The throne room exploded into flames.
As we spoke to the undead Duke, I had connected to nearly every shadow in the room, spreading my spiritual presence as far and wide as I could. I wasn’t sure if they would be able to see me doing this, but I was hoping it’d just look like I was trying to obscure my position if so.
Really what I was doing was equivalent to tossing gasoline around a room before lighting a match. I had swapped out my active titles after the scan, re-equipping Souleater and replacing Adventurer with one I’d picked up recently. I’d needed another title slot, so I’d broken Dungeon Delver and Lone Wolf, the title I’d picked up from the Solo Artist achievement earlier.
I had used my Soul Forge skill to combine the heart of a god of fire with a Reality Seed bearing the concept of endlessness. The resulting item, which still resided in my soul-space, was something out of legend.
> Boundless Inferno
>
> Reality Shard (Tier ??, Endless, Fire, Holy, Passion, Love, Special, Unique)
>
> Quality: Legendary
>
> This fragment of reality has crystallized into the perfect example of unstoppable purifying flames. It burns with great and terrible purpose, unable to be quenched. Life is its light and death its fuel. The circle is unbroken.
>
> The fragment has taken the first step to becoming something more. Nurturing it may allow it to become a Dungeon and join the Empyrean Concert of all that Is. It may also be used as a crafting ingredient to imbue its power and nature into an object of your desire.
I’d also gotten two achievements and two new titles for it already, one for being the first Traveler to craft a legendary item, and another when I’d tested my plan and activated Devour Essence, targeting my infant dungeon. I’d also received a greater blessing from Althi, the god or possibly goddess of cycles, which had at first confused me until I saw the effect I’d created.
I was perfectly aware of what everyone was seeing now. I’d practiced it a few times just to get the right dramatic effect - It was important to look cool while being a total badass. When I turned on Devour Essence, I exploded into flames. My strange red eyes burned, literally burned, miniature stars in the darkest night.
My body was sheathed in flame and shadow both in equal measure, yet the two opposites moved in harmony, dancing across my skin like a thousand memorial candles held vigil in the dark; or a concert crowd holding lighters up to reflect the star-filled sky; or bonfires strewn along a moonlit beach where friends and laughter gathered. All of these and more.
A sane person might have thought mixing shadows and fire was self-defeating, and they’d have been right, but also very wrong. Hands of Night carried fire’s light to every corner of the room, and the resulting conflagration of divine fire sent shadows spraying in every direction.
All those shadows found their way back to me.
Before I’d even started down this road I’d realized a simple truth, darkness is the absence of light, but only light can cast a shadow. I’d seen this play out twice before. First when I’d tested Devour Essence on the Greater Fire Essence, and then later when I’d used the shadows generated by my burning sword to reinforce my attempt to hold a Hand of Night against its blade.
I had noticed that Embrace of Shadows had a strange effect on existing darkness. Using it often seemed to brighten a room as the shadows left their assigned places to attend me. I’d run into situations where there were no more shadows in reach, but generating new ones created more fuel for my skills to use. I’d managed to create a feedback loop where my shadows could spread fire, which then birthed more shadows.
Even as the fire spread and undead wails filled the room, the pool of darkness I sat in only grew and deepened, becoming an almost physical thing. My fully upgraded and enhanced Embrace of Shadows was able to mostly withstand the fire light in the area immediately around me, and only momentary flickers of flame were visible in the darkness. I had become a refuge for shadow in an otherwise brightly lit room.
I had also very neatly painted a target on myself.
Skeletal archers raised their bows and pulled back on burning strings, but not a single arrow loosed. Ghouls began to fall in burning piles against the wall below me as they climbed over each other in a futile attempt to reach me. Yet my attention was firmly locked on the only one here I was surely in range of.
My fears proved well founded when the wizard quickly extinguished himself with a blast of air touched with death’s own chill. The fires near him went out, and it wouldn’t have shocked me to see death notifications in my combat log. Then he raised his staff high and a blast of lightning larger than my body momentarily caused my shadows to cringe inwards as we were connected by terrible energies.
I think that in that moment he saw what I had done, but I doubt he understood it.
Creating a divine fire within my soul had only been the first of my crafting projects that day. Creating the Boundless Inferno had been expensive, but not nearly so much as I had anticipated. That had ended up being a very good thing because my other project had been far more costly than I could have predicted, and I’d needed to get a little creative to make it work.
Under the cover of darkness, I had retrieved my new weapon from my soul-space. This had been an experiment, and one that I’d at first thought was a failure. However much like the synergy between my shadows and flame, this weapon had proven to have a strange synergy of its own.
