One With The Abyss

I returned to my body, finding it exactly as I had customised it to be.

I was now a grey elf with sharp teeth.

"I look sweet." I say, extending my eyes out of my sockets to look over my entire body. I found great pleasure in how much easier this was than before I had opened [Formless], and like I had expected the energy cost was much lower.

It was like, instinctual. The same feeling as when a person clenches their fist.

"... I'm sorry for pushing you so hard." Abby said, breaking her silence.

"It's fine, it was for the best." I responded, it hurt to go through that, but it resulted in a breakthrough. Even after putting revenge in the back of my mind, it seemed I still had a bunch of stuff going on.

Honestly, if I had faced my sister or Ursina without dealing with all that, I might have broken down.

Abby didn't seem to agree, but honestly I felt 10 pounds lighter.

"Now for something more important." I said, feeling better, "A new identity needs a new name."

Abby dropped her funk a bit and sounded excited to come up with a new name.

"Should we stick with the whole latin thing? Just change it from pig to something cooler?" Abby asked, I felt it was a decent idea, but not entirely necessary.

"I don't think it's entirely necessary, it just needs to sound imposing and be a name other people would be able to fear." I respond, "I can't be a destroyer of worlds with a name like Hailey." 

Abby agreed with that.

We shoot ideas back and forth between each other, trying to come up with a name relating either to my abilities or my title as [King of Ruin]. I wanted something cool, something that would make those asshole heroes tremble when they heard it

I'm going to make myself infamous, a real threat. So much, so that when we do finally meet up, I'll kill them knowing damn well they regret ever coming near me.

I wanted it to be something that the humans of this world could fear, but also something that allowed the heroes to know the general meaning. LEE offered a very extensive curriculum and although I hate to admit it, the school did offer a lot of good information about culture and religion and stuff, as well as many foreign languages.

Abby and I came up with many ideas until we settled on 1: Nox.

I decided to keep the latin theming of my name, instead changing it to mean night and darkness; but it was also the name of the Primordial Roman Goddess of Night, Nox.

I was ready to continue into the dungeon, completely kitted out with a new name and new shapeshifting abilities I would surely make use of.

I stretched a bit, laughing as I extended my body further than it should go before heading onto the 46th floor.

The 46th floor was made of ghost type enemies, specifically [Ghost Soldiers].

The floor opened up on an old battlefield. Old rust weapons littered the floor and bones covered the floor, as I walked through the floor, ghosts in spectral armour came to attack me.

The fight was simple enough since I already knew how to fight ghosts. These ones had a little more resistance to magic and energy coating so it was a bit more of a fight, also their swords were incredibly resistant to magic. 

I decided to only use my aura and shapeshifting in the fight as I cut through the monsters.

I received [Intangible], letting me turn my body intangible. In return the energy cost is fairly high and it gives me a serious weakness to energy attacks like aura or magic.

Still, I placed it in [Zero] and continued through the floor.

The boss of floor 46 was a [Ghost General], much stronger than a regular ghost, but also one who summons [Ghost Soldiers] to assist him in a fight.

It was a fun fight as I fought waves of [Ghost Soldiers] as well as their general until I finally killed the creature, using his own talent against him:

[Ghost Summoning]

[Call into the ether and summon a spectral creature to fight on your behalf (ghosts may refuse your call)]

What came out were not [Ghost Soldiers] as I had expected but just a random assortment of ghost monsters, it seemed there was some kind of... compatibility factor to the talent.

With his armies being pushed back by my own, I was quickly able to finish off the general and with his death all of his [Ghost Soldiers] vanished, ending the fight completely. With no use for them, I sent my own ghosts back to the ether and looked over the drops.

It was the first drop I had gotten that I felt was worth lookin at:

[Spectral Sword]

[Cannot be touched by physical means, yet it can cut flesh with ease. A rather peculiar item]

I couldn't even pick it up without an aura coating, but its most impressive feature was that it could ignore armour and cut straight into flesh. 

It was easily blocked by my aura and struggled to push past it, but against common enemies, this would be a deadly blade.

"Now for the moment of truth..." I mumbled, pulling the weapon closer to my soul blade.

And like clockwork it was absorbed, granting me an incredibly powerful weapon that I could freely use.

There was a minor hiccup though. As I discovered when I tried to bring it out, the sword still held its spectral properties, even though it was technically my soul weapon I couldn't handle it without using aura.

This did make it a constant drain on my energy to use, but I felt it was probably worth it.

