System Change

Unfortunately for Derek, after the initial roar of pain from the whale, nothing more happened. The only explanation was that his void infused attack missed any vital areas of the whale before dissipating harmlessly.

Fuck! Derek yelled inwardly. His one good plan of action had failed, just like that. Another thing he noticed was that his Cleaning skill hadn’t worked the way he had hoped. It cleaned him of the basic blubber and blood from the creature, but anything carrying toxin remained. He had to either remove the toxic material the old-fashioned way or choose to ignore it for now.

Now, out of good plans, he had to move on to a bad one. Do I go from up here at the top, or should I try going in from underneath? His actual plan, and the one he expected he was going to have to do from the beginning, was, unfortunately, killing the whale from the inside. He needed to channel his inner Avery. He needed to go inside the well somehow, find a vital spot, and attack it until he got a notification of victory. Just as Avery had done with the wyvern back in trial two.

After going over his options, his eyes fell on the whale’s blowhole. That should connect to the lungs. The lungs may not be as vital as its brain or heart, but I should at least be able to cause massive damage there.

Before diving head first, though, Derek looked back at the wound left behind by his Sweeping Slash. Before his eyes, the tissue was already connecting and healing. This showed that the whale had an enormous amount of vitality, even if its endurance may not be anything special, as indicated by how easy it was for his sweeping slash to leave such a gaping wound where it did.

Finally, Derek gripped Harbinger tightly with both hands and took off running to the whale’s giant blowhole. In moments, he reached it. Without stopping or looking inside, he jumped. “Geronimo!” he yelled as the flesh disappeared beneath him and he was left in a free fall.

The inside of the blowhole was dark, and Derek couldn’t make out anything except for the bit at the entrance that was illuminated by the outside light. As he fell, Derek kept a close eye on his own health, so it wasn’t a surprise to him when he saw that it began rapidly decreasing the further down he fell. He had figured that the lungs would be where much of the toxins were stored. So, the concentration of the toxin being higher the further down he dove was expected.

He only hoped his tankiness would be able to withstand it. He still had Greater Meditation on the table. It would be troublesome to fight with it active at all times, but against one enemy, and inside it at that, he shouldn’t need to worry about his reaction time that would be limited while using the skill.

Derek soon hit a curve in the tunnel and his back fell against the slimy wall. Still at a high speed, he slid. “Weee!” he shouted in glee as he traveled down the world’s most disgustingly slippery slide.

Then he felt the wind pick up. Uh-oh! he thought. The next thing he knew, he was hit with an amount of wind that seemed to be almost solid, and his direction reversed completely-from traveling downward at the speed of a sports car to instantly moving upwards at an even faster speed.

“Oh, shit!” Derek took tightened his grip on his glaive with both hands and performed somewhat of a flip. Facing the wall that was to his back before, he stabbed the bladed end of Harbinger into the nasal wall of the whale, hoping to slow his ascent. The move partially worked. He once again heard a pitiful groan coming from the creature as he split the nasal passage in two while being blown back up.

However, with a twist, he reversed his blade, causing the dull side of the blade to tear and rip at the passage instead of the neat slicing of the sharp side. His momentum slowed greatly, and he hung on to Harbinger for dear life.

With nothing more to do other than wait for the massive wind gust to subside, Derek checked back in on his and Harbinger’s health. He was still holding up quite well all things considered. The wind and traveling down had taken twenty percent of his HP, so he cast Rejuvenation on himself and also threw out a Cure Toxin for good measure.

Unfortunately for Harbinger, the combination of the breath and the corrosive toxins from cutting into the whale had done a number on it. Its durability was already down over two hundred points. But Harbinger was self-healing, and he would deal with that issue when it came.

Finally, the gust settled down, and Derek found himself about halfway back up the nasal canal. He wondered if the brain was located somewhere up against the nasal passage, but his lack of whale anatomy knowledge was making everything tricky. His only certainty, he hoped, was that the nasal passage was connected to the lungs and that if the lungs were too big or healed too fast, the heart wouldn’t be far from them.

