15 Art session and an explosion
2/2
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#Day 3856#
- Clearing one's mind was easier than I thought, as if the mystical arts were made for me. Perhaps it was the influence of my childhood tenacity and all that training I went through that made meditating under a waterfall so much easier.
I can't control the wind or make a stick float from the ground, yet. My efforts will surely bear fruit and/\, -
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"What good timing, you shitty earthquake."
While writing, the earth once again shook, making the forest I call home quiver. Fortunately, my Stick Tent V4 is still able to stand its ground and not collapse in on itself. Those guides didn't take into account the frequent outbreaks of earthquakes at all.
Trial and error. Over and over. Stick Tent after Stick Tent.
To say that I am annoyed is a gross understatement.
"Hhhhhhoooo. Take deep breaths. Clear your mind. This is nothing but nature's test. It will all be over soon...?"
Usually, these kinds of earthquakes would only last for a short period of time. However... today, it showed no sign of subsiding.
The continuous shaking had already shaken the foundations of my Stick Tent V4: Its collapse was only a matter of time if the shaking persisted.
I escaped to the forest outside. It was raining leaves, their smooth and hairy texture prickling my tanning skin.
"It can't get worse than this, right?"
Mother Nature mocked my words, for the tremors grew more intense.
The falling leaves soon turned into twigs. Moments later, a crisp snapping sound from above was followed by a thick branch crashing onto my Stick Tent. It couldn't hold on, and I watched as my Stick Tent V4 finally collapsed.
"Hhhhhhoooo..."
Resisting the urge to curse out loud, I saved my breath and ran towards the mountains.
According to one of my survival guides, being surrounded by trees during an earthquake was equivalent to a death sentence. The best place to go to is an open area where a falling tree couldn't squash you like a fly.
Near the mountains was an open flatland, the perfect place to go during an earthquake.
Back in the city, there should also be places that can accommodate people during an earthquake. I have no intention of going into any of them.
An earthquake is still a part of nature. Why else would we call it a 'natural disaster'? It's in the name itself! I only need to overcome it and get back to meditating.
'I need to rebuild my Stick Tent first, though... damn earthquakes probably won't even let me! JHkughefd!'
Running through the forest was a nightmarish ordeal.
Without the comfort of human shoes, each step brought about stinging pain because of the rough forest ground. Running fast wasn't an option, as the shaking made it impossible. Wayward sticks and stones would strike me, drawing blood that felt uncomfortably warm to the skin.
After passing through multiple fallen trees and tripping a number of times, the flatland was finally within sight. Contrary to my expectations, however, it wasn't empty.
"Huff, huff... people?"
They were quite far but their figures were discernible.
Seeing them made me freeze, despite the dangers of doing so. I wasn't out of the woods yet, both literally and figuratively. Despite that, my bloodied feet showed no signs of moving.
The earth groaned as rocks loudly clattered, and the once quiet forest continually released the shrill sounds of wood snapping in half.
As I was near the edge of the forest, the possibility of a tree falling on my head significantly decreased. Still, as I was in the vicinity, there was no end to the number of deadly things that would fall from above.
There had never been a time when the situation had been so dire, but I stayed out of sight within the vegetation, quietly struggling.
They cannot see me no matter what.
Not because of the embarrassment I would feel or the weird gazes that would assault me if I did come out. No, those can be overlooked.
Staying hidden, and slowly accumulating my strength without anyone knowing is how I've always done things. Being caught now while bloodied and butt-naked, even by innocent bystanders, would be detrimental to my goals.
In their eyes, I will stay an unforgettable existence. The kind that they would tell their friends, family: The whole world! Social-damn-media makes it hard to be covert. It's only a matter of time until they find out who I am, and when they do...
My mob persona? = Gone!
The goal is to become a mastermind in the shadows for crying out loud. Would it make sense to be a hidden mastermind when everyone knows of your existence?
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I barely protected my balls from extremely lethal damage, in turn receiving painful wounds to my arms. The shaking had never stopped and only kept growing more powerful.
Standing had already become an impossibility. I could only crawl and roll, and even doing them was strenuous.
'Ok, maybe I should go out there. Dying now won't let me find my precious magic.'
I checked for *something*, and feeling that there were still two of them, I sighed in relief.
'Yep, losing one here now would be too much to bear.'
There is no guarantee that they would see me from so far away anyway. If I just make my way to the edge of the edge of the forest and stay there...
I rolled as I'd never rolled before, reaching unprecedented speeds with my trained body. Almost as if all of my training was for this moment.
Unfortunately, with great speed comes a similarly greatly annoying air resistance that worked against me. No, it's not just my imagination. I swear I could feel it slowing me down.
