Piercing the clouds above, a mound of multicolored food extended upwards and outwards. A true mountain, it was easily ten miles high. Tumbling avalanches of produce ran down its sides. The entire thing was made out of fruits and vegetables, enough to feed an entire country. Jonathan could barely make out the individual pieces of fruit, the apples, bananas, and whatever other strange fruits were native to these parts.
Surrounding the mountain was a series of golden walls made from stalks of corn as tall as trees. They stretched out for almost five hundred miles in every direction from the center of the realm.
While he was surprised to see some foodstuffs that he recognized from Earth, most were a mystery. He hadn’t really seen much of the food that the vast majority of Telvaria’s inhabitants had to eat, as he had reached Tier 2 far faster than most. Most of the shapes and colors were lost on him. For the most part they looked simply like the produce from any market on Earth, only warped noticeably.
“You going to stand there ogling the apples, or are we going to move?” Eliza asked. She kept looking back and forth between Jonathan and the mountain, frowning.
“How did you even see that there were apples there?” Jonathan replied. “I thought you didn’t have that sharp of an eyesight.”
“You were muttering to yourself about Earth,” Eliza explained. “Something about how it was strange that this realm still had apples.”
Jonathan tilted his head. “Oh. That’s strange. I guess when it comes to Earth, I still have a bit of a tendency to lose my train of thought.”
Eliza nodded knowingly. “Until we’ve been here as long as we lived on Earth, it still won’t really be home. Everything we ever knew and loved lived on that tiny ball of rock, in a universe far from this one.”
Stolen story; please report.
Jonathan sighed sadly. “Yes. If we ever want to see it again, or at least get out of the Hells, we need to do our damndest to escape.” He turned his gaze to where the Great Farmer lurked. “First order of business is killing that monster.”
Jonathan gathered a few thousand points of stamina to his legs. He could have used more, but considering that he had nearly unlimited Void energy to sustain his flight, it was better off like this.
His legs burned like torches, red light painting the world around. Then he leaped. With a noise like a bomb, the mountaintop exploded in every direction.
Eliza did the same, and the two flew like arrows across the sky. The wind whipped by at supersonic speeds, enough to tear a normal human apart in an instant. To them, it was like a light breeze.
The air couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough, and it started to burn up before them. Like comets descending from the heavens, the two warriors streaked towards the Great Farmer.
The halcyon corn maze below blurred by. It was filled with thousands of monsters and demons, but it seemed that Jonathan had completely circumvented its intended purpose.
A shimmering barrier of nearly invisible force extended up from the tops of the maze walls for nearly a mile. It closed in at its peak, making it impossible to exit the maze from the inside. It was partially why Jonathan had decided to overshoot it.
Their ascension into the sky did not go unnoticed by those on the ground. Jonathan watched as a massive ballista mounted on the side of the Great Farmer’s mountain swiveled to face them. The bolt was tipped with flickering green energy, the light of Life. It was tinged with corruption, of a sense of Life rampaging unbound by any natural laws. It was an energy that Jonathan recognized vaguely. It was the conceptual nature of cancer, of life spreading without bounds. If that hit him, it would fill his body with tumors until he crushed himself within his armor.
The ballista fired with a thunderous twang, like a bow the size of a house was being fired. In reality, that wasn’t far from the truth. A comet-like tail of air pressure followed the bolt as it broke through the sound barrier. Jonathan and Eliza pushed each other out for the way with flat blocks of their elemental energy.
