So not only is the king far faster and stronger than I am, but he can also control the castle itself?

Also Devoured, so highly resistant to most spells.

Right, of course. Is there any doubt he has the seal then? Any chance I can just ignore him?

He might, but did you notice his title?

Yeah, didn't have the partially Devoured thing.

So maybe he just guards it, didn't integrate into himself. What if that's what's making the castle move?

Is that how that works? How does one go about making a castle move like that?

You give it a soul.

And we're pretty sure the last remaining seal is the soul ring. I guess that makes sense. Just seems weird the king would give it to the castle instead of using it himself.

Maybe he never had it. The guy who wrote that note, the one who made the seals in the first place, maybe he didn't give it to the king at all.

He locked it away somewhere in the castle and over time the castle ended up absorbing it?

Something like that.

I think that's even worse. That means the castle acts on it's own so I can't just distract the king. I'll always be fighting two entities instead of one.

You could try and ignore the king, but I'm not sure how you find the ring.

The castle would definitely try and defend itself and we can't assume it's an idiot. The smartest option for it is to move the king on top of me so I have to deal with both at once.

So you need to find a way to kill something far stronger and faster than you in it's sentient lair.

Pretty much.

The wyvern was strong, but it wasn't particularly fast so it wasn't too bad. This thing is strong and fast. How the hell do I beat that thing in a fight then?

You cheat.

Sure… how?

Bring a gun to the sword fight.

Is a gun enough? On my world a gun could kill someone in a single shot and it wasn't really possible to dodge, assuming the shooter was remotely competent. I don't know anything like that here. I could try and make a massive lightning cannon or something… How much do I need to overpower the spell to kill that thing though?

Well, we know about how much it takes to kill a normal Devoured.

Right and assuming the king is 5 times harder to kill…

It's between 10 and 30 million mana.

Great so between 40 and 130 batteries. I only have 47 left so I just hope that's enough?

Well, the Devoured are resistant to elemental effects. You could just make a normal cannon.

A cannon isn't a terrible idea, the issue is I have to hold and aim it. Or even worse, set it up somewhere where I can't aim it. If I'm going to have any chance of hitting the king, he needs to be held still. In that case, why wouldn't I just walk up to him and hit him with the axe?

Fair enough. Sounds like you need a trap of some kind then. Something that can hold him.

Without the castle being able to just eat it.

Speaking of the castle, you should be able to neutralize it, at least somewhat.

How?

Binding a soul to an inanimate object means it can move, but it can't just move without expending any energy.

Mana.

Exactly. Energy is for living cells, mana is for… everything else.

In that case, I think I know what to do.

Based on his and Grim's estimate, Felix had 2 more days to get the ring and come up with a plan for how to deal with Erolan. Ideally Felix wanted to spend as little time as possible dealing with the king so he had as much time left afterwards as possible. Unfortunately, the plan he had, was going to take at least half a day.

Felix pulled pre-affinized Starmetal ingots from his inventory one by one and started molding them to shape. He started with making chains as they were the simplest object he would have to make. He molded the links into each-other and then attached a hook to the links every meter or so. This would make it so he could hook the chain into itself and shorten it if needed.

Once he had more chain than he thought was necessary, he started working on harpoons. He made them a meter long with small permanent barbs and larger barbs that extended on impact. He made 10 of them and fastened loops to the ends so he could hook the chains onto them.

After that, he made two tubes that could be used to fire the harpoons from his hand with the inscribed force spell. Counterintuitively to Felix, using force spells had no recoil so the weight of the tube made no difference. After some brief testing, he made small adjustments to both the harpoons and the tubes to make sure his aim would be acceptable then moved on to the main event.

Ultimately, he didn't have a great way of killing the Devoured king in a single shot, like a gun, the alternative then was to make it impossible for the king to hurt him, let alone kill him. Felix started with a large capsule shape that would make up the torso then simple tubes for the arms and legs.

From there, he morphed a hole into the back and climbed into the suit then morphed the different pieces around him to allow as much movement as possible. His ultimate goal was to have the suit be impenetrable for anything the size of the king's sword or larger. He also didn't need to have much mobility, just enough to turn and walk.

