Matt woke up with a start, his body covered in sweat. As he clutched his head and calmed himself down, he recalled what had made him wake up so suddenly. He’d had been unhappy about his situation since it had begun, but actual nightmares about being pulled around by August like a puppet on strings was definitely new. Slapping his cheeks to try and wake himself up properly, he looked at his phone to see what the time was.

“I’ve got to figure out a new sleep schedule.” He said groggily, opening the blinds after seeing it was mid afternoon. Staggering around, he made a vague effort to clean himself up, even though he didn’t plan on doing anything else today except lying back down. Still, a certain standard needed to be kept just in case especially if he planned on ever getting a normal life back.

Thinking about he turned to the copy of his contract sitting on the table and looked absentmindedly through the notes he’d written down. It didn’t actually matter what was in the contract he’d quickly realised. Without any real legal knowledge he had no idea what he was even looking for. And even if he could find some small loophole in the contract and hire a good enough lawyer to argue the case, he’d be crushed in court by whatever legal team August purchased that week. And even if, somehow, he won the court case and got out of the contract he’d signed, it wouldn’t matter to August, who would just carry on like nothing had changed.

The thing that was tying him down wasn’t the contract, but the man himself. As long as August had the ability to reveal his identity to the public, Matt had no choice but to give in. Any legal option he had would be shut down almost instantly since he didn’t have the financial power to challenge anything the company said or did. Besides, nothing legal would able to get him free of that bastard's blackmail...

The thought sparked something in Matts mind, and he began to form an idea. It would be risky and would need some set up, but any chance to get out from under August thumb was worth the effort. Picking up the phone, he flicked through a search engine, looking for a group that looked promising. Finding one, he gave them a ring, happy he’d caught them before closing.

“Hello? Yes, I’m looking to have some work done, but I'm not a hundred percent on what would be best, do you think you could send someone out to get me a quote?...Great, when could we get that done...Sure Thursday morning works for me, let me give you the address...”

~~~~~~

Logging back in, Jicker looked around and found that the sun was well and truly up, making it a good time to pack up camp and begin to head back to town. It was amazing how a bit of sunshine and a walk could brighten up a person’s mood, Jicker noticed. Even though it was all digital, there was something about travelling and working in genesis that made it easier to move past all the bullshit that August threw at him.

The journey back was as uneventful as his trip out, though on the way he heard a few loud noises that sounded suspiciously like people running across a poppit for the first time. He wondered absently how wide spread they’d get before their population levelled out. By the time he got back to town two days later he was fed up with travelling, and swore that the next time he had to go that far he would get himself a mount, or at least a travelling companion.

Heading into the academy he, went to go and clean himself up a bit and drop some gear off in his room before taking in a few lectures. It wasn’t the most fun way to spend his time, but the last thing he wanted was to get kicked out and have to keep paying for an inn every night. As he relaxed in the back of an anatomy lecture, he let his mind wander as the professor dissected a fox for the class. The big question now was what to do next. He’d promised to go and track down the node above the city, but where was he supposed to go after that? He’d spent so long working towards the upheaval that now that now that he could go anywhere, he didn’t know what he should do. He was sure that August would have some ‘suggestions’ but hopefully his plan would work and he could avoid those.

As the lecture came to a close he shrugged, and figured he’d ask the Rising Moon if they had any suggestions. Heading out of the hall, he decided it’d been delayed long enough and made his way to the cloud for the third time.

When he made it to the stop of the stairs, the ogre at the entrance spotted him immediately.

“Hey, little green dude! Back to try again?” he called out.

“More like actually go for the first time.” he replied.

Stepping through the entrance, Jicker was again greeted with the message about being inside a dungeon as headed deeper inside. One of the advantages of working with a bunch of necromancers is that dead bodies are easy to get a hold of. This meant that he was fortunate enough to have been able to stock up on his dead man’s sight potions, and wouldn’t need to worry about setting up any torches.

As he headed deeper and deeper in, the tunnel became narrower as off shoots started appearing, passages left by other people digging through the stone. There was no real way to tell where anything from the city had ended up in the cloud apart from a few rough guesses and assumptions, meaning that people simply dug in random directions as they hoped to get lucky. Sometimes it panned out for them as they found themselves in an armoury or laboratory that had survived mostly intact. More often than not however, people could mine for days with nothing to show for it except a broken pick.

However this was one time where Jicker was at an advantage. Not only was he able to travel through some of the smaller cracks and passages that had formed, but he had an actual destination in mind.

When he’d first been asked to track down the node inside the cloud, he’d spent some time going over his notes for his explosive in Ardenvale. While the explosion itself had been centralised, the device itself had been positioned more to the north. From there he had done some rough math and bit of guess work to figure out where it would have ended up. His hunch was that since that had been where all of the energy had originated, that was where it would end up pooling as well. It was a bit of a long shot but it was all he had to go on.

