I might have said it already but the nebula was a strange, fairly messed up, place. The immortal powers-that-be that put it together only kind-of, sort-of, knew what they were doing when they were doing so. Imagine, trying to put together a complicated mail-to-order machine, with a manual that’s well written, but you’re pretty sure that you’ve been putting things like it together all your life so you never open it.
So, by the time you’re done putting together the machine, you’ve got a whole bunch of extra pieces that you’re lying to yourself and saying were probably extras. Also, oops, the construction process includes the use of superglue, so no takesies-backsies regarding the parts you’ve screwed up.
Sure you could go back to the store and buy a new machine, or ask for some help, but considering your cavalier attitude regarding manuals you’re probably not the kind of person who buys warranties either. Also, the machine was damn expensive and you couldn't afford a second. Also, who wants to look stupid?... Better to just use the machine as best as you can and muddle along.
“.....Ngh, this fucking world.”
Ignore my griping. I’ve been having a...not-very-good...sort of day. My attempts to find my way back to civilization have thus far been stymied. One might ask how that is possible with the borderline omnipotent power of [Ideation] on my side. Depending on how you ask, I’ll either ask you to bugger off...Or hit you. Those are the only two choices. In all seriousness, thanks to my “juvenile” state as an Eidolon, there are hard limits on what I can and can’t do with my power. Those limits are largely based on my stats and personal strength. Some guy once said “give me a stick long enough and fulcrum on which to place it and I can move the world”. In my case, my power was like an infinitely long pole, but my personal stats were a pitiful excuse of a fulcrum.
Add to that, the fact that this fricking realm is built like a funhouse mirror, and I don’t know what else to tell you. Each channel in our fair Nebbia could be divided into five kinds of “zone” or “site”. The biggest site was the “haze”...Each channel was at least sixty percent haze. The hazes were random. One could liken them to the procedurally generated sections of big rogue-type dungeon crawlers.
They were chaotic spaces of energy and data that were just sort of jammed together by the laws that controlled the nebula to form a semi-coherent space that was always shifting around. The “Dead-sites” were spaces born from the old multiverse’ memories of the civilizations and peoples that didn’t make it when everything fell apart. They were ghost stories that turned into jails for monsters and vaults of treasure. The “Wild-sites” were uncivilized pockets of space that were home to beasts, primordial entities, and other largely non-sapient beings. You could think of them as nebula-generated nature reserves complete with tons of natural resources. The “Live-sites” were the one zones that came closest to what the immortals had intended. They were the only zones that were safely habitable for sapient life.
I mentioned five zones, right? Well, the fifth kind of zone is the “static”. Otherwise known as the “deep” haze. I thought I was in a wild-site before. Guess I was wrong. It’s fine. I’m barely twenty, and I’m fully willing to admit that at this stage of my life, sometimes I talk directly out of my ass.
The deep haze was troublesome because it was exponentially more chaotic than the normal, or “shallow” haze. Chaotic enough to partially thwart my active data-sampling, because a lot of what was out here, didn’t fall within the definition of objective or subjective fact. Simply existing as painfully ephemeral, ever-shifting, cosmic noise. Which was why the scholars called these zones, the “static”.
Thus I found myself trapped for an indeterminable number of months, slowly eating my through my supplies till finally, I was forced to whip out my rusty survivalist skills and scrounge around for food and water in this dreadful zone of materialized madness. At first, things went well. For instance, dinner last night was a decidedly pleasant-tasting watermelon-sized fruit, harvested from a tree that was covered in agonized faces instead of bark. I harvested all the fruit from the tree after dodging whipping tentacles and cutting the disgusting plant down through use of an [Ideation] generated thermal-beam.
Then I got greedy. Deciding to supplement my diet of fruit, water, and edible grasses, with a little protein. I found a pack of strange creatures with the heads of dogs, the bodies of monkeys, and the limbs of squids. According to my passive data-sampling, they were called Lazy-Nogi’s. I decided to call them "lunch" instead, and killed two. Since each of the beasts was slightly bigger than the average man, I figured two was enough. Then an even bigger specimen appeared. The Mama-Nogi, the head of the pack. She was quite literally as big as a barn, and she was far from pleased that I was preying on her mates.
Anyway, now I’m hiding. Bending light, sound, and space to keep that dog-faced baboon with far too many legs from finding me and ripping me to shreds. I watched the wart-covered beast lumber by as it tried to find me. Despite the cover of my camouflage, I kept still. Not daring to move, for fear that the Mama-Nogi would somehow be able to pierce the veil I’d set up around myself. Don’t think me, overly paranoid. The beasts in the haze were either mutants or, inheritors of the old bloodlines, if they were sapient they would easily qualify for main protagonist/antagonist status. Many of these damned monsters were even bigger cheaters than I was.
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A few days passed, and miracle of all miracles, I was still alive. Perhaps, it wasn’t too surprising though. I just needed to survive the Mama-Nogi’s predation long enough to be “out of combat”. Then I could hide in my cabin and wait out the “wind and rain” for a few weeks. It was fine. I had fruit and nogi meat to dine on. I had freshly collected and purified water to drink, and I even had a few unread books left on my tablet. Life was good...Or at least it was terrible. My mood improved, but then again I’d have to be a total churl to stay grumpy after surviving the Mama-Nogi’s ire as I had.
I ended up...losing my ardor for leaving this strange place. The Lazy-Nogi flesh was tender and sweet even without the addition of my dwindling amount of herbs and spices. It was chock full of nutrients and magical energy. Filled with all the good stuff that a growing eidolon like myself needed if he wanted to grow properly.
