The Gamer Chapter 1700 – Serpent’s Graveyard 2 – Bones (Patreon)

“The world is… what’s the word… Oh, I’m so stupid, I can’t remember it…” Nahua knocked the side of her head. “Ruled? Is that it? Ruled by the Divided Gates, right?”

“The Divided Gates are the foremost powers of the world; they… we do not rule it.” It had been over two months now since Fusion had joined their ranks, but John still wasn’t fully used to saying it. “I think the word you may have been looking for was ‘head’?”

“Mhm… no, I think I constructed that sentence all wrong for what I mean. Ah, well.” Nahua rolled her neck. “So, who do you think is stronger, you or the great teacher?”

“The Grim Reaper is obviously stronger.” No amount of pride he had was big enough to even hesitate on that admission. “In terms of the strongest entities in the entire Abyss I suppose I would rank somewhere in the top 50 by this point? I am not aware how many gods there are that can compete. There’s also the question of how you’d measure it. Much of my power is bound in familiars and utility.”

“I’m just wondering about this and that. Honestly, we knew the outside world existed, but we didn’t think much of it. Sometimes a trader from the Abyss Auction would walk over or a dragon would bring news of the foreign lands.”

‘And yet the Giant’s Puss never became an issue elsewhere… sure sounds like a spell that requires at least some guidance of a person in range to remain active.’

“Where do you think the Aztec realm would land among the Divided Gates?”

A question that John had also asked himself. They had a unique barrier structure, he had to give them that much, and with the Mummy Lords they had an ageless military body of at least moderate size. Assuming they reclaimed most of their old territory from middle Mexico all the way to the Andes, which was a big assumption, John would say… “It wouldn’t.”

“Huh?” Nahua sounded honestly flabbergasted by the prospect.

“Even including you as you are now, after I have empowered you, your god-warriors do not compare to the elites of the Divided Gates. Even if your father himself were to rank in the same level category as the Heavenly Jade Empress or the Apex, your realm has no economy, no coherency, and no support structure. You’re 500 years behind on the development of Protected Spaces and Mobile Barriers, and your reliance on sacrifices to keep your god capable of protecting you will forever cripple you into the state of a secondary power.”

“But you rank among the Divided Gates… are you saying you would win against the combined forces of my father?”

“I would delay that judgement until I have met him,” the Gamer answered. “If it were all of my forces against all of his… then yes. I have the Fire of Destruction on my side.”

“That sounds imposing and everything, but I have no idea what that is.”

John immediately realized this was more of a language issue than anything else. “Mhm… the goddess of volcanoes?”

Nahua’s eyes narrowed, her pitch dropped into the darker moods. “You are allied with that monster?”

“Have you ever met her?” John asked. Nahua shook her head. “Would have surprised me if you did, considering how long she was sleeping… The point is that she’s not a horrible being of burning and pillaging anymore. She’s one of my women now.”

“You accepted that into your harem?” Nahua asked.

The instinctive need to defend one of his women was muted by the knowledge that at least half of what Nahua had learned about the Flame of Destruction from legend was true and it was probably the worse half. “You judge her as I judge your culture for what it did,” John said. “And I know you’ll answer that you had good reasons for sacrificing people. That is well and true but my point isn’t who is more justified, it is only that it’s not too late to change.”

“What would you know about changing?”

“You really didn’t dive that deep into my mind, did you?” John couldn’t help himself but be a little sassy about it. “I guess it was all a bit much for your ditzy brain.”

“Very funny,” she grumbled in the tone of someone that was mildly amused. “I assume you insinuate that you actually changed a lot?”

“Quite a lot. Mostly thanks to her.”

“I love this place!” Rave shouted back towards John and Nahua.

The two of them had been standing at the edge of a steep cliff, watching Rave slaughter hundreds of ants that just kept pouring out of nearby holes. John found their numbers slightly alarming. The level spread here was 40-60 and the hive seemed to produce these monsters like ant queens produced ants in a mundane context. If a force like that swept over the current Abyss, they’d be capable of taking over a massive area.

Which made it really weird that they hadn’t.

“More!” Rave shouted and charged towards a fresh set of a dozen ants coming straight at her. Like typical monsters, these creatures had no survival instinct worth speaking of. The only time John had ever seen them hesitate was when the Grim Reaper was around.