~~~~~~

When he’d first entered the mine, he’d been worried about the dangerous creatures that had started living inside. Then he’d considered all the ways things could go wrong if someone else followed him, or found the node before he did. But something he hadn’t thought about was how boring mining was. After moving as close to his target as he could using existing mine shafts, he’d started to mine through the dark stone. It was slow, monotonous and incredibly dull.

He’d gone through several dozen battle drop pills and a few uses of adrenaline to try and speed things up, but unless you were a miner by class or had the skill at a high level, it was slow going. After several hours of tedious digging, moving the fill and digging again, he’d begun to wish something would come across him, just to break up the time. But whether it was the enigma stat at work or his tunnel was too small for anything to notice, he was left alone to work, pausing only when he heard the sounds of combat from other places in the dungeon.

Suddenly his pick broke through the stone face he’d been working on and rush of stale air came through the hole. Excitedly he worked with renewed enthusiasm to clear the opening and see what he’d uncovered.

A few dozen feet wide, the room was covered in a layer of dust and debris with various cabinets lining the walls. Tables and benches were thrown around the area, and Jicker spotted a few bodies of people that had been caught in the blast, which gave him a small amount of regret. Heading deeper into the room he found broken pieces of equipment that looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite remember where he’d seen them. It was only when he opened a cupboard on the wall to find a small rotting bag with a label saying “Franks- get your own” did he realise the truth, that he had successfully uncovered a lunchroom.

It wasn’t a complete loss however, he realised as he searched the bodies and downed another sight potion. While they only had a few golds between them and the rest of their belongings were beyond repair, he could tell they appeared to be tradesmen. If a bunch of workers were in a lunch room, odds were good that there should be workshop around that this room had been attached to. Starting work from the remains of the door out of the room, he was reward after a few feet when he hit another room, this one considerably larger.

The chamber was a single room, but was huge in scale, seeming to be the size of a soccer field from what Jicker could see, with tall columns scattered around. It was these that seemed to have saved the place, as most of the walls had cracked and broken with tons of stone pouring in before solidifying. By the look of the equipment left around as it rusted away, this place had been doing large scale carpentry, with lengths of wood left to rot where they lay.

Jicker was about to go and see if any of the saws and tools were worth trying to reclaim when he spotted something out the corner of his vision. Lit up with a faint blue outline was a large spider, perhaps two feet across, sitting atop one of the racks of wood. If it wasn’t for the life sense from the dead man’s sight, there was no way he would have spotted it before he was right underneath it.

Pulling out his blowgun, he loaded up a poison shot and fired, wanting to get it out of the way. The spider flinched violently when struck, before spasming for a few moments, squealing as it died. He was about to put the weapon away before he heard a sound from above him. Looking up he saw his mistake, and that he had broken into the room directly below a nest of the spiders, which began to rappel down towards him.

