Spellheart 9: Chapter 3 (Patreon)

I still had my entire length deep into Tivana. She tried to go left, and I tried to go right. With the two of us attached as we were, we ended up sprawling on the ground.

Fortunately, I’d cast my Layered Durability spell on the area before we’d even gotten started, and the spell was still in effect. It was only three layers thick, but that was enough to buy me the time to act against any foe I was likely to face.

The first barrier shattered as soon as the metal tendril struck it, as did the second. This creature had to be immensely strong to shove liquid mercury out of the way as fast as it did and shoot it into the air like water. But I was stronger. I pulled Tivana tight and protected her with one arm while I held the other up just in time to catch the tendril as my final barrier gave way.

It pushed against me, but I held firm. My earth zeal filled the ground around me, and I ensured my footing held no matter how massive this beast was beneath the lake. Weight like nothing I’d ever felt pressed against my palm.

“Ouch!” Tivana cursed as a thick dollop of slime dripped onto her head and ran down her cheek. She wiped it away and healed with supernatural speed, but the goop still burned her like acid.

I had plenty of the stuff on my palm, but it wasn’t affecting me. The fact that this monster lived in a toxic world and dwelled in a lake of liquid mercury, I figured the food chain had a lot of metals in it.

As luck would have it, the slime the monster secreted was iron-based. That meant it would be as deadly as a Shadowblade Beast to any elf who fought it.

Mechanobeast Elemental (Mid Sorcerer, Level 55)

• This deadly monster of metal spawns wherever both large quantities of metal and magic. It is exceptionally strong and dense for its size, and it can integrate abilities otherwise only possible through high technology.

The warning flashed in front of my face just as the tendril opened up a circular hatch. That circular hatch glowed the distinctive red of an energy weapon. I pulled Tivana and me aside just fast enough to dodge a laser beam.

“Theo! You’re too hard. I’m stuck and can’t get off!” Tivana said. “Let me help you!”

“It’s too dangerous! The monster has iron in it! Let me handle it!” I replied as I kept one hand wrapped tight around her.

I cast Might of a Giant. Fighting a giant metal monster would be much easier if I was on the same size scale. Zeal took form around me, and I felt myself grow.

There was one key difference this time. Usually, all my senses transferred to my new giant form, but with Tivana bouncing along my shaft with every step as I held her tight to my chest, I felt more in touch with my real body than usual. It resulted in an odd sense of bilocation. I was the giant, but at the same time, I was the man within the giant.

I had fought with distractions before though, and this was no different.

The monster’s enormous head emerged from the silver waves, and I saw the true face of my foe.

I had been wrong to call it a tentacle monster at first sight, though it certainly had tentacles. Its lower half resembled the giant squid I fought, but from the base up, it had a more humanoid form. A pair of six-fingered arms of jointed steel emerged from the surface, each rippling with metal cabals. It resembled a massive armored robot from the waist up, and its hinged jaw was elongated like a shark. It opened its maw, and out of it came thick black tar, which coated me and the landscape in all directions.

“Yuck,” I grimaced as I wiped the goop off me. There was plenty of iron in this, along with hydrocarbons. Neither did much to me, but presumably, they poisoned this creature’s enemies. Too bad for it. I was protecting Tivana. It couldn’t harm her in the slightest, surrounded by my Might of a Giant spell as she was.

Then it pointed its laser-powered tentacles at me, and I realized the gunk I was soaked in was quite flammable.

I wasn’t sure how the oxygen concentration in the air here compared to the concentration I was used to, but I would have been willing to bet that the percentage in the air was much higher. I knew this because what should have been a bright and sudden flame that burned with vigor was instead more on the order of a massive explosion that vaporized a huge chunk of the liquid mercury lake and the surrounding terrain.

Gritting my teeth, I weathered the flame. The fire burned all around me, but I was ready to cast Layered Durability again, and I used it to strengthen my defenses. Each layer had a small gap between it and the next. I expanded that gap without opening it up to the atmosphere. That created a vacuum as strong as the void between worlds in just a fraction of a second. Layering it upon itself between each of my shields, I created insulation so thick it would last for some time against heat like the surface of a star, let alone some chemical explosion. I had survived standing at ground zero of a nuclear blast. It would take more than this to do me in.

But while I evaded the explosion, the tendrils hammered on my shields. Creating the vacuum between them helped to shut out thermal energy, but it made them weak to kinetic strikes. My opponent exploited that to its fullest. As my last shield shattered, I held my breath. I didn’t want to lose brain cells to mercury poisoning now that so much of the lake had been vaporized right before me.

With my real body, I pinched Tivana’s nose shut to protect her. She couldn’t see much inside my giant form, but from the way she was clinging to my real body’s shoulders, I was pretty certain she’d taken my advice and was going to stay right where she was.

Good. I wanted this enemy all to myself. After all, I had a new power to test, and an opportunity like this one didn’t come often for someone at my level.

And so the fight began in earnest. How did I want to take this beast apart?

Aggressively? Should I head in with fists and fingers and pound it into the dirt?

Nimbly? Should I dance around its attacks and deal a few critical blows?

Relentlessly? Should I slay it with a thousand cuts?

In the end, I decided on a combination of everything. With the amount of iron in the monster, there were quite a few skills in my arsenal. I might have been able to tear chunks off it with my Sword Storm spell and use parts of its own body as weapons against it. I might even destroy the beast from the inside.

