Chapter One Hundred and Forty Seven - 147
"She's too good!" Alister ducked beneath a scything silver blade, swooping out of the wall before being reabsorbed. "We can't fight her like this!"
Alister came back to his feet, tumbling deftly as more spikes thrust randomly from the rapidly shifting metal. His father had paid outrageous sums for his son to be trained by the best, not just in Mana Skills, but in all aspects of combat. True, he had often neglected his studies in favor of carousing, but he found himself thankful for his father's stubborn insistence. A first time for everything, he mused.
"Then stay back and let us handle it!"
That commoner, Evie Aren, flashed by him. Her preposterous weapon, a spiked chain of all things, was a blur in her hand. It whipped forward and wrapped around Yvette's outstretched arm, the blades digging into the meat of her bicep. The girl hauled on it, pulling herself toward the Bronze Rank with such speed that Alister barely had time to blink before she hit. Yvette shrieked as Evie dug a dagger into her armored robes, and a flow of battered steel hammered outward. Evie flew back, her chain falling slack from Yvette's arm.
Alister gathered Mana for his Grand Impetus, his core funneling it along his pathways until it pooled at the base of his wrist. With a twist and thrust of his enchanted rapier, the Mana discharged in a smooth bolt of blue-white light; pure kinetic force. It was a Skill Alister was greatly proud of, one that he had developed over the course of many years, combining several ancestral techniques with his own ingenuity. It was powerful, more than enough to dispatch an enemy of his own Tier. However, when it came to those of a higher Tier, it was less than optimal.
The strike put a sizable dent in a stretch of steel, but didn't penetrate.
Yvette gathered herself, having screamed herself hoarse, and shoved her mangled arm toward them. A wave of undulating spikes rippled from the walls, pieces disconnecting and flinging at them far faster than Alister would have preferred.
Avert!
A narrow shield of blue energy sprang into a semi-circle before him, and the projectiles hit it hard. Gouts of stone tore to pieces to either side of Alister as the shield absorbed and diverted the kinetic force, shunting it to either side of himself. An impressive showing, he had to admit, but it was eating through his Mana quickly. The lot of them had been burning their resources ever since arriving in the blasted Domain, and especially since attempting an assault on the keep. Alister stood up, but he was unsteady. His Mana was at 30%.
Arms grabbed him suddenly and Alister found himself hoisted into the air. The uneven flagstones beneath him erupted into jagged shards, a disorienting plume of dust and debris. For an few moments he felt weightless as he looked up at Evie, blood on her brow as she gripped him, but heaviness returned as they both tumbled hard to the ground.
"Ugh, that's hard to do," Aren grunted, rolling to her feet with enviable ease. It was something Alister could have done himself, were he not so tired. As it stood, his process involved more cursing. "Oh good, Vess' turn."
Alister looked up to see Vessilia Dayne, heiress of the Duchy of Pax'Vrell, sail above their heads alongside six floating spears. Three of them zipped forward ahead of her landing, projectiles that Yvette easily deflected. But then the woman followed, and her body fell like a boulder, suddenly speeding up with such celerity that Alister doubted his eyes.
*BOOOOM!*
The earth rumbled beneath them as she hit, spear first. Yvette had blocked it, but the steel screamed as it began to give way.
"C'mon pretty boy! Time to work!" Evie dashed ahead, sprinting toward where her chain had fallen.
"Blood and ash, why are they doing this?" Alister said before limbering his arm and hustling after. "Atar's right! There's no benefit here! Win or lose, these monsters will eat us alive!"
Even now, the steel walls protecting them shuddered with rapid, repeated blows. The screech of claws on steel had become a constant refrain. Once they fell, the Revenants would kill them all. So why were they pushing this? Had they truly been Oathbound into it? That was madness!
More spears came crashing down on the defender, this time accompanied by the lashing blows of Evie's chain. Steel flowed and shifted, moving like water under the Will of Yvette, but the attacks took their toll.
Grand Impetus!
Alister, steps away from the vicious melee, thrust his rapier and released another condensed blast of Mana. This time, the force of it sheared through Yvette's battered shield and struck the Journeyman properly. She hissed, her painted face twisting into something cruel and...it was only for a blink, but Alister couldn't shake the sight of it.
She'd looked...monstrous.
"SCREUAAAAAW!"
A bone-chilling cry cut through the air, followed closely by the bounding form of that strange Dire Hound. Though it wasn't directed at him, Alister could feel a mental Skill wash across the space, targeted on Yvette. The effect failed against her Journeyman stats, but the Hound didn't stop. Sharp planes of air Mana launched outward from it, slicing through the intervening space and putting scratches in the steel wall.
The attacks hadn't the strength to truly injure Yvette, but it all added up. Alister deflected more steel projectiles with Avert, while the others laid into her. For the first time, the noble believed they had a chance to win.
But what then?
Captain Elwick felt a fury he had never known before. These people, these...monsters in Human guise had invaded the Domain, against the Elder's wishes. They had killed, yes, of that there was no doubt. The bodies beyond the Domain were mutilated with the kind of joyous disregard for life that only the worst creatures possessed. It was clear they were the culprits. It was all finally clear. Elwick knew there was no saving them. No forgiveness.
Just rage.
"REEAAAARG!" Elwick lunged, his sword trailing an icy fog as it moved. His Skill, Ethereal Ice, helped to shroud his attacks to make them harder to perceive and defend against, and he knew it would work against the Onslaught. The man was a legend for his durability and resistances, but Elwick's Skill would overcome him because...because it had to. There was no other option.
"Why are you here, Kastos?" Elwick snarled. He needed to understand. To know if there were more of them.
"Takin' a tour," Harn grunted back, twisting sideways and letting Elwick's blade to pass harmlessly. "Maybe kill some monsters."
