System Change

The blinding light disappeared, and Derek found himself in the trial. When he looked around, he could barely believe what he was seeing. He instantly felt bad for Asana Greenland. Hell, he was already starting to feel bad for himself. Maybe I should have let Avery do this one, he thought, and the archer may have been more suited for the trial if he was taking into account the current environment.

Derek was on an island-if he could even call it that. The island was maybe four hundred square feet in size… maybe. It was really nothing more than a lump of dirt surrounded by an ocean for as far as his eyes could see. No tree or plant in sight. There wasn’t even a blade of grass.

And the ocean? It was green and bubbling, and Derek didn’t think that was from the heat. Instantly, Derek checked his skills to make sure his Cure Toxin and Rejuvenation skills were ready to go. He even felt a slight regret that he hadn’t made Cure Toxin a priority when it came to leveling skills. It probably would have been easy to level it based on his endurance and vitality.

What he currently knew was that he was stuck on a small island surrounded by what looked to be an ocean of toxic water, and he was waiting for something he was going to have to duel. The only thing that calmed him down was knowing that the trial was only epic ranked, and that he had already both survived and flourished in a legendary ranked trial.

After a few more moments, he finally received the system notification.

Trial #4

Defeat the Caustic Whale of Pestilence

You have entered a duel. Two enter, but only one can leave. All routes to escape have been blocked. Win the duel to finish the trial.

“What the fuck?!” Derek muttered as he read over the trial task. So… the whale is going to be what? Corrosive and toxic? Oh, and apparently, the system blocked any way to get out of here. It’s no wonder that Asana died. Poor elf… she couldn’t even use the escape scroll that her cousin lent her. And she had to fight with a wood affinity in a place with zero flora.

As his dancing partner had yet to make an appearance, Derek thought he might as well test out another one of his skills that he hadn’t tested before. Honestly, this seemed like a great place to see if Void Travel was as great as it sounded. In the description, it basically said that nothing could contain him if he wanted to escape with it. And it sounded like that meant this system, too.

With some focus, he connected to the skill and instantly knew how to use it. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t much different from how he activated his Time Prison, though, he didn’t need to pull the space apart like a set of curtains with Void Travel. With his mind on the skill, he focused on the void in front of him and cut down.

A tear in the space in front appeared and grew wider and wider, until it was at least ten feet tall and six feet wide. Void energy sparked from the inside and ran around the edge of the tear. Derek inwardly got a sense of dread, but he also found a sense of… direction. Like, if he wanted to, he could go inside and find his way to somewhere he’d been before.

He also realized one of the reasons that the other system had warned him against using this skill with others. The void energy inside was visible and sharp. He had no doubt that if someone other than himself got hit by one of the sparks, rips, or tears inside, they would be dealt direct damage, just like the things he attacked. He wasn’t even sure he would come out of the tunnel unscathed. It was connected to the Portal skill, but it was so much less stable.

But he stepped inside, anyway. When the system didn’t stop him, he knew he had a way to cheat the Great System. The skill the other system had given him was more than the Great System could handle. He smirked, then moved back inside the trial grounds, not wanting to stay in too long and possibly confuse the system into thinking he had died.

With another thought, the portal closed, and Derek turned around. With the sense that he could leave the trial at anytime, most of his worries faded. Besides, it’s only a whale. How hard can it be? I was a pretty good fisherman back in the day.

Seeming to react to his thoughts, an overwhelming noise that he didn’t quite recognize rang out, causing enormous waves to form in the ocean, and the clouds in the sky begin to drizzle. A mighty gust hit him like a brick, then, the drizzle turned into a downpour. Only, instead of being regular rain, it was corrosive, like an extremely potent acid rain. With the first drops landing on him, he resigned himself to losing yet another pair of clothing. What he hadn’t been expecting, though, was his storage rings being corroded.

Luckily, his storage bracelet seemed to be fine, and he was able to store the rings inside the bracelet. Otherwise, he would have to open his Void Storage or Time Prison and throw them in.

Still, there was intense acid rain that was depleting his health. His natural healing and endurance was enough that his health was only being slowly depleted, but it still slowly ticked down. If just this rain is enough to get past my natural healing, how must of it been for Asana? What kind of fight did she put up to have lasted in this atmosphere as long as she did?

Instead of starting up his meditation to combat the rain with his regeneration, he instead combined his uses of Rejuvenation and Cure Toxin. Cure Toxin seemed to be a catch-all for poisons and toxins, and that included acid-like abilities.

