Chapter 357: Second Zone

Violet nodded at the latest system message, glad that forcing other beasts to surrender worked as she had imagined.

She had no desire to kill such weak beasts, doing so just felt... wrong to Violet. Sure if she was forced to she would have no issue with killing weaker beasts, yet when the option presented itself she saw no need to bully the weak.

With that decided she promptly set off towards the center of the island once again.

The ground blurred beneath Violet as she flew, her wings only flapping intermittently to keep her altitude. One thing she did note quite quickly was that she seemed to be entirely unable to fly very high.

Once she reached around 40 meters up in the air a force began to exert itself on her, trying to force her back down to the ground. She could still resist the force and go higher, yet the more she resisted that strange force the stronger it got.

On her testing she found that she could still comfortably fly at around 60 meters high, but any higher than that and the downward force became simply too troublesome to fly through.

Whilst Violet was quite annoyed by that their was little she could really do, she was entirely unable to identify any clue as to why this force prevented flying past a certain point.

It felt somewhat similar to the force that seemed to limit how far her domain could be extended.

A strange limitation of this space, yet their was not a lot that she could really do about it other than go along with the perceived rules of this land.

So it was that Violet instead flew a few meters above the tall grasses, she avoided the collection of trees and simply flew around them.

She was enjoying her relaxing flight when she felt a slight spike of danger from her right side, near instantly she tucked her right wing in and performed a tight barrel roll as a dense ball of rock sailed just past her.

She flaired her wings once the roll was complete and instantly swept her senses out as far as they would go. At the same time her head turned in the direction the stone ball originated from.

Violet blinked when she saw the culprit, it was a gorilla type beast, it was quite large, maybe standing around 3 meters tall and packed with dense muscles and thick black fur all across its body.

Yet when her senses reached the beast she couldn’t help but frown when she felt the distinct presence of a mid rank tier 4 beast.

She stared at the beast that was currently slamming its meaty fists against its chest as it roared at her. It was clearly trying to intimidate Violet, yet, she quickly glanced at her massive 100 meter long body, then at the comparatively tiny gorilla and failed to understand.

"Why did such a weak beast try to attack me?" Wondered Violet, unable to understand how the beast was unable to sense her power. She was not hiding how her domain exuded the distinctive aura of a tier 5.

She also knew well how oppressive it felt to face off against a sovereign when only a Lord. For she had done so several times before, so for a mid rank Lord to be able to both see how massive she was and feel her power.

Violet simply failed to understand how the beast thought it was a smart idea to attack her. With a shake of her head she turned away from the beast after first firing off 3 void spears at the beast.

She didn’t even bother watching to see if they struck it, believing that if it survived her attack then it deserved to live, if not, well that was what it got for attacking someone so much more powerful than itself.

And sure enough, less than a dozen seconds later she received the notification announcing the beasts death.

"Stupid gorilla, thought apes were supposed to be smarter than birds... I guess I was wrong. Or was that one just particularly stupid?" Violet pondered that for some time as she quickly read over the notification.

[You have defeated Frank, Stoneskin Gorilla lvl 103 exp rewarded.

No token awarded as zone limit already reached.]

With that final distraction out of the way nothing got in Violet’s was as she sped towards the second zone.

Soon she saw it, a glimmering ephemeral barrier that split the landscape. It was maybe a meter thick, faintly obscuring what lay beyond it in the next zone.

Violet landed a short distance before the barrier, carefully examining the strange separation of this land.

The more she experienced this space, the more sure she was that this was no natural land. No it felt far too artificial for it to be natural.

Sure she had experienced strange environments before, like the elemental valleys back near where she was born. Yet this space was just too uniform to be natural.

Still their was once again nothing she could really do with that information other than shrug and move on.

So that’s what she did.

Violet approached the barrier, carefully poking it with one of her claws, only for the claw to effortlessly sink into the barrier with no resistance.

Pulling her claw back she did not notice any damage, so with a steadying breath Violet walked straight into the barrier and entered the second zone.

And not much changed.

Before her was still a open grassland, the grass still stood multiple meters tall. Only now their were numerous rocky outcroppings that littered the landscape.

Tall cliffs and valleys interupted the itherwise flat terrain, the ubiquitous grasses still covered much of the landscape. Its swaying stalks hiding the minute variation in the terrain whilst allowing for the more extreme shifts to be noticed.

The outcroppings were suitably massive as with seemingly everything in this land. They towered into the sky, stretching well over a hundred meters tall whilst the valleys mirrored that in their decent into the earth.

Along with this change in landscape the wind picked up. Powerful gales whipped the grass around, constantly shifting its direction and intensity.

Chunks of rock and dirt occasionally dislodged from the cliffs, only to be carried aloft and acting as both a strong discouragement to flying and effectively lowering visibility.

Violet didn’t even bother trying to fly here, knowing that whilst she may be able to stay airborn, she would really struggle to fly with any grace or confidence.

It would just leave her exposed in the sky for any waiting for to attack at their leisure.

Instead Violet stuck to the ground. She quickly moved in and away from the barrier, wanting to open some distance from that point. As she moved the wind whipped at her, buffeting her body and causing her to have to dig in with her claws and lower her head against the powerful winds whilst her eyes squinted against the airborn debris.

She headed directly towards one of the larger valleys, at the same time she also shrunk her body down somewhat. Stopping at a respectable 30 meters long so that she would be able to manoeuvre easier through the rocky terrain.

Soon enough she entered the valley, glad for the wind to die down slightly.

Now in the valley she looked about and expanded her senses in search of any other life forms.

To her excitement she felt something, a powerful burst of life deeper within the valley.

It had been moving away from her, deeper into the zone, yet at the same time Violet felt it, it apparently felt Violet as its movements stopped.

Violet grinned, already looking forward to the fight that was likely to come.