Robert sat inside a house with thirteen corpses in his spatial storage. He was in shock.
Ten billion dollars and one two-star ascension potion. That was how much his life was worth. Because, with all honesty, if it was the bounty for his head, he'd be growing a second one straight away. He almost felt like faking his death and hiding somewhere until the bounty was paid to one of his pawns. But anyone dumb and powerful enough to post such bounty would have ways to tell whether he lived or died.
What was he supposed to do? For that price, every bounty hunter and assassin in the world would come after him. On one hand, it was free latent aura and loot. On the other hand, what if one of them got lucky? This group of two stars was almost enough to nail him in the ass. He didn't have to use all of his trump cards but it was a close call. They blocked two of his biggest strengths, his time sense and his teleportation.
Their intention was to kill him, split the money, and draw lots for the potion. Robert called bullshit. At least two of the ones he captured with a working brain had plans to kill their partners if they managed to collect the bounty. If these fourteen came after him, it was a matter of time before more came. They could be already inside this place. He had to be fast and clear this quest before stronger assassins came his way.
He didn't blame them for trying, nor for throwing their lives away. His worldview on that had changed. The man who once mocked Janhalar Kraven for dying in the pursuit of some unique treasure now felt he could make the same choice if were he in the Kraven Patriarch's spot. He held no judgment for the assassins' life choices and no regret for killing them. Not anymore.
Robert used his talent and dumped the corpses in the liminal void. No need to leave identifiable bodies elsewhere. But these people might have bounties on them. For that reason, Robert left the bodies intact. He also dropped all the illegal drugs he found in their dimensional items. Most of them used bags of holding instead of storage rings.
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Fairy-Robert zipped over the buildings of the C-grade horror movie Old London. He crossed the Thames and landed before the doors of the Tower of London. He disintegrated the doors (and carved a tunnel to the catacombs). He flew inside. Nightshades came to investigate who had disturbed the peace. Invisible, Robert delivered two-star Void punches to the monsters' shoulders, blowing the limbs away and causing them to dissipate into motes of dry Darkness. Then the legs, forcing the Darkness-affinity monsters to lie on the floor. With a few more void punches, their forms destabilized. He scooped the Darkness goop and moved on.
He barged into the throne room.
"Who dares trespass?" A blob of Darkness in the shape of King Charles II asked. The Shadow King was a terrifying entity made of pure darkness, with glowing red eyes and a constantly shifting form. But he always imitated British monarchs. One moment he was Charles II, then Elizabeth I. And on the next, Henry VIII.
Fairy-Robert replied with a Zoltraak beam aimed at the creature's center mass. Six Nightshades walked into the room from the sides. The boss fight was on. The beam did little damage and the Darkness essence that the monster was made of quickly flowed to fill the hole. So long as at least one of the Nightshades was alive, any ongoing harmful magic cast on the King would be passed to one of the guards through their link. It was useless to even try to go against the Shadow King's talent.
The Nightshades blasted Robert with their full dread-inducing aura. After the first fight, it had lost its bite. Robert used his mind palace to compartmentalize the artificial feelings the Darkness essence of the Nightshades was causing.
Darkness surrounded the room, cutting the view of the night sky through the stained glass. The Shadow King boss fight disallowed escape. Challengers either prevailed or died.
With an exact count, Robert put two-star sap stamina on each Nightshade and drain essence on three of them and the Shadow King. He flew around the room, dodging shadow arms, letting his spells do his job for him. The Nightshades were indestructible so long as the Shadow King stood. The King's Darkness essence healed the Royal Guards.
The Shadow King placed a mighty three-star curse on Robert. It drained his vitality at alarming speeds. The sap stamina spells and his own stores of lifeforce from biomass absorption kept him from becoming an entomology display at the Shadow King's Museum of Natural History. If he had one. The flow of lifeforce started from the Nightshades to Robert, then to the Shadow King, and back to the Nightshades. Each step carried some losses but while Robert had six sources of vitality, the King had to pay for these six. The same for the essence Robert drained.
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He fought against the King's spell with purge essence but it was a very strong spell. But each casting of purge essence dulled the edge of the King's spell.
Once he was sure the King would run out of vitality first, Robert went around the room trapping all the light sources in resilient spheres. That lowered the Nightshades' speed since they couldn't just change spots at the speed of moving shadows in the distance.
The boss' stores of essence and vitality dropped below a certain level. Enraged, the Shadow King moved onto the second phase of the fight, when he used his once-evolved talent. He conjured weapons of Darkness essence and sent them flying after Robert. He had to apply the 5 D's of dodgeball. Dodge, dive, duck, dip, and dodge. He flew into a corner and placed a divergent lens of distorted space. Then he fired a Zoltraak void lance through the lens, catching the entire throne room.
