Chapter 339: Magical Surgery

Loth was mangled.

Will’s guts went cold when he saw the dragonkin laying limp in a puddle of blood rapidly sinking into the faewild grass. Her body seemed to be…rather unharmed. She had her hands folded over her stomach and was speaking in a relaxed tone. There were several cuts in her armor, but beneath those, her flesh seemed to have been healed already. Mostly.

Ah. There was an empty supreme healing potion bottle beside Loth’s head.

Surrounding her were an army of dog-sized insects fending off the local weasel-monsters and setting up traps autonomously, and several of them were dead, mostly scattered around Loth where she had offloaded the worst damage on the nearest ones.

Will let out a breath as he skidded to a halt beside Loth, the army of lethal insects parting to let him through.

“The reason I bring this up,” Loth said as Will arrived, “Is because-“

Will knelt down beside Loth and tapped ‘shave and a haircut’ directly into her sternum. If she couldn’t feel that, then this would be difficult.

“Two bits.” Loth said, staring blankly at the sky. One of her eyes was indeed closed, likely the damaged one she’d mentioned. Her left horn was missing a bit off the end, and she was missing a couple fingers.

Did the razor-leaves bypass her damage chain that offloads damage onto her minions? Will thought as he began pulling out the appropriate potions out of his Phantom Hand.

Imagine something being so sharp the System didn’t detect it as damage.

“One tap for yes, two taps, for no.” Loth said. “Am I badly wounded?”

Tap, tap.

Loth blew a sigh of relief.

“Can you see the debuff?”

Will squinted, then brought up his most recent map of Loth’s Class. If there was a difference, it was very small, and Will would have to pore through his map to see it.

Tap, tap.

“Damn.” Loth cursed.

Will remembered the branching structures in his brain that were affected by stat distribution and curses. If it wasn’t an obvious, gunky curse that clung to her class, then it was likely in her brain somewhere.

Will briefly considered using Word of Inversion, but that wouldn’t help much.

He suspected that the it was a single effect that the System considered a ‘buff’. The fact that it raised Movement more than it cut Acuity and Kinesthetics meant that for all the System – stupid as it was – could tell, it was beneficial.

If he used Word of Inversion, then the most likely outcome would be Loth being overloaded by sensory information and at the same time having her movement speed reduced to zero. This would effectively lock her in place and torture her.

Tricky problem, Will thought, turning his attention to Mason and Jorn.

“Mason, don’t kill any monsters if you can help it. Jorn, don’t use your arrows to kill monsters, just your summons. You may go blind. Don’t move. Once you guys meet up, stay put and I’ll get you.”

“Got it.” Mason said.

“Roger,” Jorn said before pausing. “Did you say blind?”

“What about me?” Sammohan asked.

“You’re still alive!?” Will gasped.

“Fuckoff.” Sammohan growled. “I got baddies incoming, and I can’t move.”

“I see them. I’m headed your way.” Will said as he hoisted Loth up onto his shoulder. It was a bit awkward with his lame right arm, but his left arm was strong enough to make it work.

“Am I upside down?” Loth asked, her internal senses seemingly the only ones still working.

Will saw the small weasel-shaped bastards heading towards Sammohan, weaving through the razor-sharp jungle with pure dexterity, avoiding the blade-like leaves with the narrowest margin. Their bodies squirmed like eels as they shot forward, moving more like a fluid than something with bones.

I wonder if…

Will took a chance.

One monster wouldn’t make him blind, so this was a good opportunity to give it a shot.

Will plucked the map, violently shifting the land the weasel was running across. The land…and the extremely sharp bushes attached to that land.

The weasel, not expecting the bushes to suddenly begin thrashing violently, turned into mincemeat in a fraction of a second.

Will paused, keeping one eye on his stats and the other on the world around him.

Nothing happened. There was no lowered score in his stats, and the world didn’t dim or go suddenly more quiet. Everything was as sharp and detailed as it had been a moment before.

Then…

He mentally grabbed and twisted the map, plucking it with Aspect on top of each of the speeding weasel-shaped bundles of miasma and Charge, sending ripples through the land. He watched in fascination as the Charge inside the monsters erupted outward as soon as they died, as though it had been spring-loaded inside their bodies.

The Charge rode a strand of miasma that searched around, tasting the air like a dog searching for a scent before heading towards Will, only to dissipate at the edge of the terrain that he’d converted to faewild.

