Attack. An aura command sent by a dwarven necromancer to his undead thralls and summons. The response was immediate. Every undead creature for a hundred meters stopped what it was doing, turned to face Akamori and charged. Some came sprinting in, others loped or limped as quickly as their injuries would allow. The result was the same. Anytime they crashed against Akamori, the Void Flame cloak either set them on fire or disintegrated their appendages before they could affect him.
Akamori stood unmoving, even as the dwarf backed off to cast spells as well. Assuming that Akamori was using some kind of ward that could be overwhelmed. There was only one problem. He wasn’t .
The void flame cloak devoured all that made contract with it, inflicting burning and reverberating, and void damage stacks at such alarming rates. They consumed anything that contacted it. Reducing them to nothing but ash. It was an Aura based defensive spell that had its roots in the Amaterasu’s Fire spell.
Instead of being an optical or woven spell, this version was infused in one’s aura. Thus making it a persistent cast spell. And a powerful one at that. The Necromancer before him, with all his vast knowledge and eons of lifespans lived, had no functional knowledge of a Void Flame Cloak, or Amaterasu’s Fire. Thus, he found himself at a severe disadvantage. One that Akamori did not have the displeasure of suffering.
Anger took root in place of fear. Soon a mountain of undead began hurling themselves at him. The initial wave were reduced to ash against his aura, which he contracted in so that more and more of the dead bodies could press him in. He was like chum in the water for a pack of ravenous sharks. Hands and teeth desperately tried to reach him. When he couldn’t progress any further, he took a deep breath, a purely semantic gesture at this point, and let his aura explode outward as he let out a wordless cry of rage.
When his aura detonated like a magi-bomb, the Void Flame Cloak rippled outwards like an incinerating shockwave that scorched everything with it. Akamori stopped short when he almost consumed the Dwarven necromancer with it, singing some of his beard alone. Then he drew his aura back to himself again, allowing it to cling to his blue jacket. Again his eyes opened, and two piercing glowing orbs stared down the Necromancer.
The ground thundered as Akamori began to stride forward again, slowly chasing after the necromancer like some kind of slasher movie villain. Then the world went spinning and Akamori was crashing through several buildings inside Ft. Washington. His momentum arrested itself with him upside down inside a building he’d almost collapsed. He slowly pushed off the debris and stood up, shoving aside some heavy rocks like they were made of styrofoam.
A stone golem stood where he’d been moments before as the void flame on its knuckles burned like a pair of flaming brass knuckles. A thunderclap of air behind him and he crossed the hundred meter gap between them in an instant. He brought his fist around hard on the golem’s face and it exploded into pebbles. He hesitated, throwing another attack when the golem reformed its head like it was made of clay.
“Well. That’s new.” He muttered.
He summoned fire into his body, enhancing his strength to divine levels and did the same with air, enhancing his speed. In a blur, stones and pebbles exploded off the golem with each blow he landed. At the speeds he could reach now, that was an impressive amount. In a matter of seconds, he reduced the golem to a gravel sidewalk.
“Regrow that.” He spat.
Two more lumbered up behind him, kicking him hard in the back and sending him tumbling head over ass as he pinwheeled off a car into the second story of a nearby barracks. Bedding, linens, and furniture all ignited as soon as he contacted the materials, leaving a trail of black fire like a blood trail from a wounded game animal. Using his aura, he rose slowly and focused himself. Visualizing his attack before making it.
The air exploded as he suddenly crossed the gap so fast the vacuum collapsed with a thunderous bang. He threw punches and kicks with murderous abandon as he tried to blow down the regenerative defenses of the golems. But having to split his attentions between the two of them was proving to be a disadvantage. As soon as he wore one down, its partner tagged in, forcing him to adjust target.
An overhanded double fisted smash sent him crashing into the ground hard. He groaned as he tried to get up when a large stone hand grabbed him up by the scruff of his blue coat and hurled him off into the distance like a human bowling ball. A red sports car arrested his moment with shattered glass and a half dead alarm. Undead clogging the streets lurched after him slowly.
Rotted meat burned, and enamel snapped and popped as teeth exploded from heat against his aura. Thanaton appeared in hand, and it didn’t take long for the blade to claim the undead. Thanaton hungrily carved its way cleanly through rotten meat and bone with ease. With a few flicks of his wrist, he’d cleared out a bubble of breathing space for himself, and then set to the work of cleaning out the street. He gave in to it fully, not stopping until every last undead in sight was down.
By the time he finished, the two stone golems had stomped their way back to him. A fist the size of an engine block crashed into him, smashing him into a wall and catching the interior on fire. He kicked the hand up, flying under it to crash into the stone body, sending it sprawling across the street. He had just enough time to spin and catch the fist of the other Golem as it was trying to strike him from behind.
