Chapter forty eight

As I have been doing a lot recently , I was currently meditating while I thought of what had transpired in the last five weeks in this god forsaken hell hole ( no pun intended)

I was still in the same cave I first came to after fleeing from the giant fiends, but other than the location there was nothing similar between that simple cave and this one which has been expanded several times , has multiple rooms, is fully furnished, and has a giant gate closing the front entrance.

Although I looked the same from the outside , I too have gone through several modifications, each a poignant reminder of my many life and death encounters with the native inhabitants. The dominant species around here were the arch fiends I encountered the first time I came here and the chimera , a loose classification I gave to the giant monsters that were a combination of different animals that I knew from earth. I made my first modification after one of these beasts found my cave half a day after I settled there.....

......... The thing looked like a giant wolf's body with a snake attached where the head should be, I tried to hit it with my monomolecular whips but it seemed to sense them somehow and use its sinewy neck to get its head out of range and struck from above. Its fangs ran through my body like swords and I could feel it injecting venom into me. It must have thought that the fight was over then because I could feel it relax, not one to waste opportunity I collected all the mana I could and created a giant spike to go through the roof of its mouth and into its brain. As I lay there in a pool of my own blood next to the creature that was writhing in it's death throes , I thought about the battle that just nearly killed me and noticed a critical flaw in my fighting technique. Although I can fly around freely in the air, my mobility on the ground was average at best, and it seems average just doesn't cut it here. So after I woke up fourteen hours later which was how long it took Jules to remove the poison and fix most of my body, I ate some of the meat from the monster and got two pieces of metal enchanted each with three runes for speed so they could stack and embedded them deep in my shin bones. The rest of the day I spent training with the new enchantment in my legs, how much mana to use, and how to operate with them safely. I could get pretty fast and it seemed my mobility problem has been fixed...

A week later I was fighting a chimera that I dubbed cerebus because it had three canine heads and I was literally running circles around it while it was trying to burn me with its fiery breath, but I got too cocky and the thing was smarter than it looked, it read my trajectory and blew its breath there instead of aim at me. I felt the most excruciating pain in my life as the tables were turned and it now started toying with me. In desperation I used god sight to find its weakness and blasted it through the right ear of the center head. As I limped back home barely conscious and suffering from third degree burns, I came to the conclusion that even though I had super speed, I didn't have the raised awareness and increased processing of the flow of events to handle the speed properly, so after I got home I took out a circular piece of metal, enchanted it with 'focus' 'clarity' and 'speed' and embedded it in my skull. It worked perfectly, when I activated my perception accelerated so much that everything seemed to slow down and become crystal clear. With this new enchantment I should have an easier time fighting the monsters....

....... eight days later I was fighting my first fiend since I burst out of one in the beginning. The fight was almost over, with all my enchantments active it really didn't stand a chance against me. I was about to give the final blow when I suddenly ran out of mana. The dying fiend sensing a chance to escape punted me like a football. I flew across the air for some time before landing heavily on the ground breaking several of my bones, it would have been worse but I have been using super speed a lot and Jules had to heal a lot of tears and fractures caused by the strain, while she was healing me she was also constantly improving and restructuring my body. So even if I was hurt badly it wasn't fatal and the fiend didn't seem interested in continuing the fight. While I crawled slowly and painfully towards my home I came to the realization that my meager mana pool wasn't enough to support the use of so many enchantments at once, so it was time for an upgrade. I imbedded two implants with three pentagrams into each of my ribs, which was the maximum I could take even with Jules filtering out most of the pain and ran orichalcum wires from there directly into my mana core. I felt the massive influx of mana coming into my core and felt satisfied with my work. For a week afterwards I simply meditated and practiced with my enchantments, I even learned how to compress the mana I was supplying to the enchantments, although this didn't have any effect on the other enchantments it allowed me to change the density and hardness of the objects I created with my illusion enchantment. While I was doing this Jules was hard at work integrating all the enchantments in my body to make them as natural as possible, as if they were always a part of me and she did a really good job too, the orichalcum wires became more like metallic veins feeding my core and all my enchantments were swallowed into my bones.

With these upgrades there was nothing nearby to challenge me, for real this time. For two weeks I tried to fight as many monsters as possible, but it quickly became pointless when I could simply make a giant sword with a monomolecular edge and bisect them in one move while staying behind layers of defenses as hard as steel. So I started meditating more to see if I could change the properties of the illusions I was creating like conductivity and such but I was having no success.

Which brings us to the present, since I was having no luck with meditation it was time to go out and search for the answers that I desperately wanted.

It was time to find a way home.