Chapter 88: Oh, the things I’d do for Sashimi …

“The Red Planet” was no longer an apt descriptor for Mars. Not most of it, anyway.

From space, it looked like a slightly off-color version of Earth, with an atmosphere and surface material the World Item that had transformed the planet had “designed” to capture enough heat to make it habitable despite being outside the Goldilocks zone.

And yet, in this crater Isaac had brought him to was made up entirely of the reddish-orange rock that had defined Mars for millions of years before the [System] … if it weren’t for the snow-covered slopes of Olympus Mons rising in the distance, Derek could have easily thought the portal had taken the two of them through time as well as space. Oh, and the massive lake in the center of the “arena” would have been frozen solid back then.

“So, where are we, exactly?” he asked. The rough location wasn’t hard to guess, but everything beyond that was very much up in the air.

“Raid Boss summoning arena of Akashic Academy’s Mars campus,” Isaac declared, spreading his arms wide. “The one for the Salmon of Wisdom, to be specific. You’re at a Level where you can earn the boon, and a Raid Boss makes for a good punching bag.”

“You want me to kill a Raid Boss on my own?” Derek asked, aghast. With his ship, that may be in the cards, but all on his own? No chance.

“Nope,” Isaac announced. “I figured you could try out your new spell, or whatever it is you wanted to see out in the field, then either finish it off yourself or get some help for that. The academy is right outside the arena, and there is an entire raid group’s worth of students around Level 50 waiting to test themselves against a Raid Boss under supervision.”

“And if I don’t want the help, are they just sitting around waiting on me?”

Isaac pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Then they get to fight the Salmon of Wisdom in the other aquatic arena. Whatever happens, you’re not going to inconvenience anyone.”

Then, he gestured at the lake. “So, your opponent is ready to make its appearance whenever you are.”

[Phantom Armor] replaced his regular streetwear with a light set of armor, mostly reinforced cloth and metal over the joints and vital organs, and he prepared his opening shot.

“Ready.”

Because this was going to be one hell of an alpha strike.

Cosmic Event (legendary)

In the beginning, there was the Big Bang, unleashing all that there is out into the universe: matter, antimatter, light, and energy.

Then, when all the antimatter was done mutually annihilating itself by contact with matter, gravity began to collect what little there was left into nebulae.

Eventually, those nebulae would compress further down into spheres at whose cores hydrogen would slowly begin to fuse, lighting up the darkness for the very first time, becoming the very first stars.

Then, finally, the stars would explode, sending the heavier elements necessary for all other things, from life to even technology, hurtling out across the universe.

That is only a small portion of the nigh-infinite expanse of cosmic events that occur within our universe. And this Skill grants its bearer the ability to emulate/replicate them … on a small scale, at least.

Cosmic Event is a separate mana pool that can be used to cast, and only cast, a spell created to work in conjunction with it … if they’ve been built with a function based on cosmic events.

Spells created for this Skill will be reinforced and stabilized by it, and may not necessarily be usable without it.

For every Level in this Skill, its reserves grow by one thousand for the first ten, with each subsequent Level adding five hundred.

Current pool: 1,000/1,000

Options:

Birth of a Star

Pulsar Sweep

Once that [Skill] was maxed out, he’d be able to throw twenty thousand mana’s worth of energy at a given problem, a little more than where his mana pool was liable to end up at Level 200, but achievable far earlier.

And he’d be able to use it in all sorts of ways … once he’d actually figured out how to reliably make things happen, rather than beating his head against a brick wall for an entire month.

There was a reason why there were only two “spells,” after all.

[Cosmic Event: Pulsar Sweep] had been his first creation, and one that really wasn’t something to be proud of. Because, to be blunt, it was the single most bitch-basic use of this [Skill].

No creativity, basically no effort, zero complexity, near-complete inability for creative applications … and it still packed one hell of a whallop. A direct mana-to-attack-power conversion modeled after the hard radiation hurled out into the universe. Pulsars, to use the common parlance.

