An involuntary shiver ran through Eik’s entire body as he stared at the disgusting, writhing mass below. “Ew…” he muttered, taking a few steps back from the ledge.

  Even though he had lowered the glowing branch of solid toxin down far enough for its relatively weak light to illuminate the top layer of worms, they hadn’t rushed up to attack. The one he’d killed inside the mountain had been eager enough to come after him though.

  Could it be that this was how the worms slept? Geh… Fucking alien weirdos.

  About to turn around, Eik was struck by a thought that Sonja and Michael would probably disapprove of and that Heath would agree was totally awesome. If it worked.

  He stepped back further and took in the area. The ground around the wormhole (heh) was rather spacious and would probably be perfect for what he had in mind. Before he begun, he checked the worms again and found them just as unresponsive as they had initially been. Good.

  Testing his leg, he found he could jump and run with almost no pain whatsoever, even though the painkillers had already lapsed quite a while ago. He had been continuously applying the paste from his homemade healing chunks. Ever since he had learned proper alchemy, he’d been looking into increasing the potency of his own mixture — and recently succeeded.

  The ingredients weren’t particularly powerful and there was barely any Ak’ki dimensional energy present to influence but he had realized that it was possible to affect them with his own aura regardless. Since it was a mixture he had discovered himself a couple of years ago there were no recipes for the healing chunks, and it had been an endeavor rife with error, albeit not perilously so.

  He had managed to activate the ingredients to a point where the potency of the healing effects was almost twice as powerful, although it had also raised the toll on the user’s body in turn. At this point, a low F-ranker might not be able to withstand too much of the substance lest they experience side effects of some sort, although he hadn’t had the opportunity to test it yet.

  For the first step of his utterly ingenious plan, he constructed a wall along the edge of the wormhole measuring about ten meters in length and half a meter tall. It was difficult and took him a good minute but because the actual amount of toxin that went into the creation was considerably smaller than the log he’d made to shoot himself out of the mountain, it wasn’t too bad at all.

  He constructed another four similar walls into a square and began the second phase of his evil plan — filling the bitch up with Profound Toxin. He couldn’t help but give in to the urge to cackle. Anticipation made it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand.

  With how big the pool was, it took him almost twenty minutes to fill it to the spilling point. He stood in poison to his knees, wondering how the hell his life had gotten to this point. When he had brought his black cape and role-playing foam sword to school for show and tell and proclaimed in front of the rest of the first graders that his dream job was a powerful mage who could smite a dragon in a single second, he hadn’t actually meant it literally.

  Sure, a dragon in a second might be a little above his current capabilities, but he was getting there, right? All he needed was to get a little stronger and then figure out where to find a dragon. Piece of cake.

  With a deep, slow breath and a shit-eating grin, he sat down in the pool and let the wall facing the wormhole turn back into liquid and released the entire payload out over the hole. He was carried along bodily, his own maniacal giggle following all the way down.

  As the liquid washed down over the nest of worms, the writhing mass erupted into pure chaos. There were more of the disgusting things than he had thought. He anticipated three or maybe five layers of worms at most, but it seemed to easily be four or five times that. There were hundreds of the damn things down here.

  Eik was thrown around violently by undulating bodies but chunks of poison, Potion of Mighty Strength class 2, and Potion of the Metal Body ensured his safety with the exception of a few scratches here and there. The creepy creatures clearly had no clue what was going on whatsoever and they definitely didn’t know about the exceedingly handsome man being bowled around in their midst.

  At the moment the entirety of the poisonous load had been dumped onto the worms, Eik quickly constructed a thin roof of solid toxin which, while not that heavy in reality, would hopefully create an illusion of confinement in the minds of the ugly beasts. Throughout it all, Eik had been releasing a riotous quantity of the blue substance to bolster the volumes already churning around.

  For good measure, he sent out as many Living Manifestations as he could to swim to whatever target the liked.

  Almost immediately, Eik felt the toxin flow swiftly into the hundreds of systems present in the hole. As a natural consequence of the way the creatures lived, it seemed that their bodies were covered in small and normally insignificant cuts and wounds.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Now that Eik was here to start the party, change replace that ‘insignificance’ with ‘fatal’ or ‘deadly’.

  He gave it a second or two before he reached through the Profound Toxin and connected to every single invaded system. It almost felt like the single word he then uttered tapped the pause button on time for a moment, a momentary calm before a volcanic storm.

  “Accelerant.”

  The whole place exploded as hundreds of deep, bassy booms raced through the rippling liquid like the hum of a launching nuclear reactor. Countless shock waves rocked the pool like a chain of undersea pulse bombs and threw Eik around like a leaf caught in the violent flow of a rip current.