> Null
>
> Sword-staff (Tier 5, Elite, Versatile, Undersized, Hardened Mooq, Thrown, Returning, Enervating, Soul-Bond, Unique)
>
> Damage: 60 (40 Base, +59% Elite, -10% Undersized, Slashing / Draining)
>
> Quality: Artifact
>
> This weapon features a haft made of Hardened Mooq, a strange material not found in nature. Its blade was designed by a legendary craftsman to be the perfect channel for energy passing through the haft and into the blade, shaping it into a perfect cutting aura. However, Mooq is a strange material, and even when dead it remains constantly ravenously hungry.
>
> Normally a bottomless stomach with no mouth, this weapon has, perhaps unwisely, been given the ability to consume vast quantities of energy by inverting the normal flow of energy through the blade. Some of this energy may leak into the wielder, but the vast majority of it is devoured forever by the insatiable material.
>
> Note: This is an Elite weapon and so may only be wielded effectively by an elite.
This weapon was a combination of the Gray Watch Spear and the elite spear I’d stolen. Even though the two weapons were in a strange way the same item, it had taken nearly all my remaining spirit crystals to create this, and even then, it had only been possible when I did things in the right order.
I had needed to remove the head from the Grey Watch Spear and then use it as the base item. That had lowered the costs substantially and had produced an elite spear-haft with the Thrown, Returning, and Soul-Bond properties made from the strange Hardened Mooq material.
Soul-Bond seemed to be the really necessary part of the whole process, as System had said that if I wanted to keep an elite weapon around while I wasn’t actively an elite myself, then I’d need to find a way to link it to my own personal reality. If the Soul-Bond property didn’t do that, then I didn’t know what could.
Unfortunately, when I’d attached the Endless Horizon blade the initial results were disappointing. The item description had told me in no uncertain terms that Hardened Mooq couldn’t be used to channel power due to its inherent energy drain effect.
That meant Endless Horizon was basically just a high quality but too-large head for this weapon. It did increase the damage and Tier of the item slightly compared to the other head, but it had also added an Unbalanced property and removed the Thrown property.
I’d almost given up there, but after reattaching the normal spear head I’d decided to try one more thing and played around with soul forging the Endless Horizon blade onto the spear directly. That had been where most of my crystals had ended up going, and it was obvious why. Soul forging the blade with the spear had not only worked, but had created something slightly terrifying and entirely unnatural.
The Endless Horizon blade now grew from the hardened mooq shaft in a strange blending of not-wood and steel. The metal had gained a dark sheen, as though a shadow permanently lay across it, and when I’d tested it, the weapon had come alive in my hands with a palpable hunger.
I’d made this weapon to experiment with crafting and see if I could get an elite weapon to best take advantage of my unique ability. In that I’d been wildly successful. The elite bonus seemed to start at 50%, but would scale the same way my attributes scaled, currently maxing out at 63%. Despite that, I’d nearly considered it a failure anyway, thanks to the other ability it had gained from the boss spear.
When the wizard cast his lightning at me, it curved towards Null’s blade and then died like it had never been. The only sign of its passing was the afterimage on my retinas and the slight bump to my mana pool as the weapon shared the smallest part of its feast with me.
The thing was ravenous and insatiable. It made no distinction between a friendly effect and a hostile one. It ate every scrap of power that got near it, and that included my flames. Since the moment I’d pulled it out it had started sucking the heat out of the air and the fire out of my shadows. However, that tiny bit of mana the weapon shared with me is what ultimately convinced me it hadn’t been a failed experiment.
Wounds inflicted by the weapon siphoned stamina, while drained energy was returned as mana. For the Boundless Inferno, quantity was a meaningless measurement. Its only limit was my own willpower and mana reserves. That meant that despite Null’s bottomless hunger, I had an endless supply of food.
Using the weapon did reduce the intensity of the flames around me, but in return it actually boosted my mana efficiency as I turned heat from Boundless Inferno into a constant trickle of mana. It also made it easier for Embrace of Shadows to function at full strength in the area around me.
As the lightning bolt vanished into Null’s hungry blade, I grinned The Adversary’s own grin, my mouth lit from within by a tongue of flame. It amused me to no end that of the two of us, the wizard was the only one to be shocked by the effects of his spell.
Then I threw Null at him.
Though it had been made from two spears, it no longer was one. The Endless Horizon blade was too large, and its slight curve made it unsuited for that sort of throw. Just retaining the thrown property had been an iffy thing, and I’d only been able to get its chance to be applied up to 70% before it became too expensive to boost further.
Instead of throwing it like a spear, I hurled it like you might hurl an axe. Throwing the original weapon had felt and looked natural, but this did not. It was more like letting an angry dog off a leash. As it spun through the eddies of fire and magic I watched it pick up speed in midair, its hunger guiding it to its target.
I saw the wizard futilely try to erect a shield of some sort, but the blade cleaved through it like it wasn’t even there, gaining momentum as it fed upon the effect. It sank into the hapless ghoul, knocking him off his feet and for all the world looking like an animal pouncing on prey. Then, with a dark pulse, it began to feed.
Devour Essence ticked its first maintenance fee. Thirty seconds had passed. I took in the conflagration around me. This was going pretty swell so far. Obviously, something was about to fuck it up, so I wondered what it would be. The Duke was still sitting on his throne. He was very on fire but appeared not to care. I looked around some more… where was the Duchess?
Null re-appeared in my hands, not as silvery mist but like a shadow unfurling. As it did, I caught a glimpse of something from the corner of my eye. I managed to dodge away just in time as a ghostly hand holding a black spectral dagger withdrew into the wall it had just emerged from.
I spun around looking for other places the ghost might attack me from, but I was caught entirely off guard when instead of appearing and trying to stab me, her un-veiled face emerged from the ceiling above me and let out a wail so terrible my mind tried to break under the pressure.
You have partially resisted “Banshee Shriek”
You have been afflicted by “Dazed” (Physical Bane, Tier 2)
Suddenly I felt like I had a concussion again. I couldn’t focus my eyes and I felt blood running from my ears and nose. I was having difficulty thinking properly, and with rising concern I realized I had fallen.
I must have struck then rolled off the forcefield protecting my friends as I was now sitting on the ground trying to get my bearings. A blurry figure approached and I stabbed out at it with Null, only to have it bounce off the forcefield moments before I realized the person I was attacking was a concerned Dawn who’d come to get a closer look at me.
I shook my head trying to clear it. Something loomed in front of me, and I was pretty sure it was a ghoul this time, so I swiped my polearm through it, cutting it like butter and making it reel backward even as my weapon sucked out some whisper of whatever animating force it had along with some of the flames on its body. My vision was slowly settling so I got moving, not wanting to let myself get surrounded.
Then a massive weight hit me from behind.
In my current state fire couldn’t harm me, but that didn’t keep the burning pain that ripped through my shoulder at bay as far too many fanged teeth drove deep inside me. The Kennel Cadaver tried to tear away my arm at the shoulder in a horrifyingly fast and brutal attack I was powerless to stop.
I screamed as my health plummeted, and just as I thought to Shadow Step away - literally anywhere but here - the weight on my back was suddenly torn away as Lucus’ stone covered foot slammed into the monster with bone shattering force.
Through tear filled eyes I saw the elite Kennel Cadaver, Bruno, smash into one of the support pillars holding the balcony to the ceiling, cracking it with the force of Lucus’ blow. He reached down with a stone gauntlet and helped me to my feet before turning to intercept a charging ghoul with his implacable shield.
Dawn was suddenly there, mending my destroyed shoulder as best and quickly as she could. I took refuge inside my soul gem from the worst of the pain while she healed me. Separating my consciousness from Tavi’s body provided some relief and let me look at the situation calmly and dispassionately.
I belatedly realized that my flames were burning her despite her natural resistance, and I physically pulled them back. My most recent achievements had given me a skill that allowed me to infuse fire into my other skills for some pretty strange effects. For this fight I’d paired that with Hands of Night, and it had given me some ability to extend my control of shadows to fire as well.
In my tests, Hands had worked well for spreading fire even without this skill, but they immediately dissolved as soon as I lit things up. With it, I was able to make them persist and even affect the fires they touched. I used that now to shield first Dawn and then all my friends from the worst effects of my flames. I could tell my skin was still hot to the touch, but that alone wasn’t enough to harm her.
I wasn’t doing so hot, no pun intended. I needed to catch my breath, so when Dawn finished healing me up I didn’t immediately rejoin the fight. We’d known my all out assault wouldn’t last when we’d made our plan, but now that the shield had dropped I was going to have to hold back and focus more on surgical strikes than wide area damage.
Still, as I looked around, I saw what a ruin I had made of the throne room. The balcony on the left side of the room had buckled, sending what skeletons that remained there sprawling and tumbling into the fires still raging below. As I watched, it finally gave up the ghost and collapsed with a groan fit for the banshee, taking the rest of its inhabitants with it.
