Loopshard Novel Chapter One-Hundred-and-Twenty-Nine

Beck and Adam looked up at the towering mantis. Her body looked like it was made from green leaves, and it was clear she was quite adept at camouflage, especially since she had so way of making her blood lody barely audible to Adam’s ears.

“I knew there had to be a Mantis vendor!” Beck exclaid. “The Wandering Forest has a lot of these guys, so I was confused why there weren’t any on the island. It all makes sense now.”

The Wandering Forest was the twelfth Stage according to what Elia had told Adam. It had a lot of insect humanoids and they were supposedly quite difficult to defeat, even for her. She’d especially warned him about the Weaponmasters, and said they could be identified by the badge they wore.

The kind of badge that was pinned to the chest of the mantis in front of them.

“Are you a Weaponmaster?” Adam asked her, his eyes locked on the bronze symbol of a blade on top of a circle fastened to her green carapace.

“Not many respect that title anymore,” she replied. “But you are correct. My na is Tisa and my duty on Interim Island is to reward those who obtain Victory Pearls. I would much prefer to bring my own blades to bear on those who visit , in order to test their ttle, but I was told that this is not accepted. It is a sha. I believe it might be entertaining to take on both of you at once. You might even last a couple of minutes.”

“Have you fought a Weaponmaster in the Wandering Forest?” Adam asked Beck, trying to ignore the fact that Tisa had openly said she’d be able to take them both on and win.

He nodded. “Sort of, I managed to hit one during a duel, then it congratulated

and vanished.”

“To strike one of our order during a duel is no small feat,” Tisa comnted. Her triangular head tilted and she chittered in irritation. “It seems the ruler of this floating land does not like

to comnt about our order and places you have yet to visit.”

If she didn’t know that already, perhaps that ans this is her first ti talking to another Player in this universe.

“Did the Diviner know about Tisa?” Adam wondered out loud.

Tisa shook her head. “He did not.” Then she chittered angrily. “The ruler is threatening

for revealing the truth. Such cowardice is unbecoming of a warrior. To withhold the truth is honourless. Subterfuge and lies is for the spiders and dark dwellers, not a proud mantis.”

Adam and Beck shared a look. Tisa was a lot more forthcoming than any of the denizens they’d t before.

I wonder if I can get her to reveal things about the Wandering Forest.

The fact that she knows about the Diviner suggests that she is aware of past loops, which makes no sense. I thought all the denizens lost their mories when we looped. Unless… Maybe she’s like the special denizens that arrive after perfecting a Stage. They rember

between loops, after all. But her knowing about another Player outside of my dinsion suggests that she’s tapped into all of them, which would make her similar to Luvicidix and Alivida.

Maybe it isn’t just her that’s like this. Perhaps most of the denizens have that power, but they can’t tell us about it because of the rules.

Beck seed to be having the sa sort of considerations, based on the lody of his blood.

I wonder what happens if I give her the Vanity mirror. Perhaps she’ll be able to duel ? That would be useful.

But no, I want to give it to Charlie this ti.

“How were you hiding yourself?” Adam asked. “I could barely notice you despite being able to sense the blood of all living creatures on the island.”

Tisa leaned towards Adam, tapping her spine-covered arms with her folded claws. “With enough practice, even vile magics such as yours can be overco.”

Adam blinked, surprised by that.

Even as they spoke, the lody emanating from her was very faint. He’d only noticed it when she’s snuck up on them.

Perhaps she is able to slow down her heartbeat, since I think that’s the instrunt creating the song of the Blood within every living thing.

“So, what are you selling?” Beck finally asked.

“For now, my options are limited,” she said and unfolded her claws, gesturing in front of herself.

< < Victory Upgrades For Sale > >

< Weapon Looter — Enables the looting of the Weapons possessed by Players you defeat — 10 Pearls >

< Point Looter — Enables the looting of the Points possessed by Players you defeat — 15 Pearls >

< Weaponmaster’s Badge — Beco proficient in all non-magical weapons — 25 Pearls >

“Woah,” Beck muttered.

“Point Looter would be amazing,” Adam said.

“Can we only get the pearls from using the Challenge Stone?” Beck asked.

Tisa tilted her head slightly. It looked like she was trying to figure out how she could answer without upsetting the All-Seeing System and violating its rules.

“Only the victories within an arena may gift a pearl,” she answered after a mont.

“Hmm,” Beck muttered. “There’s an arena in the Wandering Forest, and another in Avaricia. Those are the only two I know of besides the Challenge Stone one.”

Avaricia was the seventeenth Stage from what Elia had told Adam. It was a Stage with a lot of mimics. She hadn’t told him anything about arenas though.

“Are we only awarded pearls if we defeat other Players?” Adam asked.

“Correct,” Tisa replied.

“I bet sothing happens if we get the Badge and go to the Wandering Forest,” Beck said. “It’s like a special order in that world, the Weaponmasters.”

Tisa chittered in irritation, but didn’t say anything.

Adam didn’t fully understand how the All-Seeing System enforced its rules, but he was pretty sure it was focusing its attention on her in that mont, because he could tell how an undercurrent of fear filled the faint lody of her blood.

“I guess we’ll have to fight a lot of Players,” Beck said.

Adam nodded. “There are plenty of Nwetrou’s worshippers left. I suppose we could start with them. Or maybe the Courtesan’s adherents.”

Beck looked thoughtful for a mont, before saying, “There is a long list of people I think we’d probably be better off without. It’s hard to say if they’ll be an issue this ti, since so much has changed, but a lot of the deaths I saw between Players can be attributed to just a handful of people.”

Despite Adam not having a strong desire to kill other Players, the power of sothing like Point Looter was hard to deny, and he was not so na??ve as to believe there were no one that deserved to die. Not after all he’d seen so far.

“Wait, isn’t the Diviner still alive?” Adam asked.

Beck nodded. “Yeah, I think so. I’ve been trying to search for him, but none of the British people nad David have matched the way he looked. I’m pretty sure he’s one of the two Players that worship Nwetrou and was told to block us.”

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“That seems likely,” Adam agreed.

“Since neither of you have enough pearls to buy anything, would you like to play hide-and-seek?” Tisa asked.

Adam and Beck both paused and looked at her.

“You must be really bored down here,” Beck said.

Adam nodded. “You should co with us to the restaurant.”

“Restaurant?” she asked.

“Co on, you’ll see,” Adam said.

He hadn’t been entirely sure that Tisa was allowed to leave the underground forest chamber, but even though it was a narrow stairwell that led out of the place, she was more than flexible enough to get out. He guessed that she was therefore more akin to the special denizens, since they could go where they pleased, but unlike Sprite, Migraine, and Finnian, she offered no quests for them, making her a vendor like Sylvia. Sort of.

Once they got inside the Player House and went down into the basent, all the denizens within paused what they were doing to look at the newcor.

Tisa clicked her claws against her spiked arms. “Worry not, the ruler of the island does not permit us to fight. You are safe.”

Adam grinned.

She seriously believes she could take them all on if peaceful coexistence wasn’t enforced by the System?

But then he noticed the way that all of the others looked at the dead leaf mantis and how their lodies wavered.

Wait… They’re actually terrified of her?

Beck didn’t seem to notice and just sat down by a table, waving Charlie over for so food.

Tisa went over next to him, pushing a stool aside so she could stand up against the table.

Charlie didn’t skip a beat as she ca up to Beck to take his order, turning next to ask the mantis. Predictably, she asked for different kinds of insect at. She was told that she’d get at, but it was clear to Adam that it wouldn’t be insect-based.

He sat down as well and just ordered a milkshake since he’d already eaten earlier.

“Before you go,” Adam said, stopping Charlie from leaving. He handed her the Vanity mirror. “Here. I want you to have this.”

Charlie lifted the mirror up to her face and gazed into it.

< < Vanity Activated > >

A fire rose up from her feet and enveloped her, but only for a second, and when it vanished she had turned into a woman with fiery red hair, freckles, and orange-red skin and eyes. Instead of her red carapace, she wore a green apron over a white tunic and pants. The only signs that she was originally an ant were the two antennae that poked out from the top of her head.

