Deep within the forest about half a mile from the base, Greem hovered a few meters above ground and flung tiny pieces of sharpened metal at the gorillas snapping at his heels.
Though they boasted four muscular arms each and frames that would see them match heights with one storey buildings, the agitated and hostile primates had no proper defense against the tiny harbingers of doom.
One by one, their loud roars and intense, agitated stomps ceased, their lives snuffed out by the pieces of metal going through their eyeballs and damaging their brains.
In mere seconds, Greem had flicked his hands 14 times, reducing the troop of gorillas down to just one.
Said one—presumably the leader due to its sheer size eclipsing its brethren—descended from above like a meteor with its huge fists clenched, its red, hate filled eyes lasered on Greem.
Tilting his head up at the mountain of enraged muscle overshadowing him, Greem simply waited until it reached the appropriate distance before firing up the booster.
Instead of leaning and blasting himself out of the way, he twisted his whole body and deactivated the boost in the same second.
Sucking in his wings and spinning like a top, he let the generated thrust power his movements and shot his leg out at the exact moment the descending creature reached the right distance.
The alloy plated shins of his boot caught the primate in the head, removing the targeted body part entirely in a bloody and meaty shower, a small explosion going off and spreading into the surroundings.
Coming to a sudden stop, he redeployed his wings right after and straightened himself, stabilising his airborne form deftly.
A loud crash then reverberated through the clearing as the building-sized gorilla plummeted to the ground.
Dropping down on a relatively intact piece of the grassy clearing without any blood, Greem checked his right boot for any blood, flesh or bone pieces, and used his Spirit to flick them off.
While he did that, he also held out both arms and summoned different items from his spatial ring, a bunch of golem cores appearing in his left hand and a featureless black mask in his right.
He dropped the cores and slipped on the mask, the crystal lenses in the eye holes coming alive with bright red glows that left trails in the air when he moved.
As the earth and wind elementium particles coalesced and bubbled around the cores, he activated the [Elementium Vision] ability he'd enchanted into the mask, giving the world a shifting, multicolored filter.
Around the three cores—alligator king, rock snake, and wind critter—dirt yellow and cyan elementium swirled and compressed into three distinct but familiar shapes.
Underneath his mask though, he frowned.
All three of the golems were smaller than they should have been. To be precise, they were one third of what they'd normally be in Lethon.
He already expected the elementium density of this plane to be less than that of his home plane since it was a low tier one, but this was a more than huge drop.
From the golems' situation and what he could tell from elementium sight, the density of the magical particles was almost four times lower than Lethon's.
This had a lot of implications.
For one, it explained why the gorillas displayed no magical abilities, especially in the case of the leader. It had the overall strength of a Pseudo Adept, but that was it. It couldn't manipulate elementium in any shape or form.
Greem deduced almost every creature in this forest would be that way. Killing them wouldn't net him any cores, but he still had to do it so that point was moot.
Dismissing the clay and rock snake golems, he stored their cores and retrieved more of the wind critter ones. In no time, ten birds made of cyan wind took form and flew in different directions under his command.
Underneath his mask, he maintained his spiritual connection to the cores and activated the display function he'd created to process the wealth of their multifaceted feedback.
Spirit magic enchanted crystals in the mask hijacked the large amount of information sent back by the critters, preventing them from reaching and disorienting him.
The same magic gave the crystals the ability to process the intangible information and convert them into sound and images.
Metamorphosis in combination with Spirit magic made this level of computation possible, the former giving the inanimate crystals wills and the latter improving their ability to reason.
Choosing to forgo viewing the processed images, Greem instructed the crystals to notify him when the wind critters found any beasts, a command that bore fruit right after he gave it.
It seemed the enhancements he gave the critters were paying off. That and the plethora of creatures that filled this forest making them not really hard to find.
The lack of adequate magic energy may have hampered the strength and development of powerful creatures, but it sure did wonders for the mundane beasts.
Without enough magical predators, the number of regular beasts had ballooned. This was a good thing for normal humans, but a bad thing for those interested in magic and eager to grow in power.
In Lethon, the millennia-long, constant, near-death skirmishes the ancient Adepts engaged in with the powerful native creatures is what led to their current status as the supreme owners of the land.
The everyday life and deaths struggles had forced the general populace to adapt, allowing them to grow so strong to the point that they had taken the top spot on the food chain and transformed Lethon into a high tier plane.
One that suited the various adept classes perfectly.
Thinking of how the native spellcasters of this plane and the elementium mains he came with had been handicapped due to the plane's situation, Greem allowed himself some small elation at choosing the body path.
Powering up the booster and flying up past the treeline with a whoosh, he heeded the directions of the processing crystals and twisted to face a particular direction.
One of the critters had found a flight of gryphons nearby.
Before he could lean forward and rush toward the bird-lion hybrids though, a roar that sounded like three creatures doing so at the same time shook the entire forest.
Beneath him, multiple flocks of birds flew from their perches, filling the air with tiny agitated screeches and calls as the crown of the trees they escaped from trembled violently.
He turned to the direction where he sensed the challenging howl and the Adept level magical ripples emanating alongside it, quickly discovering it was the general direction Mary flew in her exploration.
At that, he simply smiled, focused back on his targets and angled his wings properly before shooting toward them.