My eyes flashed across the room, searching. I was waiting for the Duchess to make a reappearance, her ability to strike from any direction, and that wail of hers made her the biggest threat in this fight so far. Now that my friends were exposed, I needed to be ready.
When the memory of pain had faded from my shoulder, I activated Mythcaller and great shadowy wings wreathed in fire sprouted from my back, proving quite a bit larger and more impressive than the physical wings that carried me into the air a moment later.
Since any solid surface might prove a hiding spot for her, I stayed away from anywhere she might wait in ambush. As I ascended, a movement caught my eye and I noticed that the Duke was still just sitting on his throne, casually sipping from a red-stained wine glass. His flesh was melting off his face and hands, but that didn’t seem to be bothering him much. He seemed content to simply watch the show.
That was disturbing, but I put it out of my head for the moment. If he wasn’t joining the fight I was content to let him sit there.
In that moment of distraction, I felt a chill descend on me. Without thinking I whirled in the air, knowing that I was already too late. I had an instant to register the grinning spectral skull, mouth open wide in a nearly silent scream.
Then I registered that her scream wasn’t the only thing that had gone quiet. Dorian, gods bless the man, had seen what I’d missed and switched to his silencing song the moment she’d re-appeared. The cry of the banshee fell harmlessly on nearly deaf ears, and now it was her turn to be surprised as I turned my momentum into an upwards strike with my strange weapon.
The blade cut deep into the ghostly form of the Duchess, and I felt it start trying to devour her whole. She managed to tear herself away at the last moment and fled from me. An echoing howl and tattered scraps of ghostly fabric were all that remained as Dorian dropped the silence and she vanished into a wall.
I remained vigilant for her as my friends made short work of the remaining guards. Dorian sang his recovery song, keeping them fresh and allowing me some time to recover. His songs were shockingly powerful but were balanced by the fact that he could only ever use one at a time. With the recovery song active and all my other bonuses, my mana flow turned positive for the first time since combat began.
To my surprise the court wizard had survived being feasted upon by Null, though he’d lost the use of his legs, as though he were a living man with a spinal injury. Far too late to do anything about it I saw him point a finger lit by dark power directly at Dorian. I called out a warning, but a ray of utter black streaked across the intervening distance and sank into Dorian’s chest with no resistance at all.
Dorian frowned for a moment, but kept singing, idly scratching at his chest. The ghoul mage somehow managed to look even more baffled and put out than he already had, right up until Savas snuck up behind him and buried his dragon tooth dagger in the thing’s eye socket up to the hilt, twisting the blade to be sure the job was done.
Then the Duke finished his drink.
We all paused at the sound of a squelching golf-clap coming from the center of the room. The Duke was still sitting there on his throne, still on fire, still looking like a ruin of a man. He had set his glass down on the arm rest of the throne and slowly stood.
“What an excellent show. I haven’t been so amused in ages. Bravo,” he said.
Then an aura radiated out from him that put out every fire in the room except the ones actually on my body. As I watched, his flesh regenerated as though he’d taken no damage at all, and a chill spread through the room that seemed to lock everyone into place.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
I found myself still able to move, but only just, and I managed to cling to a wall before my wings became too heavy to lift me. The chill we were feeling wasn’t just physical I realized, it was spiritual. Channeling divine fire through my spirit was offering a degree of protection, but whatever the Duke was doing was of a much greater magnitude than my own ability.
The Duke dusted ash off his armor casually as he calmly began to walk towards Dawn. To my surprise I saw that alone among my friends Arven was still moving. His normal blinding speed had slowed nearly to match my own, but he stepped up to intercept the Duke. His movements were stiff and looked pained, but he didn’t let it stop him.
I pretended to be frozen in hopes of being able to catch the undead ruler off guard at a critical moment. Despite having concluded that the effect was mostly spiritual, I saw that Arven’s breath was coming out in visible clouds of steam. His blades were glowing that soft blue color I’d seen a few times now.
The Duke casually drew a sword from his hip. It was a thin bladed longsword, and he whipped it around a few times as if to refamiliarize himself with its weight. “It’s been so long since I’ve had a proper duel,” he said to Arven. “A pity it won’t be today.”
Then before I could so much as blink, he’d run Arven through the chest with his sword.
It was in and out so fast it took Arven a moment to even react. Then he staggered backwards, dropping one sword as he gasped and clutched at the wound that had suddenly appeared in the middle of his chest, right below his heart. The Duke paused to lick the blood off his blade, then glanced up at me.
