Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 172: Balance

A horrifying pressure spread out from Zac as he stepped forward with [Verun’s Bite] in his hands. The previously rowdy squad from Perseverance didn’t have time to react before he was upon them. A horizontal swing of [Chop] ripped through most of the group, crushing hastily erected defenses like dry twigs.

“Attack!” the voice from earlier frantically cried, no longer having any joviality in it.

However, it was to no avail as a dozen glittering leaves whirled around Zac as he methodically cut down everything. Spells and bullets flew through the night, but the defensive skill of Zac proved its worth as the attacks were continuously blocked. The few that snuck by couldn’t really hurt Zac either, as between his monstrous Endurance and E-Grade robes he was nigh-invulnerable to ordinary attacks.

A car door slammed and an engine started, clearly indicating someone had quickly grown tired of the fight. Zac only shook his head with some regret, and detached his fractal edge, letting it cut the military vehicle and its driver in half. He would actually already have finished the fight if it wasn’t for the fact that he didn’t want to damage the vehicles.

They would be a great asset to his town, as he didn’t have many good vehicles at the moment. With some inscriptions and the engine modifications, they would be great tools for his force to explore and traverse the main continent in the future. After all it seemed the Creators wouldn’t sell any land vehicles. The next step after the ships would be the flying spiritual tools, but that was extremely far off.

There were roughly thirty people who were part of the ambush, but the fight only lasted for less than a minute before the night once again was blanketed in deathly silence. Corpses were strewn all over, some as far as a few hundred meters away from the blockade. After the initial rampage a few tried to flee, but between [Loamwalker] and the fractal edge projectiles Zac shot out none survived.

However, the battle wasn’t completely without consequence, as Zac was panting with a pallid face. He tried to end it as quickly as possible in order to not let his wound go out of control again, but it was no stopping it as a horrible pain spread through his side.

Worse yet, it started to absorb miasma as well. It seemed like something in the wound almost had turned into a small whirlpool, slowly rotating while drawing in the deathly energy in the atmosphere. Luckily the Dao of Trees blocked out a good chunk of it, forming a natural barrier.

After a brief hesitation he chose not to head out of the Dead Zone. Between the Cleansing Pill he ate back on the island, the Purifier’s efforts, and his Dao, it would take weeks before the concentration of miasma reached the levels of concentration it had right at the beginning. Besides, the wound calmed down after a while the last time, so hopefully the same would happen again.

Still, he didn’t wish to remain at the scene of the battle. It looked like only the leader who spoke in the beginning had a semblance of power, whereas the others were normal foot soldiers. Most used machine guns rather than skills, showing that their power was limited. The huge fireball that almost blasted him up on the wall of Perseverance was still fresh in his mind. He wasn’t in the mood to take one of those blasts at the moment, as the leaves wouldn’t do much against such an attack.

Zac therefore quickly collected all the vehicles as in greatest cosmos sack, gaining 10 military jeeps. After a brief hesitation, he also threw in the bodies of all the men as well, not wanting to leave them to give clues of what happened here. He wanted to leave the so-called Lord Perseverance with some doubt, and if he was smart he’d cut his losses.

Besides, even if they were enemies they were all humans. To leave them here would mean they’d turn to zombies eventually. He’d make sure that they would rest in peace instead. He didn’t bother cleaning up the scene any more than that though, leaving the scars and cracks left from his and the other’s attacks. Finally he put his own car into a sack, and brought out a new one.

It was one of the few vehicles that already was modified to run on crystals instead of gas. Earlier he used a normal one since he expected to enter a town, but now he had no such compunctions. Gas was scarce and he didn’t want to waste it, while he had an almost endless number of crystals. Besides, the car running on Cosmos Energy had another advantage. It made almost no sound, even more-so than an electric car.

Zac swooshed along the road, a silent spectre in the night. However, a frown started to emerge on his face, as the wound wasn’t calming down, and instead kept rotating and absorbing miasma. He thought about stopping, but he still was quite close to the border town. Instead he kept driving for another two hours, until the first rays of daylight started to push through the thick grey clouds that seemed to cover the Dead Zone.

At that moment he stopped the car and put it into a Cosmos Sack, as he walked into the forest next to the road. Even with some sunlight it felt like the Dead Zone was blanketed in an endless gloom, the combination of miasma and the thick clouds creating a sort of a natural barrier against the suns.

As he walked along the forest he also noted that widespread terraforming was taking place inside. He still was quite far out in the edge of the domain of the undead forces, but the trees had already started to transform. They had long lost their leaves it seemed, though Zac couldn’t tell whether it was due to the miasma or winter’s approach.