However, it was the second application that Derek was channeling underneath the Raid Boss that had just started writhing within the lake before him.

A titanic salmon the size of a city bus erupted from the lake, water rising upwards around it as an immense column already splitting apart and compressing down into a dozen spears.

Not only were those things dense as hell and could be guided by the will of the gigantic fish, but the unnatural compression would come apart the instant they impaled someone, forcing impossibly high-pressure water through any and all blood vessels that had been severed, shredding any flesh they passed through. Especially the more fragile tissue found in the human body.

Like the lungs. Or the brain, for that matter.

In other words, unless they were struck at the far end of one’s extremities, all but the toughest of humans would be killed by a single strike.

And against that, all Derek had was … well, the fact that Isaac was supervising meant that he was actually rather safe. But all he had was a single [Skill], one which he could only use a single time before it needed to recharge over time.

[Cosmic Event: Birth of a Star]

First, lightning cracked through the water the Salmon of Wisdom was floating above, separating the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen.

Second, the hydrogen was collected and compressed into a tiny sphere at the very bottom of the lake.

Third, the hydrogen was heated as individual atoms were pushed so tightly together that regular “pressure” was inadequate to describe the forces involved.

Atomic nuclei began to fuse. Radiation began to make the surrounding water flash into steam. And at the bottom of the lake, a star bloomed …

And then promptly exploded as the magic failed and the force of the impromptu hydrogen bomb surpassed the power of the sphere’s “gravity” holding it together by several orders of magnitude.

It was a small explosion, all things considered. It fell well short of anything that came to mind when the phrases “hydrogen-bomb” or “fusion warhead” were brought up, tiny by the standards of those that shared its classification … nuclear warheads.

The titanic explosion vaporized the entire lake, only Derek’s sensory [Aura] letting him see the Raid Boss get slapped skywards by the blastwave even through the immense cloud of steam obscuring his vision.

He found himself staring up at it for perhaps a touch too long before he threw himself flat onto the ground, space twisting to turn a distant rock lying perhaps ten meters ahead of him into a massive barrier the blast front parted around, before he let the effect lapse and pulled himself back onto his feet to watch the salmon fall back down, emerging from the steam cloud like the world’s most fat, ungraceful, pigeon.

But it was a “pigeon” that was looking shockingly uninjured.

The Raid Boss had been right on top of a goddamn H-bomb, and was … fine? Lightly scorched, perhaps, and that was already being excessively generous. And if getting flung up into the air by the explosion hadn’t hurt it, then the impact with the ground was unlikely to do anything significant.

As the steam dispersed, however, Derek did see he’d achieved something. There, at the very bottom of the lake, previously hidden from sight and well outside of the area he’d been viewing with his [Aura], was a hole.

A very deep hole, whose sides were already beginning to crumble.

If something were to wind up in there, would it be able to get back out?

And, perhaps most importantly, would blowing this fight by trying something potentially stupid result in anything worse than Isaac having to step in?

Space twisted beneath Derek’s magical power, warping between the Raid Boss and the muddy, boiling lakebed it was falling towards … with an incredibly incongruous “squish,” the salmon plunged head-first into the crater, dirt cascading down as the impact caused the ground to tremble, rushing in to fill in the hole behind it, leaving only the tail protruding outwards.

For a brief moment, the monster seemed as surprised as he was that that had worked.

Then, it began to thrash, each motion hurling car-sized globs of mud through the air. It didn’t seem to be getting free, though … and it was stuck head-first in the mud, with a scan via his [Aura] showing that mud was pouring into its mouth and gills.

How long does it take for a Raid Boss to suffocate? He thought.

“About a week.”

Derek jolted as he heard Isaac’s voice from beside him.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Didn’t realize you said that out loud, did you?”

Derek shook his head.

“Anyway, Raid Bosses get by with basically no air; their brain cells take absurdly long to die even when they are starved of oxygen, and they can keep going with a truly horrifying amount of brain damage. This is gonna take a while.”

