Ray had been distracted from the battle going on far down below. Mary and her Viledrake had taken up too much of his attention. But the huge monster’s spectacular lightshow had brought the fighting beneath to a halt as well. They were all staring at the transformation.
It gave Ray just a tiny bit of time to glance down and take in the general layout of the actual battle. The gates to the royal palace had opened to let the defenders stream out in a sortie. The Everstead were engaging against each other, with the Infected providing support from the rear. Near the centre, the Denizens and the Sylvans guarded their most prized captive.
The Floor Lord.
A roar ripped Ray’s attention back to the Viledrake. The monster was ready to continue the fight.
Ray yelled out as the Viledrake charged in. Their meeting was nothing like the battle they had conducted so far. Whatever Mary had done had raised the Viledrake’s power by an astronomical degree.
At the very moment that the Eternal Guardian and the Viledrake collided, a flash freeze swept around them all. Ray jerked where he stood upon his enormous ally, but his feet were encased in a patina of ice and frost, basically glued to the spot. He wasn’t falling. That would have been a blessing if the sudden cold wasn’t trying to shock the life out of him.
The Eternal Guardian was experiencing the exact same thing. Every bit of the monster facing forward—towards the Viledrake—was now coated in ice.
But the chill was the least of their problems. Sure, it turned movement difficult and sluggish, which was the last thing they needed in a fight. It was made all the worse by the sheer ferocity the Viledrake had gained.
The draconic monster clawed the Guardian, stabbing it through the chest with icy horns. Just being near the Viledrake was worsening their frozen condition.
Ray’s huge ally pushed back. The Eternal Guardian slammed several clawed punches, even lashed out with a kick of its gargantuan talons. But the Viledrake weathered the assault with ease. Ray noticed that its craggy, rocky skin was now covered with prismatic, almost metallic, ice. Somehow, Mary had raised the monster’s defensive capabilities greatly too.
Then the huge icy halo of a wing slashed in. Even Ray was taken aback by the sheer force behind the blow.
The Eternal Guardian cried out as it lost its aerial balance, quickly beginning to plummet. Its wings flapped wildly, raising a little gust around them as it tried to regain control.
Ray held on tightly. His ally was unbalanced, which meant facing the Viledrake was up to him. With a roar, the monster in question swooped in to take advantage. Its mouth glowed even brighter than its body. Ray’s eyes widened. Shit. That was—
A beam of burning ice burst out of the Viledrake’s gaping jaws. Bastard was copying his powers, just like Mary had copied him riding a monster.
He was fast enough to fire off a chaotic laser breath in return. That prevented the beam from striking the Eternal Guardian. Poor giant bird was still regaining its balance.
The detonation of Ray’s laser breath from his hastily-summoned draconic maw and the Viledrake’s huge jaws blinded Ray for a second. He cursed. Unfortunately, the monster had no such ocular restrictions as brightness. Because when Ray could see properly again, he found a rain of icy meteors seconds away from crashing into them.
Ray cast spells as fast as he had done. Lifeblood Soulform to summon up one flying Greater Windbane Maw after another. Mottling Spiritguard to craft up a revolving barricade of chaotic orbs. The works.
He wasn’t fast enough. His summoned maws blasted out their fiery breaths to take down the streaking meteors of ice. His Spiritguard orbs shot in and exploded against them too.
But there were just too many. They burst through his defence and struck the Eternal Guardian dead-on.
The huge creature cried out as it fell back, though it had regained enough of its posture to remain airborne. Ray had created an Impervious Shell before him to protect himself, but he couldn’t extend that to the entirety of the Guardian. And even then, the Impervious Shell soon cracked and broke. He cursed as he was forced to hunker down.
Just what in the world had Mary done to raise the Viledrake’s power by such a huge degree?
Once more, the Eternal Guardian cried out. There was a different ring to its piercing call this time, though. A determined ring to it.
Even as the Viledrake’s meteoric deluge of power continued, the Guardian pulled back its wings. A powerful gust burst into being as it flapped the wings forward. A storm of ripping winds that struck the meteors hard enough to sway their trajectory.
“That’s right,” Ray yelled. “You show ‘em, big guy.”
