Origin Witch - Acid From the Sky

“Let’s see if your thick scales like acid,” Corinne whispered to the wind. She hung suspended thirty feet above the bubbling swamp floor, her Zephyr Float talent holding her weightless in the cool evening wind. Her dead legs dangled beneath her dark gray linen tunic, her bare toes hovering above the broad, thorny leaves of a giant mangrove root.

Dusk over the northern mud-swamp hadn’t brought shadows. It had brought a heavy, sulfur-yellow mist that rolled off the black mire like steam from a wet kettle. Her black frames sat snug against her nose, their blue-tinted lenses highlighting three massive shapes moving through the black mud below her. Through the special glass, three crimson text boxes flared in her vision:

[Mud-Swamp Hydrake (Grade-D Monster)] [Level: 8] [Health: 450 / 450] [Properties: Ultra-Thick Scaly Hide / Acidic Mud Breath / High Physical Resistance] [Yield: 1x Grade-D Monster Core, 40 lbs Drake Meat, 1x Corrosive Spine]

The creatures were huge, fifteen feet long, with broad, flat heads like snapping turtles and thick, armored bodies covered in dark green scales as wide as dinner plates. They dragged themselves through the black ooze using four heavy, webbed claws, their tails whipping through the water with a sound like wet leather striking stone. This was the northern boundary line, the uncharted swamp where General Caldwell’s scouting vanguard had set up their armored outposts two miles to the west.

Corinne reached into her Pouch of Preservation. Her fingers bypassed her standard health and mana vials, closing around four round, yellow glass throw-tubes sitting in her leather utility belt:

2x Grade-E Corrosive Slowness Decoctions

2x Grade-E High-Yield Explosive Charges

She steered herself forward using her hands, drifting silently through the high swamp branches until she was hovering directly over the largest Hydrake’s flat head. The beast didn’t look up. Its small, yellow eyes were fixed on a dead swamp stag trapped in the mud ten feet ahead, its thick nostrils blowing bubbles of gray mud as it dragged its heavy belly forward.

Corinne opened her fingers, releasing the first yellow glass tube, a Corrosive Slowness Decoction. The vial dropped thirty feet through the yellow mist.

The charge landed with a wet smack and a tearing rip of flesh.

The glass tube shattered flat against the Hydrake’s dark green head scales. At once a thick, mustard-yellow cloud of pressurized acid mist erupted across a ten-foot radius, adhering violently to the beast’s scaly hide, eyes, and nostrils. The Hydrake let out a deafening, gurgling roar, a sound like a foghorn blowing through wet gravel, as the 30-point acid damage ate through its thick outer scales in seconds. Yellow smoke rose off its snout as its Agility attribute dropped by 3 Points. Its heavy claws twitched against the black mud, but its massive body froze, unable to drag its weight through the ooze.

The other two Hydrakes spun around in the mire, their long tails whipping the black mud into a frenzy as they looked for the attacker. They looked at the bushes. They looked at the river bank. They didn’t look up.

Corinne hung suspended thirty-five feet above their heads, her white tunic dress clean and dry, her face blank behind her wire frames. “Target locked,” she said softly.

She pulled two round yellow vials from her bag, the new, reinforced Grade-E High-Yield Explosive Charges packed with refined sulfur dust and volcanic worm fluid. She leaned her torso forward, adjusted her aim by three inches, and dropped both vials simultaneously. Two seconds of free fall.

The blast came as a single concussive crack.

A blinding, sulfurous orange flash erupted in the center of the swamp mire, accompanied by a heavy, concussive shockwave that sent black mud and shattered mangrove roots flying forty feet into the air. The sixty-point dual kinetic explosion hit the three trapped Hydrakes simultaneously.

Two quick reports cracked out, one after the other.

The lead Hydrake’s flat head was smashed sideways into the mud, its upper snout cracked wide open, dark red blood spraying across the yellow acid foam. The second beast was thrown onto its back, its webbed claws flailing uselessly in the air as its soft belly scales burned with bright, oily yellow flames. The third Hydrake, blind with rage and pain, opened its massive jaws and sprayed a twenty-foot jet of pressurized black mud into the surrounding bushes, trying to strike an invisible enemy. The mud hit the empty reeds fifty feet away, accomplishing nothing.

Corinne didn’t waste a second. She reached into her bag, pulled out three Flame Potions, and dropped them in a tight triangular pattern around the thrashing beasts.

The explosion rolled into a gust of hot, displaced air.

An eight-hundred-degree pool of liquid orange fire erupted across the surface of the swamp mire, clinging to the Hydrakes’ scaly hides, burning through the thick black mud like oil on a stove. The heat washed up forty feet into the air, drying the cold swamp mist on Corinne’s cheeks in a fraction of a second. Down in the burning mire, the lead Hydrake let out one final, shuddering gurgle, its heavy head sinking flat into the boiling black mud.

System Notification: Grade-D Monster ‘Mud-Swamp Hydrake’ slain. Experience Allocated: +150 Points. Level Up Available: Lv1 -> Lv2.

Corinne didn’t check her level-up prompt. She kept her eyes on the second and third beasts as the orange fire ate through their belly scales, dropping two more explosive vials into the center of the flames until the roaring and thrashing stopped.

Ten minutes later, the swamp mire was quiet. The orange flames had died down to a low, blue flicker that floated on the surface of the black water, smelling strongly of burned scales, sulfur, and cooked meat. Three massive, charred shapes lay motionless in the mud.

Corinne activated Zephyr Float, lowering her body down through the blue smoke until her bare feet hovered three inches above the floating ash. She pulled her Moonstone Carver from her belt, the transparent crystal blade shimmering with a sharp, pale blue light under the moonlight. She drifted over to the lead Hydrake’s charred head. Using her Strength +30 boost, she drove the crystal knife straight into the base of the beast’s skull, slicing through the thick, burned scales like wet leather.

Pry. Twist.

A walnut-sized, glowing dark-green crystal popped out of the skull cavity, landing in her gloved palm. Through her spectacles, the blue text box flared in her vision:

[Grade-D Monster Core (Green)] [Properties: High-Density Earth/Acid Mana Core] [Application: Primary requirement for Tier-4 High-Tower upgrade, Grade-D Alchemical Arrays, and High-Tier Core Enchantments.]

Grade-D Core 1 of 10.

Corinne’s fingers closed tight around the cold green crystal, her cracked lips curving into a slow, sharp smile. She moved to the second carcass, then the third, extracting two more glowing green cores from their skulls before harvesting sixty pounds of thick, high-density drake meat and three intact corrosive spinal cords. She packed the loot into her Pouch of Preservation, wiped the dark blood off her crystal blade against a mangrove leaf, and pushed off the muddy ground.

She rose forty yards straight up into the night sky, hovering high above the dark tree canopy of Sector 666. To the west, two miles away across the black swamp, the torchlights of General Caldwell’s armored outposts were visible through the trees, a neat, orderly line of wooden watchtowers and iron palisades. Corinne adjusted her black frames, looking at the distant torchlights through her blue-tinted lenses, her white dress fluttering in the cool night wind, her spatial bag heavy with three Grade-D cores and twenty vials of liquid fire.

“Keep your tower shields up, General,” she whispered to the cold sky, her voice swallowed by the wind as she turned east toward The Spire. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Dust hung in the humid air of the hundred-meter oak trunk, a dry gray fog that coated the back of Corinne’s tongue with the taste of crushed limestone and old bark. She wiped her left cheek against her shoulder, leaving a smear of dark mud across her gray tunic. Floating three inches above the floorboards of her third-floor bedroom, her dead legs hung beneath her hem, swinging slightly whenever she shifted her weight to adjust her spectacles.

On the Magic Desk screen near her hip, the golden upgrade interface was flashing a steady, blinding light that illuminated the entire room in warm yellow waves.