But I wanted to try my new transmutation ability and push my body and my new power to its absolute limits.

It struck at the earth nearby with a pair of massive tendrils. I stepped aside with agile grace. The suckers on the end opened up to reveal hundreds more laser weapons, but I slammed my heel into the ground and kicked up a curtain of dust. That was all it took to render the weapons useless and hopefully blind any visual sensors the Mechanobeast Elemental was using to track me. After that, I would be fine even if the dust grew so thick it blocked out the sun since I could just switch to using my earth zeal to feel its presence on the surface nearby.

I could feel its confusion growing as it tried to track me. Metal whirred and gears ground. It was busy adapting to this new environment, but that would take time, and I planned to use that time to maximum effect.

I’d tried to use my transmutation ability from afar, but I couldn’t change the metal of the elemental into something else. Even my petrification skill was of limited use. This thing had some iron-based aura fragment that devoured my spell the moment it touched its body.

But I wasn’t out of tricks. I was confident that my aura was stronger than its aura, and all I needed to do was get into physical contact with the thing to prove myself its superior. A light brush was all it would take.

And in the fraction of a second, it took for the monster to adjust its sensors, I brushed my hand against it three times. Once, I hit the main joint in a tendril. Then, I brushed against an exposed gear. Finally, I lightly grazed against a single wire running down what I assumed served as its spine.

The effects were instantaneous. On the joint, the pin running through it turned to brittle stone. The next time the monster tried to use that tentacle, it shattered under its weight.

Then, the lubricant around the gear I brushed against started grinding against the gear it was meant to protect. I’d turned most of it into tiny little diamonds, and as the gear spun, it ground itself against its neighbors. Every tooth would be gone in mere moments, and it would be nothing more than a spinning wheel.

The wire I brushed against was the worst of all for the monster. Electricity crackled through the wire, only to crash into an insulator where it should have found a conductor. As a result, whatever signals this monster’s brain was sending to its body were cut short, and everything below the waist became completely useless.

Robbed of its tentacles, the monster swept at me with its brawny metal arms. I probably could have matched them with raw strength, but instead, I skipped just out of reach as it tried to grab me, then darted back in after it had passed to slap the back of my hand against the inside of its elbow. Like the other hinge, that one froze up. It tried to force the limb to move anyway, and one more smack from me meant the whole thing broke free, and the monster was waving a stump.

Far from deterred, it swept its other arm at me, and I broke it in the same manner.

Most biological monsters would have learned their lesson by now and cut their losses to flee for their lives. Elementals were an odd lot, though. They ran more on instinct than actual consciousness, and despite this Mechanobeast’s robotic appearance, there was definitely no supercomputer upstairs. With all its tentacles and legs disabled, it still opened its metal jaw and tried to bite my head off.

Even if it landed the strike, it would have done nothing more than disperse my Might of a Giant spell. My real body was located in the giant’s center of mass, so the head on this body was purely for aesthetic purposes. I stared down the rows of metallic shark-like teeth without fear. This fight was as good as over.

I felt a rush, unlike anything I’d experienced as of late. Exhilaration at such a victory? Endorphins rushing to my brain from the sheer unbridled power I felt coursing through me? I wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt nearly as good as unleashing myself deep in Tivana’s warm, wet sex.

I wrapped both arms around the monster’s neck and held them there. This time, instead of targeting one component, I attacked everything within my grasp. Doing so required longer contact, but I planned to finish the monster with this blow.

Beneath my hands, the metal turned to stone. It froze, and the light in its eyes faded as its central computer lost power. I snapped the head free and pulled it into my Dimensional Storage. Perhaps Mac could make use of some of the components. I’d also have to recover the rest of the body. There was a lot of metal in here, and that was hard to get on a world full of elves. They weren’t the most talented miners and usually preferred raw materials that grew as plants or trees.

That was the point where I remembered Tivana. She was still clinging tightly to me, but that fight involved a lot of jumping. It would take more than a few bumps to hurt someone of her level, but I was concerned she wasn’t saying anything.

I dismissed my Might of a Giant spell and let my real body fall to the ground. I sent a quick message to Mac, and he sent over some clean air from the Hearthwood, and I used it to fill a bubble. We didn’t need to breathe, since the two of us could both hold our breath for a month or more if we needed to. But the fresh air was nice, and I was hoping she and I could pick up where we left off.

But I underestimated just how much jumping around I’d done during that fight. I’d been hopping left and right, and within my giant body, Tivana had been bouncing up and down my cock the entire battle. Now, her face was slack-jawed and dazed again, like she was three barrels of alcohol deeper than she should have been.

“T-Theo...” she drooled on my chest, cheek flopping against me as she batted lazy eyelashes up at me. “I’m... I’m going to help you fight soon...”

I planted a kiss on her forehead. “I’m all done. You just nap a while. When you wake up, we’ll be back home.”

Apparently, the rush of battle or the waves of endorphins hadn’t been what thrilled me so much about the fight. I must have climaxed again while striking the final blow and not even realized it. Truth be told, it was a bit of a relief. Fighting had felt good, and I would have scared myself I’ve I’d gotten that much of a thrill out of a fight. I would have had to look at myself with mind magic to make sure nothing was wrong.

But no. Battle was still far behind beautiful women on my list of priorities. If Tivana didn’t have an egg in the oven before, she would now.

<Note>

Merry Christmas!

PREV | NEXT