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Sam stared at the metallic koala clinging to his right shin. The koala’s eyes were closed, and it was clear the creature was ignoring him. No matter what Sam did to it, Dirt didn’t budge. Sam pushed it, pulled it, tickled it, sprayed water on it, and even waved food in front of its shiny nose, but Dirt reacted as a sculpture would: it didn’t. Even when Sam prodded it with his energy by forming a connection with his Sahasrara, the koala refused to communicate—which sucked because it rendered his leg useless and severely hampered his mobility.
Sam sighed through his nose since his mouth was blocked. With his All-Seeing Gaze, he looked beyond the whale’s slightly parted mouth to observe their surroundings. Since the calamity detector had been destroyed by his talent, Sam no longer had to worry about the blue avians discovering his presence. Although they were no longer in danger of being tracked, the whale was still traveling deep underground through molten rock. Perhaps it felt it was more natural to travel through a liquid medium. As for why no lava flowed into the whale’s mouth, Sam didn’t question it; higher-dimensional creatures didn’t obey the laws of three-dimensional physics.
Several weeks had passed, but even though the blue avians had left, Sam didn’t feel lonely. Since the avians couldn’t track him anymore, he could contact people through his stone tablet again. Of course, that meant talking to Ellie and Wendy, the only close-enough friends he had that could use reptilian technology. According to Wendy, quite a few awakened with highly ranked talents had gone missing recently, and the six big companies were getting concerned. According to Ellie, several human pets had been stolen in broad daylight but with no witnesses. After hearing those two bits of information, Sam couldn’t help but think the blue avians were slaying talented humans to prevent someone like him from appearing once more. Did he feel bad? Not really.
“We’re surfacing,” Big Fish said.
Through his All-Seeing Gaze, Sam visualized the green whale angling itself upwards, swimming through the lava and piercing through rocky crust above. As Sam observed his surroundings, another person’s All-Seeing Gaze overlapped with his, causing Sam to twitch. Sam sensed a surge of energy heading in his direction, and he cut off his connection while retracting his All-Seeing Gaze. Since the other party had noticed Sam’s All-Seeing Gaze, that meant their Ajna and Sahasrara were as open and mastered as his. If Sam had to take a guess at the other individual’s identity, he’d say they were a blue avian simply because blue avians had all their chakras unlocked.
“Where are we?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Big Fish said. “This seemed like a good enough spot as any to surface. It’s easy to lose my bearings when I’m underground.”
“Well, we’ve been noticed,” Sam said.
“That’s okay,” Big Fish said, its voice echoing through Sam’s mind. “I closed my mouth, so they won’t be able to find you.”
“So, it’s back to hiding?” Sam asked. Although he could withstand another period of isolation, that didn’t mean he’d enjoy it. He had a good talent, which brought him great power, and he was also rich, but those things didn’t matter one hoot if he was imprisoned in a whale’s mouth. Imprisonment for his security was still imprisonment.
“No,” Dirt said, causing Sam’s eyes to widen. He looked down at the koala clinging to his leg, his eyes accusatory. Now it was willing to speak, huh? The koala’s voice was deep like a bass drum. “Spit us out.”
Big Fish didn’t hesitate to open its mouth. With a flick of its tongue, Sam was tossed into the air. He oriented himself and focused on his Sahasrara and Manipura, willing himself to levitate, but the koala on his leg was too heavy, and he was dragged to the ground like a flag tied around a rock. He didn’t appreciate being spat out of the whale’s mouth without warning, but what was he going to do? Complain? It wouldn’t help with anything, so instead, Sam stood on the ground and activated his All-Seeing Gaze to assess his surroundings. To his surprise, his All-Seeing Gaze’s range had expanded, and the vast amount of information flooding his mind caused him to pause for several seconds. Before, he could see everything in a certain radius around himself; now, it was as if he had become part of the ground, and he could see everything stepping on top of him.
Sam focused on his root chakra, grounding himself to remain calm. The expansion of his All-Seeing Gaze must’ve been a result of his new chakra being unlocked. According to the conversation he had with Ellie, it was likely he had unlocked his earth star chakra, a chakra outside of his body but still connected to him and located several meters below his feet. At least, he assumed it was the earth star chakra considering he was perceiving things from the perspective of the ground. The other external chakra Ellie had identified for him was the soul star chakra which was located in the space above his crown. As for how Ellie knew about these external chakras, well, the reptilian had gone to the library and did some research—for her favorite pet, it wasn’t too much of a task.
“He’s here! The calamity summoner is here!”