On the next floor, Abby talked to me about the [Ghost Summoning] talent.

"You know you can fuse that with [Elementalist], right?" She said, though it was likely only because I had not done anything with it yet.

"What do you mean? It doesn't seem like a magic talent, are summonings not their own things?" I asked.

"Some are, but undead type summoning of any type is technically necromancy and that falls under the death element. Therefore magic." Again she wowed me with her knowledge, even taking the time to explain death magic when I asked.

Essentially, death magic dealt with 2 types of spells: Instant death and necromancy.

Instant death magic did basically what it said it did, but was highly irregular and most people didn't use it since it hardly ever worked. However, a lot of this world's history is full of stories of necromancers using hordes of undead to siege a castle or some kind of fort.

Though, while they are quite fearsome, it is not the same as I had imagined it. Necromancy can only create unintelligent undead, basically monsters acting purely on their instincts and while some were strong, it was no different than a strong bear attacking.

There was one other aspect of death magic, being that it worked surprisingly well with soul magic; a deviated form of life magic. With souls a necromancer could empower their undead further, even if they were still not intelligent they could use skills and talents with their frankenstein soul.

Unfortunately, the odds of being able to get soul and death magic is very low. 

I discovered this as I fused [Ghost Summoning] to my magic talent, gaining knowledge on 2 elements.

First I needed to create nature magic. This was simple enough as I felt I was quite skilled with earth magic, one of the key components. I entered the 47th floor before trying and managed to quickly do it by combining earth and water magic to create nature, once this was done the next part of the information was revealed.

(A/N: In the past I've called nature magic, plant magic; just know these are interchangeable and mean the same thing)

The next step was to actually create death magic. This was done by combining nature with darkness, with all the affinities I had to darkness, this was also incredibly easy. And although I didn't gain any more info, I more or less knew how to create soul magic. I figured if nature and dark made death, then nature and light would make life; this could then be deviated to become soul.

I would have done that but I couldn't really bother for the time being since I didn't really need necromancy right now; I only did it so I could satisfy the 'itch' that came from getting new info from a fused talent.

After sorting that out, I gave floor 47 a proper look and couldn't really tell what kind of monsters I would fight since it was just another forest floor. Though it did tell me it was likely some kind of faefolk monster.

"Okay. I've had goblins, trolls and orcs, all that would be left is... Ogres." I mutter, thinking back to when I was first abandoned here.

Abby had told me the monsters who had cost me my hand were blood ogres, so I'm sure it would feel good to take my anger out on these ogres (assuming it was them).

It didn't take long for me to find the first monster, and I was right. It was an ogre.

However, unlike the red ones in the forest, these ones had green skin like goblins; though that's where their similarities to goblins ended. 

They were ripped, with large muscles like the high orcs, despite being regular ogres, and had similar tribal tattoos to the blood goblins.

Still, it was no match for me as my arm grew rapidly into that of a cyclops. Inside the muscles tightened and contracted to the point they were like steel and I slammed it down on my enemy, resulting in the creature ending up as nothing more than a sludgy stain of blood on the grass.

"... Overkill." Abby said, she was right, but it still felt good. Besides, there would be more ogres to kill.

As proof of that, 6 more appeared from the treeline as the sound from my attack had been extremely loud.

Tentacles extended from my back and lifted each of them up by their necks as I absorbed their talents before snapping their necks with ease. It was quite cathartic to kill them like this.

Their talents were nothing to write home about, just more enhancements to my muscles as I had expected.

After a while I changed up my strategy with fighting them. I don't know if the ogres - especially those in a 'dungeon' - had the intelligence to understand, but I tried to go out of my way to 'humiliate' the ogres by killing them with only my body: No weapons, no physical changes, just me.

I did, however, increase the density of my muscles in my fleshy body. My arm could be enhanced by aura and magic, but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of having to use that.

I quickly went around the floor killing ogres wherever I went until I reached the final boss: A [High Ogre].

It was much stronger than the regular ogres, but nothing I couldn't easily handle.

The talent was another muscle enhancement talent, [Iron Fist] literally coating my fists with iron. 

This floor only confirmed how much the ogres were losers. Both of these talents were completely useless as I had far superior talents already.

All muscle enhancements were inferior to the Tusklian's talent [Muscle Armour] despite now being part of [Zero] instead of the usual [Abyssal Soul] where muscle enhancements usually went.

Similarly, [Iron Fist] was far inferior to [Corpus Metalli] since it could only create iron and was only a coating. On the other hand, my metal shapeshifting could theoretically be any metal and went the entire way through my body, much better.

