Divinity Rescue Corps
77- Hump Thruster

The UI set me up with level 16 in Pleasure Seeker, and also informed me that my relationships were advancing. Eagle Eyed advanced to level III, while Beast Talker advanced to level II.

Eagle Eyed III

(Special Ability, Common, passive)

I- Your eyesight and hearing become better than human. You are able to discern details at a distance, and analyze close objects much better than base humans.

II- Your peripheral vision and reactions are increased beyond human maximums. You may not be caught off guard.

The changes to Eagle Eyed were subtle, just a few words. Important words, though. These included no longer being able to be caught off guard, at all, not even when asleep, and adding hearing to the list of affected senses. Both excellent additions.

Beast Talker II

(Special Ability, Uncommon, passive)

I- Your Likability is considered +3 when dealing with non-humanoid Nakamamon found in the wild. You gain a Persuasion skill of +3 with them as well. Your Identify is considered +5 when used on a new species.

II- Your Likability and Persuasion are considered +1 with all Nakamamon.

*Note: these bonuses are lost if you take hostile action against any Nakamamon.

I liked the bonuses for dealing with sapient, humanoid Nakamamon, which stacked with the non-humanoid ones.

As for Pleasure Seeker…

Level 16: +3 skill points

Those were excellent. Three was better than the usual two, obviously. I was definitely going to give them a good thinking about and consider what to do with them. There were a lot of ways to spend those points, and I didn’t want to do it wrong.

We got moving later that day. The Marshins, Marshells and Marshmellows all turned up and gave us a warm sendoff, and for the first time since I’d met them, they wore clothes. Since they had white skin with green and sometimes pink stripes on their bodies, their clothes were for some reason the same colors. This would be a theme going forward.

“I love that all your people are wearing white and pink and mint green,” I told Vel.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Out of curiousity, how much have you been outside your village?”

“Oh. Never.”

I nodded thoughtfully, sure that she was about to be in for a world of surprise.

Magical fireworks zinged and zipped and swooped around before exploding with various silly sounds. Since they were magic, they could twirl and whirl, go directly over our heads, or even flit between our legs before blasting off safely not far away. The fairy part of the Marshins allowed for some pretty wonderful illusion magic.

And then we were off. After heading down to the boats, we made our way to the edge of the marsh, to where Muppin was already waiting, muddied up to her spiky head crest. Fairy Poppins bobbed nearby, before settling onto one of the gigantic beast’s back spikes. I knew she’d given Muppin several doses of whatever fairy magic she used to make things lighter. It was kind of a Tinkerbell effect, gifting the power of flight, only Fairy Poppins wasn’t strong enough for that kind of thing… yet?

“Thank you for helping Muppin get across the marsh, my lady,” I told the tiny fairy. Sure Cinzy had slapped her away, but I had always assumed she and Cinzy just had a more contentious and emotional relationship than most others had with their bondmates. For Fairy Poppins to actually part from Cinzy was still confusing to me. She had, after all, been the spy that ratted me out to Cinzy in the first place.

I tried not to dwell on that, though. Cinzy had been the jealous one who felt the need to spy, and Fairy Poppins was small and fast enough to do the job. Not to mention, they were bonded. With these things in mind, I let bygones be bygones. I had already alienated Cinzy, and didn’t want to add Fairy Poppins to that list. “I’m glad you’re coming with us.”

In response, she flitted over to me, patted me on the head, and said several things I couldn’t hear because she was so damn small. She got the point across by flying back and forth over Muppin’s spiky surface. Where it wasn’t covered by all of our accumulated traveling gear, she mimicked scratching the hippo-sized rochidna.

I had neglected Muppin lately. The big stone beast was so patient and quiet it was easy to forget she was there.

“You’re so good to us, Muppin,” I cooed, and scratched under her chin. The rest of the team came over and gave her a good scratching, including Vellania, who delighted in helping in every way possible. Soon her eyes drifted closed and she made a deep rumbling sound, like two gigantic stones slowly grinding together. 

Then we were off.

I was joined on the road by Tara, Drat and Chrysta. They gave me a recap of what they’d found over the course of the last two days. I told Tara I noted that Airaconda was curled into a snakey spiral on top of Muppin, long body easily avoiding the spines by winding around them. She was sleeping peacefully… and snoring?

“He snores,” Tara admitted, grinning.

The recap thankfully laid out the way to Glumpdumpkin, which was not far. Two days due west and a little north, possibly three if we kept the pace relaxed. The town itself was much larger than Slinktrickle.

“You’re not going to believe what it looks like though,” Tara said.

“Why wouldn’t I believe it?” I had seen a whole lot of difficult-to-believe stuff so far.

“She means that no matter how we describe it, you’ll have trouble understanding until you see it for yourself,” Drat said.

