Chapter 603: First Fight Against the Serpent - Markets and Multiverses (Patreon)

Sallia spent the next half an hour trying to squeeze the recruits into the computer room so that everyone could enter the virtual combat room. We spent about half that time looking for some kind of convenience option, since the Market generally had some way to fix logistical problems like this.

Either it didn’t exist, or we couldn’t find it. We did discover that at the very least, there was a way to link other computers up to the main one, and we didn’t need to pay the full energy fee for them to work - each computer only needed half of the power if we were linking them all up to one main computer and treating the rest of them like a subordinate computer. Even so, we needed to turn on thirty total computers just to fit everyone into the combat rooms, and Felix had us prepare for a four hour run, since we needed to really spend some time getting used to fighting the serpent. That meant that we paid 930 total Achievement, divided among the six of us for 155 Achievement each for this training session. That price tag was barely enough to make me blink, but I was sure it would get quite a bit more expensive if we tried to hole up in this computer room for multiple months and train.

Once we finally got the entire mess working, we entered the virtual training room again and created a frostbitten serpent to train against. Since we wanted to mimic the conditions we would face in the real world, Felix found some options to create a frostbitten serpent that had already created a lair and was holed up inside of it - after all, the Frostbitten serpent in the real world had already been entrenched for an unknown number of centuries in the life purchasing areas.

Once we created the serpent and told the virtual room to simulate its lair, a giant ripple in space appeared in front of us. To my spatial senses, it appeared almost like a giant spiderweb of different spatial nodes. At the center of the “web” lay a cavernous maw, devouring space and reality and forming a sub-dimension behind it.

“So this is how the serpent guards every place that produces lives at the same time,” I muttered. “Anytime someone steps on one of the nodes connected to this spatial pocket, they immediately get pulled into the serpent’s lair. I imagine the serpent can also move out of any point connected to the center of this set of spatial coordinates, meaning it can attack and retreat at will.”

“What do you see?” asked Sallia.

I swapped out my equipment for my communication bracelet, and then shared my vision with everyone else.

Felix squinted at the ripple of space in front of us.

“At least to me, it just looks like regular space,” he said. “Also, it looks strangely similar to a spiderweb. I thought we were fighting a serpent.”

I shrugged. I had no answers for him.

“I’ll go first,” said Sallia. She materialized her new sword, and then marched into the hole in reality, followed quickly by the rest of us. The recruits followed behind the six of us, in a loose formation. The melee combatants and those with shields stood at the front of the group, while those armed with ranged weapons formed a second block of soldiers.

The moment we entered the sub-dimension, space rippled, and we reappeared somewhere else.

Our new environment was shaped like a giant cave, made entirely of glaciers. Giant ice stalactites and stalagmites jutted out of the floor and ceiling of the cave. The light was so dim that a regular mortal would have been completely unable to see, although it wasn’t quite the same as total darkness. 

The recruits all squinted, and I heard a few of them mutter that they couldn’t see a thing. I frowned. That was a problem we clearly needed to solve. Even if the six experienced transmigrators had a high enough [Perception] stat to see in darkness like this, the recruits clearly didn’t have the same advantage. If the real serpent also had a similar cave, we needed a way to deal with it.

I sighed, and then grudgingly took another step forward. Even if we needed to fix this problem, we still had four hours of training to get through first. And in all honesty, I wasn’t entirely sure how we would fix the recruit’s sight, either. They couldn’t equip items like a normal transmigrator, and most of the Market’s products were designed with the Status Screen in mind. They might have to get used to this if we couldn’t find a solution.

Just as I was idly pondering how hard it would be to make a torch or some other light source, I saw something flicker in my soul sight.

“Above us!” I yelled, as my head whipped upwards.

Slithering between the stalactites was a giant serpent. It had dark blue scales, and it moved so quickly that it looked more like a monkey than a snake. I had never seen a snake move with such agility while in midair. It used the rest of its body to coil and uncoil around each icy stalactite at a speed that beggared the imagination.

In mere seconds, it had moved nearly halfway to us. Right as I unleashed a low-level extinguish, to gather some more information, the serpent vanished.

Winter descended. The cave was immediately blanketed in flurries of snow and frost. The temperature plummeted dozens of degrees, even with {Born of Winter’s Hold} shielding me, the cold burrowed deep into my bones as the magically propelled temperatures tore into my body. It only took me a moment to realize this wasn’t an illusion. Through my soul sight, I could see that the air around us was filled with incredibly weak souls. Every single snowflake, gust of cold air, and the concept of winter itself was now alive and trying to kill us. Winter tore, shredded, and gnawed at my exposed skin and bones like a wolf gnawing on a frozen meal after months of starvation. Fortunately, {Born of Winter’s Hold} shielded me from the worst of it.

The others in the group didn’t have that benefit. Especially the recruits. Several of them gasped in pain as the concept of winter started to tear at them, and before I could react, a few hundred recruits started to die. I immediately hit them with healing magic, but healing hundreds of people while the snow and frost tore at them was well beyond what I could handle with magic.

Within another few seconds, dozens of people began to die. Fortunately, we were in the midst of a virtual battle. Them dying here didn’t mean they were really dead. However, I knew that before the real battle, I had to find a way to stop the serpent from pulling this off. I couldn’t just watch was hundreds of our recruits died. They were staking their lives on the idea that we could properly protect them and carve out new spots for them in the Market. Even if a few of them dying was an inevitability I had no power to stop, I wanted as many of them as possible to survive.