  He just couldn’t stop laughing.

  Before the last of the pulsation had even settled, Eik howled for the second time at he top of his lungs, seized by unfiltered bliss.

  “Accelerant!”

  He was flung up and out of the basin by the resulting eruption, his back slamming painfully against the roof he had just built but he barely felt it amidst the ecstasy of the rampage. He had given in completely to the euphoria.

  When he plunged back in, he gurgled a third chant of Accelerant and was pulled down underneath the still writhing worms, their massive bodies battering him back and forth. The grin never left his lips.

  Reaching for Toxic Liquefaction, he became one with the Profound Toxin and when he made to move up toward the surface, he found himself flying out of the pool, transported instantly from the bottom of the churning chaos as if by teleportation.

  Whooping loudly as he shot out and reassembled the fluid body into his human form, he flipped and manifested a toxic spear in each hand, applied Movement Boost locally to his arms and shoulder, and hurled them into a worm each. As he splashed back down, he triggered a fourth wave of Accelerant, this time including the two solid spears which both detonated like a pair of naval mines.

  Boundless joy filled his brain at the hundreds of systems continuously invaded by Profound Toxin, and unimaginable delight practically assaulted his mind at every single activation of Accelerant. He could only hope that it would never end.

  Again and again and again and again… and again, he triggered the finisher to devastating effect, his body flung into the air or against the hard, rocky walls multiple times by the violent blasts that followed every time.

  Living Manifestation wasn’t forgotten either. With each activation of Accelerant, the little guys were annihilated to completion along with all other traces of toxin inside the worms so he took the opportunity to summon them again and again with orders to go for the closest target. Surely that would earn him some levels as well.

  Several worms had managed to escape, cramming their long bodies through the gaps in the lid he had pulled over the hole, but little by little the imperfections had been sealed until the space was almost perfectly closed. With all the fun going on, he could live with a few escapees. It was not a prison in truth.

  With the chaos and constant damage, the worms didn’t seem to have the lucidity to actually make a focused effort to escape — something they could probably have done rather easily considering the flimsiness of the blue ceiling.

  Even when there was still a good amount of toxin left in the pool, one system after the other began to fail and expire. How sad, that the massacre had reached its end so soon. But when a good thing was coming to a close, it was important to enjoy the final moment to its fullest.

  Connected to all living system by the liquid splashing around, Eik reached out the the toxin flowing through every living worm and crystalized countless tiny shards inside. It took some serious concentration that he was only able to do because the writhing and thrashing had slowed to a weak struggle, but there was also a clarity of control that he had never felt before.

  Intellectually, it was also clear to him that his frame of mind was approaching something non-human. More than ever, he felt as if he was one with Profound Toxin. Like they had become one being for but a moment — just to enjoy this act of extinction together. That mental closeness must have boosted his innate control somehow.

  Everything was ready for the final deed. Almost a hundred worms still lived — but they wouldn’t for much longer.

  With a smile of satisfaction, he let himself fall onto his back, the chant only no more than a whisper this time.

  “Accelerant.”

  As if launched by a gigantic airbag, Eik and many of the corpses of the rock worms were thrown into the air with a resounding, earth-shaking boom.

  Eik landed back on his feet, followed by a literal rain of viscous, green blood that covered him from head to toe, making him look more like that wad of living slime from that movie starring that comedian slash actor. It was warm and sticky. He reached up and picked out a mushy, meaty piece of… something from his hair.

  Ew.

  With that, in shockingly little time, the all-encompassing and euphoric madness was replaced by somber disgust. As the remaining Profound Toxin began to seep back in through his skin, he looked around the around by the light of the still standing roof he had constructed to keep the lot of them inside. To call the place a bloody mess was an understatement of utmost severity.

  The simultaneous detonations of countless small crystalline shards of poison scattered throughout almost a hundred giant bodies had essentially turned the victims into mist. There was so much death down here.

  They must have been at least a few hours into the first challenge of the Championships at this point but he still didn’t know what he was supposed to do… The answer would probably have been at the top of the mountain but he had — totally by accident — destroyed. So next step was to find another mountain then. Great. No problem at all. Not a huge setback at all.

  No, actually, next step was getting out of this damned cave. A minor setback only.

  But surely all of that killing must have been worth some levels, right?

  Eik fished the wooden plaque out of his shirt, the first of hopefully many messages already displayed.

  Harvesting the fruit of his labor was going to be almost as sweet as the labor itself had been.

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