Jicker didn’t normally have a big problem with spiders, but the sight of hundreds of them heading towards him, each bigger than his head, had him running back down the tunnels as they began to follow him. He seen them run around when he tried to squash them in his house, but it had been a long time since he’d appreciated just how quickly spiders could move when they had to. As soon as they’d hit the ground they had started to rush towards him, a seemingly solid wall of legs and fangs.

Realising he had no chance of outrunning the swarm behind him, he reached into his pocket as he ran and pulled out one of his last remaining incendiberries and fired it off behind him. A few seconds later there were high pitched cries as the tunnel was suddenly illuminated by the bright flames, spiders dying in droves as the mass behind them forced them into the intense flames. Even once they had gotten over the surprise; they kept rushing through the flames, seemingly willing to give their lives to get to him.

Most died in the fire, the hairs of the spiders proving to be extremely flammable, but the sheer size of the swarm meant a fair number got through. These were only a few at a time however, and could be managed, Jicker clubbing them down with his blowgun as he fired the last of his berries to keep the fire going. As the last few spiders launched themselves towards him and met their ends, he leaned on his pipe, breathing heavily. It had been a while since he done any actual life or death fighting, and he’d forgotten how stressful it could be.

After taking a drink of water from his canteen, He headed back into the workshop, keeping an eye out for anything else moving around, but from the way they’d gone after him he had a suspicion that they’d eaten every other living thing here some time ago. The tools he found were largely ruined, though a few chisels and saws looked to be repairable. Being mostly filled with wood, there weren’t a lot of valuables to be had, though he did have a small stroke of luck. A section of the workshop had been closed off with some dividers to form what seemed to be an office. Inside he found a small cupboard containing a wide range of exotic woods, some he recognized from his days as a tinker, and some that were completely unknown to him. While it wasn’t exactly finding a safe full of gold, there were plenty of chemists, artists, doctors and all sorts of other trades that would pay highly for them.

With his new found gains safely packed away into his bag he resumed his search for the node, trying to remember where it would have been in relation to the workshop. He’d left several of the explosives in more public locations, in this case a public storage warehouse where another crate of undeclared goods wouldn’t make anyone bat an eye. As with most warehouses they tended to be surrounded by various businesses who wanted to use them for convenient storage, such as this one.

It didn’t take long to find the right direction, as more and piece of broken wood and metal started showing up in the stone he dug through, though the changes in material meant that it took the better part of a day before he reached his destination.

Breaking through the last piece of debris, he was immediately rewarded as light poured through the opening, lighting up the tunnel. As his eyes adjusted Jicker looked through the opening, finally seeing what he’d been searching for. The room itself was almost spherical in nature, a rough layer of shattered crates, cupboards and other pieces that had been stored in the warehouse making up the walls. At another time he would’ve been interested in looking through them, seeing if anything had survived the blast, but as soon as Jicker stepped inside, he was captivated by the node as it hovered gently in the centre of the room.

Where the one that the Rising Moon had claimed was slightly taller than a human, this one was taller than a building. At least twenty feet tall and half a dozen wide, the sides of the giant crystal were perfectly smooth, a vivid green colour with rich brown swirls through it seemingly at random, branching out like the veins of a leaf. In fact, as Jicker got closer, he saw that the wood directly underneath the node had somehow started to sprout, new shoots growing upwards towards the source of the revitalising light.

Jicker took a seat in the chamber, closing his eyes and relaxing for the first time in several days, drinking in the light. Earth magic was usually used for defence and reinforcement, but in this quantity its healing properties were more than enough to strip away the weariness and stress.

It was tempting to just go to sleep for a while, to just let things be for a while as he bathed in the energies of the node. Eventually though he shook himself free of such thoughts, getting back to why he’d come here in the first place.

He’d had plenty of time to think about how to deal with the situation when he eventually found the node, but now that he’d actually found it, a lot of the plans he’d made weren’t usable. He wouldn’t be able to hide it any better than it had been before he’d uncovered it, and trying to take or move it was completely out of the question. With his options limited, he fell back on his back up plan: to make a guard.