There was a brief pause before Isaac continued.

“I know this is going to sound like I’m making fun of you, but I promise, I’m completely serious when I tell you that that was damn impressive.

“The [System] built Raid Bosses to challenge plattons at the bare minimum. They’re tough, have redundancies for just about any kind of damage they can take, including some that should be immediately lethal, and are also pretty resistant to crowd control effects as well. Locking one down is usually pretty hard and requires a dedicated [Class].”

“I still have to kill it, though,” Derek replied, biting his lower lip. The question was how?

[Spatial Detonation], maybe? If he put it close enough to the head, the pressure wave would translate through the skull and scramble its brain … but like Isaac had just explained, Raid Bosses were a lot less susceptible to that sort of thing than a biological creature had any right to be.

Ah, what the hell, I got time …

There was a distant rumble underground, followed by the Raid Boss’ thrashing reaching a fever pitch, the shockwave of the explosion practically vanishing against the earthquake that was the trapped monster. Damage-wise, however, it seemed to have done very little. Could he blow up the dirt filling its mouth?

Derek tried, and, annoyingly, it failed.

Though then again, if he could do that, what was stopping him from detonating, say, the air in someone’s lungs?

Actually, why hadn’t he tried that? With a monster, that was. But still, why hadn’t he thought of that … Derek facepalmed. Because the spell worked best with already dense materials, meaning solids and liquids, rather than gases.

But if the still rather delicate spell couldn’t work inside the mostly closed mouth of the Salmon, what about forcing an opening? Earth-moving spell, force mud in through the mouth and gills until they gaped open so wide that “outside” was a far more nebulous concept?

Against literally anything else, Derek would have felt guilty for even thinking of such a plan, never mind going through with it.

This was a literal engine of destruction, though. Not sentient, not sapient, not capable of doing anything save trying to murder humans in the most effective way possible.

There was resistance. There was more than enough water in the mud for the monster to fight back, to try and stop him … until, with the last dregs of his mana, Derek cast [Spatial Detonation] right between its open jaws.

And, once again, nothing seemed to happen. The shockwave traveled out throuhg the creature’s mouth and gills, and that seemed to be the end of it, at least as far as he could tell, when watching solely through his [Aura].

Except … was the composition of the mud changing? What on Earth? Where was all that extra liquid coming from? And what the hell was it? Sure as hell wasn’t water …

When he did figure it out, he facepalmed.

The gills weren’t holes where water that came in through the mouth went out.

Well, they were, but that was missing the fact that the equivalent of a fish’s lungs were in the way, incredibly fragile tissue that the creature’s entire blood volume had to be cycled through.

On the other hand …

“Making it bleed out isn’t going to kill it any more quickly, is it?”

“I mean, it is, just not by much,” Isaac replied. “It’s not like most Raid Bosses are a bloody pile of lifeless meat by the end of the fight because people enjoy the mess.”

Some people might, because there were always some, but all in all, it was a good point.

Derek brought his ring up to his mouth, about to start eating mana jellies, only to decide against it. The potion balls were great for a quick boost during combat, but the fact that they tanked your regen once they wore off meant that using them was typically a net loss in the long term.

Granted, of only ten percent or so with the quality of product he was running around with, but that was still ten percent less mana, ten percent fewer spells, ten percent less damage, and all of this would take just that much longer.

And if he was already going to be here waiting, he might as well spend the time productively.

Derek turned around to talk to Isaac, only to see him typing away on his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I have a meeting tomorrow, so I’m trying to find someone else to supervise,” Isaac replied.

“Oh, oka- … tomorrow?! How long do you think this is going to take?”

“It’s a Raid Boss. So … a while. A long while.”

Fuck.

“I mean, it’s not like you’ll miss your holiday,” Isaac continued. “Why did you want to do the training before the relaxation? Shouldn’t some R&R have been the first thing you did after that whole mess with The Error?”