Stone grinding against stone protested as the golem tried to push Akamori back, but he was done. Thanaton came about, shaving off slices of stone from the Golem’s arm like a deli sandwich lunch meat. He popped forward in a short quick burst of air to drive his knee into the Golem’s head, sending it staggering back before it regained its balance. Another quick pop and he was on the ground, slashing with Thanaton in a wide arc and severing the Golem’s legs at the knees before removing its head as it fell back, flattening an abandoned car. Glass blew out like clear jagged confetti as metal shrieked from crush damage.
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He took a moment to survey the squad. Helios and Sala held a like while Yasiin and Sirsir were dumping fire from the rear. There was a pile of bodies in front of them, showing nothing had gotten close enough to be a threat in a while. He nodded, feeling a comforted by their self sufficiency. Turning back to the street, the Stone Golems were putting themselves back together again.
Whatever enchantments these things had, they were going to stop if he didn’t reduce them to dust. Before he could begin casting a spell, a massive stone smashed him out of the air, sending him ping ponging off the cars choking the street. He groaned as he slowly got back to his feet just in time to block a stone foot the size of a riding mower as it crashed into him. The world spun like he was in a washing machine on spin cycle. It came to a violent and painful stop, and he groaned when the movement ceased, leaving only the pain.
Even with his void flame cloak, he was getting knocked around pretty hard. He needed to be stronger. It was just like Thanaton said. The golem crushed him onto the pavement again. The air rushed clear of his lungs from the impact. His hands struggled to grip it and push it free even as it ground him deeper into the ground. The other golem lumbered back and worked its massive hands like jackhammers, driving blows down onto Akamori with steady and powerful beats.
One golem picked him up as its chest split open, forming a massive mouth with large blocky teeth. The top half of its body angled back, and it dumped Akamori into its maw. For an instant, it looked to the necromancer that his stone golem summons had done the job and finished the adventurer off. He glided to the top of a building to laugh as he studied the scene of the battle. Sure enough, the warrior had dealt with the fodder, but the stone golems were a different problem.
Victory was all but assured. Until it wasn’t. The stone golem lurched to a halt. As though it’d eaten something that disagreed with it. Acid bubbled and boiled from its mouth, splashing out and sizzling on the pavement.
The air grew heavy with the tension of a crowd holding its breath before a jump scare in a horror movie. A long black blade erupted from the stone head of the golem like a broken bone breaking the skin. Then the sword carved several lines into the golem with the speed of hot steel cleaving warm butter. The golems jaw worked autonomically, not realizing it was already dead. The entire golem then exploded as Akamori’s aura blew outward like a shockwave. Acid slid along it like rain splashing down a clear plastic umbrella.
Thanaton flicked about wildly, but to a seasoned swordsman’s eye, he was carving the remaining golem through several key points to choke off its aether flow to prevent it from reconstituting itself again. Then he blasted the remains with a magnitude 5 void bolt that carved a massive sphere into the street where the golem once stood. Once his breathing stilled, Akamori slowly turned to face the Necromancer again, as if silently challenging the dwarf with an unspoken question. What now?
The necromancer grinned. “Well, ma boy. You’re downright interestin!”
Akamori blurred the distance between the two and lunged to strike, hitting only air. The dwarven necromancer fell backwards into a slash in reality that made his eyes ache. A portal into the soul realm? Bahumet resonated deep within him.
Akamori paused. That revelation alone was reason enough to stop and contemplate. The umbral plane wasn’t the only one that could be traversed and jumped to?
A high magnitude soul blast struck Akamori in the back and a frigid chill stabbed into the very center of his soul. It was like an icy hand clutched his heart and squeezed tight.
Soul Agony , Bahumet said. The punishment of the dead cast down upon the living.
Akamori had some soul magic, but the magnitude of the attack was enough that it overwhelmed his defenses.
Gods are powerful, but not all powerful. Always be prepared for attack, even when none is coming. Thanaton growled.
“I know, I know,” Akamori said, annoyed as he struggled up to his feet.
He could hear the dwarf chuckling, but it sounded distant and all around him. Something about that made his skin crawl.
“Ya may have beaten my golems. But ya haven’t stopped me.”
“I was getting to that,” Akamori growled.
“We’ll see. Ya may be a godling. But yer young yet. There’s so much ya still don’t know. Be seein’ ya. Till then, I’d like ya to meet a friend o’ mine.”
The surrounding air grew frigid, his breath coming out in steamy puffs. A nearby puddle of water froze over. Frost crept across an unbroken pane of glass in a window to a fuel station next to him. Someone had arranged the fuel price numbers to read “6.66”. He spun and came face to face with a banshee. It regarded him for a moment, as though debating if she were the predator or the prey. Instinctively, he knew it was a banshee. Something about her soul spoke to him. Some kind of sense he’d developed? He filed that away for further thought. She hesitated, sensing what he was. But only briefly. She opened her mouth, and his entire existence became pain.