So, he ripped Harbinger out of the whale and dove once again, hoping that the corrosive breathing skill the whale used had some kind of cooldown on it. He still occasionally felt a gust of breath going up, but it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as the other one. He guessed it was part of the whale’s typical breathing routine, or it was doing what it could to try to slow Derek down.

One thing he knew, this fight would have been absolute hell for Asana. He wondered what she had tried against the whale before succumbing to it. He could only imagine that she died a horrible death due to the sustained toxins coming from the whale.

Seconds passed and the curve in the whale’s trachea began to level out, causing Derek’s uncontrolled slide to slow. Eventually, he lost all momentum and hopped up and began to run on his own. The passage was slimy, and his now bootless feet slipped and slid as he pushed on.

This fucking sucks, he thought. Apparently, when he was inside such a creature, there weren’t any void ripples around for him to connect to, thus causing both Active Void Shift and Void Steps to be next to useless. Void Shift could still have a small effect, though. He couldn’t use it to travel from ripple to ripple as before, but he could still shift into the void and slowly move himself along.

But doing that would be even slower than slipping his way forward, as he was now. Why couldn’t one of the skills I got have been Void Lightbulb? Maybe I should have looked for some glow-based skills before I left the city. Maybe I should use the dragon fire skill… In fact, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to take that scroll and use it.

Releasing a dragon breath attack while inside the whale would probably do massive damage. Derek tossed that idea to the back of his mind, classifying it as a backup plan.

Derek continued forward for a few more seconds before the floor beneath him completely disappeared with no warning. He soon hit another wall behind him and went into a short slide before landing in a pool of the slimy substance. He also notice that the wall he landed on had a different feel to it that the nasal passage he’d been in before, leading him to believe that he had made it to the lungs.

He wanted to reach out and touch the wall behind him to feel if it had a spongy feeling like he’d always heard that lungs had, but instead, he had to focus his attention elsewhere. The lungs were cramped and stuffy, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the concentration of the toxins where he landed was much more intense than anything he’d felt before.

He could feel the liquid corroding his feet up to his knees. He could feel his flesh being devoured by the acidic toxin. Without much thought, he sent Harbinger away for the time being and reached forward and ripped the void open. Quickly, he pulled his storage bracelet off and tossed it inside his Void Storage before slamming the space back shut.

He wasn’t sure if the toxins would be enough to corrode his bracelet, but he didn’t want to take that chance, especially when he could see. He also knew that Harbinger would be losing durability pretty rapidly in this situation, so he put it away for the time being. What now? He hadn’t expected such a concentration of toxins inside the lungs.

It was an epic beast, after all. But who knows if the beast was made specifically when the trial started? What if it’s been alive all this time, and the stored toxins have been becoming more potent? It was something he would probably never know, but it was a thought he couldn’t help but think.

So, Derek used Greater Meditation to even out the damage caused to him by the toxins. Even with the skill active and his recovery, though, his HP slowly ticked down as long as he was standing inside the pool of toxins. “Fuck! What am I doing?”

He couldn’t help but shout out loud when he realized he’d been a bit of an idiot when dealing with the toxins. With a thought, he focused on his legs. Soon, a thin, glowing purple layer appeared from his thighs down. It was his first real use of Void Creation.

It was minimal, but it seemed to do the job. As expected from a skill this system didn’t give me, Derek thought. It was a drain on his mana, that was for sure, but because he was only covering a portion of his legs and not his whole body, Greater Meditation looked like it could keep up with the drain. So, he decided to push it even more and re-summoned Harbinger.

He focused on adding another thin layer of protection to the glaive, and one soon appeared. Now, even with Greater Meditation, his MP ticked down a bit faster than it could fill. But that was fine. His mana pool was quite large, and he could always put Harbinger away for a bit if he needed to regain mana.

With his legs protected and no longer being damage, and Greater Meditation active, his HP finally began going back in the right direction. I wonder if the whale can do anything to me in this situation. After making it to the lungs, Derek hoped nothing more than a battle of attrition. Surely the whale would succumb to him before he succumbed to it. After all, he had chosen his stats based entirely on that, and they had never failed him.