondered the implication of that trouble was soon arriving as more of the bats started to swarm.
"Air Strike Shield!" The first of the shields appeared. "Second Shield!" Followed by the second. "Shield Prison!" And finally the ball of shields around Filo. "Change Shield: Voice Gengar Shield!" All three shields soon looked like they were made out of loud speakers which now led them to...
"YYYEEEAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Filo's screech echoed out of the shield ball and bounced off of the other two shields and echoed down the cave hall, the incredibly loud scream rupturing the sensitive ears of the bats and knocking them out of the air when they didn't outright die.
"Therese." Maple of course wasn't betting on loud noises getting to finish off what she knew to be essentially zombies. Everyone knows that when you're dealing with Zombies, you gotta burn them.
"O'Magical Jewels, I Therese Alexandrite am your friend! Incinerate my target in a mighty Inferno: Bejeweled Blaze!" Therese set the little zombies on fire and turning them into ashes, though getting no new XP notifications in the process.
"Is it always this way?" L'Arc asked as he pulled the wax out of his ears that he had shoved in there earlier at Maple's insistence.
"Usually." Raphtalia replied before she used her fingers to motion for plugging her ears again.
"If we continue along this path we'll soon start to reach the cavity where this Kyo has created his laboratory." Barring any unforeseen circumstances that is, so naturally that's what they got.
Fending off the constant attacks from the bats the group was forced to make some hard decisions. A village was not a defensible location, even one located on top of a mountain, not when it's being assaulted by a million tiny laser shooting drones. Strapping together as many carriages as possible they then stuffed as many people as they could fit inside and sent the whole thing careening down the mountain trails with Keel providing defence with his axes.
"Any idea what these things want so badly!?" Rifana shouted out as she shot another convenient cluster of eye bats.
Without anyone to infect with their parasitic plague the bats naturally started to focus their attention on three separate points on the mountain. If they weren't so busy shooting them then they might be able to figure out why they're here. Unfortunately for them the village wasn't quite as evacuated as they initially believed. Oh sure all the people were removed to safety, but people were hardly the most dangerous creatures that those bats could infect.
"We didn't think about that did we?" Eclair asked as she observed giant hairy yeti's emerge from the wilderness of the mountains and start rampaging in the abandoned village, if the fact that their faces and bodies were dried desiccated husks weren't a good enough indication of what they were the giant turtle shells on their backs probably gave a better one. "Whose!" Eclair blocked one of the Yeti's with her sword and followed that up by ramming the blade through the monster's neck. "Idea!" Eclair was pushed back by two of the yeti's landing punches on her simultaneously. "Was it!" Eclair combined sword and shield into a massive deadly battle axe and using that cleaved both of the monsters that she had been fighting simultaneously. "To send all our people inside of the turtle again?" Until Keel got back up the mountain they would be here by themselves, two people trying to defend three points, and only one of them was a range specialist.
"RRRWWWAAARRR!" One of the Yeti's managed to body slam one of the buildings that the bats had been trying to destroy, and was met with success as the entire thing was destroyed. Suddenly the ground started shaking, the horizon off in the distance started to shift it's angle as the group realised the turtle had started to wake up, before the angle promptly managed to reset itself that is. The turtle wasn't completely awake yet, nor had the monsters given up on attacking the other two locations either, the implications were clear: they cannot allow these buildings to fall.
'-'s Eye Bat Familiar Sword.' Looking down at the newest sword that she had unlocked Kuro looked up at the monsters that had unlocked it for her. The bats were currently being turned into ashes in mass thanks to Katarina's fire magic being combined with Gravity magic from Tanya to create a miniature sun in the sky that was sucking up the bats and turning them into ashes.
"So Kyurie." Kuro was holding up the sword with the wing of a bat for a blade and the shell of a turtle for a guard. "These were the monsters that you guys were fighting in the town on this... 'Spirit Turtle's' back?"
"Aye. And don't let any of those things hit you with their laser beams, or if they do hit you, take out the piece of turtle shell shoved into the wound immediately before it starts siphoning your XP." Kyurie stated as he adjusted a couple extra layers of cloth he had applied.
"Right. Don't want to go through a impromptu level down now." Kuro stated as she put the sword on her hip.
"I'm more mildly concerned about the fact that once all of the XP is drained you're turned into a turtle shell wearing zombie." Kyurie stated which to be fair that was a legitimate concern he had.
"Yeah. Not doing that." Kuro stated agreeing with the whole 'not be a zombie thing.'