He had no intention of swinging a weapon or dodging an attack, all he needed to do was shoot a harpoon into the king so he could chain him to the ground. Ideally the suit would also make it difficult for the castle itself to crush him, or at least he hoped it would.

In the end, his suit looked ridiculous and wearing it, he could barely walk but he was happy with how much protection it offered. He made sure to bend the joints to their extreme, making sure a hole didn't open up and it's range of motion wouldn't let the king just break all of Felix's joints. He was pretty sure he had thought of everything.

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He thought about the king simply blasting him with fire and trying to cook him alive but figured at that point, it would just come down to mana capacity, which he should win. The other option for the king was to throw Felix around and try to kill him with blunt force from having his body rattling around inside. Felix was hoping the king wasn't strong enough for that though and if he was, Felix's spells should be able to make up the difference.

Felix stowed the suit along with the chains and harpoons into his inventory then flew back up to the castle. The last thing he had to do was to reverse the mana spells he had surrounded the castle with so the castle would have a hard time restoring it's mana. With all the devoured creatures and guards dead, all he had to do was walk around the castle and spin the spell forms around.

Before he did that though, he didn't want to waste the mana already suffusing the aether around the castle so he walked into the courtyard and began recollecting it. He created as many batteries of solid mana as fast as he could while he flew around and absorbed as much mana as possible. In the end, he only managed to make 25 batteries before the aether around the castle fell to a level he was satisfied with.

Felix reversed the spell formations to push mana away from the castle then walked into the courtyard, made some final modifications then climbed into his suit. He created and fused an extra two tubes to the outside of his suit then filled them with harpoons. He finally climbed into the suit then walked up to the castle doors.

The first floor was exactly as he had seen from the outside, a long hall flanked by pillars on either side and ending in an imperial staircase on the other end. He wanted to check out the rooms he hadn't seen into from the windows but figured there would be time for that later.

Felix slowly took one loud clanging step after another and slowly walked into the center of the room, patiently waiting for the castle to make a move. As expected, the pillars on either side of the room lifted off from the ground and disappeared into the ceiling. One of them reappeared right above Felix's head and smashed down as if he was a whack-a-mole.

The pillar knocked him onto his back but the suit stopped it from doing any damage. The pillar lifted itself up and the carpet wrapped itself around Felix's suit to hold him steady. Felix put his palm onto the ground and started pulling as much mana as he could out of the stone floor. There was far more mana than there would be suffusing any normal material but it only took him a couple seconds to pull most of it out. The carpet fell limply to the ground right before the pillar struck down again.

As soon as the pillar struck, Felix pulled mana from it as fast as he could. This time, the castle knew what he was doing and it fought back. Felix had never felt anything quite like it, fighting against another soul for control over mana. It was interesting at first, but the castle didn't stand a chance and barely even slowed him down.

Felix pulled the mana into a new battery he was creating, just so he had somewhere to put it. Once the mana level within the pillar was approaching normalcy, Felix heard a loud crack followed by a crumbling noise. The pillar slowly tilted to the side then toppled over as it had separated from the ceiling above him.

As soon as he managed to stand up, through the use of force spells, two pillars smashed into his suit from either side. As soon as they struck, they pulled back quickly and two more pillars struck again, perpendicular from the first ones. Felix pulled his arms into the chest plate of the armor just in case and manually pulled mana from everything around him.

He created a vortex similar to the one he used to collect mana into his core and the one he used when creating mana engines. The vortex grew until it was as big as he could sustain, reaching over a meter in every direction. The pillars continued their rapid strikes but one by one, Felix sucked them dry and they fell to the ground, unmoving.

Felix accelerated the vortex as much as he could so the pull was as strong as possible then slowly walked towards the stairs at the end of the room. Before he got there though, the entire ceiling dropped downwards. It was too slow to be an attack and the ceiling above him remained so Felix simply waited and watched as the throne room was lowered by a floor. The pillars from the room above came with the floor as did the throne and the devoured king that sat upon it. The king either didn't care or didn't notice the floor beneath him slowly descending like the biggest elevator ever. He lounged upon his throne and indifferently looked towards Felix.