Another icy roar came down from above as the Viledrake slammed in. Ray knew how bad that was going to go for the Guardian. He tried to ward the approaching monster off with his spells. It didn’t work.
His constructs had all fallen in the Viledrake’s last meteoric attack. Most of his Spiritguard orbs were no more too. All Ray had was one measly laser breath.
It missed. He cursed. Then kept his mouth shut so as not to bite off his tongue when the overgrown lizard slammed into the Eternal Guardian, ramming through its defensive barricade of storming winds. The Viledrake’s power had always been incredible, but Mary’s little trick had made it almost unstoppable.
This began another little monstrous fisticuff that the Guardian was clearly losing. It was gaining too many gashes and other wounds, even more of its body frosting over.
Ray just held on for dear life. Even when he took pot shots with a draconic maw, it didn’t have much effect. The prismatic, defensive encasing of ice around the creature dampened Ray’s spell power a lot.
“Is this your idea of winning, Mary?” Ray asked. “You going to be satisfied when it’s a monster that kills me? Not you yourself?”
If Mary could hear him, there was no indication of it. He certainly didn’t receive any answers.
Or maybe she did answer. Without warning, the Viledrake exploded. Spikes of ice exploded out of its body in the blink of an eye, turning the monster from a giant flying lizard into a porcupine of titanic proportions. A thousand spears burst free with shards of ice and frost.
Hundreds of which pierced through the Eternal Guardian.
Ray screamed out just as the monster underneath him did. His was more at shock, at the sheer horror of what his ally was no doubt experiencing under that brutal assault.
The Guardian’s cloak was shredded to pieces. Its feathery body was riddled with bleeding holes, a rain of torn fluff, bits of skin and meat, and dark blood all hurtling towards the battlefield below.
With an awkward kick, the Eternal Guardian extricated itself from the spiky Viledrake. But that didn’t really free it. The monster was too injured too even fly.
It went plummeting towards the ground below.
There was nothing Ray could do stave off the inevitable crash. His mind tried to frantically come up with some way to at least slow their fall down, but the ground came up too fast. All he could do was hop off at the right time and hope the impact didn’t injure the Eternal Guardian too much.
The gigantic crash and the great gout of dust and earth really didn’t feel encouraging.
Ray landed softly beside the unmoving Guardian. All around him, the battle was raging on. Shouts and shrieks, the clang of weapons and the detonation of powers, all of them bullied their way into his ears. But he ignored them all. That wasn’t his battle.
“Thanks a great deal, buddy,” he said, trying to make his way through the dust to the Guardian. “Don’t worry, though. I’ve got you.”
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He did. As the Viledrake once more screeched out, a rain of freezing lasers and icy meteors crashing down upon them, Ray let his Spiritguard orbs and summoned constructs do the defending. He had a more important goal.
“Now or never, Fleshcrafter,” he said, calling up the relevant Tower Node.
Ray focused on the power he had used to heal the select Everstead from the Flesh Plague. Well, “heal”. But as far as he knew, his “patients” had survived. There was no reason why the Eternal Guardian wouldn’t too.
So, Ray got to work. While the destruction rained around him, while an overpowered freak of a monster did its best to kill them all, while a battle raged near enough that Ray could have been hit with stray arrows and the like, he continued using the Tower Node of the Fleshcrafter on the Eternal Guardian’s injuries.
The torn flesh continued knitting together, the blood vessels closing up to stop the flow of dark ichor. His patient was huge and there were a lot of wounds. Each one took a hefty amount of mental effort.
In fact, the Tower Node disappeared before he had even healed half the huge monster’s injuries. He had another, but still. At this rate, the Guardian wouldn’t be fully healed.
Especially since the Viledrake was done trying to destroy them from afar. Another roar preceded its direct charge in their direction.
A charge that the Eternal Guardian was in no position to dodge.
“Get up, buddy.” Ray tried to be encouraging, tried to keep the desperation out of his voice. “It’s coming. We have to move.”
The Eternal Guardian did its best to rise, the ground shaking at its effort. But it was far too slow. Even with Ray encouraging it, the monster was only able to get back to its feet.
Then the Viledrake struck in.