‘These hives clearly aren’t new and I am supposed to believe they just start operating the moment everyone else arrives?’ The Gamer tapped his arm. ‘There is such a thing as a cosmic coincidence, but I find this awfully convenient… The Grim Reaper got here about a week before us and he came here, as far as Lorelei knows, because he noticed there was activity. The Illuminati arrived around the same time. We don’t really know what happened beforehand. Maybe Mengele’s research had poked the hornet’s nest? Maybe… killing Mengele poked the hornet’s nest? God, I hate missing this many pieces.’

“It’s really, really, reaaaaaally weird being next to your thoughts,” Nahua complained. “Don’t you think so too, fellow slime creature? Can I call you that, like, jokingly, or should I stick with Undine?”

“I don’t mind nicknames, as long as they are good natured,” Undine answered. “It is not weird to me. I also can mostly keep up with his thoughts.”

“Just how smart are all y’all? You make me feel like I really am a ditz!” Nahua chatted. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “I dislike the sensation.”

“You’re far from stupid, to assure you of that much. I am just ridiculous… and I am technically not even the smartest person around. Both Momo and Delicia have more raw brainpower.” A tad of a lie. Those two had a higher Intellect than he did, but when counting both Mental Stats he did remain on top.

Nahua had an Intelligence Stat of 58 before her contracting. Far above average, but still leagues behind the 1000+ she was dealing with here. John would have increased her Mental Stats in a heartbeat, had she been a permanent fixture in his life. It would make her more capable of using her pathogens courtesy of having more resources to use Intensify with. Also, the damage of the Empty Rot did scale with her Mental Stats. It was only a secondary scaling factor. It seemed that the diseases primarily scaled off the user’s Level, so Nahua had pretty great base damages and Stat distribution flexibility. The drawback was that she couldn’t really build up to a ‘burst’ level of disease power. The damage was more or less fixed.

“You lot really are absurdly powerful.” The frilly gills of the axolotl demigoddess twitched uncertainly, while they kept on watching the scene below.

Rave’s heel descended in a straight line. The reinforced heel of her bodysuit cracked the scaled exoskeleton of the ant’s head like a bullet smashing through thin glass. Purple goo turned into ashen mist, the excess heat from a light blast from the feline techno lover instantly evaporating all of the liquid. Three other ants were turned into half-charred corpses as the scattershot blast of red, green and blue washed over them.

Copernicus watched the entire scene from a nearby rock. The solar jaguar was licking his paws and used them to clean his head. Fusing with his quarter-elemental summoner wasn’t even necessary. As worrisome as John found the number of ants, they would have required to number in the tens of thousands to be a genuine threat to all of them.

Even if they somehow managed to exhaust Rave, nothing prevented the Lightbearer from using her vastly superior speed to retreat and gather her breath. If there was a disadvantage to Rave here, it was that the lack of natural light made it harder for her to regenerate mana. She had to rely on her old breathing technique instead.

John found the light situation in general interesting. Much like some Raids and Instant Dungeons, there was a general ambient light that just existed. It put the caves at a level of illumination that suggested there was an entrance just around the corner, the sun shining in through the gap.

Surrounded by a ring of corpses, Rave looked around. Her cat ears turned. “I think that was all of them in this segment!” she shouted up to them. John teleported down and kept his first fiancée at arm’s length when she charged towards him. “Gimme kisses.”

“Jane, you are covered in Purple gunk,” he reminded her.

“I’ll help with that,” Nahua said and gathered up all of the infected blood in the room. Once she held another one of her disease fruits in her hand, she lost no time chomping down on it. Like always, John could not help but find the way she reacted to the, apparently, delicious taste adorable. “It’s soooo yummy!”

“Almost makes me want to try,” John joked.

“Would not recommend it!” Nahua licked her fingers after she had cleaned it all off. “Now, this way!”

Nahua took point and the rest of them followed. In their current formation, that was her optimal position twice over. Undine had a similar level of Endurance, courtesy of the Stat Boosts from the Elementalist Class, but she was also the group’s healer. Sending the self-sufficient poison bomb ahead worked nicely. Also, she was the guide.

The interior of the cave system was a fascinating mingling of Mesoamerican ruins, natural tunnel systems, and ant-hive, all of them overlapping in gradient areas. Smooth was the transition of one into the other. Grey, craggy walls turned into blocks of grey and brown, stacked to create pillar-shaped temples in the middle of a large opening. Then, the walls revealed purple and white materials, a kind of mixture between wax and silk thread that formed large structures around brood clusters.

