Traveling through the residential district to the east of the castle, Felix found multiple forges, warehouses and apartments. Everything was incredibly dense and even claustrophobic at times. The streets were barely wide enough for a small cart to pass through, not nearly enough for two carts side by side like they had been in the commercial district. Felix darted through the streets running from and avoiding all Devoured because he didn't even want to try and fight them in the cramped space. He accidentally attracted the attention of a few of them but managed to lose them fairly quickly. His stealth seemed to be steadily improving, not that the Devoured were a great judge by any means.
As he traveled around the city to the north, the buildings around him grew further and further apart until he was in what he would call a normal suburb. The houses were separated, there were parks and squares, some of the houses had yards and the roads were wide enough for two carts to travel side by side along with a walkway. Unfortunately, the Devoured's levels had also been steadily growing and from a quick glance around him, Felix estimated their levels here, on the east side, to be around 350.
It wasn't a huge jump, but the steady increase was worrying. Felix's best bet to defeating the Devoured down here was the axe, but in just a single fight he had to expend a significant chunk of his own health. If he had to deal with droves of them protecting a seal, he would end up tearing all his muscles and killing himself. He wasn't sure how that death would look, his health dropping to 0 without any external injuries. If he had to bet, he guessed his body would simply collapse then completely shut down, unable to repair all the internal damage. Hopefully he would never have to find out.
As he made his way further north, now that the streets were wide enough, Felix began picking fights with lone Devoured. He needed the practice and literal battle experience if he was going to be able to push further into the kingdom. Felix made sure to only fight at most one at a time and to spend time recovering between each and every fight. In the first dozen fights he took about one hit a fight, though they never dealt more damage than he did to himself just from swinging the axe. He started realizing that fighting with the axe wasn't sustainable and he wasn't going to modify his muscles until he was sure of his bones, so he needed to do something in the meantime.
Though it wasn't ideal, Felix began practicing with augmenting his swings using spells. Instead of swinging the axe using just his strength, he used a force spell to push the axe. At first it was a nightmare, luckily though, he was testing it outside of battle. Using force spells helped push the axe, but it also made it unwieldy to use. The axe unintentionally flew out of his hands multiple times before he started to get the hang of it.
The first issue was that he had to change the direction he was applying the force so the axe swung in an arc instead of flying out in a straight line. After that, he also had to use force to stop or slow the axe once it had swung through his imaginary target. A real target brought real resistance to the swing so it would be less of an issue then, but he also didn't want to be completely vulnerable if he happened to miss.
He settled on simply casting multiple spells in succession. He used one for the swing and another for slowing down the axe. While this helped him actually swing the axe and not tear his body up at the same time, it also made it difficult to strike accurately with the axe. So while it helped, it would be best used against large creatures where it was already difficult to miss. As it was, there was no way he could use it to make his swings faster against normal human sized enemies, like most of the Devoured, without missing with the vast majority of his swings. However, he kept using spells to slow down his strikes and avoid swinging the axe into the ground which made him much less vulnerable as he didn't have to constantly pry it free. As soon as the axe had struck his target, he cast his force spell and it felt like it was being swung through honey until it came to a stop.
Felix continued to pick off individual Devoured and slowly trudge through the ruins of the kingdom heading north. While their levels gradually increased, his skill with the axe did as well. He wasn't necessarily getting much stronger, his strength stat only increased by a handful in the last day, his timing and aim on the other hand were improving rapidly. As he traveled northwards, his skill with the axe outpaced the Devoured's levels making it feel progressively easier the further he traveled.
By the time their levels started surpassing the 400s, he rarely if ever missed his intended target and ended up bisecting them with the majority of his strikes. At first he simply swung to the side but that had the unfortunate issue of often having their corpses stuck to the axe blade. Instead, he learned to wait for them to pounce then he swung downwards using the cobblestone road as a cutting board. Once they were split in two, usually from the shoulder down, even though somehow most of them lived, finishing them off was trivial.
As Felix stealthed his way through the buildings and alleyways the houses grew larger and the area definitively wealthier up until he reached a wall. He had simply expected the houses to continue all the way around, like he had seen from above but before him was a couple meter tall thin stone wall. It hadn't held up very well so it was relatively easy for Felix to spot a section that had crumbled that he could get through just a few meters away. He just as easily could have hopped over it but the Devoured were starting to become more cognizant of their surroundings so he tried his best to not draw unnecessary attention to himself.
Walking over to the crumbled section of the wall, Felix looked through into the neighborhood beyond and saw a stark difference when compared to the buildings around him. While the buildings had slowly grown in size and comfort as he walked north, beyond the walls the houses were once luxurious. Around him the houses were like townhouses in a suburb back on earth. Beyond the wall, the houses were more like modern mansions and old money estates.
They were all surrounded by yards and had held up much better to the throes of time, no doubt due to the use of superior materials. Even though he had just seen estates and mansions just as big if not bigger up in Ky'Bel on the second level, these stood out for a few reasons. Firstly, they appeared to generally be in better condition even though they had been built long before the ones above. They also contrasted the houses he had just been walking through so drastically and he had grown accustomed to the gradual increase as he walked. Lastly, just looking through the wall, Felix could tell the Devoured on the other side were different.
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Not only were all the Devoured's levels in the 400s, rather than just a handful, they were also less zombie like. Instead of just loitering in the streets and aimlessly walking around with awful posture, Felix spotted multiple Devoured standing straight and walking with purpose. Some carried weapons and wore scraps of armor others wore fancy clothes and carried books. He even spotted a pair of them that appeared to be arguing with grunts and moans, something he never would have thought possible of the Devoured.
