D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad Chapter 2262 Slow Floating

--- Kat ---

"Probably that we shouldn’t touch it," offered Appoline after nobody had any other suggestions for several seconds.

Kat turned slowly to glare at the elf. "Well that part was obvious but I certainly wasn’t expecting it to combust into flames on contact after doing... whatever that was."

"I think," began Lily, "that the stick was sped up as it continued to bounce... around the timeline maybe? Or the time contained in that area? It continued to speed up until the air friction set it on fire and then burnt it away, but because it wasn’t quite in sync with normal time the flames weren’t always burning, sometimes they were teleporting to the future... and maybe sometimes the past? Obviously not very far, but it’s possible that we saw the flame at several different points in its personal timeline during that whole thing instead of a... clean ish line."

Kat shivered, "Ok that’s a new level of terrifying. Anything else?"

"Yeah there is. I can barely feel it... but see the... let’s call it the ’time crack’, see the obvious grey lines and the sort of multi-coloured nonsense inside of it?" Lily got a round of nods. "Right well those are just the obvious parts of it. I think I can sort of vaguely feel out a bunch more of them in an orbit, extra thin and nearly invisible... and I don’t know how deadly they are."

"Why would they be different from the rest?" asked Kat.

"Because I think I passed the branch through at least one of them while throwing it into the main... bud? Sure that’s good enough. The main bud obviously caused issue, but it sort of started before it got there. I’m wondering how much... power? Close enough. How much power the thinner parts have. Is it the same? Less? More? Are they not always active? I really can’t tell."

"I see the issue, or rather, I don’t see it and that’s the problem," groaned Kat.

Still, Lily nodded, Kat had hit the nail on the head. "I’m not sure I can actively feel those as we move. Focusing on it? Knowing roughly where they are? I can follow them decently well... but some of these extend pretty far. Like... hmm... give me a second."

Lily started to shift her shadows so that she had her own copy of the cracked time bud and all its feelers... or what they could easily see. "So this is what it looks like, but THIS is what it feels like,"

Lily’s shadow orb increased in size by about half again before a bunch of thinner tendrils exploded out of it, turning the entire thing into a pincushion. There was some space... but not too much. Where before slipping a hand or even your whole body through was possible with a bit of care now it was closer to fingers and even then there were some places Lily had packed so many tendrils into that nothing would pass through.

"It’s not... quite this bad because it is mostly thinner than I can manage with my shadows, but I feel like it’s getting my point across. These time cracks are a lot more dangerous then they seem... maybe."

"Ok why the maybe at the end?" asked Kat.

"I’m not certain the thinner lines can properly effect anything powerful. Us included. Sure I wouldn’t want to run my hand through a bunch, but if you just graze one I’m not sure anything would happen... maybe..." offered Lily.

"But why?" asked Kat.

"I just don’t think it has the power to age anything meaningful... but I also think it would... cling? Kind of like a static charge or a spiderweb. Ones not a problem but a bunch might be... but I really don’t want to test it on anything..." explained Lily.

"One moment," announced Kat as she flew away for a few moments. Kat scanned the mud until she noticed a tiny amount of bubbles. Her hand swiped through it pulling off some sort of mudfish with lightning on its fins. Kat nodded and then returned... before hurling the fish through the edges of the time crack, hopefully catching a bunch of the threads.

Kat wasn’t sure what she expected, but what happened was that the fish continued on its standard arc for a while... and then right before it was scheduled to hit the ground, it was shifted backwards towards the crack. It then hopped around from section to section, closing in on the centre as the fish continued ’forward’ from its perspective. Eventually, as partly expected it caught fire and turned to ash after a serious of rather gruesome moments where it was torn apart and reformed over and over again.

"Alright so... survivable up to a certain point," Kat said with a nod.

"I... well... I mean... I guess you’re not wrong?" said Lily slowly. "It seemed to be fine until it hit some sort of critical mass and got caught, which dragged it in further... hmm... are these more like time whirlpools then?"

"Let’s not complicate things by changing the name," argued Appoline. "They are environmental hazards not potion ingredients, and as such, their name is mostly irrelevant."

"Can we afford to move through them? How far do they extend into the sky?" asked Kat. Lily pointed upwards and off to the side a bit. Squinting against the light Kat realised that she was pointing to another crack, one a good deal above the ground. "Well shit."

"I think we just have to go slowly, and it’s not like just turning back even can be the answer, there’s swamp all around us at this point and we’ll need to risk it at least a bit," sighed Lily. "It is best you carry us both still though Kat. It lets me put my full focus on finding the cracks as we move, and if Appoline isn’t walking nearby I can focus on a much smaller area."

"I don’t mind, though I’d request at least a few detours on the way..." accepted Appoline.

Kat sighed but nodded and soon they were all bundled together again. Appoline was in a princess carry, Lily was sitting on Appoline’s stomach, and Kat was flying just high enough to avoid touching the ground but nothing more. It wase easier to see the cracks against a backdrop of swamp then it was the sky.

Even still, progress was slow. Lily was able to detect the cracks all over the place, and often they were hiding behind some other shrub or under the water. Invisible, or lightly visible tendrils extended up and around until they could reach out and be a bother. The cracks themselves were mostly fist sized, but the tendrils were metres long and could reach a good distance away. This forced a far more care then they’d like... and then came the monsters.

The first to attack them was actually a sort of jellyfish thing, and it was actually living inside one of the cracks. They’d seen others, and that fish Kat had grabbed earlier might have been a monster, but none of them had attacked before now. The jellyfish on the other hand blended in with the crack, floating in the centre and mostly indistinguishable from it. Even its tendrils had adapted to look similar to the naturally generated ones of the crack.

Lily had been too focused on ensuring we didn’t hit any to really think about the fact that some of them didn’t have the same sort of wonky space signature the rest did. It meant that when Kat floated by ’comfortably’ out of range and two of them moved to capture her.

Kat had been on somewhat high alert, but that wasn’t quite enough to get her moving before one wrapped around her elbow, and the other around her wing. Kat was wrenched towards the crack as Lily got to work. Her shadow exploded outwards, shredding the tendrils... but that simply caused them to blur and warp until they were back together. They were at least no longer holding Kat.

That didn’t halt them entirely though. Kat was still falling away, and she had a moment to consider what to do. In the end, for once, Kat didn’t take the purely self-sacrificial move. Instead she flared her wings and slammed her tail into the ground below her. It was wet, squishy, and didn’t help much but it was something. The combination of all three meant that she was able to pull herself back even as further tendrils came to try and pull her back in.

Lily sent a flock of paper towards it, looking to drill into the jellyfish. Instead, they were all caught in the time crack... which was actually a good thing. Instead of them all trying to hit the jellyfish head on, instead they were all coming in from odd angles. Unlike other objects, they all still tried to hit the centre for some reason. The jelly took the hits, unable to dodge. Each time a paper plane drill into it, the monster shivered before reforming. Lily simply kept pumping mana into her spell.

In the end, it wasn’t the jelly that gave up but the time crack. It seemed that all this reforming and healing was actually eating away at the cracks power. They didn’t notice at first, but soon it was much smaller and the tendrils were all shrinking away. Seeing this, Kat started to send along a little bit of demonic fire with the paper planes. Something that signalled the end for the jellyfish as it burnt away, along with the crack.