She looked down at her hands and legs, a confused but happy expression on her face. Then she lifted her head and t Adam’s eyes.

He couldn’t help but smile. “It suits you,” he said.

“Thank you, Adam,” she replied. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to stay in the kitchen anymore or wait on us all the ti, you can join us at the tables and spend as much ti with Belamouranthe and Weaver as you’d like.”

Her eyes turned misty but she grinned widely, giggling in that bubbly way of hers.

“I will take you up on that,” she said. “But first I will bring you your food.”

She reached into her right pants pocket and pulled out a glove that was also white, with a complicated red sigil on the back of it, and a different one in the palm.

“You can have this as thanks,” she said.

Adam took the offered glove from her.

< < Secret Weapon Obtained > >

< Fire Mage’s Glove (Epic) — The glove of a Fiery Mage >

Beck leaned close to look at the weapon as Adam sat back down next to him, holding it in his hands. “Interesting,” Beck muttered.

I want to play around with this, Adam thought as he swapped out his Spidersilk Needle for it.

As it equipped itself to his right hand, his Blood Bolt Ring on the finger popped off. He stuffed it in his pocket for now.

“How does it work?” Beck asked.

“I actually can’t tell,” Adam said. Like other weapons at this rarity, there wasn’t really any proficiency or knowledge gifted to him when he equipped it.

Charlie had already gone into the kitchen and vanished, but he figured he’d ask her once she returned.

As they waited, Adam asked Beck, “What’s your patron quest for ssir in the Floating Sea?”

“I have to find soone called the False Judge. I don’t know much more than that though.”

“Do you at least know what he looks like?”

Beck shook his head.

“Weird. My quest is kind of a strange one. Since there’s another worshipper of the Flayed Lady in my group, I just have to protect them as they do their quest.”

“That’s not sothing I’ve heard of before,” Beck replied. “I think normally the Flayed Lady’s quest in the Floating Sea is to kill a specific NPC in Windtop Cove or sothing. I talked to soone who lost access to the safe havens because of a person with that quest in their group.”

“That might be an issue,” Adam said.

“Do you know about the sword that makes you crazy, by the way?” Beck asked. “I realise I didn’t warn you about it.”

Adam grimaced. “I’m intimately familiar… Last ti I was in the Floating Sea, I lost three group mbers because of that sword.”

“They always put it in a place close to Windtop Cove,” Beck said. “It’s such an evil trap, especially after Stage Six taught everyone that objectives give you extra Points…”

“Did you et Iffen when you went there last ti?” Adam asked, changing the topic to sothing else.

“The giant Slug Dragon? No. I want to et him this ti around though. He gives you a quest for the Golden Slug.”

Adam nodded. “You need to feed him offerings first though. And if you tell him you’re hunting the giant airship, then he’ll show you a vision of where it is.”

“That’s good to know,” Beck said.

After Beck had finished eating and Adam had drunk his milkshake, they went up to his room above the restaurant and Adam practised with the new Fire Glove. Charlie had given him a few pointers, but she’d been pretty clear about the fact that it was instinctual for her to use it, and not sothing that was easy to teach.

The way it worked, at least in the simplest sense, was that Adam could feed Mana into the glove, where it would then allow him to summon fire sowhere close to himself, or directly into his hand, depending on how he activated it. The glove itself was fireproof, so it was easy enough to summon a fireball into his hand and throw it.

But the more Adam used the weapon, the more he realised that the sigils on the top and bottom of the glove were really just different sorts of trigger and control sigils, such as those of his blood mage weapons. This revelation allowed him to start shaping the fire a bit, but most importantly, he found a way, with Beck’s advice, where he could change the qualities of the spells he fired such that they exploded on impact, burned hotter, or left lingering flas.

“I really want to know how it evolves,” Beck said.

“ too,” Adam replied. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask, do you know if all Stage-dropped weapons only have one option per evolution?”

“As far as I’ve seen, that has been the case. But it can obviously change if you fuse two max evolutions together,” he explained. Beck paused when he saw Adam’s confused expression. “You don’t know about that?”