☀☀☀
With regards to Mary, the vampire was currently having fun, using the artifact Greem made for her to its fullest.
She had transformed into a crimson streak, her lithe and agile form zipping through the forest like she owned the place.
Everywhere she went, small creatures fled or burrowed deeper into their holes. Those big and confident enough to overcome the instinctual fear her presence naturally generated however tried to attack.
But none of them could lay a finger on her. Their roars and screeches would last for mere seconds before dying down to nothing, their bodies reduced to bloodless husks.
She even broke into the homes of the more powerful, pseudo adept level beasts, yet all of them met the same end. It didn't matter if they were wyverns, ogres, or sabertooth elephants.
Naturally, as with any system of living things in existence, this massive forest of non-magical creatures had its own food chain with an undisputed predator at the very top.
And Mary's brazen and unrestrained behaviour had caught its attention.
A chimera with three heads, the body of a goat, a pair of large dragon wings, and a snake for a tail shook the forest with its roar and chased after the bothersome vampire.
Its large, six meter wide wings flapped and created huge gusts of wind as it barreled through the dense vegetation, its massive body making it impossible for it to weave through the trees like Mary could.
Further incensed by the vampire's laughter and occasional, taunting stops, the beast forewent any of the little patience it had left and increased the activity of its wings.
Towering trees snapped like branches as it bulldozed after Mary, the tiny and unlucky creatures caught in the enraged beast's path swept away by its powerful wings or smashed into unrecognizable paste.
After a certain amount of time when it realised its chase would bear no fruit, the creature redirected its wings and sent its body above the treeline, three separate types of elementium gathering in the maws of its three heads.
Streams of crimson flame, sickly green poison, and pale cyan wind, shot from the dragon, lion, and goat heads respectively, descending upon Mary's general location in the forest below like a massive, multicolored waterfall.
Beneath the dense green canopy, the floating vampire perceived the build up to this attack perfectly but showed no reaction other than rubbing the thin red band around her left ring finger.
The unleashed attacks arrived right afterwards.
They ate through the crowns above and around her general vicinity and broke into the forest below, bombarding it with a potent and destructive mix of the differing magical energies.
Flames that detonated everything they burned, poisonous globs that stuck to and ate through everything, and a jet of wind blades that diced what they hit into smaller and smaller pieces all met together to create an absolute death zone.
Fifteen to twenty seconds later, the most intense effects of the attack faded, revealing total devastation in a radius of thirty meters and then some.
Pieces of wood, both big and small, burned with cracking and splintering sounds. The intense heat had robbed the affected area of any moisture and given wings to the poison, turning the globs into a pervasive and dense green mist.
Within this inhospitable radius however, a giant scarlet egg with ruby like quality and an unnatural glow hovered silently.
On its surface, the poison mists capable of reducing grown men to bones within seconds warred futilely with the blood that constituted it.
The chimera flapping its mighty wings and watching on in excitement and vindication, experienced a complete turnaround in its emotions when the red egg rose up out of the poison mist and revealed itself.
Before its feral mind could process the surprising event, the crystal egg devolved and began to flow like gelatin, peeling away to reveal a crimson haired seductress wrapped in skin tight armor the color of which matched her hair and full lips.
A smile that was all teeth and fangs plastered on her enchanting features, Mary held out her left arm and drew the dissolving blood towards it, shaping and compressing it into a crystalline bow and arrows that glinted in the sunlight.
Feeling a unique fear it hadn't felt in the hundred years it ruled this forest, the giant beast controlled its wings and started to fly back.
It also fired smaller balls of flame, poison, and wind from each of its heads in Mary's direction, the latter turning into a vibrant red streak as she dodged them with ease.
Pulling back the string of her blood bow and taking less than a split-second to focus her perception to the limit, she loosed all three arrows and leveraged the blood control granted by Greem's gift.
"Die," she said, boosting the speed of the projectiles and guiding them to the beast's three heads.
The chimera had been right to run, but it shouldn't have gone against Mary in the first place.
Its attempts to escape were fruitless as three blood red beams burrowed into all of its heads with remarkable precision, ruining each of its brains and going deeper into its body to wreak further damage.
It died before it hit the ground. Its massive body, the size of a van, dropped into the forest below and snapped the crowns of the trees on the way down, the descent barely slowed as a small tremor accompanied its fall.
Appearing above the bleeding corpse in a blur of vibrant red, Mary used the tight control she still held over the creature's blood to transform it into mist.
From its various orifices—both natural and acquired—and even the ground, blood rose and shifted into a dense mist that rushed into the vampire's opened mouth.
The process and the surrounding forest was completely silent, any creatures who happened to be nearby rushing from the scene as fast their bodies could carry them.
Once the tasty blood treat ended and all that remained of the chimera was a shriveled corpse, Mary shut her mouth and licked her lips, unsatisfied with the amount of blood but elated at her ring's performance.
Perhaps drunk or aroused or both due to the high energy blood, amorous thoughts filled the young woman's head when the handsome hunk who made such a display possible came to mind.
'When we are alone next time, I'll let him do it in the other hole… I've heard men love it there…'
Her cheeks reddening at the deviant things she imagined doing to Greem, Mary chose to chase away her embarrassment the only way she knew how.
She parted her lips once more and released a piercing cry, one that swept through the forest and transmitted her will to fight to every living thing in its radius.
****
Author's note:
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