"Don't be glib, bastard. You're not good at it!" Elwick pressed the attack, pushing the demoted Guilder back, trying to press him toward the steel wall. "You killed people to get in here! I know that's true!"
"How many have you done in," Harn said. He batted aside Elwick's blade, sending a spray of icy fog back toward the captain. The bastard ducked out of his line of sight as the fog rolled over Elwick's eyes. "How many has Teine had you kill?"
"Enough," Elwick grated. His own fog didn't hurt him, but it did make him lose track of the silver warrior. "I follow orders, that's all."
Pit ran up to him and jumped, putting his big paws on the Nym's shoulders in his excitement. The hidden tenku was streaked with blood and caking dirt, but his Health hadn't dipped too badly. Felix fished a monster core from his pack and surreptitiously fed it to the chimera. Pit snatched it up, eating it in seconds and hummed contentedly as threads of System power began to unspool within him.
+1 INT
+1 STR
"Well enough," Vess agreed, pausing to smile back at him. She was bleeding a bit from her left cheek and her cloak had some new holes in it, but her Health was well above 80%. "Never had to fight a defensive specialist before. Harder than I expected."
"Highest flame, Alister, you're bleeding!" Atar rushed to the nobleman's side, but he was waved off.
"It's fine, Atar. Just got winged, is all," he said, but Felix felt a light trilling from his Spirit. It felt...pleased?
"Pretty boy over here took a wall spike for me," Evie said with a grin and a nudge at Alister's back. The young man blanched at the movement and had to put up his rapier. "My hero."
"I don't appreciate being in another's debt, Aren," he sheathed his rapier. "Now we're square. Ah! Lilian! Dabney!"
As the nobleman rushed over to a mound of rocks, Felix looked over to the other side of the enclosure. It had devolved into a cloud of stone dust and Mana vapor. He could feel someone moving about, but he wasn't entirely sure it was Harn. Silently, Felix stepped forward, putting himself between the cloud and his friends.
Then a body was sent sailing through the air, one in armored blue robes and run through by a large shard of ice. He landed hard in front of them without rolling, but Felix's Eye could tell the man was barely alive. Again. Blood poured from his many wounds, looking darker than it should have as it pooled beneath him. Emerging behind him was Harn, still fully armored, though his pauldrons and breastplate sported a savage looking rent. Frost trailed from the man as he walked up to Elwick and put his boot down on his chest.
"EAAUUGH!"
The Guilder twitched several times but couldn't quite make his arms work well enough to push Harn's boot away. He resorted to writhing beneath it, instead.
"You alright, Harn?" Evie asked. "Your armor's busted. I've never seen it busted before."
Harn tried to shrug and winced instead. He nodded to Atar, Alister and the others. "Your captain packs a mean punch. Lucky fer me, it wasn't mean enough."
A discordant twang, like a steel string snapping, rippled through the air. Felix's ears perked up, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end as that ambient heat he'd been feeling all this time turned into a bonfire. He shouted and pushed the others back, away from Elwick as the man's skin began to dry and blister beneath the invisible heat. Felix's nerves screamed out in pain, but he pushed it aside, muscled it into the back of his throat as he watched what happened next.
Elwick had started to convulse, and his body at first seemed to dehydrate and shrink beneath the unnatural heat. But what Felix had mistaken for blistering resolved into small thumbnail-sized callouses that surfaced on his exposed skin, overlapping and growing as the strangeness continued. That discord he sensed grew ever stronger, and within him the whispering Maw snarled wordlessly.
This was the corruption. But it wasn't the Maw's own.
This is something new...
Felix felt it, like a figure standing at the edges of his vision, and as Elwick writhed and convulsed it grew all the stronger. The man's body was looped and knotted with shimmering threads, enough to weigh down any person. Hundreds of them at least, each of them spreading far and wide in a web Felix couldn't hope to perceive in its entirety. A few of them radiated outward, binding Atar, Alister, Lilian, Dabney. But on Elwick and Yvette, the threads weren't silver, not anymore. They crawled with a dark crimson stain, corroded by it yet paradoxically strengthened.
The threads extended into the distance, toward the supposedly secret entrance they had used. Felix, unable to help himself, pushed. He followed the threads back, back until he sensed something holding onto these threads, a powerful figure that shone like the sun at dawn. Blinding, golden.
Master Tier.
Elder Teine, they'd called him.
Someone screamed.
Felix yanked himself back to reality and saw, to his horror, that Elwick had clambered back onto his feet. Only, it was not Elwick, not anymore. His bones had shifted and deformed, his once-handsome face splitting down the middle as the man's teeth fell out. The scaling of his face and arms was more complete now, darkening toward a rust-red color save for where slick veins pulsed obtrusively along the inner parts of his limbs.
"Kill...kill you...eat you..."
Elwick's face split open with a meaty hiss and teeth the size of daggers leaped from hideous, newly formed gums.
"Kill you! Eat...you!"
Kill it, Felix! Destroy it!
Reign of Vellus!
Felix didn't need the Maw's increasingly vibrant advice to make a move. He gripped the newly born Revenant with his Will as lightning played along its battered armor. The robes burnt away under the barrage of azure electricity, but the hide beneath was tougher than it looked. A barrage of other Skills hit it moments later, fire and ice, stone and silver spear. But the thing did not buckle. The creature that was once Elwick took a single step forward, pushing at Felix with an overwhelming Strength. He had Reign of Vellus flared as hard as he could, but it barely inconvenienced it.
"Punish! Eat! Fee---!"
With a powerful swing, a silver axe bisected the monstrosity's neck. Elwick's deformed head hit the flagstones with a heavy, wet thud.
Then Yvette began to scream.This chapter was first shared on the Ñøv€lß1n platform.
