Chapter 899 (2/2)

”Something wrong? You seem... wrinkly.” Shual said suddenly. ”More than usual.”

Slightly shocked, Randidly glanced back toward the Frogperson he was carrying in his root basket. Almost immediately, the young frog ducked his head in embarrassment and hid his face behind the lip of the basket. ”Uh... sorry. I just... Well, I'll just be here I guess… If you have any more questions...”

Randidly thought about responding, but it seemed foolish to involve himself overmuch with any individual person. Even someone so young as Shual. After all, those that he touched-

-luminous sapphire eyes looked at him out of a hunger panged faced. ”What's the point? Without money, me and my brother...Our lives mean nothing…”

”What comes next will be important,” Randidly said gruffly, cutting off his train of thought. ”Especially if we want to avoid war with our two worlds. For all that we are powerful... a world is a wide place. The human who crossed to this place must be stopped before something further can be incited.”

While Shual mulled that over, Randidly pressed himself even harder to the task of accelerating. In his mind, he imagined his Yggdrasil being planted with every one of his steps. Golden Roots spiraled downward, slowly crisscrossing and building a network to siphon energy up from this world and allow Randidly to shoot across the countryside in a flash.

As more and more Golden Roots filled the world, a grand specter of the trunk of the World Tree began to faintly appear in the sky. Its bark glittered and its leaves spread open to the bare sky. Likely no one noticed due to the heavy cloud cover, but from that specter, Randidly was able to draw more and more strength. His speed increased further and further until he was going almost 50% faster than he had been previously.

It was like that, five hours later, that Randidly's almost constant Aether scans finally caught the whiff of a trace of Earth’s Aether. It was a small morsel, but it was the first he found. Instantly, his direction shifted a little bit to the East.

Very quickly, it was clear that he was making a beeline for another Deep City. Shual explained the relevance and history of the place, glad to be given relevance once more. But it all flowed past Randidly’s ears.

Gritting his teeth, Randidly began to slow. People mean trouble. Mean innocent lives that might end...But when he arrived, he was delighted to discover that the trail was already leaving the city. And it was fresh.

Very fresh.

So fresh that Randidly simply grinned and accelerated toward the lagoon. Such was the force of his momentum that he could see some people in the shallows look up in confusion at the noise of his passage. With the amount of speed that he had, he likely sounded like a roaring typhoon.

As the Frogpeople's faces split from confusion into abject horror, Randidly leaped, cresting a high jump directly over the lagoon and crashing to the ground with a wave of mud and water that soaked the unfortunate Frogpeople that were standing on the other side. Just as they were on his prior arrival to a lagoon, these people were helplessly washed away by the wave of debris he created.

This time, Randidly acknowledged that part of the issue was how sudden his arrival was. He simply moved too quickly. It wasn't that these Frogpeople weren't strong; his scans indicated that the average Level here was in the Forties. He simply took them unawares.

Truly, a war against this world would be difficult. He had seen almost a thousand people in his rapid cross country trek, and that was only the average citizens of this world. Considering the fact that all of the Toad Lords likely had elites underneath them that could rival a capable group from Earth, the frogs would not go quietly into this good night.

And with the looming threat of this Architect Toad Lord that Randidly wasn’t able to find on such short notice...

Donnyton Squads would be able to hold the line against foes of this caliber, and Randidly didn't doubt that other Villages had tried their best in order to catch up to that Level. But it was a numbers game; he had heard in their talks that the current Earth's population was likely nearing twenty million. But most of that was from projections Mrs. Hamilton had gathered from their Zone 32.

If the refugee survival rate was vastly lower in other Zones, it might be closer to five million. Or if the population from the newly arrived Zones was much higher than Zone 32, which seemed likely, it was possible that they had as many as fifty million. Yet that was still a fraction of the population Earth had before.

And most people would get a Class, but not everyone would grow that way. Most simply would get Skills related to their trade and focus on Skill Levels. Which would unlock them Paths and further Skills, but they wouldn't experience as much Stat and Attribute growth. After all, there weren't many people that could replicate the amount of Skills that Randidly had used in order to gain the stats he needed. It simply wasn't possible for the average person to earn that many Skills without having access to more Aether than was present in the air. It would start mild, but Randidly remembered Sam talking about passing out from Aether Deprivation.

That wasn’t a pretty sickness to go through. It left the body exhausted and ravaged. It was a diet that you couldn’t stop until your Aether cannibalized itself.

Randidly pressed his eyes shut even as he accelerated away from the lagoon and toward his goal. More and more strength flooded downward from the image of the World Tree to accelerate him forward.

Finish it now. Finish it quickly.