World Seed_Expansion

by Justin Miller

  “Celeste, you reading this?” I asked, as I examined the mana of the ground with my Aura Sight and Mana Sense.

  “Yeah, I see it. According to my database… this should be Dural Mana. It’s a strange mana type, with only a little information listed. All I know is that it has similar physical properties to earth, but is far more mana-conductive. The ground here would probably make for fairly good construction material if it could be refined.”

  After Celeste’s explanation, Sharon spoke up. “Anything for the blind people?” However, before I could respond, she created a fireball above her, which immediately blinked out. Instead, an orb of light rested above her head. Okay, that was a bit creative. Make a small flash with fire mana, then capture the escaping light mana to condense into a ball… small, harmless light.

  Even with Sharon’s light globe, there appeared to be nothing more to see in this place. The visible area expanded to a little over fifty meters, but it was all exactly the same. “It would really suck if this place was as empty as it appears.”

  “John…” Yin said warningly, before Celeste pulled out her cannon wristband and fired it into the distance without warning. Yin immediately went into battle mode, her body sparking with electricity as she shifted into her stormbird form. “Trouble?”

  Celeste however, did not answer. We watched the shot of plasma sailing into the distance, and I thought I saw some figures briefly illuminated by it. Then, after a few moments, the shot seemed to come back at us from behind. Thankfully, Sharon was able to quickly set up a barrier to block the blast from hitting us.

  “So… assuming we are in the center, this area has a radius of about two kilometers. And the height is…” Next, she aimed her cannon upwards, firing a second blast. I was somewhat expecting the ground to blow up and the plasma bolt to fly up from beneath us, but what actually happened confused me even more. Looking up, at the same time that Celeste’s shot disappeared into the darkness, an identical one appeared just a few feet away from it heading back down.

  “Celeste, can you please stop doing that?!” Sharon cried out as she hastily set up a second barrier. This blast seemed quite a bit stronger, having not travelled the same distance as the first.

  “Five hundred meters.” Celeste nodded her head, satisfied with her readings. Then, she turned to Sharon, an innocent look of confusion on her face. “Hmmm? Oh, sorry. Science, and all that.”

  Even Yin was annoyed at that, but stayed in her bird form for now. “No time… not alone.” She opened her mouth up, gathering lightning in it, and shot it into the distance at a slightly higher angle. Yin’s lightning moved far faster than Celeste’s plasma shot, and passed over our heads a dozen times in a split second. However, after that it suddenly stopped, and a loud shriek was heard from the darkness.

  “Was that a monster? That sounded like a monster.”

  “Yes, Captain Obvious, that was a monster.” Celeste groaned as she equipped her full battle armor, her metal wings sprouting from her back. Sharon likewise called out a pair of two headed dogs.

  The creature in the distance had a towering figure of at least fifty meters. From the brief flash that I saw thanks to Yin’s blast, it had a large cube at the base of its body, with an odd, winding appendage coming out to the side. From the top of the cube poured forth a long, snake-like body, at the top of which a demonic white face resided, two large hands coming from the sides of its body.

  “Is that a…” I started to ask, but just didn’t want to finish.

  “Yes… That’s a jack in the box.” Sharon said, in a mix of surprise, disappointment, and anticipation.

  Chapter 34 - Clean Up Time

  I looked at the demonic jack in the box in the distance, using my Cybernetic eye to enhance my vision in the darkness. Unfortunately, that let me see some other things too. Along the ground were several toppled figures. However, these were not the bodies of other psychic races that stumbled into the Toy Chest, they were green, almost plastic bodies.

  As the jack in the box let out a loud laugh, its mechanical arm cranking on the box below it, the green figures began slowly standing up. Some of them looked humanoid, while others looked monstrous. There were dogs, lions, even birds among the figurines. The birds flapped their wings and took to the skies, while the humanoids all grabbed some form of weapon. There were swords, guns, even axes. Once they were in position, a faint music seemed to enter our ears.

  New Quest Received!

  Cleaning up the Toys

  Rank ★★ Repeatable Extermination

  The Toy Chest is a place only accessible with the help of those with the Toybox power. However, it is still a space of its own, and monsters are bound to spawn there over time. Clean up the lost toys, so that this place can be used for its true purpose.

  Time Limit: Not really.

  Reward: Random magic item

  Failure: Getting teased by Malthan

  I looked at the others, and it seemed that they got the quest as well. “It’s only ranked at two stars, so it shouldn’t be that difficult.” Sharon smiled slightly, and called out an army of over a hundred horned rabbits. Raising her hand, she increased the intensity of her light sphere, raising it up until we could see the toys just over a hundred meters away.

  Celeste called out her two large cat-like robots, which stood at her side and waited for the enemies to approach. She then held up her spear and launched into the sky, flying straight towards the large bird-type toys. With one swing of her plasma spear, she instantly cut the first bird in half. “They’re not that much!”

  However, her words didn’t last long, as the bird fell to the ground. Its pieces then began stretching out, each one forming into another large bird of the same size as its former self. “Okay.. they may be a bit of trouble.” She admitted finally, as over a dozen other birds approached her.

  Yin didn’t speak, but simply rose up into the air. With Celeste dealing with the birds, she didn’t seem to want to fire lightning bolts at that area. Unfortunately, Yin’s attacks were not suited for single target damage, so instead she swept over the field with her magic. Targeting the biggest clusters of toy beasts she could find, she blasted them with lightning. Shattered pieces flew in every direction, but again the slowly grew and reformed into their original shapes, in greater numbers than before.

  Sharon, meanwhile, sent out her rabbits to engage the soldiers. They raised their weapons to attack, but the rabbits were far too quick to be hit. Thankfully, their guns seemed only for decoration, because they were used as clubs rather than actual ranged weapons. “Go for the big guy, he seems to be controlling everything.”

  I nodded, activating my Aspect of the Bird and flying into the air. Aspect of the Armored Beast followed shortly after to cover my skin in hard scales.Two of the large birds broke away from Celeste to charge after me. These two each had a wingspan of two meters, with their bodies being a meter long. Aside from that, and apparently being made of green plastic, they looked similar to eagles.

  Raising my hands, I surrounded the two of them in magnetic spheres, which I then filled with plasma. I wanted to see if they would be able to recover from incineration. If not, that would be a method to deal with them, albeit a long and boring one.

  Sure enough, there were brief cries within the glowing red spheres, followed by silence. Tiny green flakes fell out of the plasma orbs, scattering on the ground as I considered my work done. However, those few dozen flakes then seemed to absorb the ground, growing until each one was the same as the two birds that had attacked me originally. “Great… so even just a tiny scrap and they regenerate fully.”

  I couldn’t be bothered to deal with them now, and thankfully Yin swooped in to distract them with lightning bolts. My target was the giant jack in the box, who kept staring at me with that creepy white face. “Let’s see just how tough you are.”

  I quickly brought my plasma rifle out of my grove, and fired it at that giant face. Logic says that the face is always the weak point, right? Right?! Well
, the plasma shot from my rifle blew a hole completely through the jack’s head. Score on for the-oh wait, it’s healing. Within seconds, the hole had been entirely recovered, so I moved on to plan B!

  Plan B was, of course, to cut off its head entirely by the neck. To do this, I brought the two plasma orbs I had already made, and shrunk them down into long, thin donuts of red death. I call it, destructo rings! The two rings arced through the sky, easily cutting into the jack’s neck, and even severed it on the first swing. However, that faint music never faded.

  Soon, the neck began growing a new head, just like the plastic monsters. And the severed head began growing a new neck… New hands… all the way until it was a giant, creepy snake with a demonic clown face and hands slithering along the ground. There was only one part that it did not recover, which I had to assume meant that was its weakness.

  With that line of thought, I brought back the destructo rings, and prepared my assault on the wind-up box at the base of the jack. So far, this creature had not shown any offensive abilities, leading me to believe that it was not capable of attacking. However, this idea was proven wrong once the rings began closing in on the box.

  The snake-jack lunged at the two rings, hands spread open and mouth emitting a cackling laugh. Although the rings could easily cut through its body, it still cost some energy to do so. By the time the rings had finished carving through the hands, and then each cut across its neck, their glow had diminished to less than half of what it was before.

  After that, the main jack did the same thing, using its own body to block the rings. Again its hands were cut through, but this time it used up too much energy to do so, and the rings completely faded away. Although the magnetic fields were still there, there was no more plasma to fill it with. And my problems were only just beginning, as their sacrificial defense meant that I had turned two jacks… into ten.

  Each severed body part began absorbing the ground where it fell, expanding rapidly to become a full length snake-jack in under ten seconds. They seemed to have weak bodies, no real offensive power, but at this rate they would quickly overwhelm me in sheer numbers. Thankfully, nobody said I had to play fair.

  Removing my limiter program, I allowed my perception to speed up to its limit. My magic was still incapable of properly following my thoughts in this state, but it was far more effective than normal. The downside was that it also spent my mana faster than doing things slowly, as I was no longer recovering mana at the same perceived rate.

  I moved the magnetic rings that I had previously used to attack so that they wrapped around they jack’s box, and then slowly began filling them with mana again. The ten jacks all very slowly began to turn around, preparing to lunge to protect their precious box, but they were no longer fast enough to make a difference. The red rings brightened, and began constricting around the wind-up box from all around it, and I could see as it slowly carved into the frame, leaving black scorch trails. When the rings hit the mechanical arm, it snapped right off, though what remained continued its ceaseless spinning.