“Honestly? It’s mostly about Mimi,” Derek admitted. “She was going to spend all her time working on the Dragonfly once we got back, and making her take a holiday wouldn’t be any fun for anyone. So I’m delaying our next outing until she can go somewhere after she’s done with the ship.”

“And you didn’t take that as an excuse to take an extra-long holiday?”

Derek shrugged. “Pretty sure I’d have gotten bored. Besides, Atticus and Ye-in decided to train with their parents. We’re planning on touring the Core later, all four of us.”

Isaac snorted. “Yeah, I probably should do that one of these days. I left when building things on planets outside the solar system was a fad for people who got bored in Sol, and came back to a thriving multi-star empire.”

Derek’s older brother paused for a moment, then shook his head. “And about a thousand new idiotic ideas having been put into action that I never could have imagined anyone would actually try. How many times have people tried to mass-murder civilians because they thought it would give them an interesting [Class] again?”

“Way too many times,” Derek replied. “The dumbest part is that Caleb Jones is the only one who ever walked away from it; everyone else got splattered across the pavement before they achieved anything.”

Mostly because that asshole had been the first, his actions catching everyone so off guard that the man had been able to leave the planet and run off into the cosmos. And even then, if he’d ever stopped running, he’d have died. As it was, as of the most recent publicly available scrying data, Jones had gotten most of the way to the Andromeda galaxy by now, having spent nearly five decades trying to cross the gulf between galaxies.

Isaac sighed.

“You’re thinking about how you’d have caught him if you hadn’t left, aren’t you?” Derek asked.

Isaac shook his head.

“I know I’d have caught him. Get ahead of him with my faster FTL travel speed, scatter some of the FTL disruptors we got from the Koinians in his path, then rip his fucking head off when he came tumbling out into realspace. It’d have even been easy …”

For all that Derek had occasionally thought about what it might have been like to live a century earlier, during the advent of the [System], the age of chaos during which Isaac had become who he was, thought about that world were fighting the good fight was all that was necessary to get a good [Class] because of all the borderline apocalyptic threats the world kept throwing at humanity …

Well, he was honestly, genuinely glad to have been born when he was. Even in a worst-case scenario, he’d never hold the fate of all humanity in his hands. No matter what he did, he’d never find himself in that kind of situation, for “all of humanity” was too widely spread to be realistically threatened with extinction. Seeing how that kind of thing weighed on his older brother only reinforced that decision.

“By the way, I just got my first set of hate mail,” Derek offered. It was a blatantly obvious attempt to change the topic, but it was the best he had at the moment.

“Oh, do tell,” Isaac asked.

“So, that company you set up to produce my special spatial rings? The Marine Corps bought out production for the next year. And now, a lot of people aren’t going to be getting any and aren’t too happy about it …”

“You sold your entire production quota and didn’t hold anything back for individual purchases?” Isaac said flatly.

“I mean, there are more manufacturing lines getting set up, so I’ll have those available, but I’m taking that little fuckup as a sign to not try and manage things personally until I’ve got at least a couple of months of study under my belt.”

And that was only that short because of how quickly Derek could learn thanks to his starter [Class]. Of course, relying solely on book learning was a bad idea in almost all situations, but given the choice between getting practical experience with or without prior study, he’d always come down on the side of “with.”

“Meaning … what exactly?” Isaac asked.

“Meaning I’m going to trust the people you recommended to run things, and trust that if they screw me over, I’ll be able to take every cent they steal out of their hide.”

Of course, the person who was in the best position to screw him over was his brother, and human history said that that was far more likely than he might like … but ultimately, if Isaac were that kind of person, he wouldn’t have done half the things he had. Derek figured he’d risk it.

“Incoming,” Isaac deadpanned and took a couple of steps to the side before a motorbike-sized glob of mud splattered across the dirt between them.

Right. There was still a Raid Boss around.

Derek took a second to check his mana pool, then decided he had enough to try something else.

An [Anima Bolt] flashed from his hands, slamming into the base of the tailfin, blasting apart several scales, though blood proved not to be forthcoming, which Derek quickly realized was down to the creature already having bled out due to the damage he’d inflicted to its gills.

Except, of course, with only a few drops of blood left in its entire body, the damn thing had not slowed down one iota.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a table and some chairs in your storage ring, would you?” Derek asked.

I mean, it is going to take a while, and if we stay at a safe distance … weird as it feels, I wouldn’t mind a“picnic” while I tickle that thing to death.Could be nice.

“Table, chairs, food, drinks, paperwork, all the things we need to stay busy.”

Or maybe not.

***

Salmon of Wisdom (Lv. 50 Raid Boss) has been slain. 50,000 XP gained

It had taken three days. Three. Freaking. Days. And, by the end of it all, Derek had had to use a nigh-endless series of [Spatial Detonations] to eviscerate the creature in the most literal of ways, first tearing open its stomach, then reducing its organs to pulp, and finally detonating the earth against its head until the kill notification finally arrived.

Fucking Raid Bosses.

This also left him with a final issue … how the fuck was he supposed to get the fish out of the hole?

The answer turned out to be even more raw effort, burning the entirety of his mana pool in a few massive bursts of energy to push against the creature’s head from below, using an earth-moving spell to force the rock down there upwards, then hardening the earth to prevent it from slipping back down.

That ended up taking another two hours, but by the end of it, the Salmon of Wisdom was revealed in all its grotesque glory, the shredded monster far more disgusting when seen directly with his own two eyes, rather than through his [Aura].

“I mean, you don’t need to eat that much,” Tanja commented. “I’m sure there are decently sized chunks left intact in there.”

A sword manifested in her hand, though she immediately flipped it over and presented the hilt to him while she continued holding onto the blade.

“You wanna do the honors? I’ll set the table.”

Derek carefully took the proffered blade, while his sister pulled a table from her storage ring, as well as a bowl of rice, some soy sauce, and a dash of wasabi. Some of the traditional accoutrements for sashimi, aka raw sliced fish.

Part of Derek wanted to cook this fish properly, but he’d spent three days eating nothing but his stash of emergency rations. He was desperate for some proper food. Now, all he needed was to find something he could actually eat without getting a mouthful of gravel.

Clambering over the carcass, he found himself a piece as far from the eviscerated stomach as possible, as well as all other breaks in the skin, and started cutting. It was almost entirely muscle up here; anything he didn’t want to eat, especially the fishbones, would be so massive on this fish that he’d spot it the instant he cut into it, which would make this quite simple.

Whatever the sword Tanja had lent him was, it had to be a masterwork, because the creature’s flesh parted like butter before its edge, swiftly allowing him to carve out a chunk as large as he was, then telekinetically levitate that over to the table.

Tanja snapped her fingers, and the fish fell apart, cut into thousands of pieces, sliced apart by a hundred invisible blades, falling onto the large platter in the center of the table in a surprisingly neat-looking pile.

That was when, finally, Derek grabbed a piece with chopsticks and took his first bite, the taste of the fish all but forgotten in the face of the rush of endorphins at the [System] window that appeared in front of his face.

Well of Wisdom’s Blessing (unranked)

Nine Hazelnuts once fell into a well, the Well of Wisdom. A Salmon ate these hazelnuts, gaining all the knowledge in the world.

And then, humans hunted down this Salmon for its power, devouring it like the monsters they are.

The holders of this Skill gain 5% faster Mana Regeneration.

Upgrading this Skill requires the user to kill and eat stronger versions of the Salmon of Wisdom.

A solid enhancement, not to mention one that was basically free in the grand scheme of things. Especially since it could be further upgraded by killing the Salmon of Wisdom at Tiers 7 through 10. Eventually. He wanted to earn those boosts himself as well.

And there was more than enough left for the others, assuming they hadn’t already gotten it from somewhere else.