"Alright no problem we just gotta go and find this turtle thing and shut it down." Kuro stated as she took a look at the mountain in the distance.
"Just to be clear by shut it down you mean..."
"Let's start by having a look at it's back." Kuro stated as she made out what was clearly a town on the back of the mountain they knew to be their enemy. "I can't imagine that the people who put that town there did so completely ignorant of what they were building it on."
"What do you mean by that?" Kyurie was confused by the statement. "I wouldn't build my house on top of what I knew to be a giant monster."
"Which might be believable if not for miss Haven filling us in on just how paranoid these people are about keeping outsiders away from their town." And that was after building it on top of a treacherous mountain trail filled with laser shooting bats.
"Are you two done yet!?" Tanya shouted as she black-holed another cluster of the bats. "We found one of Maple's party members!" Keel had been using her axes to continuously spin around cutting down any of that bats that got close to either themselves or the people that they had been defending. The bats were getting wise to the fact that flinging bodies wasn't working so they were mixing in laser beams and Keel had countered with a water bubble shield to block their shots. The lack of openings in her defences was all well and good and all but with the reckless expenditure of mana and Spirit it wouldn't hold for very long. Then the rocks started falling, each boulder crushing entire groups of the bats as they were stacked on top of each other in the form of a extremely crude wall.
"What's the situation?" Tanya's voice calmly carried on the wind, even as the bats were rocked by repeated explosions.
"Maple, Raphtalia, Sadeena and Filo have gone into the Turtle's body along with the scythe guy, fan lady and jewel lady. Rifana and Eclair are still in the village while I came with the villagers to escort them down the mountain." Keel shouted in reply prompting a nod of Tanya's head.
"Katarina, for now stay here and take pressure off of Keel to let him recover his energy." The sound of booming flame and falling ash served as the indicators of Katarina's progress in eliminating the undead bats that were in the sky. Tanya and Kuro in the mean time flew up the mountain using Kuro's eyes to search for information and their missing allies. The good news was that Rifana's lightning made it pretty easy to find her, the bad news was that she had so very little of that left to use. "Which way did Maple go?" As Tanya asked that Kuro got a nasty little surprise of her own ready.
"So you and the Queen know each other?" Maple asked as she ate some of the food that he had prepared for herself and the group.
"Melromarc's Queen and I... rarely see eye to eye." Ost stated as she let out a sigh. "Her first priority is her people. But I have the spirit turtle to think about too, which I can't let anyone know about."
"It can't be easy is it?" Maple had no idea what it's like to look after what is basically a god. "I mean... I can't even imagine trying to feed something that big." So says the girl using her shield to tear off bits of the Spirit Turtle's flesh so that she could cook it.
"It doesn't feed in the way that you do." Ost reluctantly started to explain.
"What does it eat then?" Maple asked as she slowly chewed her food.
"Huu. XP." Oh Maple did not like where this is going.
"Is that why those bats were sucking the life out of everyone?" Maple asked as she seriously debated the pros and cons of finishing her meal.
"The familiars are not a first resort, they're meant to only be used if the spirit turtle's energy falls below a certain threshold." Ost let out a exhausted sigh. "The main way that we gather XP is getting people to fight wars near the Spirit Turtle."
Mythril was a rare and valuable resource, capable of being used in numerous powerful weapons but was rare and hard to get your hands on it. It wasn't hard to imagine nations being baited into attacking the area, a hard fought battle considering the mountainous nature of the area meaning that it would be a literal up hill battle. In addition the overly impulsive Shieldfreeden and formerly very racist Melromarc are both relatively nearby: she imagined it wouldn't be hard to bait both nations into fighting wars in the general area.
"They really hate you don't they?" Maple commented, the words oddly familiar to her as she realised she's been caught up in other people's battle again.
"That is our purpose sadly. If we announced one day that we were living on the back of a giant monster who would one day slaughter all life in the world to gain the power necessary to save the world from the waves then we would just be stomped out as some cult and the turtle would be killed it's mission unfulfilled." Maple nodded her head in understanding before she had another question to ask.
"The Spirit turtle absorbs the Extra XP from things getting killed around it, that's why you are always starting wars right?" Ost nodded her head.
"Then, is the turtle the one who set up the system?" Maple asked brow cocked in the air.
"The System?" Ost asked looking confused.
"Levels, Stats, XP." Maple replied simply but Ost shook her head in the negative.
"The turtle is no more responsible for that than apples falling from the trees when they grow ripe enough." Ost stated her choice of comparison implying what she thought about the situation.
