Zalia summoned her bow in, alarm flashing in her mind just as adrenaline pumped through her veins. Boreal, in full armour, was attached to the back of a… demon. It stood at twice Zalia’s height, still smaller than the aura monster yet just as hideous. It had six large wings that looked more blade than limb, each with sharp metallic edges. The humanoid creature spun in alarm, trying to grab at Boreal as she mauled its back.
An aura much like the aura monster yet weaker burst from the creature and Zalia responded in kind, pushing her own aura towards it. As that happened, she had already applied Hunter’s mark and was in the process of casting three simultaneous rituals. One was an extra layer of armour for Boreal in the form of the ice armour as well as the Dodge-vine basic ritual. The third was the lava curse on the demon.
As the rituals went off, Zalia began firing but the demon was faster. Feeling her aura, it whipped around in her direction and took off into the air, dragging Boreal up with it. Its flight was somewhat disturbed as Boreal had her jaws clamped over one of the top wings.
? - Bronze rank.
It was definitely stronger than the undead but hopefully, nothing they couldn’t handle. The real problem came when the shades above took notice and swarmed towards Zalia. They either really didn’t like Zalia’s focused aura or they were being directed by the demon above. She liked neither option.
Deciding Boreal would be fine for the moment as the shades ignored her, Zalia cast the ritual to hide from their sight on herself, dropping Hunter’s mark on the demon and applying it to herself and Boreal so that she also got the effects of the ritual. As that happened, she ran.
While it would hide her from their senses, they would still swarm where she had been. Dashing off into the forest, Zalia began using her air steps to jump, twist in mid air and let off a shot before using her remaining steps to stabilise and land. The demon was flying towards her in an unstable flight, somewhat less focused on her and more on trying to get Boreal off.
One, then two of her arrows landed as she ran, the shades having lost her in the forest. Applying her air wings ritual to both herself and Boreal, Zalia dropped Hunter’s mark on them both and placed it back on the demon. She flew up above the treeline to take a few more shots but was surprised as the demon vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving Boreal hovering.
She felt a push of air behind her and quickly dashed to the side but was too late as the claws of the demon caught her left hand and tore the arm free below the elbow. Muffling a scream of pain, her healing automatically focused onto her arm and she spun about, summoning her weapon as a blade to fight back.
She wasn’t good at airborne combat but held her own as Boreal flew at high speed through the air on a collision course. Zalia held back from using either of her druid actives as her arm slowly grew back, the other defending the extremely quick enemy before her.
While she was close to Bronze, both her Herbalist and Hunter classes were still Iron and the difference in stats was definitely noticeable. If she was to guess, the creature had both mental stats and both strength and dexterity bonded. Its body was already showing some damage from the lava curse riddling its body in addition to the few glowing starlit arrows sticking out of it. Not to mention it probably had a severely mauled back from Boreal’s initial surprise attack.
There was a pause in the battle as they regarded each other warily but despite the rank disparity, the biggest difference in this fight was the fact that she had allies. Not waiting for her arm to fully regrow and ignoring the pain for now, she used her own teleport to pull the same manoeuvre it had just pulled on her. She appeared behind it already swinging but it predicted that and swiftly moved to the side as it spun. What it didn’t see was Boreal who had been diving from above at that very moment with a fully charged pounce at the ready.
The armoured form of Boreal enhanced with the impact increasing effect from pounce hit the demon like a truck, the two of them shooting down towards the ground. Zalia quickly followed suit, dropping into a dive as she saw the two of them impact the ground with a loud slam.
Boreal was on top, mauling the creature's face as its claws tried to get through her armour. Unfortunately for it, in the disadvantaged position it simply couldn’t get the force or leverage to do any real damage.
Zalia soon landed next to it and got to chopping.
Pinned under the heavy form of Boreal, the demon no longer stood a chance as they finished it off. It had some type of regeneration that grew stronger the more they hurt it but it too was soon overwhelmed. Unfortunately, she was unable to force her healing aura into the creature as she had predicted previously. This thing was obviously a lot more conscious than the undead and fought back against her aura with its own, not allowing it to come into contact.
With a final yank of her whole upper torso, neck and head, Boreal managed to rip the demon's head off, tossing it aside. Looking away from the gruesome sight towards her own injury, Zalia flexed her newly grown arm with a wince.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
There was a phantom pain in her arm, an ache that wouldn’t leave. It was an odd feeling and one she didn’t feel like experiencing again. The thought made her chest ache, the memory of being impaled surfacing once more.