“This is correct,” Chrysta added. The normally stoic and silent floating ice lady was hovering much closer than before. She radiated cold, and I was glad to have clothing on for once. “The town itself is difficult to describe.”

I turned to Drat, and he nodded. Although the Rogue seemed loathe to give out secrets to anyone who wasn’t me, he confirmed that HQ hadn’t been wrong. He had spent several hours prowling around the outskirts and listening in without being seen. He had a lot to report and didn’t want the knowledge to get farther than himself and me. I considered this, but then figured that whatever we learned was good to have public. And Tara would make sure it was public.

There was a problem in Glumpdumpkin. As much as the name was adorable, the people were beset by some kind of god malfunction.

“You didn’t happen to see any humans there, did you?” I asked.

He squinted at me. “Noooooo…”

He had. “All right. We’ll discuss it privately after we get camp set.”

The day turned gorgeous, and we were able to get out of the wet marshy area, into a series of rolling foothills covered in tall grasses, grains, and wildflowers, with the occasional boogie tree dotting the landscape. It looked a lot like there was no end to the hills. Another series seemed to rise up on the horizon every time we crested one.

The Nakamamon seemed sparse at first, until we got down into a shallow valley between two of the hills, and suddenly a crocodile-like creature exploded into motion. All four of the Guardians were quick to bring up shields and draw aggro.

We all went wide around the thing while it caused the earth to rumble and pillars of stone to rise up and put the Guardians off balance. It also tried creating potholes in the dirt to trip them up. Trent helped by working the dirt beneath their feet flat again.

I marveled at the creature, which was studded with gems where the scales would have poked out like spikes. Many of these were orange like Trent’s companion Garnet, yellow, brown, or deep red. The creature’s teeth were crystals in these colors, along with its claws.

Geodile

First Stage Nakamamon

The Geodile can be easily classified by the numerous crystals and gems it uses as teeth and scales. It can often be solitary in nature, relying on its ability to soften earth to conceal everything but its eyes and nose. While it can use earth magic to put prey off balance or ensnare them, the lumbering creature’s powerful tale can propel it through regular soil as though it were water.

Typical length: 20-35 feet from nose to tail (large)

Typical weight: 2000+ pounds

Gender: unknown

Aspect: earth/creature (beast)

Transformations: Unknown -> Geodile -> unknown

Geodile has been added to your Nakamadex.

It lunged and tried chomping on Ivy, but Isabelle was there with her shield, with poured out magic sparks when the creature’s teeth scraped against it. Ivy seemed to grow to three times her size, and that caused the thing to reconsider eating her.

Once we were out of striking range, the Guardians backed off. Trent assisted with a timely sinkhole beneath the creature.

“Don’t see a lot of those as bonded companions,” Trent announced, and the others laughed.

Some things I took to be features of the environment were instead Nakamamon. Several bushes burst into motion when we approached them, and I employed Identify yet again.

Shrubbit

Basic Nakamamon

Shrubbit are excellent at camouflage, preferring to disguise themselves as tufts of grass or bushes and able to sit absolutely still for hours. When that fails, they are extremely fast.

Typical length: 1-1.5 feet (small)

Typical weight: 3-8 pounds

Gender: unknown

Aspect: plant/creature (beast)

Transformations: Shrubbit -> unknown

Shrubbit has been added to your Nakamadex.

We then ran across a nest of Tulipedes, which had various different flowers growing out of each of their many body segments (not tulips, not sure why they went in that direction), and one enormous rock turned out to be a Bouldurr.

“Please tell me it isn’t a big stupid troll and we called it ‘durr’ because it’s not that smart.”

“Would you prefer Boulderp?” Regina asked, and gave me a wink.

Actually I kind of did. When it turned to regard us with its too-big head, there was a derpy tongue lolling out from one side that made it look especially dumb. Although the Guardians were on their guard, the thing didn’t react at all, except to track us with its eyes. It stuck one rocky finger into one rocky ear and wiggled it around, then seemed to forget we were there and contemplate whatever it had just pulled out.

Overhead, more things flew around, but they were either too fast or too far away to track. I definitely spotted another Slitherwind, but otherwise several new creatures I hadn’t seen before.

Achievement: Enter 50 Nakamamon into your Nakamadex

Gotta classify them all, adventurer! The world of Nakamamon is endless, vast, variable, and full of surprises. Keep your eyes peeled for even more.

Reward: +1 Identify skill level, +1 skill point

“Wow!”

Everybody else (save Alan) had already gotten this Achievement, but they still shared in my exuberance. We went through the weirdest and coolest examples of creatures we’d seen in our Nakamadexes, and the Scorchomp draconic aspect earned some jealousy and low whistles. There weren’t many draconics to be found. That was fair, since the Scorchomp lived inside a magma vein. The thing was enormous and powerful enough to be immune to all fire damage.