  I had to feed the rings plasma an additional two times to make sure that they cut all the way through, and even spent my entire mana pool to speed things up. However, it was more than worth it to see the box explode in slow motion. I was tempted to just sit there and watch the last of the explosion before reactivating my limiter, but decided it’d be better to see what was happening first.

  Once the limiter was back on, I saw the box quickly shattering to pieces in an eruption of red light. The music had faded away, only echoing from the distance at this point. Looking over, I saw that the girls were no longer fighting monsters. Instead… they all seemed to be covered in dirt. Where’d they go? I thought curiously, looking around for any signs of the toy soldiers. However, I only found clumps of soil falling to the ground. Even the giant snake-jacks were no longer present, having turned into large piles of dural.

  “So… there was really only one monster…?” If that was the case, then it would make a bit of sense. Calmly, I looked back and analyzed the situation. The jack in the box’s box was the only monster that actually spawned in the Toy Chest, but it had the ability to manipulate dural to form constructs. These constructs would serve as its fighters and protectors. When Yin attacked the jack with lightning, it triggered its defense response.

  From there, any time one of the constructs were destroyed, it would use more dural to regrow the severed pieces and only increase its army. In a way, we actually started this fight…? Maybe it wouldn’t have even attacked if we didn’t do so first? Oh well, it’s over now either way!

  “I’m filthy…” Sharon spoke up from the ground, shaking her arm to try and clean it off a bit. Since they were all covered, it seems like they had already been overrun by the dural soldiers by the time I finished the fight. “I don’t care if this is only a clone body, I am so taking a bath when we get back.”

  “Me too…” Yin flew down next to Sharon, first using a burst of wind to blow a large amount of the strange substance off of herself, then doing the same thing for Sharon.

  Quest Completed!

  Cleaning up the Toys

  Rank ★★ Repeatable Extermination

  You have defeated the evil, sinister jack in the box, who was really only lonely and wanted friends. Congratulations!

  Each of us had a small light form in our hands as we were awarded our quest item. For Yin and Sharon, it was a ring. Though, Yin’s ring just sat on the ground in front of her, since she was not in her human form. For Celeste, it was a small cloth bag that seemed to be filled with marbles. And for me… Do I really have to say it?

  Okay… fine… it was a toy wand, with a little plastic heart at the end. It even gave little sparkles when it moved. Why, god, why?!

  Because everyone needs a magical girl in their life.

  I looked over to the girls, who quickly looked away and pretended that they didn’t see anything. “Please tell me one of you are willing to trade…”

  “Are you kidding? That thing would look terrible with me.” Sharon violently shook her head, while Yin simply pretended not to hear me. Celeste, however, had a wide grin on her face. Oh god, don’t tell me…

  “I’ll take it!” She said, and instantly tossed me the bag of marbles, snatching the toy wand from my hands faster than I could react. She then looked in front of her, blinked, and her grin grew even wider. “Magical Girl Celeste, go~!” She waved the wand in a wide circle, and her body was enveloped in a bright pink light.

  Her armor seemed to shatter under that light, instead replaced by large ribbons around her waist and shoulders. A leotard formed under the light, a deep purple color, before a short red jacket covered her chest. Even her metal wings turned into wings of pure light during this transformation sequence. Dear god…. I dare not imagine what would have happened if I had used the wand myself.

  “So cool!” Celeste said, looking over herself as the light surrounding her faded, leaving her in her new outfit. She then floated around happily for a few moments, while I began wondering what the bag of marbles in my hand were for.

  Well, it was either that, or a dildo bat. I doubted that Celeste would take that as seriously, so I went with this. As for what they do... well, you'll have to throw them at someone to find out, won't you?

  Thank you for taking this seriously… even if only a little bit. I then turned to look at Sharon and Yin. “So… what did you two get?”

  Sharon looked down at her ring, which looked like a plastic ring with a murky blue stone. “The information window called it a mood ring. It said that I could use it to affect the moods of those around me…? That’s not how they work, right?”

  “Decoder ring…” Yin said simply. “Translates text?”

  ...And what I ended up with was a magical girl wand. You did this on purpose, Malthan!

  Why yes, yes I did.

  Chapter 35 - Must Conduct MORE RESEARCH!

  I looked down to the bag of marbles in my hand, and debated asking t
he girls to help me test them. However, that thought was quickly dismissed, for several reasons. If these things had a function like grenades, then it would hurt them far too much to ask that. Worse, if they did something like absorbing souls, then even being in a clone body wouldn’t save them.

  Why is this the only one that didn’t come with a user manual!? I sighed, shaking my head. I was told how to activate them, but not what they would do. Looking at the marbles, they all appeared varied in appearance, just like a normal marble collection.

  It was Sharon’s voice that broke me out of my concentration. “Wasn’t there something you came here specifically to do?”

  “Huh? Oh, right! The experiment!” I had almost completely forgotten that after the appearance of the evil jack in the box and Magical Girl Celeste.