The first thing I did was teleport behind the snake monster, then valiantly resisted the urge to say "nothing personnel, kid," because she wouldn't have understood the reference—and possibly not even my language in general—anyway. Once there, I decided to wait and observe, curious what the violet light would have done to me if it hit.
Instead of hitting a human, it struck a tree behind the spot I'd just been in, and the results, to the snake woman's credit, weren't that bad. Sure, I would have been distinctly unimpressed by having purple vines covered in thorns that leaked caustic-looking red fluid from their points extend from tears in reality and wrap around me, but the spell she'd used clearly wasn't some kind of annihilation beam, at least.
It did rather shred the tree up, however, and its trunk was about twice as wide as I was. Anything the caustic thorns touched let off hissing plumes of steam, and the bark of the tree blackened slightly.
So, a baseline human would have had a very bad time under its tender ministrations. Not necessarily lethal, I didn't think? But not nice either. I was far from baseline and thus suspected it wouldn't have been so bad for me, but the snake lady had no way of knowing that. She'd basically just tried to capture and inflict agony on me without a word of negotiation.
This time, her spinny disco ball thingie didn't need any time to recalibrate. Up close, I could see its lights better, and I suspected they were blinking in some kind of set pattern, like that one scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind where they communicated with the alien spaceship. Indeed, she must have read something from the way it was sparkling at her, because she aimed her sceptre over her shoulder without looking. The gem at its tip flared.
Not keen to test out how durable I was against those thorny branches, I decided to [Blink] to the other side of her and snatch the sceptre out of her hand.
It was as easy as stealing sweets from a toddler, physically speaking. When I put my mind to moving quick, the world slowed to a crawl. The snake lady appeared to be moving in slow motion, not even having the time to reflexively flinch to my sudden appearance. Her eyes didn't even twitch.
The sceptre felt oddly warm to the touch, like I was holding one of those heat packs. There was a subtle energy to it, too. An undercurrent, like electricity. The violet gem at its tip flared a little, and I swear I could almost feel its attention on me.
I already suspected what was going to happen long before it did. Unfortunately for the sceptre, I was already [Blink]ing away again before its purple vines could make it even an inch out of whatever weird dimension they came from.
I found myself pretty much back where I started, staring at the sceptre. There was a bit of lag, but it soon flared once more, then vines started to emerge from nowhere more, reaching for me in slow motion.
Ah, I see, I thought, nodding sagely to myself. You're booby-trapped, aren't you? You'll probably attack anyone who isn't your master.
Well, sorry, but I don't want you to attack me, and I obviously ain't giving you back to your master.
I took the sceptre in both hands, left hand at the end, right hand just below the gem. Then I brought it down with savage strength and snapped it over my knee. The gem was still glowing even after that, so I cupped it in my palms, then brought them together. It grumbled to tiny shards of dust with nary a blip of resistance. A little shockwave of purple energy shot out, ruffling my clothes.
[Achievement Unlocked: BM
You destroyed a weapon your enemy personally crafted.
Reward: Steal Item
Skill Already Unlocked]
Since I wasn't focusing so hard on getting things done quick anymore, the world resumed its usual pace. I winced as another sonic boom erupted through the jungle. I had been moving pretty fast.
To Snake Woman's credit, she had quick reflexes. Barely a second could have passed since the start of the "fight" in real time, and this would make it the second time she'd reacted to my manoeuvring almost instantly, taking in the information her disco ball was projecting in the blink of an eye.
Unfortunately for her, the second time she thrust her hand out at my new location, it was no longer holding the sceptre she had been carrying.
Her eyes widened as they stared at her empty hand, face falling slack in shock. I gave her a jaunty wave, then showed her my other hand, which was clutching the two halves of her sceptre.
It hadn't been a clean break. The strength with which I'd snapped it over my knee had kind of sent shards of the magical item flying all over the place, reducing it from a metre-ish long shaft of pale wood to two handles that were barely bigger than the width of my average male hands.
Snake Lady's expression quickly transitioned from bafflement into fury. She hissed a word that was almost certainly a curse in her snake-y language, then thrust her disco ball towards me. Not wanting to get cursed magic sparkles on myself, I [Blink]ed away once more, this time taking myself up into the canopy, balancing on a thin branch with the grace of an acrobat.
Which, sadly, kept me in line of sight of the disco ball. It was able to sparkle on me unimpeded, presumably following my mana signature or something, no need to spend even a moment hunting me down visually.
Multicoloured specks of light twinkled on my white shirt, then promptly caught fire.
Despite the fact I'd just thoroughly displayed my durability by smashing my way through over a thousand floors of solid rock that were each thick enough that you couldn't see through to the bottom of the hole I'd made from above, I'm ashamed to say I let out a little yelp of alarm. In my defence, my monkey brain hadn't had the chance to get over its primal fear of fire yet. Especially not multicoloured fire. Something about seeing yellow, pink, green, and black flames accompanying the typical red, even if they were all no larger than the flame you'd get from a cigarette lighter, made all my neurons band together to say, "NOPE! NOPE NOPE NOPE! DON'T LIKE THAT ONE BIT!"
Reflexes kicked in. My hands came up to slap at my shirt in a futile and ill-advised attempt to put it out.
And, in that action, I once again have to emphasise: monkey brain. We were thoroughly in panic mode, acting on primal instinct, and the fact I had rather heightened strength didn't even occur to me until a bone-shuddering boom exploded out when my hand impacted my own chest just above a little tongue of purple flame.
It quickly became apparently my mundane shirt was not as durable as I was. The same could be said for much of the jungle around me. Trees, dirt, and plants went flying, reduced to splinters or blown away by the omnidirectional shockwave that erupted from the point where hand met chest. My shirt practically disintegrated. I dropped a few metres to the now-barren ground with a dull thump.
Well. At least the fire's out, eh?
Looking around, seeing the destruction that spread for a couple of hundred metres around me, I could only let out a nervous chuckle. It wasn't all bad. I hadn't been able to put my full strength into such an awkward angle. It had been more like a light slap.
Something told me the Snake Lady, if she was even alive, wasn't going to see it that way. If trespassing in this place was enough for her to attack me on sight, how would she react to the destruction I'd just wrought? I had a feeling she wouldn't accept "it was an accident!" as a valid excuse.
[Levitate] pulled me back up into the air, and I spent a few minutes looking around. Even with my visual acuity, I didn't see much in the way of snake women slithering around the destroyed section of oasis, and there was simply too much still-intact jungle to search through in any reasonable time frame.
Luckily, I had cheats. Lots of cheats. Too many cheats, one could say.
When I sought out abilities that would let me track her down, I was spoiled for choice, leaving me dithering for a few extra seconds that could be crucial; I already knew she could cover ground like a race car even in dense terrain, and every moment I wasted could mean she got back to her snake tribe or whatever to organise an angry mob.
Not something I wanted to deal with, even if I suspected I could deal with it quite handily. If nothing else, the battle—if it could even be called a battle—had showed me I stood head and shoulders above this particular denizen of the 1,792nd floor, at least in terms of pure power. Only my stupidity and inexperience had let her disco ball land that shot on me, and it hadn't really even done anything.
If I'm honest, it was a little disappointing. Part of me had been hoping there'd be challenges to face up here. Let's be real, I could have wrecked that snakey bint's shit if I had really wanted to. I could have messed her all the way up. She literally wouldn't have known what hit her.
Anyway, I eventually decided on [Detect Life], but that turned out to be a bust as there was quite a lot of life around me, to put it mildly. A bit more trial and error eventually lead me to [Instinct of the Hunting God], which let me designate a previously encountered target and allow me to, well, hunt them.
As soon as I activated the Spell, a fey awareness appeared in my mind, pulling my attention in a specific direction. Following its lead, I narrowed my eyes, which somehow served to zoon in my sight, only to find the area of jungle it was trying to direct me towards was too dense to see through with the naked eye, even ridiculously enhanced.
[X-Ray Vision] sorted that out simply enough, and I was able to see the snake woman slithering away through the trees at great speed. She appeared to be clutching her disco ball to her chest, and there was a frantic energy to her movements. Glancing over her shoulder every few seconds, I was able to see the naked terror in her eyes. There were even tears on her cheeks.
Man. Now I kinda felt bad. Like I was bullying some dumb kid.
Then I remembered that she'd attacked me first with no warning, and decided that dumb kid could go fuck itself, actually. Fuck around and find out, scrub.
Activating [Blink], I teleported into her path and adopted the cheesiest grin I could muster.
"Ready to talk, Snakey?"