As soon as the floor stopped moving, the king lazily rose to his feet and lifted his sword from the ground. He took a few steps towards Felix then suddenly shot himself forwards. Felix was ready for the attack but knew he had no chance of dodging it so instead, he readied a harpoon. The king feinted with their sword then launched the momentum from shooting themself forwards into a kick knocking Felix's suit back into the stairs.

The suit smacked the stairs and rolled upwards while Felix, inside of it, rattled around. He lost a large chunk of his health just from being smacked against the inside of his suit, far more than he expected. He had managed to launch the spear but once his vision stopped spinning, he saw the king standing unharmed above him.

The king was standing a top the suit and started pulling on the left arm. Felix quickly pulled his arm into the chest plate of the suit just in case and shoved mana into one of the spears on the outside of his suit. Just as the spear fired off, the king ripped the arm off at the elbow joint and the spear shot past his head and into the ceiling.

Felix quickly started sealing the left arm of his suit but wasn't fast enough to avoid the king shoving his sword inside. It couldn't go very deep, but it was enough to rip through Felix's upper left arm. The king pulled the sword out to strike again and Felix managed to seal the hole.

The king jumped off and Felix sighed with relief that he didn't go for the other arm but was interrupted by a pillar rocketing out of the wall behind him. It smashed itself into his suit and shot him across the room, once again smacking him just as hard against the inside of the suit. The vortex had pulled a lot of mana from it, but the castle hadn't let go so it simply lay there. The other harpoon from his suit was stuck in the wall and held his suit aloft for a few seconds before it slid off and fell to the ground.

As soon as his suit clattered to the ground, the king was on top of him again and started pulling on the other arm. Felix decided to sacrifice it and pulled out another harpoon. He quickly made a small hole in the front of the suit and stuck the harpoon through, firing as quickly as he could. This time, the king was still pulling on the arm when the harpoon buried itself into his abdomen.

This harpoon had a chain attached to it and Felix held onto the other end. The harpoon interrupted the king's attempt as he jumped back to avoid further injury. Felix reached up and quickly hooked the end of the chain to the harpoon in the wall above him before the castle once again launched him across the room.

He cushioned the blow as much as he could with feather fall. Though it didn't make it harmless, it helped. As soon as Felix hit the wall, he stuck a harpoon into it then hooked one end of a chain to it and ran towards the king with the other. The king had tried to leap at Felix, following his trajectory but the chain attached to the harpoon in his abdomen held him back.

Felix clanged towards the king and fired a spear attached to the second chain from a dozen meters back while the king was busy pulling on the harpoon in his stomach. The harpoon landed in his left arm and Felix immediately pulled on the chain, hooking it onto itself to tighten it as much as possible.

The king was limited by the chains to just a few meters of movement in either direction but it was more than Felix wanted. He clanged his way over to a spear he had missed with earlier that was stuck in a stationary pillar then hooked a chain to it. He fired the other end into the king's flailing right arm then tightened the chain as much as he could. He circled around the king as he tried to break free of the chains but all it did was create slack in the chain nearest Felix. Felix hooked the chains with slack into themselves and continued circling until the king was barely able to move.

The castle tried to attack Felix a few times, but each and every time it did, it's attack was cut short as it was running out of mana and wasn't nearly as fast as it had been before. Finally, Felix morphed the starmetal so there was an opening in his suit and climbed his way out of it.

He gulped at the fresh air and stretched out then wiped the blood from his face and pulled out the axe. Now that the king was chained up and could barely move his arms, his speed and strength didn't matter at all. Felix picked up and stowed his sword, which seemed to just be a simple steel longsword with durability enchantments, then started dismembering the king.

He started with his legs, which took a handful of strikes to sever, almost like he was trying to cut down a large tree. Felix left the arms because they were being used to hold the chains, and he skipped straight to his head. It took him almost a dozen strikes to fully behead the king and finally receive the kill notification.

Ding You have slain a [D] Partially King of Kroterra: Devoured (Lvl 902)

Real shame these don't give any experience.

Their stats are also massively reduced. There is no way you'd be able to take out a normal level 902 like that. The only reason you could kill this one is cause it's really dumb.

Yeah, you're right. Still seems like a shame. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .