Ray took a deep, focusing breath. The chaos of the battle was unfolding. But that was fine. He was in his element.
The Everstead soldiers were quickly recovering. They were trying to regroup, the wounded being dragged away by a small handful while the rest reformed to confront the invaders. He wondered how shocked they were that their enemies had come this far without being seen.
Mimic Mana really was something else.
Ray concentrated on the unfolding battle. His real goal lay deeper inside. Right into the centre of the palace, where the heart of the Everstead lay.
But he couldn’t just leave the Infected to fight alone. It wasn’t simply sentiment driving him. Without their skills, the Infected would be wiped out. Even if Ray had healed a couple of them to the best of his abilities, such that they could use their skills again, it wouldn’t be that effective.
And once they were beaten, they would surely rush in after Ray himself. No matter how strong he was, how quick and clever he tried to be, their sheer numbers would overwhelm him.
Unless they believed he was already dealt with.
Which was why Ray yelled out and dived into the fray. The first soldier he targeted was too surprised to do anything. Ray landed in the midst of the battle with the draconic maws around his hands firing full throttle. His target screamed as he perished, several others falling back as his Spiritguard orbs slalomed around.
Ray’s sudden appearance had relieved the pressure off the Infected. The momentum of the fray shifted. They rallied, ready to continue fighting
He was glad to see the two he had healed up were alive and kicking. They bristled with their powers active. One of them looked like he had turned parts of his recently-healed body into pure metal. The other was casting green balls of who knew what everywhere, though it was effective at making the Everstead retreat and disengage.
Although, it wasn’t just whatever the Infected’s power was. The defending soldiers were afraid of the Infected as a whole.
After all, they didn’t want to turn into Infected as well.
This worked to Ray’s advantage really well. He smashed into his enemies, blasting them with salvos of his draconic maw breaths, or round after round of Mottling Spiritguard, or hammering blows from two Soulstrike True Mana arms.
Spiritscourge Chain helped tremendously to take them down as a whole group, as did Anima Charybdis.
Still, the soldiers weren’t willing to remain pegged down for long. They were professionals. More importantly, this was one location where they couldn’t afford to be defeated.
No surprise, then, that they countered and began pushing back.
The foot soldiers were making little progress, thanks to Ray’s incessant use of overwhelmingly powerful spells. That’s when they called in their reinforcements. The ground shook as the cavalry came in—soldiers armed with polearms and riding raptors that growled with bloodlust, all of them clearly buffed up with some skill that made their bodies glow silver.
Alongside Ray, the Infected were forced to scatter at the enemies’ charge. Their momentum was completely disrupted.
Ray tried to have his Mottling Spiritguard punch through the mounted formation, but the buff was clearly powerful. His sparking chaos orbs weren’t able to even injure the soldiers.
He tried using True Mana arms to bash them back. It worked, somewhat. Ray was able to unhorse—un-dinosaur?—two of the cavalrymen. But the rest survived. They were nimble on their mounts, the raptors moving smoothly and changing direction far quicker than what their size suggested.
And then he was forced on the defensive himself. The Mottling Spiritguard orbs that Ray had kept close to him warded off a bunch of different skills.
Several soldiers thrust their lances at him. They glowed before they lengthened tremendously, seeking to skewer him like a shish kebab. Several more threw golden spheres connected to their owners via chains. Fucking magic flails.
They were all kept away thanks to the Spiritguard orbs. But the sheer number of them made Ray stagger back a step.
The problem was that they were falling into a pattern. The soldiers were still able to maintain their formation to an extent, still able to hold on to whatever game plan they had come up with to deal with Ray.
Not for long on his watch.
Ray used Primal Spiritcraft to call up his Soaring Wings. He immediately took full advantage of the combination of the Flight Mana imbued into his Vestments and Soullife Cloak to boost his speed a great degree. The assholes wanted to pin him down and overwhelm him? Well, good luck with that.
The battlefield blurred with how fast Ray moved out of his original location. Several attacks aimed at him completely missed.
He wasn’t completely out of all their range, though. The nearest soldiers were turning quickly, once again throwing their lances and glowing arrows and flail heads and whatnot. Ray used a series of Mottling Spiritguard casts to not only protect himself but to hide his form for just a second.
When the Everstead army’s attacks destroyed his defence, they found themselves facing a small armada of flying dragon heads. Ray grinned. Then made them all fire at once even as they flew off.
Three Greater Windbane Maws shooting their compressed beams of chaotic fire tore apart the cavalry’s formation. Every single soldier panicked, twisting their raptors every which way to get out of the line of fire. They had seen what Ray had done to their gate. They really didn’t want the same happening to them.
That was just the first part of Ray’s counter. While the soldiers were busy dodging, he cast Mottling Spiritguard a couple more times. Once to replenish his defence.
The next to attack and kill the bastards.
Before his attack-stance orbs flew offs, Ray also cast Primal Spiritcraft to bring up the Viledrake tail. Abstract Conversion and Origin Resonance imbued Molten Mana into the orbs as they shot towards their targets.