Since Zac Dao of Trees he could somewhat sense how the trees was faring, and he wasn’t surprised when he felt that most of the trees were dead or on the verge of dying. However, there were some that defiantly struggled on in the face of death, actually somehow gaining strength from the struggle. Others had simply mutated, and seemed to be quietly absorbing miasma as nourishment. As he saw it he was reminded of the adage that life finds a way.

After having walked for thirty minutes he felt confident that he was both far from any civilization, meaning he shouldn’t run into any zombies, or far enough into no-man’s-land that no zombie hunters should find him. Therefore he started to look around for a place to camp.

He still hadn’t slept during the night, as he was busy trying to calm down his wound earlier. Even with his stats he was starting to get tired, and he didn’t want to risk losing focus inside an incursion. He looked around a bit and finally he found a tree that stood tall and proud, actually still having its leaves on its branches.

It was one of the trees that had found a way to combat the miasma. Zac didn’t really understand how, but after holding his hands to it for a while it almost felt like it slowly transformed the deathly energy back into normal Cosmic Energy. It was essentially the reverse of what zombies and unholy beacons did.

Zac was also happy to sense that the miasma actually was quite a bit sparser around the tree, prompting him to sit down and rest his back against the thick trunk. Still, even with better environment his wound wouldn’t stop absorbing miasma.

Until now he’d held back on trying to cut out whatever was in the wound, as the Demon physician had noted it might come with unexpected side-effects. It was a bit like cooking a fugu fish, one wrong cut and the whole fish would turn poisonous. There was a risk with the same happening to Zac, so he decided on slowly healing.

However, things had changed since the purifier tried fixing him. It wasn’t slowly getting better like before, but rather getting worse. Zac had seen the effect of miasma poisoning first-hand, and had no desire to become the walking dead.

He was tired, but before sleeping he’d give it a chance. He took out a knife he’d prepared for just this occasion, along with some bandages and a flashlight. Next he took off all his clothes on his torso, displaying the wound out in the cold air.

It truly looked ghastly, a black hole with tendrils spreading out from it. After a brief touch it didn’t feel hot like an infection, but rather a numbing cold. This much was the same as before, but one startling change had taken place. The wound was now slowly pusling, as though it had a heartbeat of its own.

The disgusting sight only reaffirmed Zac’s decision, and with a somber expression he disinfected the knife before he gingerly cut into his flesh right outside the core of the wound. His plan was to quickly cut out the center, and then slowly heal the tendrils after the main part of the wound was gone.

However, he only managed to cut a centimeter into his body before a wave of pain unlike anything he’d felt before flooded his mind, overloading his system. Zac had no way to produce any semblance of a response as his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed back against the tree unconscious.

The suns were already quite high in the sky when Zac woke up again with a start, and he was surprised to see that he’d actually slept for 5 hours. It was far longer compared to the two to three hours he usually slept, and guessed it was since he wasn’t in great condition.

After making sure nothing in his surroundings was amiss he quickly looked down at his wound, and breathed in relief that his little experiment didn’t seem to have made anything worse. The black core was still slowly pulsating, but it hadn’t spread out while he was knocked out.

A quick internal check also showed that his body didn’t contain any more miasma compared to earlier. In fact, it almost seemed there were less of it than before in his body. However, Zac was worried to see that small amounts of miasma were still entering him. As he dressed again he pondered on his next step.

He was truly walking along blind, not knowing what the hell the thing in his body was. It was quite unfortunate that neither Calrin nor Ogras could figure anything out. The undead faction was extremely vast with tens of thousands of classes and means, and there was no way they could find out exactly what he’d been struck by.

It also was quite hard for the gnome to buy anything used for purifying the miasma. The undead empire saw those types of pills as a direct affront to their faction, and that selling those types of things an attack on them. The pills themselves weren’t hard to make, but few were willing to draw the undead’s ire for the limited revenue that came with the purifying pills.

Zac sighed and rested his head back against the large tree again, closing his eyes. It truly was a marvelous specimen, surviving in this harsh climate. The suns were obscured, and the energy in the atmosphere was corrupted, yet the tree pushed forward, not giving up. Zac thought of trying to glean any hints from it, and entered a meditative state as he tried to understand what the tree actually was doing.

The hours passed and soon the small Dao field he had erected around his wound started to change. Before it was like a cloud that blocked miasma from entering the wound, but since the cloud was porous some snuck through. However, the cloud started to transform, turning into a small whirlpool as well, moving the opposite direction from the whirl in his wound.