Ray had tried heading off the monster. He crushed a True Mana shard, then fired off his draconic laser breaths, had called up two True Mana arms with Soulstrike. Neither worked.
The Viledrake dodged the laser breath with ease. Ray wasn’t anywhere close enough for his True Mana arms to reach the icy monster.
With a ferocious howl, the Viledrake slammed into the Eternal Guardian. Ray’s huge avian ally tried protecting itself, closing its arms in a cross across its wounded chest. It didn’t help much. The Viledrake’s momentum sent it sprawling back, before the draconic monster grabbed the Guardian’s shoulders and rose into the air with it in tow.
But not before Ray had grabbed the Guardian’s legs with one of his True Mana arms.
Wind whipped about him as he was taken into the air too. It was insane how powerful the Viledrake had become. The monster had grabbed a different creature even larger than it and continued ascending like it bore no weight at all. Fucking crazy.
The Eternal Guardian was fighting against the Viledrake’s grip, but it was making little headway. Its struggles were actually slowing down. It was… giving up.
“Don’t surrender!” Ray yelled. His throat grew hoarse since he had to shout over the wind, but that wasn’t going to stop him. “We can beat this thing. We will win.”
As he continued shouting, the Guardian’s struggles came back. Ray grinned.
“That’s it!” he said. “Don’t ever give up. Don’t let go of your fighting spirit!”
Ray began climbing higher up the Guardian’s body. The Viledrake changed direction all of a sudden. Instead of climbing, it was now diving straight for the ground. Did it intend to crush them to pulp directly?
Grunting and doing his best to hold on, Ray forced himself to keep climbing. He had to reach the shoulders. Had to help the Guardian break free.
The monsters continued struggling against each other even as the Viledrake maintained its grip. Ray’s breaths misted before him, his whole body shivering in the intense cold. He didn’t know how long he or the Guardian could bear it, but then, the ground was coming in way too quickly again. Shit, they were nearly out of time.
“We can do this!” Ray yelled once more, casting Mottling Spiritguard and Lifeblood Soulform to call up his Viledrake tail with Molten Mana burning along its length. “We’ll be free. You’ll be free. And when you are, remember to grab and hold tight. Understand?”
There was no way to be definitively sure that he could ever tell the Eternal Guardian understood him. But screw it, they had no other option.
Origin Resonance turned the Spiritguard orbs into spheres of vaporizing lava.
“Go!” he yelled.
They sure went. All but one of the orbs hit the Viledrake dead on, the orbs of lava exploding and splashing their molten contents upon the prismatic outer skin. Steam erupted everywhere as the Viledrake’s outer layer cracked. The monster screeched out in agony.
But most important of all, its grip on the Eternal Guardian slackened. Enough that one final kick from the Guardian finally pulled it loose.
Ray grinned. It was time.
He gripped the Guardian as tightly as he could, then used Spectral Step. The last Spiritguard orb that hadn’t struck the monster was his target. An orb that had sailed to a point just behind the Viledrake.
It was sort of experimental, since Ray had never teleported with another living being before. No telling if it would even work. But, as it turned out, so long as he had a tight-enough grip on the person or object he wanted to be teleported with him, Spectral Step would bring them along as well.
Ray and the Eternal Guardian both reappeared behind the Viledrake.
Then he screamed.
The pain was blinding. He couldn’t tell what had broken, where he had injured himself, what had he hurt. But for a moment, that was all he knew. Hurt.
Ray instinctively tried to use his Recovery, though he didn’t know where he was supposed to send it. The world had blurred. Was it because of the tears? He couldn’t take this. Breathe. Breathe. Ray forced himself to inhale, exhale, and things slowly began to clear up.
It was pretty obvious he shouldn’t have done that. He should never have teleported something like the Eternal Guardian with him.
He pushed the thoughts aside. The Eternal Guardian had done what he had asked. It was indeed holding the Viledrake trapped. As Ray’s vision slowly returned to normal, he found the Guardian looping its arms around the Viledrake’s claws.
This time, it was the Viledrake struggling and failing to free itself. Its freezing aura was acting against it. The Eternal Guardian had locked its near-frozen limbs in place to keep its captive trapped.
Creating the opening Ray had asked of it.