Unlike the last salvo, this version of the Spiritguard orbs were a lot more effective. The spheres’ direct contact was repelled at first by the army’s defensive buffs. But they couldn’t protect themselves from the Molten Mana exploding and belching out globs of lava in every direction. Soldiers and raptors both cried out as they burned, struggling and panicking and dying.
Ray was about to smack them all with a True Mana arm, but then, a different soldier charged in. Not on a raptor like everyone else. This guy had a triceratops for a mount.
“Isn’t that supposed to be like your version of an ox?” Ray asked.
His answer was a yell before the huge man rushed in. The sword he swung was thick and long, as big as any of the polearms the other soldiers had been wielding.
Ray didn’t have trouble evading him. The triceratops couldn’t move anywhere near as fast as the raptors. As for the soldier, his swings were powerful but slow. He wasn’t going to hit his target like that. Probably why he started using his skill, which summoned up a tornado around him.
Now, that was something Ray had to be more wary of. While the twister was faster than its parent, it still moved slower than him. Ray had no trouble firing off a laser blast from the draconic maws on his hands.
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But that was the problem. They were distracting him. Switching the momentum to their favour again.
The foot soldiers from earlier who had taken a beating had now rallied enough to start attacking the Infected again. Enough of the cavalry were still alive to begin targeting his constructs. Things were not looking good overall.
But then, they were never supposed to. Time for Ray to go all out, one last time.
Ray flew back. Far, far back. He probably would have been caught by several of the soldiers trying to come after him on their raptors, but he boosted his motion using his draconic maws. They fired off, acting like jetpacks to propel him backwards.
Now he had space to act.
All his constructs had died by then, but that was fine. Ray crushed a True Mana shard, and an Origin Mana shard to boot. Then he used Lifeblood Soulform to recreate his fallen summons. The flying draconic maws came, but so did the Imitator Construct. Ray wasn’t wasting any time. He used Origin Resonance to cloak his other constructs in Mimic Mana.
His enemies were almost upon him. The cavalry was charging in, a different company of foot soldiers rushing in from his left.
Ray took a deep breath. Then he flew forward as fast as he could.
The sudden change in direction made it difficult for the soldiers to react. They tried to attack him, but they couldn’t get their skills up or swing their weapons in fast enough. Ray shot past them all with his wings and made sure to cast Spiritscourge Chain and Anima Charybdis.
His enemies cried out as he struck. Ray didn’t need to focus too much on defending himself. He reduced the frequency of Mottling Spiritguard casts. Of course, that meant more of his enemies’ attacks made it through. He suffered a nasty burn on his hands. A glowing arrow shot in and punched into his shoulder.
But those little injuries were fine. Casts of Anima Charybdis filled up his Recovery, and Ray didn’t hesitate at all to use them and get rid of the wounds that tried to distract him.
Last but not least, Ray made sure to activate Deathlife Corral. That was the death knell. When Ray cast Soulstrike twice in quick succession, the True Mana arms didn’t come off his shoulders like normal. Instead, he cast them through the souls of the dead rising back to life all over the battlefield.
Well, all over close to him, of course. But that was enough. As the charging soldiers turned around at his sudden motion, the True Mana arms rammed them from behind. They couldn’t protect themselves easily. Several soldiers had shields, but that didn’t help when the arms disappeared from one soul only to reemerge from another behind their target.
Ray raised his arms into the air, feeling the conductor of some grand orchestra.
An orchestra of war and death.
To cap it all off, his invisible constructs fired into the soldiers’ midst. It hadn’t taken them long to figure out that Ray’s casts were coming from the strange souls floating nearby. They had tried attacking him directly but was warded off by his surefire Spiritguard defence and Anima Charybdis healing up any damage he took.
But getting out of the range of both Ray and the souls called up by Deathlife Corral only made the soldiers bunch up together. In perfect position for his flying draconic maws to unleash devastation.
They fired their laser breaths all at once, ripping through the soldiers with fiery, chaotic detonations. Ray barely heard the screams over the boom.
He really should have been allowed to take a break or something at that, but things weren’t that ideal. Shadows swam over him. For a second, he wondered if this was some ability from someone else who hadn’t entered the battlefield directly.
But then he looked up.
“Ah, fuck.” Despite the curse, he grinned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
It wasn’t enough that these Everstead were riding raptors and triceratops. Now they were flying around on pterodactyls too.
Ray wasn’t surprised at all when the lightning started coming down. Of course, some prick riding a flying dinosaur would be chucking lightning at whatever poor sap happened to be on the ground beneath.
It was just a bid odd that the bolts raining down were an ochre colour. What was that supposed to be? Rusted lightning? At least none of them hit him thanks to Mottling Spiritguard keeping him safe like normal.
Ray rose high on his own wings, though, he didn’t get far. That pterodactyl had a huge elevation advantage over him. He wasn’t going to be able to get close enough.
No problem. His constructs would do the job for him.