She shook her head and focused again on her now unarmoured and unclothed arm. The shirt would hopefully grow back but she would need to go find her… missing pieces.
“Drag that thing back to the cave would you?” Zalia asked Boreal.
Boreal looked up with a bloody maw dripping with black blood, her icy blue eyes a sharp contrast to the red and black surroundings. She gave a little chirp.
“Yeah I’m alright, thanks for tearing its head off for me,” Zalia said gently with a smile.
She had bigger concerns than having her arm torn off.
She found her missing arm not far from where they were, stuck in the V of two twisted tree branches. She flew up and picked it up with a grimace, taking her armour off of it and equipping it back on her new arm. With a shudder, she threw the rest of the limb away and flew back to where Boreal was.
She helped in dragging the body back to the cave and they dumped it in the entrance chamber. There were a few reasons she had in mind for why it had come sniffing around her home. One was she had been seen killing the undead or flying back and forth between the islands and it had followed her here. Two, and she only considered this due to the possible control it had over the shades, was that the shades had informed it of her location.
Three was the worst, that it had somehow been able to sense the ritual arrays she had set up under the ground. If that was how it had found her, she would be in trouble wherever she set them up and she really did not like that.
She quickly went down to the cave she called home and set about setting up another ritual array. Using the same plants she spent the next two hours setting up the ritual that hid her from the shades senses, or rather any form of senses that were spiritual. She didn’t stop there however. The smart thing to do would be to abandon the caves entirely and she definitely considered that. One issue was the fact that she lived just next to the collective and would feel horrible about bringing attention to their hiding place then abandoning them.
So, she set up another ritual array. This one was to hide from normal senses, a third layer of protection around the two rooms. With that one done, the rooms were positively packed with plants, almost like her own private cave forest. The air had a tangible feeling of magic to it, so full of power that she could feel it when she breathed it in. She instinctively felt that if she decided to do something like this with clashing ritual arrays or more varied plants they would most likely interfere with each other. The good news was that all of the rituals had the same few plants in different patterns to form the different effects so it wasn’t an issue here.
After almost five hours of hard work trying to get the three ritual arrays to fit into the two separate rooms, Zalia sat down and exhaled deeply. She had sent Boreal off to watch the entrance up above and was considering setting up these same ritual arrays up there too. It felt like things had just got a lot more dangerous. Encountering a new type of demon, one that she could at least defeat, wasn’t such a bad thing but the fact that even such a low level one had found her was concerning.
The image of the aura monster flashed through her mind, four spiked legs, flaming bat wings, the twisted torso covered in thousands of eyes.
She was almost tempted to go into her vault and deposit that memory into one of the storage slots but held back. Getting rid of that memory might seem like a good idea but preserving it for as long as she lived in all its horror, not such a good idea after all.
Instead, she ripped open the doorway to the vault and dragged the demon body in, depositing it in one of the indents. Much like the map, it shrunk until it fit nicely into the indent and a clear dome formed above it. She closed up the vault and left it in there, unsure as to what to do with it entirely. She didn’t want to eat it, that was for sure. Maybe it would make a nice gift for Glemp if she ever made it back to Endaria.
“See anything up here Boreal?” Zalia asked.
“Nothing,” Boreal replied.
She manipulated the floor into a small stone stool and sat down next to Boreal.
“Do you think we should leave the caves? They might come back here,” Zalia said.
“Leave with Collective?” Boreal asked.
“If we can convince them, maybe. I doubt they would and we would have to find a way to transport their little jellyfish homes too. We could probably use a ritual array to create a self reliant water biome they could live in but where would we go? We could go to the temple with Ro’s god in it but I don’t want to bring attention there,” Zalia explained with a sigh.
This was annoying.
“Maybe it just followed us back here after we went to that fourth island with the adapting beasts,” Zalia said hopefully.
“Maybe,” Boreal agreed.
“Want to go to the temple and tell Delphi about it?” Zalia asked.
“Delphi! Ro!” Boreal replied excitedly.
With that decided and the best hiding rituals she could make at the moment set up, Zalia performed the air wing ritual on them both and they took off towards the god temple.
“Probably should have put that demon into my vault before dragging it all the way back to the cave. That was stupid,” she thought.
Oh well, what was done was done. She focused her mind back to her destination and took flight.