"So the turtle just takes advantage to absorb XP?" Maple asked looking legitimately concerned.
"I don't know how it is in your world, but doesn't it make sense that something would be designed to work with a world's law of physics?" Ost asked and Maple could only nod her head in response as she finished eating.
"So is this how it always is with you guys?" L'Arc asked as he looked outside at the chaos going on.
"Yeah, pretty much." Raphtalia couldn't argue with L'Arc, just silently nod her head.
When everyone started to get hungry the fact that they hadn't eaten since that morning came to light, and was exacerbated by the fact that they were running at full speed to get to the Spirit Tortoise's core. So anticipating that they might need a counter Maple set the shield to process all the mythril and rock that she fed to the shield before into stone blocks and Mythril rebar, she then followed that up by using the 'Earth Magic orb Shield' to shape those blocks in to a cylinder shaped house and hold them together with the rebar and then creation to imbue the stone and high grade metal with numerous defence increasing equip bonuses the end result basically being a building that was almost as sturdy and indestructible as Maple was.
"Hey everyone." Maple walked into the room putting the dishes into the sink, because of course she made a entire house while she was at it! "We didn't have any breaches did we?"
"I don't think the Spirit Tortoise itself could breach this place if they stomped on it as hard as it possibly could." L'Arc stated as he looked out the window, a freaking window, at what was going on outside. He made his statement on a educated foundation, because for the past couple of hours dollops of flesh had been popping out of the walls on both sides of the house and shaping themselves into humanoid one eyed turtle men wielding Mythril shields.
"I don't think that trick with the bats are gonna cut it here Maple." L'Arc stated as he looked outside at the creatures that had been trying to break into the house.
"Ku Ku Ku!" Maple's response was to laugh menacingly as if L'Arc had said something foolish. "Do you know how many shield's I've unlocked since I've come in here?" Maple asked as the group vaguely recalled Maple absorbing different pieces of the Spirit Tortoise's flesh as they made progress before pointing her finger out menacingly. "I have a even more devastating combo to unleash!"
"I'm listening." L'Arc stated as he non-the less gulped. Under Normal circumstances Maple would never do something like this, her claims of having once fallen asleep while getting attacked by monsters be damned, this is because this particular combo took too damned long and too many skills to set up. But it was different matter if she casts from within a fortress.
"Air Strike Shield!" The first green translucent shield appeared... "Change Shield: Chimera Viper Shield!" And turned into the familiar shield with crossed snakes. "Second Shield!" The second of the green shields appeared... "Change Shield: Nue Adder Shield!" And the second shield turned into a tiger leather tower shield with crossing adders on the front. "Third Shield!" Thus a not before seen third shield appeared, courtesy of the the most recent Mile stone that Maple had earned. "Change Shield: Hydra Shield!" The third shield turned into a round shield depicting swirling cobras on the front. But Maple still wasn't done with her combo. "Tri-Force Wings!" With the latest skill announced the three shields merged together and formed a image that gave the impression of a giant three headed snake monster with wings. "L'Arc, Glass, Therese..." The three people were called over to the excessively menacing looking thing as Maple opened the front door. "Defence reversing attacks please, like the ones that you used on me." She wants them to infuse this thing with Magic and Ki when she uses it to horrifically slaughter the enemy monsters...
"You are mad woman." Glass stated bluntly.
The ensuing three part combo from the other worlders struck the back of the shield causing it to worm to life, spewing out the spiritual form a giant three headed snake monster of dubious species as it glared at the enemy contemptuously. The three heads belched a giant stream of purple liquid at the enemy monsters simultaneously poisoning them, paralysing them, melting them and their weapons and armour into a sludge like material, and on top of all of that popping them from the defence raiding attacks L'Arc and the others had just fired off that was now flowing down like a river. The horrible liquid that Maple had just mass produced flood down the cavity they had been travelling down flowed like a river as it was absorbed into the Turtle's flesh turning it into a sick purple colour while the entire thing trembled in pain. Everyone blinked stupidly for a few moments as they saw the turtle's healing factor try its damnedest to hold the cave together.
"You've done this before haven't you?" Glass asked looking at Maple like she was dealing with some sort of eldritch horror.
"Done what?" Maple asked apparently not bothered by the horrible thing she just did.
"Kill a monster from the inside." Therese clarified not taking eyes off of the purple stained path.
"Well I had to eat my way out last time." Maple admitted sheepishly scratching the back of her head.
"Why is it the things you say no longer surprise me?" L'Arc asked as Raphtalia sympathetically patted the man on his shoulder.
