Chapter 76: Deforestation

Clataire

Lady Clataire Astley stared down at the little necromancer in stunned disbelief. If her features could still display emotions the utter shock and outrage she was feeling right now would have been plain to see. Everything that was happening around her was impossible. Impossible! The dark-haired boy who carried a tiny speck of his own Doom seemed to have simply decided now was the time to end the Challenge and then ended it.

She couldn’t help but feel like the boy had been toying with her, letting her use her most powerful strategies out of some morbid curiosity to see what she could do. Before he simply reached out and snuffed her like a bug.

‘It didn’t make sense!’

The necromancer, and that was obviously what the boy was hadn’t been lying when he said he was rank twelve, and even the Cards he used hadn’t been high-cost. Yet it was like she had been a puppet dancing on his strings from the moment the match had begun.

With resigned fury, Clataire watched as Alabaster Roe commanded his two zombie hordes to both attack her Unearthed Botanist. They would overrun her monster easily enough, both hordes battering the botanist aside to attack her directly. The botanist monster would survive the first attack, but not the second. Would she survive either? Doubtful, 8000 was the kind of power held by monsters that slaughtered warbands and breached castle walls. Her semi-rotten form would likely be reduced to splinters. Certainly, she would take enough damage to lose the Challenge and then she would be left defenseless anyway.

Against an enemy with honor that would only matter so much, but this boy had already swore he would kill her. That along with the fact that he hadn’t Manifested anything until their Challenge began were dead giveaways to the sort of person she was dealing with here. One who was barely out of childhood, and yet was so sociopathically dangerous he had already been cursed.

She couldn’t imagine the sort of heinous acts a teenage boy would have to commit to be curse-locked so young, but one thing was for sure. Alabaster Roe did not care if he broke the strictest rule of all Challenges.

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‘Do not kill your defeated opponent.’

The Unearthed Botanist fought valiantly attempting to clobber the swarm of dozens of zombies that descended onto it. The botanist backed up by Obsession Beyond Death was a powerful Creature in its own right, but against the horde, it stood no chance. Almost as though they didn’t even realize the monster was there the swarm simply trampled and battered it aside in their frenzy to reach Clataire. Not involved in the clash of Creatures Malaithe offered her a sardonic grin and stepped out of the way of the crush of monsters.

This was the end then, just as she had predicted. Her Doom had grown too much, and she had grown too little. Now she would be torn and toppled by the swarm of zombies, before likely chopped or burned by their master. She knew it was going to hurt, but she was far more afraid of her end than pain.

If only the boy was Undead she could pin him in place like she had his mouthy Deck Sprite, at this point in her existence she needed the Deck not at all to project and control the Undeath Resonance that grew in crystals from her very being. He did have some Undeath Resonance inside him, only a little being Rank twelve of course. Still there was something there….

‘Yes! Yes, it can work. If Armon never gave up despite dying multiple times how can I surrender to my doom and this runt now?!’

She could hardly call it a plan, but an idea of sorts had formed within the leafy mass that acted as her brain. All Clataire had to do was endure the pain of the zombie assault, and then wait for the boy to close in on her as he planned. She swore at herself for not thinking of this earlier and instead agreeing to the Challenge. It wouldn’t matter though, this boy had said her Deck was a bad match for his, well he was about to find out his body was a poor match against hers.

The thought comforted her as the zombie horde swarmed her but that didn’t stop her from screaming when they began to rip her branches and bark clear. Part of her had wondered if maybe just maybe she would require both zombie hordes attacking her to be defeated, but no, one was more than enough to defeat The Garden Of The Doomed Maiden

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[Garden Of The Doomed Maiden

Player: Clataire Astley

Dealer: A pair ornate gloves

Rank: 10- Lesser Imbued

Resonances: Undeath, Bloom, Faekin

Library: 45 Cards

No Linked Items.]