Still, the whole time he combatted the rain, he had his head on a swivel, looking for signs of where the whale might appear. It sure is taking its sweet time, Derek thought. Is it just sleeping underwater or something? Dueling his opponent underwater, especially in whatever type of water this ocean was, was the last thing Derek wanted, but if he had to, he would do it. It would be a struggle, and he would probably have to rely heavily on his Void Shift skill, but if it came down to it, he trusted in his own body’s regeneration, especially if used in tandem with Greater Meditation.

Fortunately, and unexpectedly, that didn’t end up happening. Far in the distance, the whale began to make its appearance, not from the ocean, but from the sky. Derek watched in awe as a sickly green whale, six, maybe more, times the size of the largest whale he’d ever heard of on Earth, slowly floated down through the clouds.

Holy shit! That thing is like the size of three American football fields, he thought in amazement. And how big around is it? How the hell am I supposed to fight something like this? He summoned Harbinger into his hand and looked at the blade. The length of the blade was only a couple of feet long. Two feet wouldn’t be able to do anything, and he was unsure if his void attuned attacks would be able to travel deep enough into the whale to do any significant harm.

Finally seeing the whale, Derek realized what the sound was. It had to have been the sound of the corrosive water being spouted out through the whale’s blowhole. His theory was soon proven correct as the rain soon subsided.

As Derek readied himself for the battle, and the whale slowly crept closer to him and his small island, Derek went over everything he knew about whales, which wasn’t much. What he did know was that comparatively to their large size, their brains were small. What he wasn’t actually sure of was the exact location.

Now, its heart should be pretty huge, at least compared to its brain, and shouldn’t be too hard of a target. At least if whale anatomy is the same here as it was back on Earth, he thought. Uh… I’m going to have to cut through so much blubber, aren’t I? One thing was for certain, if his void attacks weren’t able to do enough damage from the outside, he would have to somehow attack its vitals from the inside. Who knows how potent the toxins are going to be on the inside?

Derek checked his weapon’s durability to see how well it survived the downpour of acid rain and was relieved to find that it had only lost a couple dozen points of durability. With its innate ability, it would be able to gain that back rather easily. So, thankfully, he would be able to fight all out with Harbinger without worrying too much about it. Finally deciding on a ‘plan a,’ and not wanting the whale to get close enough to destroy the only piece of land in the area, Derek kicked off the ground and jumped into the air. He would meet his opponent head on. He didn’t have much of a choice.

The whale turned out to be even further away than he had originally estimated, its size even more robust than he imagined.

Derek drew closer and closer to the massive creature, then, all the sudden, he disappeared. He was banking on the rarity difference at the moment, and used Active Void Shift. With his Void Sense turned up as high as possible, he had been able to make out a ripple in the void almost perfectly overhead of the whale. When he saw the chance, he took it.

The thing about giant creatures such as the whale is they move slowly. So, even though it sensed his appearance as soon as he came through the ripple, it wasn’t able to do much of anything other than release another sprout of toxic water out of its blowhole and send some kind of toxic wind his way along with it. This gave Derek time to charge up an attack.

In the moment, he had decided to try to go for an instant kill or at least give it a serious injury by estimating where its brain would be and hitting it with the power of his full force. It took quite a while, at least in terms of fighting, to channel the void into Harbinger and create as big and solid of a projection of a blade as he could. He was at it for almost ten seconds before he was satisfied with the outcome.

He also noticed that the corrosive wind was even more potent than the rain had been. Blisters slowly formed over his body in those ten seconds, and he even lost a small portion of his health. But, ignoring the pain and stiffness caused by the blisters, Derek kicked off the void and launched himself down at the creature.

With the glaive in both hands, and his position as close to where he thought the creature’s brain would be, he slashed down with all his might while heading head first into the whale. Of course, he didn’t forget to activate Sweeping Slash and Multi-Strike along the way.

His attack perfectly timed, the visible Sweeping Slash bit into the creature’s surprisingly soft flesh and left a wide wound. A wound that Derek ever so gracefully landed head first into. Jumping up quickly, he wiped as much of the whale off himself as possible and tried to use the Cleaning skill to remove chunks of skin and blubber, blubber which happened to have an even higher toxicity than the wind.

Jumping out of the wide wound formed by Sweeping Slash, Derek listened to the whale release an agonizing groan. Now, he needed to wait for his void energy to do the rest of the work. Hopefully, he would be out of the trial soon, because even if he liked fishing, a toxic blubbering whale was just a little too much, even for him.