My bad habit started acting up and I found myself making excuses for why I was still meandering through the jungle-like environment. I tried to tell myself and say I was still lost, but in truth, but that was a lie. Even if it was impossible for me to figure out a way out of here due to the chaotic energies that filled this space, I’d still managed to figure out an alternate way for me to find the limits of this zone.
The truth was that my greed was keeping me in the deep-haze. After my first time scrounging for edible materials like the fruit, and hunting the weaker of the monstrously high-level beasts like the Lazy-Nogis, I realized that this place might not be an actual wild-site, but it still had plenty of things to off. The scavenger and prospector in me were awakened. Now I’d spent the last few weeks testing my luck to its extremes. My active data-sampling might not have been able to tell me where I was in the nebula, but it could point me towards points of interest in the little pocket of chaos. I’d found too mineral lodes, and a deposit of rare metals the other day. Then I looked for more agony-trees to harvest their fruit, and see if there was any value in the trees themselves.
The average level of the average monster in this place was at least one tier higher than what I could reasonably be expected to try and handle. I was still a non-rated nobody at level 877. The advantages my powers and unique eidolon physiology gave me, all came with the trade-off of me needing much more magical energy to go up a level. I could kind of cheat my way around this, using resources found and made through the use of my [Ideation] but there was a clear bottleneck that still left me leveling slowly.
In contrast, the creatures in this place were stellar-tier or higher. In other words, for most live-sites and settlements, they’d count as calamities. Talk about leaping from the pot into the fucking fire. Yet, the magic of [Ideation] allowed me to find cheeky little cheats and exploits that I could use to fell the weaker creatures. The ones within one tier of me, sitting either in the stellar-tier or high lunar-tier.
I was currently hidden in a recess, in a cave, several miles away from my current target. I used a combination of light-manipulation and a high-powered scope to watch a certain barn-sized, simian-squid hybrid strut around. That’s right. I’d come back for round two. I planned to take down the Mama-Nogi. I’d found that the creatures had a soft spot in their skulls that was quite exploitable.
To be clear, the creature’s skulls were largely armor-plated, and thick enough that the Mama-Nogi could head butt the dense, metal-rich, stone-hills that littered this strange zone. Reducing those hills into powder. However, as a remnant of a former-life as aquatic creatures, there was a gap within the Lazy-Nogi’s skulls that was meant to leave space for the expansion of a set of vestigial air bladders. That was the soft spot. It was positively minuscule, and likely wouldn’t be worth talking about if you were fighting the creatures up close, but when it came to fighting at range, that soft spot represented an opportunity.
I currently held in my hands a slingshot. It was made from an [Ideation]- refined mixture of agony-tree wood and rare metals that I’d found both during and before my time in this wonderful nightmare-zone. I called it a slingshot but it only passingly looked like a slingshot. It had the v-shape, but instead of two prongs, there was a long, covered, v-shaped barrel. In truth, my slingshot was more of a rifle that was powered by a combination of specially-channeled, and specially-tempered kinetic energy, air pressure, and electromagnetism.
Instead of an actual slingshot, this little baby was more like a gauss rifle, air rifle, and slingshot hybrid. The projectile that the slingshot fired, was like a miniature space shuttle in that the main cartridge would explode a few microseconds after flying clear of the barrel, releasing the actual bullet. So you can add rocket power to the mix as well.
The bullet was enchanted with sigils that destabilized the weak nuclear force of any material that it struck. It was also enchanted to lower the constitution and defense of whatever it struck. Finally, the bullet itself wasn't a bullet. It was a micro-nuke. How would I even know how to make a nuclear device? The answer is my inherited memories. My ancestors were terrifying war-like people and one of the first devices I ever made as a child, blew my eyebrows off, and gave me a moderate dose of radiation. I’ve wisely tried to avoid repeat performances of that particular close-call. However, that doesn’t mean I was never able to see the use in having enough firepower to make a low-tiered army go, poof, if my hands were ever forced.
In the simplest terms, I was going to try and do the impossible and punch two tiers above my own tier. Hoping the combination of shameless damage-amplification of the sort most game-designers would nerf immediately, and a rocket-propelled micronuke, would help me get the job done.
“Okay...Let’s see how this goes…” I muttered. Already prepared to teleport away and hide in my cabin if things didn’t work out.
I pulled the trigger and shuddered as the entire hillside shook under the influence of the forces released by the slingshot. I was glad I’d thought to anchor the weapon to the hill itself because I was pretty sure the recoil would have been enough to kill me. I watched the projectile fly towards my target, the tiny, dime-sized soft-spot in the Mama-Nogi’s skull. Then I watched it hit, and my jaw dropped as I heard the beast’s bellow of rage, and saw the mushroom cloud that rose from around its body.
“M-...Mission complete..” I said. Awed by the power of stats.
The Mama-Nogi was dead, but only barely. The micronuke took her head off, but I could see how if I’d been just a bit off in my aim, she might have been able to tank the blast. After all, micronukes were not full nukes. It was in the name. I watched her lumbering corpse keel over and immediately rushed out to kill the rest of her pack and picked up the bodies before other beasts came to take the carcass away.
As I did so, I stubbornly decided to refine my slingshot a little more. I wanted to be able to fire it without having to anchor myself to something. I also wanted to be able to reliably do damage without relying on convenient biological weaknesses. As my mind mulled all this over, a stupid grin crawled onto my face. It hadn’t been lost on me that I had indeed been able to do the impossible and put an end to a calamity. My level jumped as a result. Massively. Rising from the 877th level to the 1591st level. I’d finally left the non-rated tier. Showing just how much magical energy, I’d absorbed from killing something two tiers above my own
