Sam gathered his Dao, and focused it upon a narrow cone of space, before teleporting out of the cavern, and landing on the ground above. Immediately, space started to twist and turn. Triggering his new elemental infusion, he found the effects diminishing to near nothingness. His speed decreased with it, by maybe a quarter, but it was manageable. In response, his durability surged upwards. Resilience was his highest stat right now, and it was boosted even further beyond the norm.
A few dozen feet away, the twisting streams of elemental energy continued to whorl and eddy, but to Sam, they were of no consequence. He made his way through the crystalline trees, his feet tinkling on the ground. There was nothing living nearby, and Sam simply wandered, feeling out the limits of his new elemental infusion. The skill made his body feel like a boulder, but in a good way. His decrease in speed was far outweighed by his boost to durability, which was a tradeoff he was willing to make. Besides, when teleportation was one’s main means of transportation, their physical speed hardly mattered.
A sharp uptick in the local elemental corruption alerted Sam to the presence of something nearby, which he assumed was one of his quarries. He teleported into the air, and caught a glimpse of what looked like a crow, flying over the forest on wings of night. Its body was about the size of his own, and each flap sent ripples of spatial anomalies in every direction.
Locking eyes with the beast, Sam teleported again, Terra’s Will descending from above, a wave of Dao energy preceding it. The elemental squawked in surprise, but it was too late. Coating his hammer in a layer of elemental energy and his Domain, Sam forcibly unbound the incorporeal form of the elemental, shattering its body. It exploded into a storm of spatial tears, hissing off in all directions. Sam teleported to safety, watching as the anomalies tore through the ground below.
A wave of stability coursed through the air around the elemental’s demise, and Sam found himself surrounded by a sphere of calm, extending beyond his natural defences. Smiling, he flitted off, ready to get to work. Judging by the strength of the elementals, this would be a task more injurious in terms of time than any real danger.
***
Sam explored the dimensional plane over the next week, finding that its size was far more deceiving than had originally been evident. While the bounds of the realm were visible from a decent vantage point, actually reaching them was a different story. Space was strange in this place, with the eye impossible to trust. In fact, all the senses were impacted, to an extent. Foreign smells and sensations would sometimes brush up against Sam’s psyche at odd times, their sources nowhere nearby. While he was able to shut out a localized amount of elemental corruption, most of it was too powerful to deny. A person might be able to traverse the ocean in a submarine, but the ocean still existed.
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Hundreds of elementals fell to his hammer, all with the same degree of ease as the first. None of them were in any way sapient, and were unable to learn from the execution of their comrades. The essence gains were minor, with most of the elementals somewhere around the initial stages of E Rank. As a result, by the time his quest was complete, Sam felt cheated for the amount of time he had put in. Though, the System had to regulate the amount of essence gained during the Tower somehow, and doing so when the challenger was being sent off to far flung Multiverses seemed like it would be a serious challenge.
With the last of the basic elementals destroyed, Sam returned to the cavern of the Gemstone Spirits, and received his next task. To nobody’s surprise, it was to eliminate the next stage of Dark elementals.
Sam had already encountered one of the creatures during his hunting spree over the past week, but had ignored it in favor of his more pertinent prey. The elementals were about the size of a small plane, a few dozen feet long with a wingspan of a comparable magnitude. Their anatomies were more realistic, with the faint outlines of feathers present on the lesser elementals now almost realistic in their appearance.
Hunting them was more difficult than their lesser brethren, as they could teleport, riding the winds of Space to escape their pursuers.
Flying on slipstreams of folded space, even their normal motions were difficult to predict, and even more difficult to intercept. Sam came to learn that teleporting within the vicinity of one of the more powerful elementals was a process fraught with danger. He found himself emerging in places he hadn’t intended, and those places were dangerous ones, more often than not. Once, he had emerged half trapped in bedrock, his torso sticking out of the ground. Naturally, his strength was too high for the stone to hold him, but it was a reminder that he could have been trapped somewhere beyond his abilities to escape.
In the end, Sam’s first kill came from a utilization of Dao Juggernaut, boosting his speed to a level where he could move faster than the elementals could escape.
Racing along the ground at massively supersonic speeds, Sam skipped like a stone across the grey waters of the realm’s stony floor. With a grunt, he leaped up, transferring all of his horizontal momentum into vertical speed. The elemental above had no idea what had hit it. Sam’s hammer punched straight through the center of its body, a sheath of Dao energy extending outwards in a cone as he blasted the ephemeral being apart. It turned out that the monsters could only teleport as fast as they could react. At the end of the day, they were still limited by the System.
Sam flipped through the air, already setting his eyes on his next target. A smile creased his face. Now that he knew the technique for killing the spatial elementals, his quest would be over in no time at all.
