Chapter Eight

Elysia refocused inward on her core. Buoyant from her success, she tried again, reigniting her migraine. Still, like before, she pushed through the pain. This time, she grabbed several strands of regular lightning and pulled them from her core. As soon as they left her core, they became practically weightless, allowing her to grab some more. She soon had dozens of strands, probably the most lightning she controlled at once if one didn’t count the divine lightning.

Upon releasing her hold on her divine spark, a wave of dizziness hit her as the strain overwhelming her brain disappeared suddenly. Fortunately, she recovered a few seconds later, though it was a struggle to keep the lightning strands from returning to her core.

Several seconds passed before she refocused on her collection of lightning. Her core fluttered in excitement as she found controlling the dozens of strands effortless. Each one of the strands nearly had the power of a smite, yet she had no trouble controlling them all. The idea of smite swarms burrowed its way into her mind, but she waved it away, knowing it wouldn’t be so easy to control the lightning outside of her body. Still, the idea was tempting.

As tempting as it was, there were several hurdles in the way. First of all being it wasn’t easy to grab so many lightning strands. She doubted she could pull off what she did in the middle of a fight, and that wasn’t even considering the risk if she did. What if she took one too many and fried herself? It wasn’t worth the risk, but if she could hold a reservoir of regular lightning strands outside of her core on standby, she was far from helpless. She still needed to improve her method of extraction, but she now had a workable alternative. Though she wasn’t sure how she felt about holding onto dozens of essentially live bombs. What if something caused her to lose control of them? Would they return to her core or destabilize and explode?

A shiver ran through her at the prospect, but she didn’t see an alternative in the short term. Until she could siphon regular lightning from her core without temporarily incapacitating herself, it was her only option. She just had to ration herself like the old days. Fortunately, unlike before, all she needed was a few seconds to rebuild her stash.

Plus, if forced to, she still had a divine lightning strike, and that wasn’t even taking into account she had her family to back her up. She was far from helpless now and if she had her way, she would never be helpless again.

Elysia on her ring next. Curiosity got the better of her, prompting her to send a single strand to the ring. The moment the lightning entered the ring, a prompt appeared in her vision.

Would you like to activate the storage function?

Without thinking much on it, she confirmed her desire, then braced herself just in case something happened. A stray thought snuck into her mind as she waited for it to activate. Didn’t she just say she would avoid impulsive actions?

Oh well, too late now. At least it wasn’t some divine pill. She knew where the ring came from and it wasn’t of divine origin. A shiver ran through her body as she remembered one important detail. What if her divine lightning turned it into a divine item? Her eyes snapped open and shot toward the window, locking onto Eva and Joe cuddled together on the couch.

Just in case, she sprang to her feet and launched herself overboard. She sunk like a rock to the street below, eyes widening when she spotted her father’s pickup truck scrunched against a bent tree on Main Street.

However, any further investigation halted as her world turned black. She flailed for a moment, only to realize she still had control of her body. For once, the feeling of water surrounding her gave her reassurance, knowing she didn’t teleport to somewhere unknown.

Now knowing only her vision changed, Elysia investigated further, finding as far as she could tell it was just a useless black void. This must be the storage space within the ring. How could it be so big, though? She barely gave it any lightning. At best, it should be a square meter.

Curious, Elysia focused back on her body only to gasp when she found she didn’t just feed it a single strand. The strand didn’t power the ring. What it did was activate it and establish a connection with her core. A constant stream of lightning traveled through her body from her core to the ring. To her surprise, even a tinge of divine lightning joined the stream without destroying the ring. The regular lightning must dilute it enough. Though she wasn’t sure how long that would last.

A glance at her charge caused her to pause. Her charge wasn’t dropping like it should. Instead of spending charge to maintain the ring, it took a chunk of her total charge. Two thousand charge became unavailable to her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Sure her charge wasn’t dropping, but what if she used the rest of her charge? Would the ring automatically deactivate to save her life or would she shrivel up and die?

On the plus side, it didn’t appear like she had to worry about maintaining the ring. She should have activated it sooner. If it was as big as it seemed, she could have fit the feathers from the bird dungeon. Though she would have had to run the dungeon a second time because of Ione. She might need a feather nest to sleep in if said feline grew any bigger.

How did the ring support itself if it wasn’t spending her charge, only partitioning it? Could it maintain itself indefinitely on the 2000 charge? She needed to do more testing.

At the thought, Elysia’s eyes scanned her surroundings, finding herself standing in the middle of Main Street, surrounded by devastation. Somehow most of the buildings survived mostly intact, though anything that wasn’t nailed down laid in heaps against walls. Even the trees that gave her so much trouble way back remained at least somewhat upright. Some even still had green needles and leaves, though the force of the wave ripped most of the smaller branches off.

Overall, it made for a creepy sight seeing the street she walked down countless times submerged underwater. Yet again, a shiver ran through her as one of her human fears sparked. Despite knowing it was stupid, anything human made underwater caused her to freak out. Her mind flashed back to the one time she stopped in a run near an isolated like until her eyes landed on a submerged boat.