As long as the creature he created could keep people away from the node for long enough for the Rising Moon to launch their assault it would be good enough, so it didn’t need to be perfect. But when he’d thought about adapting something to become a guard, he hadn’t thought about what he could use as a base, and now racked his brain trying to think what to do. He considered trying to make something out of the few sprouts growing underneath the node, but a strange plant would be more likely to attract people rather than send them away, and he wasn’t sure exactly how making a plant monster worked yet.

He was going to head back out to the workshop to see if there were any spiders left or an egg in their nest, when he spotted a few specks of blue buried amongst the plant life. Getting onto his knees and taking a closer look, Jicker found a number of insects crawling around, having found one of the only sources of food around.

“Well, beggars can’t be choosers.” Jicker said to himself as he carefully picked up a large millipede, looking at it as it curled up on his palm.

Activating adaptation, the first and most obvious change needed was size. His evolution stat gave him more leeway, but he found that there was a fairly hard limit on what he could achieve, at least at his current level. He ended up settling for only half as big as he could go, since at maximum he wouldn’t be able to anything else, and a giant millipede would be only slightly more dangerous than the original bug. Getting to work he reinforced its carapace, its shiny body becoming a rough reddish colour with a texture resembling shark skin. Its head also got an overhaul, with much larger and stronger jaws, as well as a number of additional eyes since he didn’t want anyone sneaking by it. The last change was more complicated, needing him to play with settings he hadn’t touched up to this point.

Adding the ideas of using pack tactics to the silhouwolves hadn’t been difficult, as wolves tended to use them naturally. But adding the idea to protect a magical rock to a millipede was something else entirely, especially since he couldn’t change its thoughts, only its instincts. In the end he settled on trying to get it to hoard earth energy, like a dragon hoarding gold, hoping it would want to keep the node to itself.

Finalising the change, a glow overtook the millipede, its form beginning to rapidly expand, the sounds breaking wood coming from underneath as its weight rapidly increased. Once it eventually faded Jicker was left staring up at the giant insect, its head the size of a car as it moved around lazily, its body fluid despite its new size and shape.

Ding!

Adaptation has become permanent. Unique creature created.

Type: Modified Insect. Level: 28

Do you wish to name this creature?

“Got it in one.” He said quietly as the creature ignored him. It wasn’t as high a level as he would have liked, but considering it had been a normal insect before he couldn’t say he was surprised.

“The name will be Earthwyrm.” He said, having thought about it while he was working

Name accepted, Earthwyrm has been created.

It will receive additional stat points as a unique monster.

This creature is now able to respawn, and will drop items proportional to its level.

Creator will remain unknown. Now applying changes to creature.

The creature was lit up for a moment as the changes took hold, and Jicker turned back towards his tunnel, happy that he’d achieved his goals. It wouldn’t last forever, but a giant insect should at least dissuade people from investigating this area for long enough. All that he had to do now was let someone from the guild no and then he’d be able to relax and make some longer term plans.

A muted clicking sound managed to get his attention, causing him to turn towards the source. Looking back he saw that the Earthwyrm had stopped randomly sliding around the area and was now in the process of swallowing the entire node whole, its jaw unhinged far wider than he had thought possible.

Jicker wasn’t sure when he started running, but he did know his brain had nothing to do with it. Before he knew it he’d sprinted out from dungeon, shoving past other adventures and the bouncer who had turned to say hello. Throwing himself face first down the side of the cloud, he ignored everything else as he willed it to go faster as he plummeted towards the ground. He had no idea what was going to happen, but every instinct he had was screaming at him to get clear of ground zero.

By the time he reached the ground a few people began to yell at him for cutting in line but he didn’t pay them any attention. All that his mind could focus on was getting enough distance from the cloud before...something happened. A few people noticed him running and wheezing down the streets, but while a pale gremlin wasn’t a common sight, it was hardly interesting enough to take a second glace.

“So how’s the node search coming along Jicker?”