Will let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding and continued sprinting towards Sammohan, slaughtering the local monsters with the very environment they’d come to take for granted.

When he arrived at Sammohan, the bush full of razor-leaves that Sammohan had been surrounded by turned to the carefully manicured bushes of the faewild, which were not known for their cutting, allowing the prospector to collapse out without peeling off his skin or losing any limbs.

A straightforward source note: the author's publishing page has this chapter, but the version here was copied without permission.

“Thank the gods,” Sammohan groaned as he collapsed onto the grass, his entire body bleeding from various tiny cuts incurred from trying to stand as still as possible.

“Don’t kill anything, and if it gets in your face, throw it as far away as you can.” Will said to Sammohan as the oversized miner gathered himself.

“What’s up with them?” The miner asked, gesturing to Beth floating beside Will and Loth over his shoulder.

“Environmental debuff.” Will said.

“It makes you fast and clumsy,” Beth replied, still able to see and hear, just not well enough to handle her speed.

“Ah.” Sammohan nodded, putting the trick together.

All together, the three of them headed towards Jorn and Mason. The two of them gave sighs of relief when Will arrived.

“How’s your eyesight?” Will asked Jorn as he arrived.

The necromancer ranger hybrid was riding one of his stormcloud goats, attached to the summon by thick red veins.

“Eh?” Jorn asked.

“HOW IS YOUR EYESIGHT!?” Will repeated, already knowing the answer.

“Not great, honestly. BUT!” Jorn raised a finger. “My Class specializes in Focus anyway so my summons aren’t negatively affected by the loss, and I get rough feedback from my summons, who are unaffected by the debuff, so I can still somewhat function normally.”

So it triggers even on a summon? Will thought. It also triggered from non-direct damage. Will had just caused the land to ripple, it was the shaking bushes that minced up the weasels.

Somehow the magic had identified his signature and sought him out, only dissipating when it hit the area of his altered terrain. So even long range wouldn’t work as long as they were in the original environment.

“I’m screwed.” Mason said from where he was sitting against a tree. “I can’t see worth a damn.”

“So whaddya wanna do, Boss?” Sammohan asked. “We skipping this Floor?”

“…No,” Will decided. “We’ve made a little safe spot for ourselves. Let’s get some civvies out to take care of the rest of the crew. Jorn will keep the border safe, and you can do some prospecting while I try to figure out this debuff.”

“What!?” Jorn asked, cocking his ear towards them like an old man.

“I don’t want to leave while our Party is half-blind. Nothing says the debuff will go away when we go to a new Floor.” Will continued.

In fact, Will suspected it wouldn’t go away by itself, because they were already basically on a different Floor at the moment thanks to the amulet of the Homeland Advantage. Maybe stepping through a Door would cause it to wear off, but Will didn’t want to take the chance.

They brought some guards and priestesses out of Mason, gave them instructions to never kill any monsters within the range of Will’s modified terrain, and throw them out if they came within range.

Jorn was given the assignment of having his summons patrol the edges of the space to hopefully prevent that from happening, while Sammohan organized a mining mission.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t venture deep into the razor-jungle for obvious reasons, so they were forced to sample the earth right outside the patch of safety and hope for the best.

“let’s get a nuker to blast away the foliage, then we’ll cut a ten foot deep trench through the earth. Let’s get a sluice running and see if there’s any minerals with strange properties. Isolate anything extra light, extra heavy, extra stubborn, extra glowy, extra anything. I wanna see what the roots of these trees are snacking on.” Sammohan said to his foreman, marking off the channel they wanted to cut while the man nodded and took notes on the manpower they would need.

Will on the other hand, turned his attention to Loth.

“Is Loth okay?” Devourer of Knowledge asked.

“Probably better than you,” Will said, glancing at Devourer’s haggard appearance. The Devourer had frayed strands flying everywhere from where the razor leaves had reached across dimensions and sliced into her fluffy funnel-shaped body.

“This? This isn’t a wound. This is basically my armor…or coat?” Devourer said, pulling strands of miasma back inside and tucking them away, her eight miasma strands behaving very much like a spider’s limbs.

“As long as you’re fine,” Will said, turning his attention back to Loth, who was snoring faintly, which was impressive in its own way. Will had been subject to complete sensory deprivation before and that shit was not relaxing.