It turned out the pterodactyl rider had considered the constructs emergence too. The soldier kept away from them, moving so fast on the dinosaur that Ray’s draconic maws had no hope of hitting their target.
And even while the soldier kept dodging, the bolts kept raining down. With the way they seemed to be emerging from the wings of the pterodactyl, it almost looked like the dinosaur was being used as some sort of catalyst for the abilities. Wild.
That’s when Ray was struck from behind. The blow was so vicious that he found himself tumbling from the air to land on the ground, cursing at the sudden spiking pain on his back. Had to be another arrow or something. Also had to be something thrown from a good distance because there was nobody nearby. He had dealt with them all.
When he tried to get back up, the pressure suddenly disappeared. That was when he noticed Ray himself hadn’t been the target of that attack at all.
Instead, it was his wings that had been destroyed.
There was no time to find the culprit. Ray was already under attack from his main opponent. It wasn’t just that rusty lightning continuing to strike at him.
The rider and the pterodactyl were both swinging down directly at him.
Still way too fast. Ray’s draconic maw constructs had no hope of hitting their target. Ray himself had no hope of dodging with his wings gone. But there was just enough time to cast Lifeblood Soulform once more, to call up Impervious Shell right between himself and his assailant.
The crash was satisfying and deafening. Just as the flying dinosaur had smashed into Ray’s defence, its ride had turned the whole dinosaur into the same ochre lightning, which had exploded everywhere all around them.
Ray continued to remain safe thanks to another cast of Mottling Spiritguard just after he had constructed the Duskshell shell. What they didn’t protect him from was the rider herself.
The woman swung in beneath the Impervious Shell like she was an expert at parkour. Probably was, with whatever weird training the Everstead gave their military. More importantly, she was completely unfazed from her collision with the construct, and now rammed in at Ray with a spear enwreathed with the same ruddy lightning sparking and bursting everywhere.
Even worse, she was too fast. Ray didn’t have time to consider the right move. She was relying on her speed to take him out before he could act.
Thankfully, breaking through all those Intellect Tiers had Ray landing on the right spell almost instinctively. He cast Spectral Step. The world twisted as he reappeared on top of one of his flying Greater Windbane Maws. The balance was so precarious that he immediately began falling.
But that was fine, because he now had room to call up the Soaring Wings again.
Ray slowed his plummet down to regular fall with his wings. Now, he could take out that pesky pterodactyl rider before she did anything even more annoying. Lightning was already sparking around her and—
His head turned to see something seeming with a speed that could rival lightning bolts. Was that—was that a flying axe?
Ray swerved away to dodge it. He had the distinct impression that it was that very thing that had destroyed his wings not too long ago. But then the axe jerked in mid-air and rushed at him again. He cursed, sending out his constructs to search for the axe-wielder while casting another Mottling Spiritguard to protect himself.
Just in time. In that tiny moment where Ray had been distracted by the flying axe, the pterodactyl rider had charged up her abilities too.
The blitzkrieg of lighting that struck Ray wasn’t evadable in the least. Ray didn’t even have to make an active decision. There was no time for it. His decision was made for him. Ray’s time on the battlefield was up.
Ray did use Spectral Step to get away from the blast. But as he did so, he cast Lifeblood Soulform to create his Imitator construct. There. Now he’d have his construct taking his place for him on the battlefield, pretending to be dead and stopping the Everstead from coming after him.
Because Spectral Step hadn’t taken him to wherever the draconic maws were flying.
No, it had brought him straight inside the palace itself.
Ray breathed in deep, trying to let his body calm down. The tiny black-red bee he had sent out had managed to enter the palace interior. He was home free.
The little intelligence he had granted it had allowed the construct to seek out a spot where Ray wouldn’t be discovered easily. A tiny room where no one else was present, where the only light entered through the gap under the closed door.
[Enemy Defeated—Human]
Hoplite [Tier 2] Human: [Level 33] x8
Vanguard [Tier 2] Human: [Level 34] x13
Cavalier [Tier 3] Human: [Level 37] x8
Essence: +115,000
Knowledge: +87
True Mana Restored: +50,100
[Level Up!]
Reward
* +5 Intellect, +5 Spirit, +2 Vitality +2 Agility, +10 allocatable free stats.
* 10 True Mana shards
Essence to Level 43: 5,660/161,200
Knowledge to next Threshold: 2,289/2,500
Ah, that was good. That battle had been enough for another level. Just what Ray needed before he got going into the place itself.
[Primordial Gauge—Dungeon]
Pinnacle of Ascension [Tier 18]
The precipice of reaching the next Floor provides a direct challenge for all those seeking to ascend. But beware the great changes that have transpired within its halls, for they may be foreign and unfamiliar. Climb up the floors until you arrive at the point where your journey can go no farther.
Ray frowned at the new notification for a bunch of reasons. He was inside a dungeon? Wasn’t he supposed to be within the Everstead royal palace?
The ruler of this Everstead kingdom lived within a dungeon. Well, Ray had a feeling he was about to find out why.