Yet again, the limits of the human body have failed me. Why wasn't I born with an aerodynamic body?
The exit was just a few more rolls away, yet the distance was daunting. The pain from simply moving my injured body was becoming increasingly unbearable, especially with all this shaking going on.
My only way of coping was to chant a mantra continuously.
"Magic! Magic! Magic! MAGIC, MAGIC, MAGIC!!!!!"
Haaah... I feel better already.
"MAGIC!!!!!!!!"
Alas, Mother Nature's sadistic tendencies persisted.
The ground rumbled with greater ferocity, enough to make it collapse and tilt inwards towards the forest I was just in.
My rolling soon slowed to a still as the ground became steeper. Using that opportunity, I held on to a crack in the floor, stopping myself from moving in reverse. Not when I was so close to getting out.
But little by little, strength left my arms and fingers. It was becoming harder to stay stuck to the tilting ground.
"No! No! No! NO, NO, NO!!!!!"
Battered and worn out, I gave way.
"DAMN IT!!!!!!!!"
To my dismay, I rolled down even faster with the unwanted help of gravity and the rough, inclined ground. Without any means to stop, my body gradually returned to the forest depths.
Amidst my incessant rolling, behind the countless greenery on my way, an increasingly inescapable sight had become visible. At the base of the tilted, fissured ground was a jagged rift releasing smoke wide enough for fallen trees and boulders to fall into, let alone a human body.
It emitted mellow, yellow light and heat that felt pleasant to the skin. Rolling closer, however, the light became frighteningly brighter while the heat rose higher and higher.
Breathing became difficult. Each breath scorched my lungs, bringing about blistering pain.
Then it burned my skin, like spilling steaming hot water on your whole body but at an entirely different magnitude. There were no flames, I knew that much, but my body felt ablaze.
Through squinted eyes, my 'burning' body tumbled down, finally reaching the mouth of the sweltering rift.
As I fell, bubbling, crimson rivers and suffocating smoke invaded my sight, accompanied by the toxic smell of sulfur.
The heat became too strong and, combined with the presence of sulfur: made peeking for a moment longer become a torturous and irritating ordeal.
Drained of strength, out of breath, and about to die a painful death. There was no time left. I sought an answer, a way to pull through such a situation.
In the end, only one way to survive came to mind.
"MAAAGIIIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
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All of my research, my efforts, and my... decisions resurfaced from the depths of my mind. None of them could help in such a situation.
Then it went back even further.
Stories from my childhood, heroes that unlocked their hidden potential in the middle of calamities, flared within my mind. With the power of friendship, love, or sheer will, they rose above their limits and carried on fighting.
In those stories, I found hope, only to realize one crucial thing.
I never wanted to be the Main Character. Never the one to take up the role of a Hero or a Villain.
Not a person crucial to the story. Someone forgettable, mediocre.
In a word, someone ordinary.
An ordinary mob.
But only on the surface.
An ordinary mob, yet so much more.
But becoming "more".... the chance has already passed.
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Plunging to my inescapable death, I grinned.
'Dying so early... without no one knowing... how mob-like.'
No matter what I thought, I still fell deeper and deeper.
Death by lava... or by an earthquake... by both...
'Getting hit by a truck would have been way quicker.'
Death is a shitty experience filled with an unbridled amount of pain. Or at least, my death is a massive pain in the ass.
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Until the pain was finally gone...
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...replaced by the soothing smell of sweets.
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Saiki's Secret Spot (????)
Looking at the sculptures, I thought about the next addition to my prized collection.
A Gundam
Godzilla Earth
Kurama
An inconspicuous, extremely harmless truck
And lastly: Steve from Minecraft. Life-sized, standing at a height higher than mine, with all his blocky features and a stone pickaxe in his hand.
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'What else can I do...'
It's getting pretty repetitive and more or less...
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[Ding!]
Sculpting Skill |Rank: SSS --> XI|
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...easy. Boringly easy. They all look good, but that's it.
I need inspiration for something new!
'Stone sculptures... what else is there... what else can I do...'
...
EUREKA!
I closed my eyes, and a picture appeared in my mind. Its general outline was there, albeit blurry. It currently lacked many of the finer details, so I worked on that.
The texture of thick skin encased in a heavy, woolly coat; the imposing, upwards-curving tusks that adorned its massive frame; and finally, multiply them by three because why not. Instead of simply copy-pasting the already existing model in my mind, I adjusted them individually to have different poses to make them more diverse.
'I might as well modify their body proportions to make them distinguishable from each other.'
In a second, three images that were similar yet different at the same time remained in my mind.
'Let's see if this works.'
Usually, my way of sculpting requires a big enough rock from somewhere, afterwards taking off bits and pieces here and there to make what I want.