Manifest.

Will manifested a map of the local area, then drew in until Loth’s skull filled the entire thing, her Class constantly shifting and changing as she breathed.

Will then manifested the saved map of Loth and expanded her head until it filled the entire thing.

“We seem to have stopped moving.” Loth said into the silence. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

Tap, tap. Will tapped ‘no’ into Loth’s sternum while he played ‘spot the difference’ between the two maps.

“Oh, here we go.” Will said, expanding a small portion of Loth’s brain in both maps.

The branching structure that represented the distribution of stats had indeed been modified. A tight collar was wrapped around the branch responsible for Acuity and Kinesthetics, cutting off the supply inside Loth’s brain entirely while the energy was diverted into a movement speed buff that permeated her entire body.

Will isolated that particular strand of miasma, expanding the image further and removing other miasma structures in order to get a better look.

“Does that look dangerous to you?” Will asked Devourer.

“It looks flexible and stretchy, likely to accommodate layering, but I doubt it would react explosively to being cut.

“Hmm…” Will created a rough copy of it using Titan’s Grasp, and then cut it.

The copy unravelled gently without thrashing around violently, although the nature of the magic seemed to change a bit, which was unacceptable inside someone’s brain.

“How about this.” Will said, showing The Devourer a hypothetical solution where Will made a similar strand of miasma, half-wrapped it around the branch behind the collar, then when he cut the collar, immediately connecting it to the new strand in such a way that they were no longer entirely wrapped around Loth’s Acuity and Kinesthetics branch.

All he had to do then was gently pry it lose and pull it out of her brain. Only then would he allow it to unravel into undifferentiated magic.

Will wasn’t sure what it would do inside her head, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

“Can you connect the ends when I make the cut?” Will asked.

“Give me a moment to adjust my field of view.” Devourer said, her eight miasma strands weaving an enormous eye at the front of her body, looking straight at the side of Loth’s skull.

“Okay, I can see it directly.”

Will didn’t need to see it directly, he was using the expanded Map in his mind’s eye to guide Titan’s grasp, carefully weaving a stiff half-circle out of miasma, with two connection points designed to receive the debuff.

He carefully guided it through the tiniest gaps in Loth’s Class to the structure in question, taking several minutes of quiet concentration.

He nestled the half-circle up against the collar.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” Devourer said.

“Cutting it now.”

Will cut the collar with the tiny crowbar-like barb he’d learned from faefire.

In his map, he watched as Devourer grabbed the two severed ends of the collar and stitched them to Will’s strand, creating a neat double half-circle.

They repeated it for the second part, and then Will carefully pulled the ‘buffs’ out of Loth’s Class and head.

Loth’s eyes shot open.

“I can see and hear. Excellent.” Her eyes flickered to Will’s face without making a single movement.

“Should I move?”

“Not…just…yet.” Will breathed, carefully tugging the last of the miasmatic structure out of her Class, trying not to snap it off and leave it inside her.

“Hey Will, check this out,” Sammohan said, arriving beside Will with a pouch filled with some kind of powder.

“Concentrating,” Will said aloud, but a moment later, the last piece of the buff came free and Will chopped the magic up and tossed it aside.

“When you ingest this stuff it gives you weird powers, check it.” Will and Loth’s gaze were drawn to the oversized prospector as he took a swig of what was presumably some of the mineral mixed in water.

Will watched as the blood in his body became charged, the miasma slowly working its way to his skin, most of it moving towards any hard edges and creating the same distinctive ripples that the leaves had.

“Hah!” Sammohan drove his fingertips into a rock and carved a smiley face.

“Pretty cool, right?”

“You just got started, how do you already have a bag of that stuff?” Will asked.

Sammohan shared a glance with his fellow miners. “You’ve been going all night, Boss.”

Oh.

In that moment of silence, Sammohan’s pants fell off, waistband severed by errant ripples emerging from his skin.

“I wasn’t expecting the first thing I saw when my eyes worked again to be so…disappointing.” Loth said.

“I feel like that’s punishment enough for being stupid,” Will said as Sammohan’s fellow miner burst into laughter. “But seriously, don’t drink magical dirt before I’ve had a chance to make sure it’s safe.”

“Ya, Boss.” Sammohan muttered, sidling away to go find a seamstress.