The larvae of the ants were monsters unto themselves. Level 20 to 30, even they would have given the average Abyssal fighter quite some trouble. That being said, courtesy of their lack of intelligence and general slowness, John assumed that even a level 10 Abyssal could have beaten them if they weren’t stupid about it. Humanity’s greatest assets were their tools, not the raw strength of their body. That was for those closer to baseline humanity anyway.

The wiggling larvae were surprisingly regular compared to the ants that they turned into. Piled up in large, wiggling mounds or, if they were larger, stuffed into their own cells within the hexagonal grid of the ant hive, the white larvae had nothing of the feathered serpent look. Bits of bones all around hinted at why that was.

Nahua was near constantly exuding a dense purple fog. It only redoubled in its spread when she picked up one of the bone shards. Any larva that was touched by the mist writhed where it lay. Soft flesh liquified, turning entire piles of brood into bubbling plague sludge. “I feared this, but I did not want it to be true.”

The Gamer did not have to ask what she was talking about. Another minute of walking revealed the truth of the matter to them anyhow.

They dropped down a near vertical tunnel and onto an overhang above a gargantuan opening. End to end, the elliptic chamber was easily 500 metres across. It was big enough to have its own ecosystem. To have had its own ecosystem, it should be said.

Remains of a forest of emerald trees still stuck out between the large rib cages of serpentine bodies. Each Quetzalcoatl seemed to have reached a size of about 50 metres before dying and dozens of them were scattered over the ground below. Apparently the god-warriors of this particular deity had a tendency to be of the risk taking and self-assured variety, a combination that got them killed more frequently than the others.

This was where the majority of Quetalcoatl’s had been laid to rest over the history of the Aztec empire’s reign and this was also where the majority of ants were now active. Mighty bones were nibbled away by hundreds of ants, using their mandibles to rip out whatever chunks they could. They were struggling, even the bones of the god-warriors outclassing their teeth considerably, but chip by chip they succeeded. Mandibles and teeth gnawed, turning skeletons and bits of rotting flesh into a pulp that was then carried to the larvae. Fed this god-warrior meat, they evolved into these hybrids between ant and feathered serpent.

Nahua grit her teeth at the desecration of the graveyard. “Go wild,” John encouraged her. “I’ll try to support where I can, but my spells will likely deal damage to the remains as well.”

“Your support is appreciated,” the demigoddess growled, then jumped off the overhang. The fifty-metre drop meant basically nothing to her. The fog that she had spread through the tunnel they came through followed her. Where it met the ground around her, it spread outwards like a rolling ripple of death and decay.

John continued to scan the sheer scale of it all. ‘Any society that could have beat this should have been able to beat off the Spaniards. I understand they were stronger at the time, relatively speaking, but it was just an expeditionary force that accompanied the mundane explorers and colonists. It makes no sense that there are no records of any major pushback… the more I think about this, the more gaps are opening… who benefits from all of these gaps?’

The Gamer scanned through the mental connections he had while they stood up there. Claire and Siena were chatting as they walked about, the familiars of the vampire shredding everything the cave was throwing at them. Aclysia and Sylph were engaged with a cluster of much stronger ants, but not strong enough to actually halt them. Beatrice and Gnome were cutting their way through various artificial barriers of blockage. Momo was watching Salamander torch a particularly giant pile of brood.

Then he noticed movement in the entrance area. His attention shifted to the three pebbles he had Possessed and left there when they had entered about four hours ago. “Of fucking course,” he sighed.

“What now?” Rave asked, noting the tone of her man.

One of the pebbles was lifted up and held in the palm of an entity with an oddly elongated, almost Xenomorph-like head. The blank surface of the metallic skull was interrupted only by a pair of empty white eyes. Coral-like horns surrounded the faceless surface, scattered out in chaotic asymmetry. Bits of pieces of silvery white and azure metal were anchored in swirling grains of blue and purple sands.

Two similar figures stood behind her. One was a giant of a man that appeared like an armour of arcane energy, pointing a manifested mana sword at the second of the pebbles. The other was a gorgeous woman with flowing, pale blue hair. The light blue lips on her porcelain face twisted into a teasing smirk as she stared directly at the third pebble. Further behind those two marched in a whole battalion of soldiers. Their appearances were difficult to grasp, beyond uniforms and gas masks.

“The Azure Tribe is here,” John answered the question of the feline Lightbearer.

“For realzies?” she sounded more excited than anything.

The three pebbles went dark in that moment.