Overlord Tamer: All My Pet Monsters Have God Potential

Chapter 216: Picnic & Action

The next stretch of days became, against all reasonable expectation, fun.The fourth terrace nearly ended in disaster before it started, when an innocuous-looking meadow of silver flowers turned out to be a single organism, and the whole field tried to digest Jibril the moment she sat down to rest. She came up sputtering, covered head to toe in faintly glowing sap, screaming threats at a meadow that could not possibly hear her, while Yuna laughed so hard she fell over.

"It’s not funny," Jibril snapped, wringing sap out of her hair.

"It’s a little funny," Azelis said, not even trying to hide her smile.

"Sap. Suits you," John said. "Very shiny."

Jibril’s answering glare could have melted stone. It didn’t stop the whole group from teasing her about it for the next two days straight, and it didn’t stop her from getting her revenge by dunking John face-first into a river three terraces later, claiming it was an accident with a completely straight face that fooled absolutely no one.

The fifth terrace held a colony of stone-shelled crabs the size of houses that turned out to be entirely harmless, gentle grazers who took an immediate and baffling liking to Terravax, following him around in a slow, clattering parade until he finally sat down and let three of them climb onto his shell for a nap.

"You’ve made friends," John said, grinning.

Terravax rumbled something that sounded suspiciously like smugness.

The sixth terrace threw a real scare at them, a flash flood of the uphill silver river reversing without warning and nearly sweeping Yuna and Emberlune off a narrow ledge, and it took Volkia’s full flight speed and Levi’s void-threads working together to haul them both to safety in time. Afterward, soaked and shaking and laughing with the particular giddy relief of people who’d nearly died and hadn’t, they made camp early and told stories around the fire until well past when any of them should have slept.

It was, John thought more than once, watching Azelis actually laugh at one of Yuna’s terrible jokes, one of the best weeks he’d had in longer than he could easily remember. Danger and wonder and family, tangled together the way they always seemed to be for him.

The seventh terrace was where it stopped being fun.

They felt it before they saw it, a pressure that made the earlier terraces’ saturation feel like a light breeze by comparison, thick enough that even breathing normally took conscious effort.

"That’s not ambient energy anymore," Azelis said quietly, all humor gone from her voice.

"That’s a presence," John finished, already scanning. Inspect tried to resolve whatever was ahead and returned nothing but a flat warning.

[Rank exceeds safe assessment threshold.]

"Chuthulos," John murmured, "walk me through something. What actually happens when a monster hits the top of Calamity-rank and just... stays there? For a long time?"

Chuthulos’s voice answered inside his head, uncharacteristically grave.

"You’ve heard of them, even if you didn’t know the name. The Ancient Ones. Monsters who reach the ninth stage of Calamity and then simply keep living. A hundred years. A thousand. Some, over a million. Their bodies can’t grow any stronger, brother John. The law is absolute on that point, no monster crosses into what would be Demi-God rank, not through strength, not through age, not through anything at all. But their minds keep going. Comprehension doesn’t have the same ceiling their bodies do."

"So they get smarter instead of stronger."

"They get smarter until ’stronger’ stops mattering," Chuthulos said. "Some of the oldest ones comprehend a genuine Law, the same kind of fundamental principle a Prime God might wield, just scaled down to fit inside a body that can’t hold more raw power than it already has. A monster like that isn’t just the strongest thing at Calamity-9. It’s arguably the strongest thing in this entire layer of existence that isn’t already a god. And it can never leave. Never ascend. Just exists, at the ceiling, forever. That’s why the places that house such monsters are called forbidden zones."

John absorbed that in silence for a moment.

"That’s not what’s ahead of us, is it?"

"No," Chuthulos said, something like relief coloring his voice. "What’s ahead is young. A century, perhaps two. Freshly capped at ninth-calamity, still adjusting to its own ceiling, which is exactly the kind of temperament that makes a creature furious rather than wise. Be careful regardless. Young or old, ninth-calamity is ninth-calamity."

John relayed all of it to the others in low, quick words, and every face turned serious.

"So somewhere in this crater," Yuna said slowly, "there might be something a million years old that’s smarter than a god and can never leave."

"Somewhere," John agreed. "Not today, hopefully. Today we’ve got the young, angry kind."

They didn’t have to wait long to find out exactly how angry.

It came from below, not ahead, erupting out of the terrace floor in a spray of shattered stone and silver dust, a serpentine mass of obsidian scales and too many limbs, jaws unhinging wide enough to swallow Terravax whole.

There was no warning growl, no telegraphed lunge. One moment the ground was solid. The next, death was already in the air, closing on all five of them at once with speed that shouldn’t have belonged to something so large.

"SCATTER!" John roared, and they did, instinct honed by every fight since the Labyrinth carrying them apart in half a heartbeat before the serpent’s first strike crushed the empty ground where they’d been standing into a smoking crater.

"It’s fast," Jibril gasped, already weaving Razewater into a defensive shell. "Way too fast for its size!"