Sam raised his head to look at the blue avian floating above him. He could see it with his All-Seeing Gaze since it was within his detection radius. Not only that, but he could see the other blue avians in the trees outside of his personal detection range. Although the distant blue avians personally weren’t touching the ground, the trees they had perched on were, which allowed Sam to perceive them as well. However, when they flew out of the trees and into the air, they disappeared from his All-Seeing Gaze, but they reappeared once they entered the airspace above him with the blue avian who had called out his location.
“Were you tracking me, or was I just unlucky with my emerging location?” Vercedei asked the blue avians, speaking for Sam.
“Rather than saying you were unlucky, it’d be more appropriate to say we’re just fortunate,” the blue avian in the sky said as its companions gathered around it. There were dozens of them, and even more were on their way. “After all, Oterra is threatened by the existence of calamities, so why wouldn’t she bless us and assist us with getting rid of you?”
“Also, you emerged right next to our territory,” another blue avian said, chiming in. “What were you expecting? For us to not be home?”
“I was closer than I thought,” Big Fish said, evidently proud of itself with its aura shining brighter than normal. The whale had shrunken down to the size of a pebble and was resting on Joe the sloth’s shoulder, who was wrapped around Sam’s waist. “Not bad.”
Sam wanted to know what wasn’t bad about this situation. He was besieged by even more blue avians than the last time, and from what they were saying to one another, he could tell they were much more coordinated as well.
“Split up! One dozen of us per calamity!”
“Those who are on standby, come with me! When one of them fighting the calamities is injured or weakened, we’ll replace them before they can get killed.”
“When the calamities are bunched together like this, bombard the area! Attack!”
Sam braced himself, crystallizing his aura while using Toughen to harden his muscles. Hundreds of telekinetic impacts struck him at once along with physical debris picked up from the ground: logs, rocks, branches. Through his All-Seeing Gaze, Sam saw the blue avians’ telekinetic impacts colliding against his aura. Much to Sam’s surprise, instead of his aura being shaken, the impacts were diverted towards the ground where his earth star chakra was located. The impacts slammed against the earth and dispersed without harming Sam. As for the physical debris, they bounced against Sam’s body harmlessly, leaving tiny traces of dirt on his clothes.
“Why does he always get stronger every time we see him? He’s mastered his Vasundhara!”
“If we let him get away again, who knows what he’ll have the next time he’s back? We have to stop him here!”
“The other two groups are on their way!”
“We have to get him off the ground, or we won’t be able to do anything to him. I’ll rip the ground out from underneath him, but I’ll need a dozen others to help me.”
Evidently, the blue avians knew a way to deal with Sam’s new ability granted to him by his earth star chakra. As long as he maintained contact with the ground, he could redirect energy downwards, using the whole of Oterra as his defense. Considering he couldn’t fly—or move, really—because of the koala weighing down on him like an anchor, it was a great ability. However, he couldn’t stop the blue avians from lifting the ground. A circular fissure appeared around Sam as a dozen blue avians telekinetically grasped the region beneath and lifted. And lifted…?
“He’s too fat! We need more people to lift the ground out from under him!”
Suddenly, Sam didn’t feel too bad about being unable to move with the koala attached to his leg. At first, he was disappointed in himself for being too weak to walk with it hugging him, but now, the disappointment was gone. If even a dozen blue avians working together couldn’t get the metallic koala to budge, there was no point in Sam feeling bad about failing something impossible to accomplish in the first place. However, if all the blue avians present worked together, Sam had a feeling they’d be able to lift him even with the koala dragging him down.
“Do something,” Sam said, communicating with Dirt through his head. “You’re the one who told us to emerge. You have a plan, right?”
“Watch,” Dirt said. The ground rumbled, and the blue avians paused as a lump protruded from the ground, expanding and growing with every passing second with Sam at the center. Thanks to the increase in height, he could see more things around himself, but the range of his All-Seeing Gaze was still much greater than the range of his physical vision.
Sam held his arms out to the side, steadying himself as the ground continued to rise with no signs of stopping. The blue avians that were hovering above him were now hovering below him, and Sam wondered if the koala was going to murder him by removing the pillar he was standing on, so he’d plummet to his death. Even though his familiars were born from his ability, it was hard to trust them right away considering what they could do on their own. However, this time, Sam didn’t need to be wary of his familiar. The lump of dirt, which was now practically a small mountain, cracked open horizontally. Seven tendrils made of stone, roots, and dirt extended out of the fissure, and they swept at the blue avians in the sky, extending to reach the feathered individuals.
Was this Dirt’s unique ability? Summoning some kind of eldritch horror from the ground? Although Sam questioned it, he wasn’t going to complain; after all, the tentacled rock monster was slapping the blue avians, inflicting heavy blows despite the blue avians crystallizing their auras. They flitted about and shouted, attacking the dirt monster that was still growing, but they couldn’t damage it faster than it grew.
