Scyth, you have the right to name this new zone!
You can keep the old name (Abandoned Sanctuary of Doracant) or come up with your own.
As was my tradition, I left the old name, but this time I got no bonuses for it.
The sun couldn’t pierce through the flint-gray clouds, only highlight them with a din greenish gleam. Thanks to my advanced Night Vision, I could still see even in the gloom and even through the acid rain.
The new continent felt like a completely different world. Even beyond the Barrier, when visiting with the Old Goddess of Death, Morena, the foreign landscape didn’t seem quite so strange as this. At least the trees there seemed earthly, at least by Dis standards. But here… I remembered the stories of Mr. Riordan about Venus and its climate, with clouds of sulfuric acid… Maybe the game designers took inspiration from the Morning Star, as that planet was called in ancient times.
Beyond the bounds of the place of power, thick colorless strings stretched dozens of yards into the air—something like grass or trees. The surface of the land was like a sieve, peppered with multi-angular holes of various sizes. Living beams of light emerged from one of the holes, stretching and writhing as if feeling for something. Others emitted stiff strings of whitish syrup, as if someone was firing a water pistol below.
Creepy insects like dragonflies with long flexible worm-like bodies darted through the air. One of them flew into a geyser stream and instantly dissolved into the flow. Another hit a beam of light and grew in size, expanding and bursting, scattering in a shining cloud of dust.
I looked around dumbfounded, then it occurred to me to look down. Only smoking blackened bones remained from my feet to my knees. Flesh continued to slough off my body and dissolve, either from the acid rain or from the sprays of a pale-white geyser bubbling beneath me.
The place of power scared the mobs away. I saw movement behind a purple stone tree with rainbow sap seeping from its trunk. A huge… Nether knows what it was. A giant black three-foot-long cockroach with a tall vertical fin on its chitinous back and powerful mandibles that reminded me of an excavator bucket. Oily liquid seeped from the joints in its exoskeleton.
Barakata, level??? solitoid
So the mob was called a barakata, and its species was solitoid. Kind of like, ‘wolf, animal’ or ‘skeleton, undead.’ After the disgusting barakata, the mobs of the Lakharian Desert seemed cute and fluffy by comparison. I wondered, would Shog’rcissars Protection work on solitoids? It halved damage from insectoids.
The game bestiary updated, informing me that the barakata was undiscovered in Disgardium. My Cartography skill leveled up.
My time in the Nether had taught me how important it could be to remain unnoticed to my enemies. I went into Stealth. The conditions here were right for the skill to level up, and rank one was approaching.
The skill’s experience bar filled up in less than a minute, and I begrudgingly decided to spend the remaining time on leveling up. Soon, I got what I wanted.
Stealth level increased: +1! Current level: too.
Stealth rank I reached!
The ability offered no Paths of development, just automatically took rank one, and a couple of minutes later—level one.
Stealth level l
Rank: I.
Chance to remain unnoticed by enemies at your level or below—100%. You can move and remain hidden. When you attack from stealth, you always deal double critical damage. When you go into combat, 1% chance to maintain stealth. You have a 1% chance to detect an enemy using this ability.
The game itself hinted that my days of reckless farming were at an end. Without Immortality, I’d have to play more carefully.
I crept toward the barakata to test my new Stealth capabilities. The cockroach sniffed, worked its mandibles, cluttered, opened its strange ’fin’ and emitted a cloud of orange smoke. The ’forest’ answered with a series of similar sounds, coming from all sides. I froze, but it was too late: Stealth check failed! Barakata detected you!
Soon, ten barakatas surrounded me. They clicked their mandibles threateningly, but refused to cross the invisible threshold of the place of power. I glanced at my watch—I still had time, but I couldn’t afford to waste it. First I had to check whether Reflection could kill the barakatas. If not, there was no point in bringing the others here. I thought of summoning the Montosaurus to help, but no—the dinosaur would be no good here. These barakata could be so much higher in level than him that they’d tear him apart, but the deadly atmosphere would kill him even faster.
I looked around tiredly, preparing for yet more pain, another relentless battle. Everything there was alien, otherly. Just being there was uncomfortable. I would have said that the place itself dealt psychological damage. Why had Snowstorm created an alien zone like this in a fantasy world? I doubted casual players, who were in the overwhelming majority, would want to spend any time here.
Maybe there was something hidden on Terrastera, something that would change the landscape and climate, make the continent more habitable? The map showed that the instance where I could learn how to create Rifts was on the other side of the continent. Sorry, Three. You’ll have to wait.
I attacked the nearest barakata. Hammerfist broke through chitinous exoskeleton and Reapers Scythes sank down inside, taking away ten percent of the cockroach’s health. Sticky muddy-orange liquid splashed from the wound and began to dissolve my bones with a hiss. The rain had activated Diamond Skin a while ago, but Immortality protected me.
The barakata split into two halves along its fin with a crack, and articulate scissor-like pincers emerged from the open chitinous shell. Dodging with one part of its body, the mob grabbed my leg in its pincers. Bones crunched, but the cockroach couldn’t tear