"I think personal bias is interfering with your perception of ogres." Abby said as I left the floor.

"What! Why would you think that?" I exclaim, "I just think they are weak losers who can't do anything at all."

"... Ok. You may be right. But I lost my arm to an ogre."

We laughed a little and I headed to the next floor.

Floor 48 was on top of what seemed to be on a floating island, high above the clouds. While I wanted to enjoy the view, I was interrupted by an attack.

A giant talon tried to push me off the edge, a half naked bird woman was attacking me.

She had feathered wings and bird feet, with a human torso and head. 

"Why are harpies naked?" I wonder aloud, grabbing her talon as she swooped down to attack again. With a firm grip I smashed her into the ground, hearing the sound of her bones cracking.

"Seems she has bird bones as well." I mocked.

The talent was another affinity, unfortunately it was for my least favourite element:

[Wind Affinity]

[Attune yourself to the silent whisperings of the wind, have it bend to your will]

I didn't really appreciate wind as the element was more annoying to use than other elements.

It did, however, allow me to use the wind to fly more easily. I even found I could use it without wings, though it was much harder.

The floor was easy as my superior control over the wind element allowed me to ground the harpies and kill them quickly. I made it to the boss room with speed, it being a giant nest in the middle of the island.

The boss was a monster called a [Queen Harpy]. Essentially, a much stronger harpy, it was too large to fly and was instead another minion summoning boss. It let out loud cries that would summon harpies while bombarding me with sound attacks.

Harpies were of no concern as I grounded them easily, and since I could use sound magic I could sense the sound mana coming towards me as an attack.

My control over wind magic was higher than the average harpy so floor 48 was a breeze.

"Shut up." Abby scolded me as I chuckled, "Puns aren't funny."

I didn't stop chuckling until I reached floor 49. It was an underground burrow, where I was immediately attacked by an insect monster, specifically another ant-type.

But they were not regular insects, these were [Insectoids]. Strong carapace and powerful physical bodies all with the proportions of a human. But their greatest asset was their perfect coordination.

Even just the first group was made up of 20 ant insectoids that attacked like a finely tuned machine. It wasn't until I got a hold of their talent that I understood why:

[Hive Mind]

[Extend your mind to connect to a psychic structure. <Can only enter structures you are invited to>]

"A useless talent, but I can more or less guess what the boss has." I say, killing the last of the ant-men.

"Yeah, that'll be a pretty good talent if your really unite Gehenna." Abby said. While I hated to conform to fate - a new phobia of mine after learning it existed thanks to [Time Manipulation] - at the moment becoming the king of ruin as I was supposed to was likely best to destroy the human empire on Arcadia.

I made my way through the burrow, gradually being covered in blue blood and fought my way to the boss room.

I had expected to just fight a big ant like last time, instead I was surprised to see a very... Curvy, ant. I don't know if it was because I had completely abandoned my attachment to my physical body, but I was finding myself attracted to this ant.

At the very least she was still humanoid.

As I entered the room, the ant queen pulled out a rapier and struck a pose with it.

My expectations were being shattered one after the other with this monster.

She charged at me with extreme speed and precision, obviously I avoided it. Becoming more and more experienced at [Time Manipulation] had made it so that I had not been hit (willingly) in an extremely long time.

I was enjoying the process and pulled out my own rapier to fight back. My technique was not as good as hers, but it was a fun time.

I was also right about the talent:

[Telepathic Structure]

[Use the power of your mind to create a psychic structure for communication]

When combined the 2 talents created:

[Psychic Web]

[Create a web of psychic power to connect between people]

It was much harder to use, but would allow me to create connections between people without the [Hive Mind] skill, much more useful when considering that other people wouldn't have the talent.

I would extend 'psychic power' in the form of something like a string, then connect it from person to person allowing them to talk. I could also connect multiple strands to one another for something like 'group calls'. I was also glad to know that I could block messages or people from talking to others if I wanted to.

I was also excited to see the drop from the ant queen:

[Royal Blade of Formica]

[Blade wielded by the Grand Queen of the Formica kingdom. When raised high it raise the moral of your subordinates]

"This floor seems very much for becoming a ruler." I laugh.

Abby agrees and we head down after the sword is absorbed.

Almost halfway done with this dungeon and I am feeling great!

Soon the world will shake in fear at the sound of the name 'Nox' as the king of ruin and clearer of this weird dungeon, that probably isn't a dungeon!