Sam looked down at the koala on his leg. It was keeping him atop the rocky monster, the tremors shaking his body doing nothing to disturb his balance. As the stone monster beneath him grew even larger, more fissures appeared on its body, and even more tendrils sprouted out of the mound. There were as many tendrils as there were blue avians. Sam couldn’t help but wonder what kind of higher-dimensional being he had summoned this time. Its potential for mass destruction seemed to be much higher than the rest of his familiars—at least, visually.
Sam looked off to the side, and from where he stood, he could see the blue avians’ territory. The trees there were massive, much larger than the trees in the nearby vicinity. They were thick, requiring hundreds of people linking hands to fully wrap themselves around the trunk of one of the trees, and the leaves on the branches were even larger than a fully grown, adult, human male; they were thicker than one too. If he stood on the branches of any of the trees, he’d probably understand the perspective of an insect. The earthen abomination Dirt had summoned leaned over, extending a long and thick tendril towards the closest tree on the outskirts of the blue avians’ territory.
“It’s trying to destroy our home! Stop it!”
The blue avians disengaged from the tendrils they were fighting and appeared by the tree the dirt monster was targeting. Together, they struck the reaching tendril, the combined impact of their fists shattering the limb.
“Work together to break its limbs. We need to buy some time for our reinforcements.”
Although Dirt was powerful with its summoned rock creature, Sam didn’t like the koala’s chances of winning. The dirt monster might’ve been enormous with more tendrils than blue avians present, but it was slow, and the blue avians easily avoided its strikes since they learned their lesson about blocking them directly. They shifted from tendril to tendril, working in unison to smash them apart. Instead of falling apart into sand, gravel, and dust, the tendrils disintegrated, vanishing from existence after the blue avians pounded them with their fists. Since the dirt monster couldn’t hit the agile blue avians, it had to aim for the stationary trees instead.
Then, a bad feeling struck the top of Sam’s head and ran down his spine, causing him to whip his head downwards to look at the source of unease. The metal koala—which had been easy to balance for some reason despite its weight—suddenly became no longer as easy to support. Sam’s eyes widened as the koala slowly tilted to one side, rotating Sam’s shin along with it as it leaned towards the sloped surface of the dirt monster’s back.
Sam’s eyes widened, and he barely had time to curl himself into a ball and use Toughen. As his muscles hardened, his descent began as the koala rolled Sam like a barrel down the dirt monster’s back. As he rolled, the path on the dirt monster’s back cleared itself of obstacles, allowing Sam to pick up speed with every passing second. The ground turned into the sky, and the sky turned into the ground, and the process repeated over and over until Sam closed his eyes, choosing to view himself through his All-Seeing Gaze. Unlike his physical vision, it wasn’t spinning around and around.
Sam ignored the uncomfortable sensation of having his guts pressed against the walls of his body as he spun around and around. Instead, he focused on where he was going. He was rolling down the dirt monster’s back, and he could see it expanding. Behind him, where he had first fallen from, the ground had risen up, forming a mound that was a rushing down towards him almost like an underground wave. If it hit him, Sam didn’t doubt he’d be flung through the skies, and that’s probably what the koala had intended to happen. Sam reached the bottom of the dirt monster where the slope ended in a ramp pointed in the opposite direction of the blue avians’ territory. As expected, when Sam’s body was rolling off the ramp, the moving lump arrived and struck Sam like a finger flicking a fly off someone’s arm. He flew through the air, rotating all the while. Why couldn’t they fly normally?
Joe and Birdbrained agreed with Sam’s thoughts, the two animals clinging onto Sam’s body as if their lives depended on it, and in a sense, they did. If they fell off Sam while he was soaring through the air like this, it’d be a pain in the butt to get back to him—maybe they’d be intercepted by blue avians while they were alone. Speaking of Sam’s familiars who were alone, Manga’s four-syllable-long cry drifted into Sam’s ear from not too far away. The wooly pig was running through the air in a straight line towards Sam, making his escape very noticeable.
“He’s trying to escape!”
The blue avians instantly spotted Sam, and the ones who could afford to peel off from the main group defending the trees from the dirt monster went after Sam. However, before they could get very far, the dirt monster compressed itself like a man sucking in his gut. Then, the dirt mound erupted, and several miniature—but still large compared to the blue avians—dirt monsters appeared in their way. They were connected to the main body by a strand of dirt with the width of a human hair, but even though they were small, the blue avians had keen eyes.
“Separate them from the main body!”
The blue avians worked in tandem, distracting the miniature monsters as others struck at their weaknesses. They moved quickly, but they were still too slow. By the time they dispatched the monsters, they had lost sight of Sam and the wooly pig. The only trace they left behind was quite obvious: a large, pig-shaped hole in the ground.