NOVPUB
As an emissary force of the blight, this abomination is a gull in both form and function because the blight willed it so. At its core, it is something other, a darkness representative of the illness that is the blight, following its mindless commands as it works to render the territories into which the blight wishes to expand more vulnerable.
Gull Exploders are a high-level flying threat, a usually solitary monster added to higher level dungeons to increase their difficulty. Each gull hits hard, but must sacrifice itself in doing so, exploding against their enemies as they extinguish their own life force in pursuit of destruction.
These gulls have been altered slightly by the blight. No longer solitary, they now attack as a swarm, any of which can cause serious damage with even the slightest contact. If a flock hits you directly, your life will be in serious danger, no matter how tough you are.
“Damn. Any ideas?” Tulland asked.
I’d say to find cover but there is none. Move quickly, at least.
Tulland tried to, but the gulls were more agile than they at first appeared. The swarm pivoted upwards, making a backwards loop towards him. He jumped back, only to find he was never their target in the first place. The ground at his feet was. Several dozen of them hit, blasting him back in an explosion of blight and dirt that momentarily blinded him to anything besides his own movement backwards.
Since Tulland had arrived on Aghli, he had rarely been in real danger. If anything, his biggest fears had been for the people around him. This was different. Each of these gulls hit like a thrown boulder, and he had just taken more shots at once than he could count. He felt hot liquid in his ears that he realized was blood, and his stomach roiled as nausea and disorientation took over his body.
Not going to be able to run fast now.
No, I’d imagine not. Stop the entire flock, if you can. We’ve seen they can blow up on something besides you.
Tulland nodded and immediately threw an Acheflower at what remained of the flock. He missed, still reeling from the hurt they had put on him before. Diving out of the way, he managed to avoid the next dive-bomb and gave himself just enough room to throw the next Acheflower. This one hit.
It wasn’t immediately clear if it had worked or if Tulland had wasted armaments on an animal that couldn’t even feel their effect. That was all cleared up as soon as the gulls tried to change direction again. A few moved as if to separate from the flock, while some moved inwards, upwards, or down. The variety didn’t matter at all once the first two birds bashed into each other. Where before the birds had skillfully flown out of range from the explosions that their flockmates triggered, this time they completely failed to do so. It was spectacular.
Tulland took a little more damage from the nearby explosion, worsening his nausea but not putting him in a much worse position overall. The gulls got it worse. The whole flock disintegrated, caught in its own chain of explosions as the entire group was ripped apart.
Tulland laid in the dirt, bleeding as his regeneration struggled to close up a surprising number of wounds on his body. Another direct hit might not have killed him, but it would have certainly left him as a sitting duck for any other threat that might have wandered by. Another hit after that? He would have been broken in a way he wasn’t sure he would have recovered from.
“That can’t be fair. How would anyone but me survive that?” Tulland said.
Nobody would. The rules of balance call for that kind of threat to announce itself far away, and for them only to appear in small numbers. The blight apparently does not have to respect the rules of balance in the same way this world’s System would.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Well, that isn’t great.” Tulland struggled to his feet as the ringing in his ears very slightly eased. “And the worst part is if those things were out looking for me, there have to be more. I brought Acheflowers, but eventually, I’m going to run out.”
I think you probably know the solution. You keep moving until you are out of the range of the dungeon.
“No can do. Think about if that had hit Yuri or Amrand. They’d be toast. I have to find the dungeon proper.”
If you must. Just… keep an Acheflower in hand. Don’t fall to birds. It would be embarrassing for me, as your mental companion.
Tulland felt some odd sympathy for that. Everything the System experienced, everything it saw, was part of what Tulland saw. If Tulland died to something as embarrassing as a flock of birds, the System probably couldn’t avoid feeling some of that shame.
The next few hours were weird. The flocks of gulls were not rare at all, and they divebombed with no warning whatsoever. Tulland was constantly rolling in the dirt, getting blown off his feet, flying here and there and everywhere as the damage built up and was healed at the expense of his distant farm.
You really should be dead by now. Thank Aghli’s System for paying for the self-repair function of your armor if you get the chance. You’d be as naked as a baby by now if it wasn’t in place.
I’m sort of busy, friend. Tulland hucked two Acheflowers in quick succession, taking out two of the three flocks trying to blow him up at the moment. Give me a second.
The last flock flew past him, doubled back, and slammed into the ground again. He still had no counter for that move, except hitting the birds with an Acheflower before they could try it. Even that had risks. It worked fine when the birds were distant, but as they got closer, he had no chance of avoiding damage himself when they went up in flames.
He got blown up a little again, not as badly as the first time but still enough to render him a mess of blood and burns. The only upside was where he got blown to in the explosion, an outcrop of rock that he would have otherwise avoided being near for fear of what the shrapnel would have done to him in the case of an explosion.
At his feet, there was a dungeon.
What’s our game plan here? Can we just go in?
Not a chance. Imagine how many of them there must be in there. You’ve seen how the blight overloads those dungeons.
I might be able to run through.
A simple bump against a single gull would ruin that plan. The entire inside of that dungeon would be an inferno. Nothing would survive. It would… actually, wait. You still have at least one Acheflower, correct?
Six of them. And then I’m out.
Then I have an idea. This will be funny, frankly. Throw one of the flowers into the dungeon. Tell it to explode when it hits anything at all.
Tulland did as he was told. Nothing happened.
“What’s the plan here?”
The plan is to go fishing. Trust me. There are so many gulls in there it simply must hit eventually. Throw another.
It took all but two of the remaining Acheflower to make the System’s plan come to fruition. Somewhere near the entrance, some of the gulls must have finally wandered into the poison cloud, then tried a maneuver of some sort. The System had realized that with that many bombs in close proximity to each other, nothing inside the dungeon stood a chance. With that many gulls, the pillar would be gone. The walls would be carved away. It had done the calculations, and everything would be destroyed.
What it hadn’t expected, and couldn’t know, was what would have to happen when that much energy was expelled at once in a space too small to hold or absorb it all. Tulland saw the flash of light coming from the dungeon just in time for his paranoid reflexes to kick in, and jumped to the side a split second before a mile-long plume of burning blight stabbed out into the failing light of the night, lighting up the land like the day.
Oh. Well.
“That’s all you have to say?”
I… I did not expect that. What do you think would have happened if that had hit you?
“My armor is good, but it’s not that good. I would have been cooked. To ash, mind you. There would have been nothing left.”
Well, I’m sorry. To be fair, you were thinking of going in there yourself. That wouldn’t have turned out much differently.
Tulland gulped as he realized the massive spear of death he had just dodged really was the better of two options, and quickly forgave the System of any mistakes it had made. Their relationship healed, he went on to scatter some seeds over the broken dungeon, happy to find they were more than willing to absorb any excess blight from the explosion to spur their own growth.
With that, he went to bed. He looked up at unfamiliar stars in an unfamiliar sky before he fell asleep in his bedroll. Back on Ouros, he had known the name of every light in the sky. His uncle being a fisherman, it was sort of expected. Here, he tried to give each shape he saw a name, something to help him remember what he was looking at. He kept that up just long enough to realize that they probably already had names, names that he could learn for the asking.
Pulling himself as close to a rock as he could to defend himself from any surprise attacks, he drifted off. That night, he dreamt of grass and plants as far as the eye could see, surging over a landscape clean and pure of blight. He woke up the next morning with that vision still running around his head, eager to make it a truth.
There was still a lot of work before he’d even be close. Taking a handful of seeds with him, he set off in search of more danger.