Biting down on a scream, Ray forced himself to his feet. They were still pretty high up from the ground. He wouldn’t be able to maintain the elevation for long. But he wouldn’t need to.
“Thank you,” Ray said, jumping off the Eternal Guardian’s shoulder. “Just hold on a little longer.”
The Viledrake was shrieking and roaring out now. It spewed the freezing beam from its mouth everywhere it could, but the Guardian was not letting go.
Ray had to make the most of it.
His leap had taken him past the Viledrake too. A quick cast crafted Soaring Wings on his back helped him control his flight as he turned around.
Then he prepared to attack. Primal Spiritcraft turned his hands to draconic maws. Reusing Soulstrike brought the Ture Mana arms waving off his shoulders again, with Origin Resonance turning their ends into spectral Greater Windbane Maws.
But that wasn’t all. Lifeblood Soulform called up the Viledrake tail on his back. Which meant it was again time for Abstract Conversion and Origin Resonance.
The two spectral maws floating high above Ray’s head turned as brilliant as the sun. They shone a gleaming gold-white-orange as Molten Mana filled them to the brim.
“This is where you die, Mary,” Ray said.
He aimed all of the Greater Windbane heads at the Viledrake and fired. Both the physical ones on his hands and the spectral ones at the end of his True Man arms unleashed their furious, lasering breaths.
The Viledrake tried to counter with the ice beam from its jaws, but the Eternal Guardian was faster. It grabbed the draconic monster’s neck and made sure the beam’s aim was off.
All of Ray’s attacks struck the Viledrake with nothing blocking or stopping them.
The two spectral maws had released massive, horizontal geysers of Molten Mana. Flecks of glinting lava flew off like welding sparks, the heat so intense that all the chill disappeared and the air itself began to mirage.
The beams punched in with the force of a plane crash. At the point where they met upon on the Viledrake’s ice-encased chest, the fiery chaos and the magma beams combined into a devastating detonation that Ray was pretty sure would make volcano’s jealous. Yet the explosion didn’t end the beams. They continued firing, continued pushing.
Because yes, the Viledrake was flying backwards. The force behind Ray’s blasts was enough to hammer both monsters back, back, back, all the way over the walls of the palace and into the palace itself.
“Let go!” Ray yelled. “Now!”
Once again, it was impossible to tell if the Eternal Guardian actually heard him. Especially at this distance. But then, maybe they had never talked. Maybe all they had done was use the connection created by the Tower Node of the Songstress. A connection that was so faint now, Ray almost felt as though he was imagining it.
The sensation of losing the connection wasn’t helped by the detonation. It did look like the Guardian had heard him. Kind of. At the last moment, before both monsters struck the palace, the captor twisted and slammed the captive upwards.
As the explosion sent a burst of light and heat over the entire battlefield, Ray was at least relieved a bit to note that the Guardian was falling down to the ground. Unlike the Viledrake, which was half embedded in the now-ruined wall of the Everstead royal palace.
The crash into the edifice coincided with Ray’s Mana capacity quickly reaching its limit, which was why he finally cut off the spells. That was what led to the detonation.
Also the fact that he had been losing elevation all this time. Now, he had finally reached the ground again.
He had reached the battlefield.
[Enemy Defeated—Viledrake]
Tier 13 Monster: Viledrake [Level 43] x1
Essence: +4,940
Knowledge: +3
True Mana Restored: +430
Essence to Level 43: 51,800/161,200
Knowledge to next Threshold: 2,225/2,500
Ray stared at the notification. He had received good Essence for killing the Viledrake, sure. But there was no mention of Mary Felds. Was she somehow still alive?
He didn’t have time to wonder. The battlefield was raging. Ray’s skin prickled. Was it supposed to be this chaotic? They had planned to make it only an act. But this… looked too real. The blood and injuries and fallen bodies only made Ray’s heartrate spike This was no act at all.
A second later, it hit him. Of course, this wasn’t fake. This was no pretence.
They had been betrayed. The Everstead commander had never truly been convinced, even after the Floor Lord’s seeming confession.
As was proven a second later. A huge pterodactyl was swooping in from far above, diving straight towards the centre of the massive battle.
Straight to where the Floor Lord was supposed to be held captive.
Ray yelled out and rushed in.