Nightmare Realm Summoner

Alex crept through the gem-riddled street, his magic buzzing in preparation to summon his monsters. Claire and the others flanked him. Everyone scanned the surroundings intently, looking for any sign of a Region Boss or enemies lying in wait to ambush them.

Ascending Forerunner continued to lead Alex deeper into the town. The faint pull at the front of his mind was steadily growing stronger. They were definitely close. But even still, they’d yet to see any signs of either normal monsters or anything that could pass for a Region Boss.

The town had been a little larger than it initially looked from outside. All the jagged crystals jutting up from anything and everything certainly didn’t make traversing it any faster. Perhaps climbing over them would have been easier — but not one of them tried it.

There was an unspoken agreement. Touching the suspicious crystals was a definite no-go. Even without a giant glaring neon sign identifying them as traps, they were way too out of place for any of them to want to risk it. It was far better to just avoid the problem altogether.

Alex led the group around the remains of what had once been a park. Gems had ascended the trees, turning them into a garden of glistening stone. It was undeniably beautiful. Something like this probably would have cost millions of dollars back on Earth.

Then again, if this had been on Earth, the crystalline trees probably wouldn’t have tried to murder them the moment they got too close to anything. Probably. There was probably some artist somewhere who would have tried to make that.

I wonder what kind of monster we’re up against here. A golem of some sort? Like a big hunk of living crystal? That would be pretty annoying. It would probably be completely immune to slashing attacks, so Claire would be in a pretty bad spot. My anchor would work great into an enemy like that, though. So maybe it wouldn’t be all bad.

There was precious little evidence to go off. Aside from the stones riddling the city, there weren’t any traces of… well, anything. No other monsters lurked in the streets. There weren’t any signs of the passing of some huge beast, nor were any of them able to find eyes in the buildings watching them.

It really felt like the town was entirely abandoned.

If Ascending Forerunner hadn’t been telling Alex that they were getting closer and closer to their target, he could have been easily convinced that any monster residing within this city was long since gone or dead. It felt exactly how Valley Ford had.

Empty and forgotten.

The urge to speak was overwhelming. There wasn’t even anything he particularly wanted to say. The silence was just oppressive. Alex could tell that he wasn’t the only one thinking that way. Derek was practically bursting at the seams. If someone could have suffocated out of inability to say anything, then the large man would have been well on his way to the grave. His face was practically blue.

Hold on a bit longer. With the Region Boss — or whatever monster managed to trigger Ascending Forerunner — this close, we have to be careful. The silence makes any noise way too obvious. The less we make, the better.

They continued on for nearly half an hour. Their pace had dropped drastically now that they were moving through the city instead of sprinting across relatively open ground. It was undeniably frustrating, knowing their target was somewhere within the mixture of warped structures and overgrown mineral surrounding them and not being able to see so much as a trace of it.

This isn’t going to be one of those situations where the monster is just the entire damn city, right? That would be a huge pain. But Id’ imagine it would have attacked us by now if that were the case.

And if the whole city had been a monster, than Alex’s senses wouldn’t have still been pulling him forward. IT would have settled down the moment they’d stepped past the outermost houses. Whatever their potential opponent may have been… he was nearly certain they hadn’t seen it yet.

By some miracle, not one of them accidentally stumbled into a crystal or accidentally made excess noise. The faint sound of their footsteps was all that came from their group.

Time ground on. They continued to push deeper still into the city. Strangely enough, there were no apparent changes to the density or amount of crystal.

Nothing at all implied that their target was anywhere nearby. But Alex’s senses told a very different story. His hair was practically standing on end. Even though he didn’t have the faintest idea as to its exact location, he knew for a fact that the monster they sought was close.

He raised a hand as the group drew up to what looked to have once been some kind of sports field. It wasn’t a small one. His own college had something similar. It was in the style of a Super Bowl stadium, with enormous stands rising up in a huge ring.

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The structural integrity of the massive building had been torn to pieces by huge gemstones that pierced out from within it like the back of an agitated porcupine. There were more crystals here than there had been in any part of the city. The entire stadium was completely covered by them. If Alex hadn’t recognized the general shape of the building, it would have been next to impossible to tell what it had once been. Even the entrance had been transformed into a fanged crystal maw that yawned open to grant passage into the stadium.

All of them stood in stunned silence for several long seconds. They squinted at the opening of the building, trying to figure out if the building itself was their opponent. The entrance was certainly slightly suspect. But Alex’s senses pulled him into the building, not just up to it.