Felix immediately refocused on being stealthy and crept through the hole in the wall. His feet landed on soft dirt that he suspected was once a park, though there wasn't any hint of vegetation remaining. He carefully made his way along the wall, towards the nearest building so he could duck behind it. He wanted to avoid traveling through large open spaces as much as possible in case these Devoured were more perceptive than the others.
Felix darted from building to building using the remnants of fences and statues to obscure his movements as much as he could. He ended up making his way north, towards the outside of the kingdom and away from the castle. As he did, the growth in the Devoured's levels started to slow down until they completely stopped. Peeking around the corner of a mansion, Felix looked around and noticed there were no Devoured anywhere around him. He could see some walking along the streets to the south and east but it was almost like there was an invisible line they wouldn't cross.
Looking ahead to the north, he immediately knew why. A massive area of the kingdom had been completely razed. The ground was blackened and the mansions reduced to char completely evenly. It looked like a massive explosion of fire had gone off and obliterated everything. Felix crept towards the edge of it to try and see if he could figure out what had happened. He walked right up to it though and wasn't able to discern anything more than it was burnt. Looking around, he confirmed his suspicions that the Devoured were staying away from the area.
He decided before investigating the area, he would use it's repellant effect to his advantage. He crept through the buildings and found the nearest Devoured which was walking down the street wearing scraps of leather armor and held a rusted short sword. A Mana Bolt struck it in the side of the head causing it to whirl itself around. Felix drew the creature towards the blackened area of the kingdom right up to the point where it stopped and screeched at him. Easily still a few dozen meters from the edge of the charring, the creature would not take another step forwards.
Perfect.
Felix rushed back up to the creature and swung at it with his axe. The creature simply hopped back and completely avoided the strike. As soon as it's toes touched the ground, it launched itself forwards and stabbed at Felix who was still trying to recover from his strike and pull his axe up.
Since he was completely vulnerable physically, Felix quickly cast a spell firing off a blast of force into the creature rushing him to knock it aside. The creature hit the ground and rolled to it's feet then rushed him again, this time swiping at him from the side. This time, Felix hauled the axe blade in front of the sword barely in time to block the strike. The creature whirled the blade around and went for a quick jab to Felix's other side where he had no chance of moving the axe in time. Felix jumped backwards and barely managed to hold onto the axe as it pulled on his arms and stressed his shoulder joints to the limit.
He landed on the ground a few meters away but landed on his back because of the axe's momentum. Luckily he had landed a couple meters past the line the Devoured wouldn't cross so it simply stood there screeching at him. Felix took a few moments to stand back up and pull the axe's blade out of the ground then walked back up to the creature. They continued their duel, where Felix desperately tried to match the quick strikes of the short sword by blocking as many as he could with the axe. He didn't even try to strike back with the axe because he already knew it was far too slow by itself.
After a few hours of repelling the creature's strikes, where it only landed a dozen or so minor scratches, Felix backed up and meditated as his health was dangerously low. He had accidentally let it get all the way down to just 10%. Normally he would never let it get this low but he was so absorbed in the fight and getting better at predicting, reading and blocking his enemy that he barely noticed it plummeting.
This time, Felix only practiced constructing a single Fire Ball spell while he meditated with the majority of his focus absorbed in mentally reviewing the duel. He managed to find a few things he could do to definitely improve and a dozen that might result in improvement that he would try out. Once he had completely restored his health pool he opened his eyes and was happy to find the Devoured he had been fighting still standing exactly where he had left it, hollow sockets trained on him. If he wasn't so excited to get back into it, and so used to the Devoured at this point, he would definitely have found it very creepy.
This time, Felix added in pivots and short steps to dodge any strikes he had no hope of blocking. He also made sure to step into his axe strikes and towards the blade at the end of a strike to hide more of his body behind the axe as well as have more leverage to stop it. He still had no hope of actually striking the creature but he had massively reduced the number of close calls and rarely had to completely bail from the fight now.
He still got cut a few times as they fought but the scariest part of the short sword was not it's razor sharp edge that no longer existed. Every time it struck him, the rust encrusted blade risked an infection of some kind if it managed to cut through his robes at all. Luckily, his body was able to deal with it quickly especially given how shallow the wounds were. Without an actual edge, it was difficult for the creature to actually fatally harm him with the sword. In fact, Felix suspected it would be much better off using it's claws and wasn't entirely sure why it didn't. He didn't question it too much though at the moment as he was more than happy for the easy battle experience with what was effectively a training dummy to him.
Felix continued this cycle for almost a day of dueling the creature then backing up to recover and analyze the fight. He was improving, he could tell but he had reached a plateau of sorts. He realized that he could accurately predict just about every strike, largely due to it's sinewy muscle showing through it's skin, but he still hadn't found openings to strike back. If a real fight went like this, he would simply kill himself just from swinging the axe around. Thinking back to what he knew from fantasy barbarians, he was starting to think he was going to have to get hit in order to land any strikes.
The axe was too unwieldy to be able to land a strike on a creature as small and nimble as a human unless they had already committed to a strike of their own. He had tried stowing it at the end of a strike then pulling it out right when he needed it but his inventory wouldn't let him retrieve or stow things in the middle of an attack. He could do so, given a few moments, between swings, but not mid swing. He was disappointed but figured it was probably better this way so fighters with weapons weren't constantly pulling out shields and swords just to block single strikes. He didn't love the idea of just accepting hits, even if he did so strategically so he tried to think of another way while he performed his daily routine of stretching, weights and the Dragon Dance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .