Guardians of Terraria II: The World of Calamity

Episode 21.1 - A Fabulous Palate

He could hear it coming.

William glanced around the dank purple tunnels, listening to the crunching and digging in the walls. He turned, his prismatic sword swinging upwards right as a big brown worm burst out from the ceiling. The Eater of Worlds – a creature with eyes all along its diseased body and sharp teeth bordering the maw at its front.

But it was surprisingly weak. Two swings of his sword burst the Eater's head, spraying guck everywhere. The new front of the rest of its body morphed into a new head, but as it lunged downward William just sliced again, ripping that head clean too. And so on, as the rest of the worm kept on trying to make its way towards him, until he had worked its way along its entire length and sliced the worm's tail in half. It fell completely to pieces, items raining down into his inventory. Demonite ore and Shadow Scales, just like what the Recipe Browsing Tablet had promised this boss would drop.

"That was easy," he muttered to himself. He'd been fully ready and willing to drink a recall potion to get out of there if he'd needed. But that boss had fallen apart so easily he reckoned he'd rather fight ten of those than one Slime God.

That thought caused him to cast his mind back to that intense battle.

A couple of weeks had passed since then. They had settled in the village and were now using it as a base, naming the settlement 'Slimetown' after the boss they had fought to purify the lands around it.

Now having a place to call home again, William and his friends had begun properly exploring the world. He felt a bit more at ease now with a safe home to return to and no longer feeling like he was on the run from the murderous and powerful Lord Yharim.

But Slimetown wasn't their true home.

And this world wasn't their own.

The first thing they'd done after the Slime God's defeat was repair all the damage on the houses, patching them up with wood and stone, and getting the citizens settled in. They'd allocated the largest building in the centre of Slimetown as their storage area.

There'd been some odd items left in chests sprinkled throughout the rest of the village, but not enough that really gave any hints or indication as to who had lived in Slimetown or anything about this world. One item that Sid had greatly appreciated finding was the Black Hawk Remote, a summon weapon that spawned a fleet of miniature fighter jets that shot at enemies. It felt like kind of an odd weapon for him to find, William thought, as the jets so clearly resembled something from the real world when most weapons they'd found were generally more fantastical in nature.

The Recipe Browsing Tablet turned out to be one of the biggest aids over the last few days, basically being their new Guide in a world that had none. They'd figured out how to use the drops from the Slime God – Purified Gel – to craft more weapons and an upgrade to all of their armor. Meg and Sid had gone to the Underworld to mine Hellstone, which could be combined with the gel to craft Statigel armor for all of them.

William had focussed his efforts on the surface, exploring the lands and mapping out where all the different biomes were. On the surface it had appeared as untapped as their original world. But there had been more evidence – plenty of it – of a world scarred.

Like the several more ruined settlements like Slimetown and numerous lands disrupted by what was left of ancient fortifications, battle craters, and who knew what else.

And despite all he'd seen, he had yet to map out the entire world. Sid had started calling the original world 'Firstworld' and the world they were now in 'Secondworld'. Secondworld was much larger than Firstworld, containing many of the same biomes such as a snow and desert biome. The jungle in particular had been concerning as most of its foliage had gone completely arid – the grass patched with grey, only some meagre shrubs dotting the landscape, the few trees that remained charred and leafless. Even the usual surface enemies had seemed quite uncommon, as though afraid to come out.