He glanced back at the others.

Even if they could have spoken, there wasn’t much to say. It was pretty easy to figure out what their options were. None of them had brought an eagle to fly them in over the top of the stadium. There was only one way in.

So they took the front entrance.

Alex tried not to look like too much of a tourist as he entered the stadium. But even with his guard up, he couldn’t help from looking around in awe. The entirety of the entry hall was completely swallowed up by crystals. Light danced through them and the world reflected within their depths seemed to change with every step he took.

He had to remind himself to watch where he was going before he accidentally tripped over a bundle of crystals jutting up from the corners of the walls. The hall was simply mesmerizing. If there had been anything on Earth so beautiful… well, he hadn’t gotten a chance to see it.

For that matter, he hadn’t gotten a chance to see much of anything beyond the inside of a drab classroom and his computer screen.

Maybe that says a bit more about me than it does about Earth, huh?

The inside of the arena was positively massive, and even the halls beyond the entry corridor were largely encased in crystal. There was so much that they had to slow their progress even further to take care not to touch anything on accident as they worked their way up one of the many staircases leading up into the stands.

Every step Alex took made him want to summon his monsters. His own reflection within the crystals nearly scared him half a dozen times. Even Claire and Orchid looked twitchy. Something about the complete silence paired with the hauntingly beautiful stone surrounding them was the perfect environment to set them on edge.

The only one that — somehow — seemed to be more at peace within the arena than outside of it was Derek. He hadn’t even flinched once. Part of Alex wondered if that was because his mind was so far away that he hadn’t even noticed any of their reflections in the crystals yet.

They finally reached the top of the stairwell, arriving in a partially covered hall. Across from them and over a massive gap where the field indubitably waited below rose the seats on the other side of the stadium. They were similarly overrun with crystal.

And rising up from somewhere toward the back of the field was a jagged spire of crystal. There were dozens of different types and colors, ranging from pitch black to a speckled gold, but he couldn’t make out the base or the actual field from where they stood.

But even so, his senses were more than clear. They were nearly right on top of their target. And that meant there was only one place it could have been. The giant spire certainly wasn’t doing anything any favors if it was trying to hide. He glanced back at the others, then pointed down in the direction of the field and the looming crystal structure upon it.

They all nodded.

Then they started forward again, advancing toward the railing at the edge of their section. Adrenaline pumped through Alex’s veins with every step he took. He could practically feel it burning in his heart. His fingers twitched in anticipation, and it took no little amount of focus to keep from summoning all of his monsters and flinging himself over the railing to find out what they were up against.

His field of view expanded as they drew closer to the edge. He saw the edges of the field first — there wasn’t so much as a single spot of uncrystallized ground anywhere upon it. The entire thing was just one massive sheet of a myriad of mixed gems.

He inched closer. The entire field came into view, and the hair on the back of Alex’s neck stood on end as he finally caught a glimpse of what they’d been hunting for nearly two days.

The spire was attached to the top of a massive shell. The entire thing was covered in a thick layer of crystalline growth, and it sat on the back of the world’s biggest, ugliest hermit crab. It was massive, taking up nearly a quarter of the field while largely retreated into its shell.

But the shell wasn’t where the crystal had stopped.

Huge patches of glossy crystal had cut down the monster’s rough, red carapace like veins, running down to the car-sized claws that rested on the ground before it. Portions of them had been completely turned to crystal. A faint, pulsating energy traveled down the crystal veins covering the monster’s body every few seconds. It didn’t seem like the monster had noticed them yet.

The System shimmered into being above the great monster’s body to identify it.

[??? Boss] Corrupted Scuttler (Expert 3)

Alex held his breath. He could practically feel the crab’s power radiating out from where he stood. Expert 3 was a ridiculously strong monster. But… it wasn’t completely out of their range. There weren’t any other monsters that he could see backing it up, and they had 3 people with Partial Soul Manifestations plus his monsters.

I don’t know what the question marks in its name are covering, but its stage is the most palatable so far.

There was a decent chance they could pull this off.

He glanced back at the others. One by one, they nodded. There wasn’t really a way to discuss any sort of plan without breaking their silence and risking getting noticed — but they’d all fought together at some point or another. They knew what the others were capable of.

Alex grinned.

Then he turned back to the crab below and readied his magic. Everyone else did the same.

They’d found their target.