The Spire – Tier-4 Structural Evolution Requirements Status:

– Wood Logs: 100,000 / 100,000 (Complete)

– Cut Stone Blocks: 10,000 / 10,000 (Complete)

– Black Obsidian Blocks: 100 / 100 (Complete)

– D-Rank Fire Element Essence: 10 / 10 (Complete)

– Grade-D Monster Core: 10 / 10 (Complete)

Every single box was checked. Ten Grade-D monster cores, glowing green crystals she’d extracted from the skulls of the three Mud-Swamp Hydrakes yesterday, lay arranged in a neat circle on her worktable alongside the five remaining Fire Element Essences Garrett Thorne’s haulers had brought up from the Charcoal Trench.

Corinne reached out, her fingers hovering half an inch above the glowing gold [Execute Upgrade] button. Her hand trembled. Just a little. A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch in her knuckles that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with forty-eight straight hours of continuous potion brewing. If she pressed this button, The Spire wouldn’t just be a comfortable wooden treehole with three floors and a balcony. It would transform into an outright fortress, a fifty-foot stone-and-timber spire integrated directly into the heartwood of the ancient giant oak. A landmark visible for five miles across the canopy of Sector 666.

“Visible means a target,” she muttered to the quiet room, her voice raspy from inhaling sulfur fumes.

Steelwool let out a low click-click from its perch on the window sill, its big amber eyes tracking her hand. The owl chick’s steel-gray feathers were fluffed against the cool draft coming through the balcony door, its small beak twitching as if it could sense the massive surge of latent energy sitting inside the Magic Desk.

Corinne took a slow breath, held it until her ribs throbbed, and brought her thumb down flat on the glass screen. Press.

For two seconds, nothing happened. The amber light of her hanging lantern didn’t even flicker. Then, deep beneath her floating body, thirty yards down in the dark earth where the giant oak’s roots gripped the granite bedrock, the world split open with a sound like a freight train slamming into a stone wall.

The stone settled with a deep, grinding thud.

The entire tree groaned, a heavy, vibrating bass tone that rattled Corinne’s teeth in her skull. The three-story wooden sanctuary didn’t just shake. It expanded outward in a violent, terrifying surge. The floorboards beneath her floating torso split, slid, and re-aligned with loud, sharp CRACKS that sounded like rifle shots.

Corinne’s Zephyr Float held her weightless in mid-air, but the sudden air displacement knocked the wind right out of her lungs. She grabbed Steelwool off the sill with her left hand, tucking the screaming owl chick tightly against her ribs while her right hand held fast to the hilt of her Moonstone Carver.

The transformation was horrific and magnificent all at once. Outside the third-floor glass balcony, the broad oak branches weren’t breaking. They were fusing. The hundred-foot obsidian blocks she’d stored on the ground floor dissolved into rivers of black, glassy liquid that crept up the inner walls like liquid night, coating the wood in a three-inch layer of shock-absorbent, fireproof armor. The granite blocks from Garrett Thorne’s quarry swept upward, forming massive, reinforced stone buttresses that wrapped around the outer trunk, interlocking with the living bark to create a fifty-foot defensive curtain wall.

The Spire grew. First floor: expanded from eighty square meters to a sprawling two hundred square meters, its floor reinforced with smooth black obsidian slabs, built specifically for heavy storage and high-volume material containment. Second floor: turned into a massive, industrial-grade alchemy laboratory fitted with sixteen independent stone array stations, automated Anseic water lines, and an integrated ventilation chimney that vented straight out through the upper canopy. Third floor: transformed into an expansive master suite and study, complete with floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors, an expanded observation terrace, and an armor-plated door frame.

And then came the new levels. A fourth story burst upward through the oak canopy, a hundred-square-meter automated botanical greenhouse covered by a dome of thick, heat-treated glass panes, fitted with soil troughs, temperature-control glyphs, and internal irrigation channels. Above the greenhouse, a fifth story rose like a narrow, pointed crown, a twenty-meter high observation tower and spell-turret, offering a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the entire northern swamp and southern ridge.

A crack and a heavy thud. The final stone buttress locked into place. The violent shaking stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving behind a silence so absolute Corinne could hear the blood pounding in her own ears. The gray construction dust drifted through the air, thick and warm, smelling of fresh pine sap, melted obsidian, scorched granite, and ozone.