She didn’t stop running until she made it home and even then she had nightmares for several nights about waterlogged zombies chasing her because she didn’t save them from their long sunken grave.

At the thought of zombies, her body turned rigid as her eyes rapidly scanned her surroundings, but when no zombies jumped out at her, she released a sigh, creating bubbles. She had no reason to fear some zombies. If what she knew was right, only dungeons scaled to the person’s level. That meant any zombie that could jump her down here were at most level 10 if that. If a level 10 zombie hurt her, she had no one but herself to blame.

To take her mind off a possible zombie ambush and the irrational fear of submerged structures, she returned to her previous plan of testing her ring.

Her gaze landed on the crumpled heap of her father’s crumpled truck. If she didn’t know where she left it, she might not have recognized it. It looks like it crashed head-on into a wall at highway speeds. That made her wonder how so many trees and buildings survived. If the wave had that much strength, it should have crushed everything. Maybe system shenanigans saved what was left of the town. Another unusual thing was the fact that the water didn’t recede. It didn’t tear away land and the water levels weren’t much higher than they were pre-system.

Maybe the key laid in how the elemental performed the wave in the first place. It was possible the wave was part of the merge and the elemental only piggybacked on it to cause more devastation or redirect it in her direction.

That made a lot more sense than some elemental creating a massive wave from thousands of kilometers away. It was still absolutely absurd feet of magic showing how far behind they were from those chasing them, but at least it didn’t mean they could crush them under a wave from an ocean away.

However they did, it didn’t change the fact that she and her family needed to grow stronger to ensure their freedom. They had a long way to go to match a feat, a magic even close to that wave.

Yet again, Elysia shook her head, trying to refocus on the reason she was standing in the middle of a sunken street.

The first problem presented itself instantly. How did she store things in the ring? Did she touch the items, or did she connect her lightning to it?

With hope it was the first option, Elysia waded through the water. She found moving through the water much easier than it should have been. It was about on par to when she ran in downpours. She felt the resistance of the water, but it was hardly on par with when she did pool resistance training. Another odd quirk of her body or the world either way, it didn’t matter to her. She had no plans of spending extended time underwater, though Sereia may force her to.

She put the unusual water resistance out of her head as she rested her right hand on the scrunched tailgate.

Her core skipped a beat as she felt a connection to the truck the moment her ring made contact. With hope she was right, she gave a mental confirmation to store the truck.

A blink later, the truck vanished, but before she could celebrate her success, her eyes widened as she dove backward. Where the truck previously resided, there was a pocket of empty space. For one long moment, seemingly frozen in time, the space retained the truck’s shape before water rushed in.

Fortunately, her quick reaction saved her from the crushing force of the water, but not from the attention it drew.

The residual current from the water obscured movement in the buildings all around her. She almost reacted too late, but out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a rotting arm reaching for her. Her head snapped to the right, coming face-to-face with a bloated zombie.

On instinct, she launched a lightning bolt with one of her remaining strands. Being so close, the lightning had no chance to veer off, scoring a direct hit. In an instant, the zombie exploded, feeling the water with gore.

Before another zombie could reach her, she swam upward, then hovered as she looked down. Hundreds of zombies gathered in the street, causing a flashback to her ill-fated trip with the squad car. Unlike then, she had the power to fight back, but was it worth it? She glanced at the kill notification she just received.

Killed Zombie Level 11.

Yeah, they weren’t worth it, but did that mean she didn’t want to do it? Of course not. These damn zombies tormented her. Now it was time for her to torment them back. Actually, no, even if they could feel she doubted she would torment them. There wasn’t much torment in an instant death, after all. Still, this would be satisfying.

Elysia focused inward and gathered a dozen lightning strands and fed them toward each of her arms as she pointed them down at the horde still mindlessly gathering on the street, unaware of their impending second death.

The best kill was overkill, especially when it came to zombies and spiders. Actually, crabs, most insects, and walking mushrooms should join that list. Really, anything she faced in a dungeon deserved overkill. Was she petty? Of course.

A smile spread as she released her payload on the unsuspecting zombies. Even with the inaccuracy of her lightning, magnified by the water, it didn’t matter. With a dozen lightning bolts descending on a tightly packed horde, it didn’t matter if a couple missed.

A muffled shockwave reached her ears as the lightning made impact, blinding her and causing super-heated bubbles to float up. Still, she remained where she floated, wanting to see the devastation she wrought.

A devastation it was. When the light cleared, there was a crater where she stood only a few seconds earlier. No zombie existed in said crater. In fact, even the gore from their exploded bodies was absent, as if it was burned away. If it weren’t for the endless stream of dings filling her mind, she would have assumed the zombies somehow dodged her lightning barrage, but unfortunately for them, that was not the case.

Satisfied with her genocide, Elysia swam upward, a smile still plastered on her face.