Sam headed off across the gemstone forests, over canyons lined with amethyst and geodes. He searched the land with a cone of Dao energy, trying to find any sort of resonance point. He found nothing for a few hours, but eventually, a patch of moving Dao energy, attuned to a concept, Greed, that could only have belonged to a sapient.
Sam turned his gaze towards the pocket of Dao energy, finding a small party of about five cultivators racing across the ground. All of them were E Rankers, and quite powerful ones at that. They were led by a stockily built Teruvarian, a pickaxe slung over his shoulder. It was no ordinary pickaxe, though, and was crafted out of what looked like gold. The weapon was a bit too shiny to be of that metal, at least in a mundane form. It was a powerful armament nonetheless.
With him were two slender, androgynous warriors, each almost ten feet long. Both wore long, flowing robes, covered in glyphs and esoteric accents. They held staffs that looked like mirror images of one another, topped with chunks of crystal. The final two were humans, and from the looks of it, a couple. A middle aged, scarred man holding a rifle, and a younger woman with a sword, clad in half-plate armor. The group was completely silent, that was, until Sam landed in front of them with a sharp crack of E Rank armor on rock.
To their credit, the group reacted instantly. The leader’s pickaxe blazed with light, shining like the sun itself as the Teruvarian swung it. Sam merely raised an arm to block, girding it with his Dao. Behind the Teruvarian, the others attacked, the alien twins slamming their staffs together, releasing a dome of shimmering purple light. Meanwhile, the humans launched themselves forwards, the man leaping off the woman’s sword, his gun pointed directly at Sam.
A spray of bullets erupted from the weapon, crafted from bolts of light itself. All of these attacks homed in on Sam in an instant, condensing behind the Teruvarian’s pickaxe like the hand of a god, blasting the gaudy weapon forwards at immense speeds. Even Sam lost track of it for a moment, which was long enough for the weapon to strike him. His armor bent beneath the blow, blood spurting out of his gauntlet as the flesh beneath was crushed. Sam skidded along the ground, a bit surprised. His health had only taken a small hit, around fifteen thousand points, but it was there nonetheless.
“How are you here?” The Teruvarian commander roared, leaping towards Sam.
His pickaxe glistened as it descended, making it clear that this question was meant to be a rhetorical one. Only, Sam had no qualms now about going all out. Dao Juggernaut triggered, and he rose to his feet in an instant. His Dao sank into the ground, forming a platform capable of taking the force that would soon impact it. Smiling slightly as he remembered his father doing something similar on the 25th floor of the Tower, Sam raised his hand, and caught the falling pickaxe. A shuddering boom shattered the still air, and Sam grunted as he pushed back against the blow. With a grimace, he steadied himself, and forced the pickaxe to stop, ragdolling the Teruvarian’s body around it.
“How am I here?” He asked. “I’m here because I’m stronger than you lot. Because I’m meant to be in this place. Unlike you intruders.”
The Teruvarian propelled himself backwards, pushing off his pickaxe. He clearly saw a contest of physical might against Sam as a lost cause. “So you’re defending the elementals? Why? They’re just monsters.”
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Sam tossed the pickaxe aside, showing how little he cared about the weapon. “Do you think everyone and everything that is different to you is a monster? Are your allies here monsters?” He turned to the human duo. “Do you two know that Teruvarians like to eat our kind? Like livestock?”
The gunner laughed, pointing his weapon at Sam. “I don’t give a shit. Granak pays us well. Hell, I’d eat another human for the riches that we’re going to make from this place.”
Sam sighed. “So you’re all hopeless, I take it?”
“You can take that righteous attitude and fuck off with it,” the human gunner spat. “I don’t know how you got to your level with that sort of idiocy, but it’s going to end here.”
“Why? Does a complete lack of morality add to your strength?” Sam replied. “Why don’t you show me how you’re going to end me?”
Before the odious man could reply, Sam was already standing in front of him, his hammer impacting his torso. The man’s flesh exploded outwards, a wave of devastation turning his body into a spray of blood and gore. A cry of rage came from the direction of the female sword-wielder, and Sam grimaced. It had to be done, but he still felt bad about it.
Turning his gaze to the survivors, he was blasted by a concentrated bolt of elemental energy and the Dao, forged from the union of the two willowy aliens’ staffs. Sam raised his left palm and shattered the projectile with his Dao, forcing it apart in a spray of crystalline shards.
Sam sprang forwards, moving faster than the limits of the mages’ perceptions. Terra’s Will traced a silvery arc across the air, a comet’s tail of blood traveling behind it as the weapon blasted the two spellcasters’ heads apart. Normally Sam would have destroyed their bodies as well, but as mages, the two posessed little overall durability.
Before their bodies even hit the ground, Sam teleported before the Teruvarian, and brought his hammer down. At some point, the green skinned man had reclaimed his pickaxe, but it did him little good. The weapon bent as Sam’s hammer struck it, providing as much defense as a paper towel. As the head of Sam’s weapon was bigger than the hilt, it curved around the paltry defence of the pickaxe, and slammed into the Teruvarian’s head. The warrior’s face caved in, the backside blasting outwards, painting a nearby boulder with viscera. His eyes bulged out his broken sockets, but Granak was not yet dead. He reached out for Sam with twitching fingers, Dao energy crackling around them. The sum total of the man’s life condensed down to a singular attack, made possible by the concept of Greed. Every ambition that he would never realize, every treasure that his death would preclude, was funneled down into an all consuming desire to kill Sam, the man who had done this to him.
Sam felt an immense amount of danger spike around the Teruvarian’s hands, and he flashed away, just before Granak’s entire body detonated, a pillar of Dao energy touching down where he had stood. A hole was bored into the ground all the way to its base, dozens of miles in depths. Sam was filled with an unshakable certainty that had he been struck by that pillar of light, he would no longer be among the world of the living.
A piercing whine of displaced air assaulted Sam’s ears, the resonance causing the ground to shudder as the stone beneath his feet cracked. Granak was gone, but he had left his mark on the world. With three more foes left, Sam knew that this battle could hardly be called such anymore. Granak had posed a little bit of a threat, but the survivors did not.
“Still sure you don’t want to talk about this?” Sam asked. “I don’t know how complicit you were in all this, but you seem different to the others.” There was little hope of this working, and Sam had no idea what he would do if the prospectors actually surrendered, but he figured that it was worth a shot. People could change, and Sam’s own father was a testament to that.