I searched for the serpent. I knew that if I could force it out of its current state, I should be able to stop this attack where it had literally turned winter into a sapient monster and used it to attack us. However, there were too many souls in the area. It made locating one soul surprisingly hard - it was like trying to locate one specific star in the middle of the night sky, while the entire area was filled with light pollution.

A few moments later, the serpent reappeared.

It was right in the center of the ranged combatants.

Recruits began to scream as the serpent tore through them like a goliath kicking over a pile of children’s toys. I tried to hit it with another extinguish, and this time I succeeded - but before I could even look over the new System message that had appeared, the serpent had finished ripping through another two hundred or so of the recruits. Right as Anise’s fireballs were about to connect with the serpent, it vanished again, and the cold of winter began to seep into my bones again.

I gritted my teeth. The serpent had teleported. It had also demonstrated the ability to freely swap between raw physical might and summoning winter. This was already troublesome to handle.

I searched for the serpent again, but things were moving too fast. Through both my conceptual sight and my soul sight, trying to locate the serpent was nightmarishly difficult. Through my normal sight, locating the serpent was completely hopeless.

Space rippled again. The serpent reappeared right behind Sallia, and it tried to snap her up in one bite. Sallia managed to duck beneath its mouth, and then she swung her blade right at its eyes. Before the serpent could dodge, time seemed to bend. Sallia had used {Timewinder’s Slice}.

The blade buried itself into the serpent’s eye. It howled in pain as one of its eyeballs was torn apart. Its blood dribbled out of its new eye socket, and each drop of blood froze as it fell to the cave floor.

The serpent disappeared again. This time, it reappeared above us, accompanied by a blast of ice magic. I gritted my teeth, and tried to keep the recruits alive as another gust of snowflakes tore into their bodies.

I also began to probe the serpent’s pocket dimension using my spatial senses. I wanted to see if I could find a weakness in the pocket dimension itself. If I could, I might have a much easier way to handle this fight when we did it for real. However, my probing felt like it was pointless - no matter how I probed the pocket dimension around us, it was clear that the serpent’s mastery of space was much greater than mine.

I gritted my teeth, and then burned hope. Since this was a virtual battle, I didn’t need to worry about wasting my hope reserves before the real battle - while I wasn’t sure if items would recover, Felix had confirmed that hope, and other kinds of ‘special resources’ would recover, at least.

Instantly, my spatial abilities became more. Combined with {Space Mastery (Advanced)} and {Void Magic (Basic)}, my magic gained an even stronger ability to interfere with space. 

I tried to tear into the pocket dimension itself, but the moment I did so, another wave of cold energy seemed to seep into the pocket dimension from outside.

To my horror, I realized that the ‘web’ of spatial connections I had seen outside also had some kind of winter-based property. By opening a hole in the pocket dimension, the web of spatial connections had whipped towards us like a taut string cut with a pair of scissors. A moment later, accompanied by another burst of cold, the breach I had spent half of my hope reserves to make was patched.

My attempt to see if I could just collapse the pocket dimension in on itself and force this environment to collapse had failed.

“At least we know part of why the Market’s army failed now,” muttered Felix, as the surviving army started to cluster closer together.

The serpent reappeared. This time, it appeared right in front of me. It opened its maw, and a burst of cold tore into me. I felt my limbs start to grow weak and heavy, but {Born of Winter’s Hold}, coupled with my healing magic, was enough to keep me alive.

Every recruit near me wasn’t so lucky. A quarter of a second turned another hundred of our recruits into ice sculptures. Several of them managed to get off a few attacks, and the serpent hissed in pain as a few projectiles hit its ruined eye - but a few moments later, it dissolved into more snowflakes.

“Above us!” yelled Anise. I looked up, and realized that I had missed something. The serpent hadn’t just been using the concept of winter to attack us - it had also been interfering with the stalactites positioned above us.

The stalactites above us suddenly collapsed, like a giant avalanche. Several hundred tons of snow collapsed on us. I gagged on a mouthful of snow, and I felt several of the people I had been healing die.

Before I had time to respond, the snow around me tightened, almost like I had been gripped in the hands of a giant. I struggled and thrashed, and tried to teleport myself away - but it felt like space itself had clamped around me, preventing me from opening even the tiniest gap.

The snow’s pressure on me grew greater, like a giant was squeezing me.

I gasped in pain, but my lungs couldn’t suck in the air. My ribs were creaking and groaning in protest. Finally, a rib broke. Once one broke, the pressure on my remaining ribs grew greater. With a series of sickening pops, my entire ribcage collapsed inwards.

I died.

You have died! Placing you in observer mode! You may exit virtual reality at any time!

I suddenly came to while floating in a small sea of white orbs, many of whom were chatting with each other. Below us, the serpent continued to rampage through the few remaining survivors - but the collapse of the ceiling, accompanied by hundreds of tons of snow and sharp stalctites, had buried any hope of resistance our group had. Less than a minute later, the few surviving combatants all fell as well.

Your party has been annihilated!

We had utterly failed our first challenge.

Author’s Note:

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