“Come little whatever you are. Join us. It will hardly be any fun if I only have this one to play with.”
Arven went down on one knee and coughed up blood. With that one blow his health had been reduced to 50% of its maximum, and I saw he had multiple status effects. I threw myself into the air again, letting my wings carry me behind the undead ruler. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do though. I could shrug off the chilling aura whenever I wanted, but even at my fastest I couldn’t match the Duke’s speed. I was rapidly running out of tricks.
Well, come to think of it, maybe I did have one more trick. Two at most.
Arven stood back up, scooping up his sword as he rose. Without any hesitation he attacked the Duke with a ferocious series of blows. I was caught off guard by the speed of the attack, and belatedly activated Blades of Twilight in support.
The Duke moved like flowing water. As terrifying as it was beautiful, he moved with perfect grace to parry each of Arven’s attacks as well as my own flurry of shadowy daggers. It was over in a second, and this time when we paused the Duke’s sword was embedded in Arven’s shoulder.
Arven grunted, then pulled himself away from the outstretched blade, falling back into a guarded defensive style. His HP had dropped another 10% or so. I could tell he was planning on trying to defend himself while I launched attacks, but I didn’t think it was going to work. Even with my long arms and longer weapon, my size meant I was at a reach disadvantage in addition to being much slower.
We needed something else.
I launched another barrage of shadowy blades at the Duke, empowering these with Burning Bolts, then before the first set had even reached him I did it again, rotating around him as I did, hoping to divide his attention. He smoothly dodged or parried each of my attacks, all while defending himself from Arven’s blades, but I didn’t let up, certain that the moment I ceased my attacks he’d be able to pierce Arven’s guard.
One of my attacks went wide, and I stopped using Burning Bolts to conserve mana. I got close enough to start prodding at the Duke’s defenses with my polearm, but continued weaving in shadowy blades between attacks.
The Duke actually seemed to take my attacks with Null seriously, despite how slow they were. He was always careful to dodge any attacks from the weapon rather than parry them. I wasn’t sure what he thought would happen if he parried my strike, but I was happy to keep him on his toes with the weapon.
I used the opportunity to play my last card. Shifting my grip low on the weapon, I swung it like a sword, then released it mid-swing, turning the strike into a throw. At the same moment, I pulled Gratuitous Violence of the Inferno out of my soul-space and into my hands, replacing the undersized polearm with the massive greatsword.
I was hoping to catch the Duke mid-dodge with the unexpected appearance and length of my weapon. I was only going to get one shot at this, so I activated Unrestrained and it gave me a burst of speed as I broke through his chilling aura.
The Duke simply blocked my attack, parrying it with his blade. Null spun off into the far corner of the room, dodged effortlessly in the same motion.
Suddenly I was doing everything I could to avoid the Duke’s questing blade as Arven was ignored in favor of an all out assault on me. The only thing that kept me alive past that first moment was dumb luck and my dodge defense stat. I let the ever-burning greatsword fall to the ground as I desperately dodged, waiting for Null to return to my hand.
Arven took full advantage of this, switching to offense and attempting to press the Duke. It was to no avail, as the Duke was simply too fast for him. Arven caught what would likely have been a lethal strike on the flat of his blade at the last possible moment. The deflected strike missed Arven’s throat but cut into the flesh of his shoulder instead, driving him to one knee with the force of the blow.
For a moment it looked as though he were being knighted.
Then from across the room came a trembling voice, and I grinned my biggest, toothiest grin as I realized that my gamble had finally paid off.
Captain! He heard them cry
From judgment’s seat on high.
How dare you to kill this man,
Far nobler than thee?
The voice picked up strength and confidence with each word, and at the same time I saw Dawn, Savas, and Lucus start to shake off their paralysis.
Dorian stepped forward, still on fire from the single burning blade I’d sent his way in my second attack on the Duke. That, and the intense heat cast by the Ever-burning sword, had reduced the power of the Duke’s aura enough for Dorian to begin his song. His arm was bleeding, and his clothes were aflame, but his voice was clear and steady as he recited the spellsong he’d created from the Unrestrained skill.
The traitor’s blade.
The cowards knee.
Soon you will be broken,
For all the world to see.
Arven seemed to explode. His blade was still in contest with the Duke’s keeping him from taking off his arm, except there suddenly was no contest, and no Duke for that matter. Arven’s parry turned into a shove that swatted the Duke with the flat of his blade with such force that the Duke was flung across the room. He crashed into a pile of rubble which in turn exploded into a cloud of ash and splinters. Arven’s wrist glowed for a moment like overstressed metal, and he stared at it, baffled.