A golden system announcement banner, glowing with an intensity that burned through the haze, flared across her spectacled vision:

Global Notice: Sector 666 individual ‘Corinne Mercer’ has successfully evolved her sanctuary into a Tier-4 High Fortress! Structure Classification: ‘The Witch’s Spire’ Defensive Rating: Grade-C (Sustains direct physical and magical bombardment up to Grade-C Max). Reward Allocation Unlocked. Please choose your bonus category: [Tools] [Spells] [Items] [Knowledge]

Corinne didn’t even glance at the public chatroom, which was undoubtedly erupting into a frenzy of panicked messages across the sector. She tapped [Knowledge]. A thick, heavy grimoire bound in dark blue sea-drake hide, wrapped with iron clasps, materialized on her small desk screen. Advanced Transmutation & Element Fusion (Volume I).

Corinne picked up the heavy book, setting it carefully inside her spatial bag, then floated down through the newly constructed heartwood staircase to inspect her new domain. The Spire was no longer a treehole. It was a monolith. The walls were five feet thick, a seamless fusion of ancient oak, dark granite, and polished black obsidian that felt cool, solid, and utterly immovable to the touch. The air inside was crisp, filtered continuously by internal air-vane runes that pulled fresh oxygen from the upper canopy while venting potion fumes out through the top chimney.

She drifted up to the fourth floor to inspect the greenhouse. The room was bathed in warm, golden sunlight streaming through the massive glass dome overhead. Twelve long, oak-lined soil troughs were arranged in neat rows across the floorboards, filled two feet deep with rich, black forest humus. Along the western wall, the D-Rank Fire Element Essence she’d buried earlier was glowing softly beneath the dirt, keeping the soil at a steady, tropical thirty degrees Celsius.

“Ten Fire-Bell plants,” she whispered, looking at the tiny green shoots already sprouting through the warm earth. “And twenty room slots left for wild herbs.”

She reached into her pocket, pulled out the small glass jar containing the Elven Monarch Chrysalis she’d scavenged from Thane’s cellar weeks ago, and laid it gently on the wooden edge of the central soil trough. The silver-wrapped cocoon inside the glass sat motionless under the bright sunlight. Corinne adjusted her spectacles, her blue-tinted lenses highlighting the requirements for hatching the S-Rank beast:

[Elven Monarch Chrysalis (Grade-S)] [Hatching Requirements:]

– 1x High-Density Water Element Environment (Complete – Anseic Water Line Connected)

– 1x Pure Mana Crystal / Element Core (Pending)

– Ambient Botanical Density > 80% (Pending)

“We need more plants,” she said to Steelwool, who was currently sniffing a clump of warm dirt in the nearest trough. “And a lot more water.”

She opened her private channel with Jasper Finch.

[Corinne]: The Tier-4 evolution is complete.

The response came back in less than two seconds, accompanied by a string of exclamation marks. Jasper said his haulers on the southern ridge could see her Spire’s glass dome rising forty feet above the canopy from three miles away, like an obsidian lighthouse in the green ocean, and that General Caldwell’s scouts in Sector 665 had definitely seen it too, already repositioning three heavy catapult units toward the border.

[Corinne]: Let them look. Tell Piper Bell to send up every wild seedling and live herb root she has in her storage. I want this greenhouse filled by tonight.

Jasper asked about Caldwell, who was moving five hundred armored men toward the ridge as they spoke.

[Corinne]: Tell Garrett Thorne to fall back to the Spire’s outer perimeter. We’ll fight them under my glass dome.

She closed the messaging thread, turning her eyes to the massive glass dome overhead. Outside, far beneath the high observation tower of The Witch’s Spire, the vast, green forest of Sector 666 stretched out into the distance, quiet, dark, and waiting for the storm that was about to hit its borders. Corinne pulled her Moonstone Carver from her waist, held the cool crystal blade against her palm, and began preparing the soil for her new garden.

— Origin Witch —