There were creatures that were made entirely out of crystal, like Garnet, but some of them weren’t just gem shaped Nakamamon. Some looked like moles or other tunneling animals, but it wasn’t unheard of to have them in humanoid shape, or the shape of sea creatures. After all, there’d been a crocodile that could swim through the dirt beneath your feet.

Thankfully, Muppin the Rochidna smashed its gigantic feet into the ground with every step, announcing that there would be trouble for any of the Geodiles or other predators that tried to get the people traveling near it.

“I th-th-th-though the a-a-a-a-admin said n-n-n… n-n-n-n-n…” Alan paused and growled at himself in frustration. “N-n-n-no v-v-violence,” he asked. Regina clapped a hand on his back and gave him a good comforting rub between the shoulder blades, and he smiled in return.

“That applies to the sapient types here,” Chrysta said. “We have used our magic and abilities to defend ourselves from predators since time immemorial. And the predators here can be…” She trailed off.

“Large? Fast? Powerful?” Tara asked.

“Vicious? Ambush predators? Coordinated?” Isabelle asked.

“Precisely,” Chrysta affirmed.

She then went on to describe how, when she was still just an ice aspect Nakamamon and not yet dead, their village had been attacked by a number of orca-like Nakamamon during an exploration and fishing expedition. One of their number had been killed, but they had also taken one of the colossal orca things with them. While the other orcas went insane and eventually feasted on their own companion rather than the tiny ice creatures, Chrysta and her people had been able to get away.

Secretly, I wanted to know why the ice ghost had opened up in the last two days. She had spoken more in just the last ten minutes than she had on all the other expedition days combined.

Nobody asked. It would’ve been Cinzy’s thing.

***

“Well I hope there isn’t a gravity god that’s sick and needs curing,” I muttered, staring at Glumpdumpkin.

See, there was this… let’s call it a mountain. It looked like a half pipe, in a way, where the ground rose smoothly in an arc up the sheer cliff face. This mountain got thinner and thinner until it appeared to be as thin as a potato chip, and not only were there houses and buildings covering the whole thing, they were on both sides of the potato chip thin part some several hundred feet in the air.

“Imagine being a window washer for the Empire State Building,” Trent said in awe, “but you have to live on the outside of the building.”

Tara snapped her fingers and gave him the finger guns. “That’s how I should’ve described it.”

This wasn’t the end of the weirdness.

And somehow the river ran over the midpoint of that thing, branching out into three tributaries… and one of them ran up the slope.

***

“Down the slope,” my father said.

“You’d like to think that’s how it worked,” I told him. “I mean, I was on a lake when it transformed into a dragon and took us into the sky, so here we were looking at a new impossible thing.”

“That’s wild,” my mother said. “If only you could’ve gotten a picture of it.”

I was able to create something like it using an AI image generator on my parents’ ten year old desktop computer, but I had to point out several places where it wasn’t quite right. The river didn’t run through the valley, it ran over the hump of land here. Yes, that meant the water was held in at an angle, defying gravity. The one tributary ran through the valley. 

“On the other side of the valley it rose up into another thin spire of earth, with even more houses on it. These ones didn’t seem so much like they contradicted gravity, but it was still weird to see a heavy building several stories high on an outcropping of land only about three feet thick.” It was like the earth should’ve cracked and sent everybody’s houses tumbling down and shattering into a million pieces.

“Well, Glumpdumpkin doesn’t sound like the right name for it at all,” my mother said.

“You’ve got that right,” my father said. “It sounds more like it should be called ‘Death Wall.’”

“Not Hump Thruster either.”

I cringed. “Mom, it’s called Flunt on the Rustle.”

“Well, what were the people like in Glumpdumpkin? If they were the wrong sort, then Sex Racket seems more like the proper name for it.”

“Saxwhacket!” I cried, grossed out. “Sax as in saxophone, whack as in whack-a-mole.”

She shrugged and gave me a guileless smile. “I thought you said Sex Racket.”

“Well I didn’t, and I’d rather you stopped saying gross things,” I said, while from the other room where Sarah was changing Brayden’s diaper, I heard snickering.

“Well next you’re going to tell me there’s a town called Analville—”

“Mom!”

“Or Two Girls One Cup Burg or—”

“Okay that’s enough of that!” Sarah called from the other room.

My father was breathing through his nose, hands clenched in a white knuckle grip and looking like he was about to have an aneurysm. Trying not to laugh, clearly. 

“How do you even know… no, you know what, absolutely not. I don’t want to know where you heard that from. Gross gross gross.”

My mom sat stock still, staring like she had no idea what was happening, which made me totally certain she knew what she was doing and that she was having fun watching me squirm. It also told me she knew why I’d come back home and why I was telling her all this. She had already guessed The Plan.

That meant I needed to get through the next four months of what had happened during my stay in Dorfialtos, and get The Plan moving.

This is Christopher amazed at his mom’s dirty, dirty mind.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.