Upon him, a curse set.
Sentenced to pay the debt.
They cast him to the underworld,
And called it mercy.
Dawn rushed over and began healing him as quickly as she could, while Lucus positioned himself between us and the Duke’s last known position, shield raised. I looked up at Arven and said. “Remember how I said to picture your curse?”
The traitor’s blade.
The cowards knee.
Soon you will be broken,
For all the world to see.
Arven nodded slowly, not looking at me. Then he moved with incredible speed, meeting the Duke sword to sword as the undead lord launched himself out of the cloud of ash he’d been flung into. Sparks flew everywhere, and Arven’s wrists and ankles all glowed painfully red.
It seemed like the curse was being strained by what Dorian was doing, but for some reason it wasn’t failing outright. The glow was coming from the exact places I’d seen Arven shackled when using Spirit Vision, but the chains were missing, as was the sword.
Heros do not cowards make.
Blade’s thirst do monsters slake.
In broken halls the dead sleep,
Their ruler, unworthy.
I disabled Devour Essence. I was going to need some fine control for what I was planning, and channeling elemental fire was no longer necessary to keep moving. Lucus had quickly realized that in the fight between Arven and the Duke he was little more than a liability, so he backed off and stood in front of Dorian, protecting the singer as he continued to create music out of what I soon realized was a poetic retelling of the story of how Arven had come to be here.
The madman had used Arven himself as the inspiration for his song.
The traitor’s blade.
The cowards knee.
Soon you will be broken,
For all the world to see.
I opened my character sheet and mid-combat swapped out Quality Assurance Specialist for Keeper of Souls, then activated Spirit Sight. Immediately I could see the chains of the curse once again, and I reached out with Hands of Night.
I wrapped shadows around the chains, making them visible to everyone. With Hands of Night I could actually feel the spiritual bindings, and I used that sense to hold onto them with shadows. As I revealed them, the bindings began to glow red hot just like the shackles, peeling away the shadows as their glow spread.
Now comes the tolling bell,
Freedom’s clarion knell.
Justice long delayed held fast,
Unchained by journey.
Before long Arven was visibly wrapped in red hot chains that strained to contain him. While the song was active they bent and stretched unnaturally, causing stress fractures that continuously sealed themselves up. The spiritual heat they were giving off was causing Arven visible pain, but he fought on, now easily keeping up with the Duke’s raw speed. I could only think of one more thing to try.
The traitor’s blade.
The cowards knee.
I will not be broken,
And soon the world will see.
Arven was moving too fast for me to aim an attack so I got as close as I could then simply held the blade of Null out in his direction. “Use this! Cut the chains!” I called out to him.
The Duke and Arven were both suddenly on top of me. I didn’t move, I couldn’t move. It was obvious the Duke was trying to prevent Arven from making use of my weapon to free himself by forcing Arven to defend me. Sparks flew in every direction as their blades met. The ring of steel blotted out Dorian’s song and I couldn’t tell how much longer it might last. Only one thing to do.
You will not be forgiven.
I threw myself in the direction of the Duke, completely open and unguarded. I intentionally made it impossible for Arven to defend me as I all but ran myself onto the Duke’s blade. Yet I didn’t let go of Null, holding it out to the side and almost behind me as I ran forward.
I felt a series of impacts. The first was straight through my chest and was instantly followed by a sensation of terrible ripping as the Duke stabbed me through the heart, then pulled the blade out sideways, nearly cutting me in half as it emerged from under my shoulder.
The next several impacts were all absorbed by my arms, as Arven whirled, spinning his chains through the blade of Null one after another. There was barely any resistance at all. The chains screamed with the sound of tortured metal as they parted, the edges suddenly looking pitted and aged as Null ate away at their very being.
I bent over gasping, then let out a completely involuntary giggle as I straightened back up, apparently unharmed by the blow that had seemed like it was going to bisect me.
The Duke stopped cold for the first time in several minutes, staring at me. “What are you?” he asked, incredulous. Arven also stopped, standing above me, spiritual chains flailing in every direction and looking for all the world like snakes with their heads cut off.
“She’s a Nilbog,” he said, shrugging. “I stopped questioning it a while ago. Less headaches that way.”
The Duke’s dead eyes went wide at this, and I intuited that perhaps he alone, the ruler of an inverted city, where everything was the opposite of what it should be, where the cold light of a black sun gave off no heat, and the river, the very lifeblood of the city, ran black and foul with ichor and death. Perhaps this thing that wasn’t a man did indeed understand what it meant to be a reverse goblin.