"Everyone, on me!" John shouted, and even as the serpent whipped around for a second strike, something crystallized in his mind, a plan formed in the space of a single breath. "We hit it once, all together, everything we’ve got, and we hit it before it resets!"

"With what?" Azelis called, already moving to flank left. "It’s ninth-calamity, John, our normal output isn’t—"

"Eldritch Energy," John cut in. "Overcharge. Feed your strikes with it directly, don’t hold anything back, we melt through whatever gap we get and we don’t get a second chance to be subtle!"

There was no time to argue the wisdom of it. The serpent surged forward again, and this time all five Tamers and every one of their Monsters moved as a single organism rather than a group, drawing on the crystallized shards they’d been carrying since the Labyrinth and pouring that raw, concentrated power directly into whatever they were about to do next.

Jibril’s Razewater blade ignited with violet light, the water inside it turning dense and strange, humming with borrowed power that had no business existing in something so small.

Yuna’s Wraithbound Convergence split not into two overlapping states but three, her control screaming under the strain, Emberlune’s own fire blazing incandescent as it drank down its own share of Eldritch Energy.

Azelis’s Shadow Ink stopped looking like darkness at all, becoming something closer to a tear in reality itself, Volkia’s plated wings crackling with the same overcharged current.

Terravax planted himself directly in the serpent’s path, absorbing its next strike point-blank, his shell glowing white-hot from the energy flooding through his own body, buying the fraction of a second everyone else needed.

And John, Feralsteel claws extended, Chronolight and Voidspace both bleeding into the black starlight patterns already crawling up his arms, felt the Eldritch Energy answer his own nature like recognizing like, amplifying not just his strength but the fundamental wrongness of what his attribute already was.

Alfred howled beside him, matching the surge perfectly.

They struck as one.

Five separate attacks converged on the serpent’s exposed flank in the same immeasurable instant, water and shadow and fire and void and raw Eldritch chaos overlapping into something that stopped being five techniques and became, for one blinding heartbeat, a single overwhelming statement.

The serpent didn’t even finish its next strike.

Light tore through its entire body from the point of impact outward, and for a moment its massive form simply hung there in the air, obsidian scales cracking apart like shattering glass, before it collapsed all at once into a heap of dissolving matter, leaving behind only a single dense, pulsing core where its chest had been.

Silence rang louder than the fight had.

"Did we just," Jibril started, staring at the wreckage, "one-shot a ninth-calamity monster?"

"We did," John said, breathless, already moving to retrieve the core with hands that weren’t quite steady. "Don’t get used to it. That cost more than it looks like it did."

As if summoned by the thought, Chuthulos’s voice cut in sharply.

"Brother John. Check your Eldritch Energy reserves. Now."

John did, and winced.

"That’s... a lot less than I expected to spend."

"That overcharge technique is powerful precisely because it’s wasteful," Chuthulos said, stern in a way he rarely allowed himself to be. "You just burned through nearly a fifth of everything you’ve gathered in a single exchange. Use it like that again and you won’t have enough left to craft a single gear, let alone four."

"Noted," John said, tucking the core away with considerably more care than he’d shown grabbing it. "Emergency technique only, then. We need two more cores. Let’s find them the old-fashioned way this time. Patience, positioning, and not panicking when something the size of a house tries to eat us."

The next two hunts went considerably smoother, armed now with the knowledge of what they were dealing with and the hard-earned discipline not to reach for the overcharge unless there was no other option.

The second ninth-calamity, a lumbering, four-armed brute wreathed in crackling storm energy, fell to a slow, methodical war of attrition, Terravax and Volkia trading tanking duty while Jibril and Azelis wore down its defenses layer by layer until John and Yuna finished it together in a coordinated strike that cost far less energy and far more time.

The third, a swift, feathered predator that hunted in the high canopy of the eighth terrace’s crystal forest, very nearly slipped away entirely before Pymon ran it down mid-flight, and Levi’s void-threads finally grounded it long enough for the rest of the group to close in.

By the time the third core settled into John’s storage beside the other two, exhaustion had carved itself into every one of them, but it was, once again, the satisfied kind.

"Three cores," John said that evening, laying them out on a cloth beside the campfire, each one pulsing with its own dense, individual light. "Enough for the ignition components. Frames, attribute materials, housing, cores. That’s everything the Forge needs."

"So what now?" Yuna asked, leaning against Emberlune’s flank. "Back to Monster Paradise?"

John looked out at the deepening dark of the crater, at the mist-wall still churning far below where something ancient and unimaginably patient had been waiting, quite possibly, since before any of them were born.

"Not yet," he said, a slow grin spreading across his face. "We’ve got what we need for the gears. Now it’s time to do the part I actually enjoy."

He stood, brushing dust from his knees, and looked around at the four of them, at all eight of his own Monsters resting nearby, at the vast, glittering danger of the Expanse still stretching out ahead.

"Alright," he said. "Now it’s time to start capturing and taming, and giving the monsters who are willing to join us a fair contract."