The shadow weapons vanished, along with the columns. The Nightshades lost a lot of their Darkness but survived with varied degrees of injury. And the Shadow King didn't seem affected at first glance but he was forced to spend time and essence to heal his Royal Guard.
Drain Essence spread to another Nightshade. Robert flew around the front of the room, sending volleys of magic missiles at the Shadow King. It was partially intangible and physical attacks had little effect. The void lances harmed him because they could destroy both matter and essence. But the Force effects affected ethereal creatures all the same. The nightshades moved to intercept the magic missiles with their own bodies. Robert thought it was similar to a chess player moving pieces to defend the king. But dealing damage to the monsters and keeping them away from his ass were good things.
Another swarm of shadow weapons appeared. Robert repeated the same defense, killing two royal guard Nightshades. Two of the ones afflicted with drain essence.
Robert pressed on the offensive. The King conjured more shadow weapons but didn't send them after Robert. Instead, he had them hack at the resilient spheres, placing his Nightshades back under direct light. Robert fired magic missiles and dodged the shadow weapons. A Nightshade, using the weapons as a distraction, landed a nasty blow. It broke Robert's mage armor and sent the fairy straight to the floor.
The others' reaction was immediate. They rushed in, forcing Robert to evade via the liminal void. That also cut off all ongoing spells on both sides. He pushed his anger down and focused on regaining his cool and refilling his void heart.
Back to the fight, he recast his debuffs and kept the ballet of death and destruction. Black powers from both sides, Void versus Darkness, they engaged. Equals and one wasn't a higher concept than the other. The roof collapsed for lack of support. The semi-ethereal creatures cared not.
Shadow weapons came from all sides. Robert wrapped himself in a resilient sphere and used a blink spell to reach the far corner of the room. From there, he fired another wide-arc Zoltraak lance, killing another two Nightshades. He quickly cast a two-star essence drain and sap stamina on both of them.
"You will pay for killing my guards!" The Shadow King, in the form of Queen Victoria, declared. It started the third phase of the fight when the talent evolution the King gained from reaching three stars activated.
Chains of shadow stuff erupted from the six corners and trapped Robert. Due to talent bullshit, they were impossible to escape, even when actively triggering his talent. It blocked teleportation, and any essence use, and made the one trapped invulnerable from any effects or attacks; no matter if they were beneficial or harmful. The only effect that remained on the target was the King's own vitality siphon.
At this point, the invaders would have lost one of their own. For where the fight was concerned, the trapped person was as good as dead. So, what about soloing the King?
Well, that's why his debuffs were so important. The debuffs he cast before the King's speech were keeping him alive, along with more than a trickle of lifeforce from his biomass absorption.
Robert stared at the Shadow King. He could see that two of his three stars were empty, with the third rapidly draining as his talent forced him to use his essence to keep his guards alive.
Despite that, the treasury of essence available to the King seemed inexhaustible. Hours passed. Robert was starting to fear that his calculations weren't enough. Twelve, eighteen hours. Twenty. The Shadow King seemed to be on his last leg. The first star was about to dim, his essence spent. But he had a kickass essence regeneration. Robert suspected he earned a tithe from his citizens in the Dungeon. Twenty, twenty-three. Once the clock reached twenty-four hours from the last time he'd used his main talent, it triggered but in its passive form. Robert was dumped in the liminal void for ninety-nine days.
But he was free. The first thing he did was to eat to replenish his biomass reserves. Then he meditated, slept, stretched, and put the final touches on his imprint. Soon, he would become able to survive having his brain destroyed. As he learned firsthand in the tournament, healing the brain didn't restore the synapses the brain develops as a person learns.
Robert returned to the throne room full to finish the fight. The Shadow King stared at the fairy with horror in its eyes. The chains fell down, useless. They had a twenty-four hours cooldown, which was why the castle remained locked down for a whole day if the King survived. And probably why the King respawned only after twenty-four hours on the rare occasions he was killed.
Robert had only a few minutes to finish the fight. He cast his void lance as fast as he could at the King, forcing the two remaining Nightshades to sacrifice themselves. Alone and spent, the King finally died when Robert vaporized his torso, legs, forearms, hands, feet, the throne, the wall behind the throne, and a quarter-mile section of the land.
The head dissipated in a puff of Darkness essence, leaving the crown to clatter on the new ground. Which was two feet below the old ground because Robert had disintegrated the entirety of the throne room.
Robert collected his prize and bounty target. The crown was worth a hundred million to the right buyer.