I looked up at the spiritual sword still rammed through Arven’s back, broken chains still attached to it. “Uh, this might hurt a bit,” I told him.
Then I connected to every shadow in range and sent a hundred Hands of Night to grab the sword from every direction. Some pushed, some pulled, some merely anchored. In the end I needn’t have bothered with the effort, the sword slid out of Arven as though I were King Arthur pulling it from a stone. He went down on one knee and screamed to rival Dorian when he’d been having his spirit devoured by the Unmakers.
The Duke moved forward in a blur taking full advantage of the situation. Arven cut him in half while he was still three paces away, without even standing up. The Duke’s own momentum carried him past us in two pieces.
I belatedly realized he’d actually managed to parry Arven’s attack, but it hadn’t mattered. His sword had shattered when blocking the blow. The wall behind the Duke had cracked as though a great weight had hit it.
The last remnants of the curse faded to nothing. The sword disintegrated in my clutches with its parasitic source of power removed. To my spiritual vision Arven looked like he was made of light. There were cracks and scars, yes, but the moment I’d pulled the sword out he’d lit up like he’d been set on fire, if that fire was made of white and blue light in human shape.
“Wow,” I said, lamely.
Arven turned around, located the duke’s torso, and without bothering to walk over to him, beheaded him by simply waving one of his swords in the thing’s direction. The stone cracked once again, and head and body separated with violent force.
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 15 Goblin!
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 10 Valerian!
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 9 Shadow Thief!
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 9 Trailblazer!
“Wow,” I repeated. I hadn't been paying attention to my combat log, but I was pretty sure I’d managed to level up some of those during the fight as well.
Savas had been sneaking his way around the room, trying to get into position behind the Duke. Now he deactivated Hide and stood up, shaking his head. “Why didn’t we do that before we came in here?”
The Duchess chose that moment to re-enter the room through the floor, screaming something about her husband. Arven annihilated her with a single casual wave of his sword, accidentally causing more of the burnt balcony to collapse in the process.
New Achievement! “Dungeon Defier”
> System Message
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> Area Alert
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> The event affecting this dungeon has been concluded! Rewards will be distributed based on your contribution to the event when you exit the dungeon. Effects caused by the event will fade within the next 8 hours. Congratulations to the victors!
Above our heads there was a clicking sound, and a door in the wall popped open slightly. In the original version of this throne room the door would have been behind the throne, and probably the one the Duke and Dutchess used to enter the room. Now it was pretty much unusable, being on the ceiling, but a soft warm light shined out from behind it. I was pretty sure we’d found our exit.
Arven started laughing. I’d never heard the man laugh before. It was nearly as disorienting as the ridiculous power he had just demonstrated. Then it got even weirder as he picked me up and started swinging me around like a little kid.
“You magnificent little monster! You actually did it!” he told me. I couldn’t see his face with my spirit sight turned on, so I toggled it off only to find that he was openly weeping despite his huge smile.
Then I was being crushed to death. Or possibly hugged. It was hard to tell. “Arven! I can’t breathe!” I gasped out.
“Oh, sorry… It’s going to take me some time to get used to being this strong again,” Arven apologized, setting me down.
“What level are you anyway?” Lucus asked him.
“One hundred and seventy-three,” Arven told him, grinning.
Savas rolled his eyes. “Again, why didn’t we just do that before we walked in here?”
Dorian piped up. “Sorry, but the song wasn’t ready yet. If I hadn't leveled twice during the fight, I wouldn't have even had the points for it. I also needed the appropriate inspiration,” he ran a hand through his hair. “I made up most of it on the spot. I actually got an achievement for it. Recitation is part of the crafting process, but you don’t normally get it right on the first try, especially not while the inspiration is happening…”
“I didn’t believe it would actually work,” Arven said, still laughing. “I should have known better than to doubt you, Tavi. Oh gods, I feel alive for the first time in years!”
“You know, if you had believed it then the song probably would have been enough. That skill is heavily influenced by what you think of as a restraint,” I told him, somewhat grumpily.
“We haven’t actually completed the quest yet,” Lucus observed. “Didn’t we beat the dungeon? What else is there?”
He was right, and I opened up the quest to take another look. It had been a while since I’d looked at it. The timer was still going, though we still had plenty of time.
“Search the room,” I said. “The quest seems to indicate there’s something secret to be found.”
Lucus motioned to the Duke’s head, which had rolled near the center of the room. It was glowing a sort of orange-gold color. “That’s lootable, maybe he has a clue?”