"Master we can't take this path!" Filo shouted holding her hand over her nose, which considering the amount of poison around here...
"You might have a good point there." Maple commented while she pressed her gauntlet, her legendary weapon, down against the smoking acid and pulled it back up to see that the poison had eaten through it. While Maple was wondering about that Ost suddenly collapsed, blood coming out of her mouth. "That can't be good."
Outside the entire mountain started to shake like it was at the epicentre of a earth quake, which did nothing to help the battle going on outside.
"Would you guys keep it down out there!" Kuro shouted angrily while she did nothing notable to fix the situation in question. "Some of us are trying to read in here!"
"We'll let the apocalyptic demi-god know that it's being too noisy." Welt replied his tone filled with scathing sarcasm.
"That would be appreciated." Kuro replied dismissively.
"Have you found something we can use against the Spirit Turtle?" Chem replied getting to the gist of the situation at hand.
"I believe so." Kuro stated as she continued reading the history inside of the ancient tomb of a past hero. Someone had come along and scratched out the information written on the walls detailing the method of resealing the spirit turtle, which would be unfortunate if Kuro couldn't simply read the thing's history. "There's a three part seal on the thing's heart, head and core respectively corresponding to three separate buildings in the village." One of which was now destroyed, if the imaginary map that only really exists inside of Kuro's head was accurate. "The proper method of unsealing this thing has it that we go into each building, complete a puzzle, and the turtle wakes up, which also has the benefit of being able to restore the seal if we can get to those three parts respectively." Unlike the case with this Kyo person who was trying to smash it apart with brute force which would also have the additional benefit for him of making it that they wouldn't be able to put his pawn back into it's cage.
"So what do we have to do now?" Welt asked looking at Kuro with blatant suspicion.
"We need to fix the broken building while simultaneously defending all three locations from the seemingly limitless monster attacks and hoping that Maple is going to find the person responsible for all of this and beat them for us." In short: they're doomed. "Well. We should at least cork up this blasted turtle." Saying that Kuro found the entrances from which the Spirit Turtle's familiars had been poring out and proceeded to mark them, water magic appearing in the air above them in the form of a simple arrow.
"Finally." Tanya commanded several boulders to lift into the air and threw them at the entrances sealing them up in the process. Kuro could've easily 'corked' the entrances with her magic, so long as they didn't mind that said corks would disappear the moment Kuro got out of range of them, or as soon as she ran out of magic to maintain their existence. Tanya minded very strongly, hence this strategy. "Welp. Guess I better prepare my follow up then." Saying that Kuro changed her blades to the familiar thunder swords.
"Thousand Swords. Change Blade: Bomb Sword!" The name sake swords that had been rigged to explode when they break were subsequently fired into the clouds of bats along with Katarina's fire magic and Tanya's use of gravity magic to bunch them together into convenient packages.
"Well that's finally dealt with." Tanya stated noting that they seemed to have run out of ways to stop the spirit turtle from awakening, short of repairing the damaged seal that is. "Well, time to give fancy dancy Time Magic a try I suppose." Tanya stated as she went to meet up the other heroes to figure out a way of dealing with this situation.
A quick diagnostic of Ost revealed that she had been poisoned, as well as paralysed, and had at some point ingested acid. While debating how coincidental all of this had been Maple fed the woman one of her antidotes and for her trouble got absolutely no response out of her. Then looking at the fleshy cave that she had poisoned, Maple got a bad premonition and pored out one of her bottles of antidote on the ground, clearing up a large amount of the poison from the surrounding flesh, and true to predictions causing Ost to open her eyes, everyone staring at her.
"Ost." Maple started having by now realised the unspoken truth. "Are you the Spirit Turtle?"
Review Section:
Guest: Sorry to disappoint. I might pick up a weapon like that sooner or later.
RonaldM40196867: It does wear out ones patience quite quickly. Giant animals tend to have a bad temper, unless there's a professional nearby that says it's safe to do so you really shouldn't go near them. She does don't you worry. Faubrey, and yes that's taking into account the country that was being run by literal criminals. Tons.
Captain Imaginat: Yet another difference between Maple and Naofumi, Maple is not a violent person by default, yes if she has to she will use violence to solve a problem but it is not her default option. Thank you for saying so. Raphtalia is a little more familiar to Maple than you think.
imortal333: I would think that it keeps to the character that she changes her responses in line with trauma, and gradually shifts back as she moves past that.
Nightshadegirl: New episodes should start next month or so I'm told.