“No, I don’t… What the hell is a fuse evolution?”

“Fused Weapon,” Beck corrected him. “There are only a few of them that I’ve seen. But I’m theorising that getting both the Crawler’s Arm and Crawler’s Eye to their third evolutions would do sothing, but that’s impossible unless you can send a weapon back in ti since you can’t have both weapons drop in Stage Six.”

“Being able to loot another Player’s weapon would also work,” Adam pointed out, referencing Tisa’s first Victory Upgrade.

“That’s true. It might be why that upgrade even exists.”

“What are so Fused Weapons you know?” Adam asked, quite interested in this hitherto unknown chanic of the Trials.

“Defender plus the Forlorn Bulwark from Stage Nine does sothing. I don’t think the final evolution of Defender matters, but anyway that’s probably the most common one. It gives a few extra skills on top of the ones from the evolutions you picked for Defender.”

“That makes the Weapon Saving upgrade even better than I thought,” Adam realised.

Beck nodded. “If you can send back a Fused Weapon that would be sothing.”

“What are so other ones?” Adam asked.

“There’s the Backstabber weapons and the throwing dagger from Gravegard Castle.”

That’s Stage Fourteen, I think.

“There’s also the crossbow from the Floating Sea and Archer,” Beck went on. “I think there was one for Duellist also tied to Gravegard, actually.”

“So they’re all Stage weapons that fuse with starter weapons?” Adam asked for clarification.

“That seems to be the case,” he replied. “But I still feel like my theory about the Tower Crawler weapons would work.”

Adam turned the Fire Mage’s Glove around in the air in front of himself. “For a mont, I thought that this weapon might fuse with my blood sigils since it also uses sigils for the spells, but it’s not a Stage weapon.”

“I haven’t seen anyone use any weapons tied to the denizens before, so it’s hard to say,” Beck replied. “But there’s a secret weapon in Moonport that uses sigils as well, I’m pretty sure. Maybe you could gain a Fused Weapon that way?”

“I think I know which boss it might co from,” Adam said, rembering sothing Elia had told him about Moonport. “But I’ll try and level up the glove anyway, once I’m back from Stage Seven.”

“Just be careful,” Beck said. “I get the feeling that old squid daddy is not gonna let us get away with killing his champions.”

Adam nodded. “You be careful too. You’re the one they wanna kill the most.”

They practised a bit more, and Adam finally learnt how to use the Shade Barrier spell with his blood magic, thanks to Beck, but it drained too much Mana for him to use it without turning it into a woven spell construct with the Spidersilk Needle.

Once Beck returned to his own dinsion, Adam spent the last bit of ti left practising with his Blink spell using flesh constructs. As far as he could tell, there was no limit to the range, but the further away he was, the harder it was to hone in on the signal of his distant flesh and the longer it took to complete the spell.

Still, this is going to be extrely useful in big Stages. I can basically teleport around as much as I want, saving a lot of ti.

I could even put a small construct onto other Players, like sothing as tiny as a finger, and use that to track them and teleport to them.

To make sure his finger theory actually worked, he scattered a bunch of flesh-shaped ones around on the island, but teleporting between them turned out to be much harder, since the lody they gave off was much smaller with their reduced sizes.

I think that for long-range teleportation I probably need to leave behind quite a big construct. Especially if there will be a lot of living things around to drown out the signal.

Once he was done testing his Blink spell, Adam returned to the Player House and wove so spell constructs using his Spidersilk Needle. He left the Fire Glove behind in the weapon rack for now, since he could only bring two weapons with him, and the spell weaving was just too invaluable for preparing ahead of fights.

I hope all these spells can travel with , he thought as he laid down while Yenna sung a lullaby next to him.

He’d shaped his body back into sothing close to how he originally looked, but under his skin he’d packed a lot more muscle and made his muscle fibres a lot stronger, but without turning into a roided-out freak like what Beck and Alivida had been so upset about seeing.

Then he finally closed his eyes, the long day and hours of preparation falling away as sleep took over.