Arven was standing closest and reached down to loot the body, but Dorian piped up before he could. “One moment! Let me examine it first!”
“Right, sorry.” Arven said, waiting for the bard to use his new skill on the corpse.
Dorian’s eyes went distant for a moment, but when he came back to himself, he was all smiles. “Success! I’ve unlocked his Chill of the Grave skill.” He relayed the new skill to me before continuing.
> Chill of the Grave
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> Active Skill (Tier 4)
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> Prerequisites: Undead (Any Greater), Mastered (Undeath), Affinity (Undeath), Branch (Undeath)
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> Rank: 0 / 10
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> PP: 0 / 8
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> Activation Cost: Mana (Very High)
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> Activation Type: Maintained (10 seconds)
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> Cooldown: 1 minute
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> Inspire dread mortality in your foes, draining the heat from the air and leaching away their will to live. Living creatures within a 1-meter area centered on you are subject to a paralytic effect that can render them immobile and unable to defend themselves.
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> Each rank in this skill increases its range by 1 meter and reduces the effectiveness of the target’s Resistance by 5%, to a maximum of 100%. When a target fails to resist this skill only because of this reduced resistance, it instead suffers a 50% reduction in its Dexterity and Agility statistics for the duration.
It was a pity that one had so many prerequisites, but it was something to consider using with Mythcaller in the future.
“I also saw a strange vision,” Dorian said. “In it, I was in this very room, but the real one, not the dungeon. I was holding court, and my only petitioner was a man I felt both affection and annoyance for. He asked me if I would reconsider, and I said no. Then a dark look crossed his face, and he stormed out.”
“Any idea what it means?” I asked.
“Not a clue!” the bard replied with a cheeky grin. “I’ll admit that when I came to Altria I was much more interested in its recent history than its distant past. If that vision of was from the perspective of the real Duke Talcion then perhaps it had something to do with his estranged family on his brothers side.”
Arven ignored our speculation and finally looted the Duke’s body. The head dissolved a moment later in a flash of gold light, and then Arven was straightening back up, holding a large sack. He frowned down at it, then opened the bag and looked inside.
“Ah.”
“Ah?” I asked.
“It’s a minor spacial bag, there’s a somewhat silly amount of gold inside,” Arven said, reaching into the bag and withdrawing a solid gold bar to show us. “Looks like some gems and such too.”
Dawn laughed. “Of course. Dungeon victory rewards tend to get better the longer a dungeon goes unbeaten, and no one has ever beaten this one. There’s probably a fortune in there.”
Arven put the bar back into the bag, then threw me the entire sack. It felt like catching a heavy backpack, but when I looked inside there was a comically large pile of gold, gems, and miscellaneous valuables sitting in a cloth-like area that was definitely much larger than the bag I was holding.
“Holy crap that’s a lot of money,” I said. “Can I even store this bag in my soul-space? It’s not going to explode or anything like that is it?”
Arven gave me a weird look. “Why would it?”
I threw up my hands. “I don’t know, I’m not sure how this stuff works!”
Everyone else gathered around to see the loot haul, and then I stored it all away in my soul-space. I found that the only oddity was that only the bag ended up in my soul-space, not its contents. The loot remained within when I checked, but as long as the bag was stored it remained inaccessible. The two forms of storage were apparently incompatible, but not violently so.
We spent the next couple of hours searching the rest of the castle. We got a surprise in that there was yet another mini-boss located in the kitchens, an elite but enormously fat ghoul.
Arven killed it before it even managed to attack, and we got two interesting pieces of loot off it, a chef’s hat that improved cooking skill, and a butcher’s knife that did extra damage against unarmored targets. Amusingly, none of my friends had any cultural context for the chef’s hat. It was listed as a unique item, and none of them could figure out why a hat would improve someone’s ability to cook.
We found a few other small items, each of which we intended to hand over to the guard or sell when we got out of jail, and I ended up consolidating all the random loot in the spacial bag with the piles of gold so it didn’t take up so much room in my soul-space. We’d need to figure out what we were keeping and what we were handing over, but we all wanted to figure out what was up with our quest first.
As far as we could tell there were no hidden secrets in the castle. Arven even showed us a few hidden passages, including the Duke’s emergency exit, but none of it led to any dark secrets and eventually we were forced to call a halt to the search.
We were all tired, except for Arven who claimed he felt like he’d gotten fifty years younger since breaking the curse. Even so, when we settled down he was one of the first to actually fall asleep, the burden he’d been carrying for so long had finally lifted from his shoulders, allowing him to rest cleanly for the first time in years.