Turning to one side as he ran, Jicker saw Oda, who was casually strolling alongside him while keeping pace.

“Got to...get out...of here.” He wheezed, not willing to slowdown despite his lungs burning. Oda raised an eyebrow curiously.

“Why do you-”

Before Oda could finish asking the question, a sound came from behind them. To call it a crack would be an understatement, since it had almost nothing in common with something like a branch snapping. Instead it had the same deep, booming quality that fireworks have, a sound that is felt as much as it is heard. Jicker looked towards Oda as the assassin turned to look back towards the cloud, the man’s normally impassive expression turning to shock.

“Right, yeah ok, leaving now.”Oda said, tripping over his words slightly as he hoisted Jicker under one arm and mutter something under his breath. Golden light began to pulse along his veins as whatever ability or spell he’d cast activated. Before he could think to ask what he was doing they sped off, their surrounding blurring as they ran far quicker than Jicker had thought possible. At any other time, the sight of a person dashing through the city like a living bolt of lightning would have attracted attention, even with enigma in effect. But with whatever was happening in the cloud, not even the guards at the city gates paid them the slightest bit of attention. Eventually Oda’s spell ran out, and they slowed down to a more humane speed. Well into the tree line at this point they stopped, both gasping for air.

"What’s going on?” Oda said after a few moments in between wheezes. Jicker shook his head. “Don’t know exactly. I was looking for the node, and I found it. Then I tried to make a thing to guard it, so I made it attracted to earth energy.”

“Makes sense, what’s the problem?”

“It... ate the node.” Jicker said quietly.

“It ate the... ok, not going to pretend I understand how that happened, but what does that mean?”

Before he could answer, Jicker received a message from the game.

Warning: Unique created creature ‘Earthwyrm’ has greatly exceeded your limits and no longer qualifies as your creation.

Evolution will no longer grant experience for this creature.

“Oh, that can’t be good.” Jicker said to himself.

“What can’t be good? What did you do!?”

An explosive noise came from the city, and the pair turned to look back. A section on top of the cloud had broken open, throwing huge chunks of stone over the city, and from the crater rose the Earthwyrm. Its appearance was fairly similar to how he’d crated it initially, but the key factor here was scale. Visible even from this distant, the monster had grown dramatically, extending out the top of the cloud for hundreds of feet. It s enormous head swivelled around looking at its new surroundings, each of its dozen eyes larger than a house, and then it opened its maw and screamed, the sound tearing the air around it, leaving visible ripples as it deafened the city.

“That. I did that.” Jicker shouted as he clutched his ears.

“Of course you did. What’s the plan?”

“What?”

“You made it, so how so we deal with it?” Oda asked, not taking his eyes of the monstrosity over the town.

“I didn’t plan on creating it, why would I have a plan for this?”

“Well come up with one now then! Weak points, habits, anything that could... hold up what’s it doing now?”

The Earthwyrm kept screaming out, but its tone seemed to have become more desperate. From where it left the cloud, its body was becoming discoloured, slowly beginning to match the stone around it. The discoloured sections began to slow and crack, seeming to become nothing more than an oddly shaped rock formation, the legs snapping off under the strain of the transformation. The beasts head scrambled upwards, as if in an attempt to escape from its own dying form, but it didn’t take long before the change covered it completely, bringing about a sudden silence.

For a brief moment nothing happened, and it seemed as if the entire city held its breath. The as quickly as it had come the silence was broken as the head of the beast exploded outwards, showering the city in a hail of stone. And there, sitting on the remains of the petrified monster’s neck high above the city, sat the node, spinning gently as it shined in the morning sunlight.

“I guess... problem solved.” Oda said after a while.

Jicker nodded. “Looks like the nodes contain a lot more energy than a living creature can handle.”

“We should probably get back to the guild hall; they’re probably going to have a few questions. And while I'm there I think I’ll put a note on our node.”

“Oh?”

“Warning: Do not eat.”