I'm not doing that today.
Underneath the open sky, the sun assaulted the barren wasteland with its burning rays of light. It would get in the way of my creation process, which is why I removed it.
No, I didn't Annihilate it. I don't even know if I can handle Annihilating something as big as that.
[Notice]
[The host is fully capable of Annihilating a Yellow Dwarf Star]
I guess that's a yes.
Anyway, I just fast-forwarded to night-time with my time powers. A time skip, basically.
Without the sun, the wasteland immediately turned dark and frigid. With a deep breath, the frosty air filled my lungs to their entirety before coming out as a volley of white mist.
"Heee— Hooo—"
This is fun. I'm like a dragon.
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'An approximate measure of -1°C. Good enough.'
With me acting as the origin, ice began to outwardly spread from beneath my feet, forming a frozen sheet spanning an area of a few thousand feet.
"Step #1 is done."
Injecting more psychic energy, the ice lengthened in response, surging upwards to create one massive cubical glacier. Standing on top of it made the vapor from my every breath thicker, much to my satisfaction.
"Alright, time for step #3..."
Parts of the glacier melted into a liquid state. They streamed down and pooled into the nearby ground. Most important, however, was that the glacier began to take shape, turning from a cube into a creature of gargantuan size.
An ice sculpture emanating boreal white mist, gleaming with the faintest moonlight, stood beneath me.
I gave it a name.
"You shall be known as Manny!"
Manny The Ice Mammoth.
'And now for his siblings.'
From the ground up, ice crystalized but didn't form into a cube. The process was even slower, but as it materialized, it became faster.
I could already make out its features.
Two pairs of towering legs, atop them a torso of similar composition, emerged from the wasteland in quick succession. Curved permafrost tusks pointed to the sky as the creature exuded a threatening, chilly air.
"You shall be known as Manfred!"
Manfred, The Other Ice Mammoth.
From mid-air, an explosion of ice occurred, swiftly forming another mammoth with a head lowered in submission.
"Hmm... you'll be called Munou!" [A/N: I'm kinda obsessed with the song. I always listen to it when I'm washing the dishes.]
I am satisfied. This experiment was a success.
'It really makes you think about what else I can make... some kind of fire sculpture? Nah, I don't think that's possible. Or is it?'
I'll do it later. For now—
I turned my head towards the ground where a pink-haired person was standing.
"So what do you think?"
{I think that you keep making your sculptures way too big.}
I shrugged.
"They look cooler, in my opinion. You know, apart from their icy properties."
{Sure, sure.}
There was a pause until Saiki spoke again.
{I didn't think that they would react so oddly. To your face, I mean.}
"I'm more surprised you and your family didn't react similarly."
{Beauty is a concept that I cannot understand. As for my parents, you know how they are.}
True that.
The Saiki household is a family of weirdos. I appreciate that about them.
"So, is it finally happening?"
{Yeah. We will need you to be ready soon. Just in case of emergencies.}
"That explains the smell around here. It's getting stronger."
{What smell?}
"Nothing. Let's go!"
Holding my breath, I took his hand and teleported right above the bubbling lava of Owari Mountain. The heat didn't reach me; it wasn't hot enough to threaten my XIII-ranked Endurance.
{...I said soon, not now. I'm going back to sleep.}
"Look at it. It's simmering like a pot of stew! That's going to explode in a minute or two!" I sent a voice transmission to his head instead of using my real voice. I need the oxygen right now.
The air here stinks. I fear the stench more than the actual eruption.
{See you later.}
Saiki disappeared. I was left alone amidst the hisses and crackling of the seething lava.
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*Stare*
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*Staaareee*
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For approximately 13 hours—
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[Notice]
[13 hours, 31 minutes, 07 seconds]
'Thank you, my dear system.'
Ahem. Let's do this again.
For the past 13 hours, 31 minutes, and 7 seconds, Owari Mountain never left my sight.
It didn't explode. I thought it would, but it didn't.
For the past 13 hours, 31 minutes, and 8 seconds, I've been holding my breath. Just in case the volcano exploded, but it didn't.
'I should've slept like Saiki.'
Well, it's okay. I didn't actually stay here for 13 hours. I technically did, but at the same time didn't.
Time has been moving at about 100x usual speed thanks to my powers. Lemme do some math real quick.
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8 minutes.
I've only been here for 8 minutes. It felt like it was 8 minutes but it was technically far longer.
The sun has already risen, basking me in its warm embrace. What I'm trying to say is, I could've slept for 8 minutes and dreamed a little ice cream dream.
Such a waste.
Truly a waste.
At least the volcano is about to explode. You know, get this event over and done with so that I can breathe again.
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...am I tripping or is that a naked person over ther—
*BOOM*